The Break Read online

  “Forget it,” Dino said, then lowered his eyes and looked at the boy. “Listen, I’m sorry to drop you here. I’d have liked to drive you all the way to the border, but with this contraption it would have taken too long.”

  “Is OK, boss. You do too much. You real friend.”

  Dino nodded, then again raised his head and looked up at the sky. “It’s a nice night,” he said.

  Blondie also looked up. “Yes,” he said, “is nice night.”

  For a while they stood there motionless, staring up at the stars. From the fields around them they heard the sound of crickets. Every now and again, an owl hooted.

  “You have cigarette?” Blondie asked.

  “No,” Dino said. “I’m sorry.”

  “You not smoke,” Blondie said. “Is good.”

  Yes, maybe it was good. And yet at that moment, standing there sweaty and dusty, with this whole mess behind them and an uncertain future ahead, a cigarette wouldn’t have gone amiss.

  “I don’t know,” Dino said.

  They looked at the sky a while longer, then Dino lowered his head and glanced at Blondie. The owl hooted again.

  “Listen,” Dino said. “Tell me something.”

  “Yes,” Blondie said.

  “Where the fuck did you find a bomb?”

  Blondie also lowered his head and after looking down at the ground for a moment or two threw a glance at Dino. “I build,” he said.

  “I what?”

  “I build.”

  “What do you mean, I build?”

  Blondie threw another glance at Dino. “I mean, I make bombs with jars and liquids and spare parts we find around. Little bombs.”

  “Oh,” Dino, said staring for a moment at Blondie’s thin profile.

  “I bomb expert.”

  “I what?”

  “Bomb expert. You deaf.”

  “Fuck off,” Dino said smiling.

  Blondie also smiled.

  “What do you mean, you’re a bomb expert? Where?”

  “At home.”

  “In the army?” Dino asked, glancing at Blondie.

  “Revolutionary army.”

  “Oh,” Dino said, and for a few seconds stared down at the stones and earth in front of his feet. “Why did you come here?” he asked after a while.

  “I was prisoner,” Blondie said. “Managed to escape, but tired of war, and when outside told my comrades I leaving.”

  “And what did they say?”

  “They understand. They tired too.”

  Blondie and Dino exchanged a quick glance, then Dino nodded and looked up again at the sky. “And now?” he asked after a while.

  “Now I go home.”

  “Oh,” Dino said, then turned for just a moment to Blondie.

  “Same shit everywhere,” Blondie said after a while, picking up two or three stones and throwing one into the fields. “If my job putting bombs, better I put bombs in my country,” he went on, throwing another stone and watching it land in the field in front of him, then turned towards Dino.

  “Doesn’t turn a hair,” Dino said, staring for a moment at Blondie.

  “Is better I go,” Blondie said. All at once he seemed older and taller, and when Dino moved away from the side of the three-wheeler to embrace him, it seemed to him that he was hugging an old friend.

  “Please,” Dino said. “Don’t fuck things up.”

  Blondie squeezed Dino and gave a laugh. “Of course I fuck things up,” Blondie said. “Is our fate fuck things up.”

  The two men separated and Dino gave a little laugh. “OK,” he said. “Then be careful you don’t fuck things up too much.”

  Blondie smiled and looked at Dino for the last time. “Yes, I be careful,” he said, and he put his hands in the pockets of his jacket and started walking along the white road.

  “Bye, Blondie,” Dino said.

  Blondie turned and for two or three steps walked backwards, without stopping. “Bye, boss,” he said.

  Dino watched him walk away, then after glancing up at the sky again and at the countryside all around, he opened the door, which squeaked again, and got back behind the wheel.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  IT FELT GOOD, driving around in the three-wheeler. It would be nice to fill it with luggage and go off with Sofia to all those places they had dreamt of going. They could even take the baby with them. Dino could build a metal framework with clamps that could be welded to the bed of the van, he thought as he passed the police cars and happily raised his arm and waved to them, and Sofia would be able to sew a rainproof sheet to put over it.

  By the time he was again gliding between the tower blocks, with the river just visible in the distance, Dino was convinced it would be great, and he saw himself charging around the world with his family in the three-wheeler. Sofia might even be able to hang a few flowerpots somewhere.

  As he drove alongside the river, glancing at the seagulls with his head slightly out of the window, it struck Dino that it was an absolutely perfect picture, a precise, sharp-edged equation like the strictest rules of mathematics, perfect, immutable proportions, resisting any slight—three people within the triangle of a blue three-wheel van.

  Dino climbed the stairs of his building with that fleeting sensation of being someone who, at least for a moment, has seen how things really are, and has sensed despite himself, in a fold of the world, a rule that puts together all the pieces of the mosaic. As he looked for the key to his apartment door, he decided he would tell Sofia straight away. She must be in bed, worried probably that she had not seen him or heard from him all evening, but as soon as she heard him get into bed and he told her about the three-wheeler she would certainly start laughing, and as always after a while would come up with some brilliant idea to add to the programme. They would probably start fantasising, drawing roads on Sofia’s swollen belly, using it as a globe. Maybe after a while she would even get out one of the travel books and make a few notes, Dino thought as he unlocked the door of the apartment, trying to make as little noise as possible. Then, while they were talking about the three-wheeler and where they would go, they might even make love. But Sofia wasn’t in bed, Sofia was lying face down on the floor of the living room, between the sofa and the little wooden table. It was an image that took a few seconds to reach its destination, as if after all those fantasies the world had to take the time to fall back into place. Dino stood motionless and bewildered in the entrance for a few seconds, with one hand still on the door. A large blotch of dark liquid surrounded Sofia’s belly and legs, impregnating her clothes, and a sickly metallic odour seemed to be everywhere.

  All at once the world finished falling back into place, and the image of Sofia lying face down and motionless in a pool of dark, sickly liquid hit Dino’s stomach like a battering ram.

  Dino thrust his chest out and gave a cough that had come from somewhere deep in his guts. He slammed the door behind him and ran to his wife.

  “Hey,” he said, bending down next to her, but there was no answer.

  He turned her over. Her face was pale, and her hollow eyes stared at him as if they were open.

  “Oh,” Dino said, kneeling there, supporting her head with one hand and stroking her cheeks with the other. He bent over her mouth and her chest, trying to hear if she was still breathing and if her heart was beating.

  “Shit,” he said, resting her head back on the floor.

  He stood up, ran into the bedroom, lifted both blankets off the sheet with a single gesture and went back into the living room. He laid the blankets over his wife, slipped an arm under her legs and one under her shoulder and got to his feet. He reached the door, opened it, turning his hand under Sofia’s body, walked out onto the landing, kicked the door shut with one foot and descended the stairs. He repeated the operation for the front door of the building, crossed the street and laid his wife on the bed of the three-wheeler. He tucked the blanket in on either side, in such a way as to protect her from bumps, then opened the door, took t
he plastic sheet from the passenger seat, folded it firmly one more time, lifted Sofia’s head a little and laid it on the sheet.

  “It’s all right darling,” he said. “Don’t do anything stupid.”

  He got back in the three-wheeler, put in the key and, as soon as he felt the engine leap into life, set off as quickly as he could. Every few seconds he glanced back through the glass window behind him, and observed his wife lying like a corpse on the bed of the three-wheeler, struggling in silence against something he could only guess at.

  From time to time, the three-wheeler hit a pothole that was a bit deeper than the others, and Sofia’s body was jolted more than it should be.

  “Sorry, darling,” Dino would say out loud at the window behind him. “We’re nearly there, don’t worry.”

  He should have been there. He shouldn’t have been driving around saving his bomb-making revolutionary friends, he should have been at home saving his wife and child. He shouldn’t have allowed any variation. Precise, simple rules. The shortest route possible for the best result. Two cushions, ball, pins down, in the cover. A simple shot. Cover, always in cover. There is no gain without cover. Simple precise rules. No bombs. No rushes of blood to the head. Carefully calculated shots, then cover. Bad luck doesn’t exist. If you make a mistake it means you played a bad shot.

  When the three-wheeler pulled up in front of the door to the emergency department, two males nurses dressed in white were standing outside, smoking and chatting.

  “Hey!” they cried, almost running out of the way for fear the three-wheeler would run them over.

  “Come on, darling, come on,” Dino said, breathlessly, as he got out of the three-wheeler and lifted his wife out of the bed of the van. “Come on,” he said again in her ear as he walked away from the three-wheeler with Sofia in his arms.

  “What happened?” one of the male nurses asked, throwing away his cigarette and coming towards Dino.

  Dino kicked the door wide open and rushed inside like a bandit.

  “I need a doctor!” he screamed once he was inside. A handful of weary-looking people jerked their heads up to look at him.

  “Don’t worry, we’re here,” one of the male nurses said, while the other went to fetch a trolley. “What happened?”

  Dino turned, dazed, to look at the nurse. He had a round, soft face and a fatherly expression.

  “I found her like this,” Dino said.

  The other nurse approached with a trolley. “Put her down here,” he said.

  “What happened?” the round-faced nurse said.

  “I don’t know,” Dino said. “I came back home and she was in a pool of this dark stuff.”

  “What month is she?” the other nurse asked, starting to push the stretcher towards a large double door of opaque glass.

  “The seventh,” Dino said.

  “And what happened?” the round-faced nurse asked, pushing a large red button to open the opaque glass door.

  “I don’t know,” Dino said. “I was out.”

  “All right, don’t worry. You just sit there. As soon as we know anything, we’ll tell you,” the round-faced nurse said, and he disappeared through the opaque glass door, swallowed up by that oesophagus full of people in white and green coats rushing back and forth.

  “I was out,” Dino said again in a thin voice, watching the opaque glass door close.

  After a few seconds he lowered his eyes and put his hands in the pockets of his jacket, and before turning to sit down listened to the sound of his own breathing and the loud beating of his heart.

  The people in the waiting room wall had all been looking at him, but when he turned to find a seat they looked away. Dino walked back across the room, settled in an empty seat in the far corner and sat with his hands in his pockets, looking down at the floor.

  A thin white-haired old lady, who might have been even older than the lines on her face indicated, leant slightly towards him, lightly touched his leg and smiled. “Don’t worry,” she said in a sharp but quite clear voice. “Everything will work out in the end, you’ll see.”

  Dino looked up for a moment and smiled, then looked down at the floor again.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  TIME PASSED. After more than an hour, the old lady’s husband came out. He had a cloth cap on his head and a big plaster on his right arm. The old lady patted Dino on the leg and said, “Cheer up,” then went to her husband and walked him out of the hospital.

  A few people were discharged and a few others arrived, among them two parents carrying a little boy in their arms. The boy was in pyjamas and had a bandage on his head.

  “He fell out of bed,” they said to the people around them as they sat down, with those intense, polite smiles typical of parents.

  “Hello,” Dino heard someone say to him at last. It must be nearly dawn by now, and Dino had his elbows resting on his knees, with his head dropped forward. Two black leather shoes had appeared in front of him. Dino slowly raised his head and found himself looking at a tall, grey-haired man in a white coat.

  “You’re Sofia’s husband, aren’t you?”

  The doctor was looking at him with an expression that Dino could not decipher. He had his hands in the pockets of his white coat, with the thumbs outside.

  “Yes, I am,” Dino said.

  The doctor gave a slight smile and held his hand out. “I thought so. Sofia’s told me a lot about you. I’m the doctor who’s been treating your wife. It’s lucky I was on duty tonight.”

  “Hello,” Dino said as he stood up and shook the doctor’s hand. “Dino.”

  “Yes, I know,” the doctor said. “Come, follow me.”

  The doctor crossed the waiting room like an army general, also pressed the big red button and led Dino into that teeming oesophagus, which was a bit quieter now than before. He did not take Dino along the corridor, but turned left and pressed another button, a smaller black one, next to what appeared a metal door, and started to wait, first giving Dino a little smile, then looking down at the ground. After a few seconds, the metal door opened onto a small square cubicle which could not have been more than two metres by two metres. The doctor went in, waited for Dino to do the same, then pressed another button with a number on it. The cubicle gave a little jolt, and after a few seconds the door opened on to a corridor identical to the previous one, only emptier and more silent.

  The doctor started walking along the corridor. They came to a half-open door, and the doctor put his hand on the handle and looked Dino straight in the eyes.

  “I’m going to be quite frank with you,” he said, his smile completely gone now. “Sofia is very ill. She had a bad haemorrhage, and lost a lot of blood. The machines are keeping her alive for now, but I can’t tell you what’s going to happen.”

  Dino felt a scythe suddenly plant itself in his side, and for a moment he felt as if the whole left side of his body had gone hard. “All right,” he said, nodding and swallowing he didn’t know quite what, in a voice that was not completely his.

  The doctor nodded, too, and after a couple of seconds opened the door. The room was completely white, with an empty bed on one side and his wife’s bed on the other. He seemed to be entering another dimension, in some fantastic future time, a time when machines lived lives of their own and stood by next to the beds of the humans, holding them by the hand with their tubes and their cables.

  “Jesus,” Dino said, slowly entering the room. A funny machine with a screen emitted strange pulses every now and again and a tube emerged from Sofia’s slightly twisted mouth, fixed to her lips with white tape. The tube was attached to a little bag and every few seconds the bag would inflate then deflate quickly. The tube ended in another strange machine, with a kind of accordion inside it which rose and fell suddenly in the syncopated rhythm of the bag. There was another, smaller tube going from Sofia’s arm to a little bottle hanging from a kind of coat rack, and on her finger there was a kind of clothes peg, linked to the wire from another machine. God alone know
where all these machines were trying to take her, Dino thought.

  Dino also thought that Sofia seemed quite peaceful, and that she was not the kind of person to be as relaxed as that with people she didn’t know. That meant she must feel comfortable with those machines. He even thought of waking her up and asking her what she thought about it, then he told himself that it was better if she rested, and anyway, with that tube in her mouth, talking couldn’t be much fun.

  Dino looked at the white sheet neatly spread over Sofia’s body and saw that, beneath it, that globe that he had stroked and listened to until the previous evening had suddenly disappeared.

  “What about the baby?” Dino asked in a thin voice, feeling his skin turn to dry, cracked plaster.

  “She’s fine,” the doctor said, just behind him.

  Dino turned his head quickly towards the doctor, as if he had suddenly woken up. “Is it a girl?” he asked.

  “Yes, it’s a girl,” the doctor said.

  From somewhere, Dino found the strength to smile, then turned back to Sofia.

  “Do you want to see her?” the doctor asked.

  “Of course,” Dino said, nodding, then went up to Sofia, told her he would be right back and walked to the door.

  The doctor again led him to the little sliding metal door, pressed the button again, waited for the door to open, entered the square cubicle with Dino, pressed another button with a higher number and, when the door opened again, walked out into another corridor similar to the previous one. A nurse came out of a room with a bundle in her hand, and for a second Dino wondered if it could be his daughter, but the nurse went through another door while the doctor carried straight on. Through a large window at the end of the corridor, you could already see the red light of dawn starting to colour the distant hills and the silent walls of the town.

  “Here we are,” the doctor said halfway along the corridor.

  Dino gave him a puzzled look, then realised that they were standing beside a large window, behind which was a dimly lit room full of gadgets and shelves and machines. In the centre of the room were two large rectangular transparent boxes, with canvas rings on the sides. Inside the boxes, if you looked closely, you could see the outlines of two tiny purple creatures, one in each box, which seemed too weak even to be held in one hand.