A Little Lumpen Novelita

IX

His real name was Giovanni Dellacroce. This was something that neither the Bolognan nor the Libyan knew (let alone my brother, who because of his age and lack of skills plays a marginal role here, I’m afraid). His stage name was Franco Bruno. People called him Mr. Universe, because he had won the title twice in the early sixties, or Maciste, which was the name of the character he played in four or maybe five movies, all huge hits in Italy and around the world. He was born in Pescara, but had lived in Rome since he was fifteen, in Santa Loreto, a suburb that he thought of as home and for which he was sometimes nostalgic, though when luck was on his side, he bought the big house on Via Germanico where I met him the night I was brought there.

A night that was like high noon in August and was one of the strangest nights in my life.

The Bolognan rang the bell several times. A voice over an intercom asked who was there.

“Friends,” said the Bolognan. No answer. The intercom might as well have been broken. After a while he rang again and said the name of the gym and the name — or so I thought I understood — of a mutual friend, and as if this weren’t enough, he announced our full names, mine included.

Then the gate opened and we were let into the little garden where even at night the plants struggled for scarce living space. More than a garden, it was like a cemetery.

There were three stone steps up to the porch. For a long time we stood there waiting for someone to open the door.

The tension on the faces of my brother’s friends, the tension and at the same time the joy, a primordial joy, pure and unwavering, is one of the things that comes back to me whenever I remember that night, and each time it does I try to brush it away, because it’s a joy that I want neither for myself nor anywhere near me. It’s a joy that comes too close to beggarliness, an explosion of beggarliness, and also to cruelty, indifference.

Then the door opened and we got a glimpse of a dark threshold where I seemed to see a shadow move very quickly, and a foyer, also dark, into which we stepped and out of which we backed like frightened children entrusted with a mysterious responsibility, and into which we stepped again, sheepishly, and out of which we inevitably backed again, until I took three steps inside, this time alone, and bumped into a piece of furniture and asked whether anyone was there.

A voice — Maciste’s — told me to stay where I was, not to move forward or back, and then he greeted my brother’s friends, hello, how are you? And in that brief how are you I sensed an incredible fragility, a fragility like a manta ray falling from the ceiling, the dark foyer the bottom of the sea and the manta ray watching us from above, halfway between the sea floor and the surface.

Then I heard the Bolognan and the Libyan saying they were fine, and how are you, Mr. Bruno? and Maciste, who wasn’t up above anymore and whose voice no longer echoed with infinite shades of fragility, replied:

“Plagued by ailments, my friends, that’s the way of it.”

And he said this in a voice in which there wasn’t a hint of ailing, a voice that boomed in the darkness as if it, the darkness, was a muzzle, and he was straining at it furiously, itching to come out on the porch and gobble up my brother’s friends, who just then, the cowards, were saying that their business here was done, they hoped everything would go well, and then they left, wishing us goodnight, Maciste and me, and as they were backing away almost at a run to the garden gate, the door to the house closed and since I didn’t see any shadow cross the threshold, I deduced that Maciste had closed the door with some kind of remote control.

Then, for the first time in a long time, I was plunged into total darkness.

What happened next is hard to describe. Maciste’s voice guided me to a room on the second floor, lit by a dim bulb half-hidden in a corner. I know I went up some stairs, but I know I went down some stairs too. Maciste’s voice was always ahead of me, guiding me. I wasn’t afraid. I crossed a dark room with a wall of windows that overlooked the back garden and the tall ivy-covered walls separating the house from the building next door. I felt calm. I opened a door. It wasn’t Maciste’s room, as I had imagined it would be, but a kind of gym. His private gym, the one my brother’s friends had told me about.

I turned on the light. On a wooden table there were several bottles of liniment and various lotions. I took off my jacket and waited. After a while the lights went out. Only then did the door open and I saw Maciste.