The Break Read online

  The stones and the earth and the dirt and the street and the pavements went past under his feet like a winter river, with all their voices and their calls which Dino had no desire to listen to. Dino had laid over his skin a layer of granite, while inside all his muscles and nerves were twisted and drawn and stretched and painful, in an attempt to stop the fire from spreading and blowing everything up, into millions of ragged fragments and sparks of bloody meat.

  By the time he had reached the river he had become convinced that his poor army would lose the battle, and he already felt the heat of the fire burning his skin and getting ever closer to the powder keg, so close that for a moment he had been seized by the almost irresistible impulse to climb the little wall beside the river and drown the fire down there in the current.

  He had barely found the energy to walk down two or three side streets, far from the river, before his body and the layer of granite that he had laid over it fell like plaster from a wall. He had leant with one hand on a lamp post, had felt every single muscle in his body crumple, the sides of his mouth drawn down, his eyes so taut they were almost bleeding, and as he felt his strength leave him he had just had time to fall in a sheltered corner of the pavement, thinking that, all things considered, it wasn’t a bad way to die.

  He had been given barely a moment to feel himself fall, and yet in that moment he had found time to say goodbye to the world, to see his body explode there in the middle of the street in a pool of blood and flesh, already weeping for the daughter he had not managed to bring up.

  And yet now he seemed still to be alive, alive with the life that most human beings live. He moved his head away from the shutter behind him and for a few seconds looked around him again, trying to figure out if it was just an impression of his or if everything really was completely silent inside him. This really did seem to be his town, and he really did seem to be alive. Obviously he had only fainted, or something like that. He straightened his back and pulled his legs, which lay abandoned like rags on the pavement, towards him. He put his arms on his bent knees and listened to the air passing like music in and out of his lungs. There was still that black sense of emptiness that seemed to be trying to suck him in, but the fire appeared to be extinguished and the powder keg for the moment to be safe. Maybe his army needed forces he wasn’t even aware of, and to obtain them he hadn’t found anything better to do than put it to sleep. Maybe. But it wasn’t really worth thinking about. Now he felt more tired than anything else, and when you came down to it, a life didn’t seem so much more restful than a war.

  He rubbed his face with his hands and took a deep breath, then opened his eyes again and looked at the building in front of him. He looked at it for a few seconds, then let his eyes fall to where he was sitting, looking for something. He stretched out his right hand, picked up a few pieces of rubble that had fallen off the wall a little further on, then, rolling slightly with his bottom and putting one hand on the ground, he got laboriously to his feet. He took another deep breath, and as he relaxed his legs he let his head fall first on one side then on the other, listening to his neck stretch and crack. Then he took a few steps into the middle of the road, looked at the front of the building, broke a piece of rubble and threw it against one of the shutters, hitting it slightly.

  “Rosa!” he cried in a thin voice.

  He looked around to make sure that nobody was coming, then took a larger piece of rubble, pulled his hand back and threw it with some force at the front of the building. This time he had caught the shutter full on and the piece of rubble exploded loudly in a cloud of dust.

  “Rosa!” Dino cried again in a thin voice. After a moment, the shutter on the second floor opened slightly.

  “Who is it?” a sharp voice came from behind the shutter.

  “Rosa, it’s Dino,” Dino said.

  “Idiot, it’s four in the morning,” the voice said. “Stop drinking and go to bed.”

  The shutters slammed shut.

  “No, Rosa, stop!” Dino called, still in a thin voice, trying to summon up his strength.

  The shutters opened again just a little.

  “Who’s there?” the voice said, as if it was made of stone.

  “Rosa, I need a grandmother,” Dino said, still in a thin voice, but yelling less.

  “Piss off, Dino,” the voice said, and the shutters slammed shut again.

  “No, Rosa,” Dino said, starting to yell again, then, slightly lowering his voice, “Sofia’s dead.”

  It was the first time he had said it, and for some reason it had never seemed as true as it did now.

  The shutters remained closed and still for a few seconds, then very slowly they opened completely, showing first two thin arms pushing them, then just above the windowsill Rosa’s sharp, lined face in the middle of that halo of white hair.

  “Dino, you shouldn’t joke about things like that,” Rosa said from behind the windowsill, although she already sounded a little anxious, less convinced of her rightness.

  “I got home last night,” Dino said, “and found her lying in a pool of dark stuff.”

  “What about the baby?” Rosa asked.

  “The baby’s fine. She was born early so they put her in a glass box to keep her warm.”

  “It’s a girl?”

  “Yes, it’s a girl.”

  Rosa nodded from behind the windowsill and for a moment looked Dino straight in the eyes. “I’m coming,” she said, then disappeared, pulling the shutters behind her.

  Dino stood there in the middle of the road. He dropped the last pieces of rubble he was holding, beat his hands together a few times to get the dust off, then rubbed them on his legs. After a few seconds he saw the shutter of Rosa’s shop rising, making an almighty racket in the night, and beneath it there appeared first the slippers, then Rosa’s thin legs, then her gnarled hand and her bowed head.

  “Come in,” Rosa said, motioning to him with her hand, before disappearing inside.

  Dino walked to the half-raised shutter and bent down to get under it.

  No sooner was he inside than he was overcome by that orchestra of smells that always played in Rosa’s shop. After so many hours, he was pleased to hear something familiar.

  Rosa was bustling about over a few vases. She picked out a dozen red and blue flowers and green leaves and heaped them up on the counter. Then she took some string and tied everything as best she could. She leant over to one side, got out a little bottle full of liquid the colour of which Dino found hard to figure out, placed it on the counter, walked to the last vase, took a little yellow flower, went back to the counter, pulled three petals off the flower, opened the bottle, and pushed the petals into it. Then she closed the bottle and placed it next to the bunch of flowers she had tied earlier.

  “So,” Rosa said with her hands on the bunch and the bottle. “Take this home and put it in a new vase. It’ll do you good, you’ll see. And this,” she said, raising the bottle slightly, “put it close to the baby if you can, it’ll help her. What have you called her?”

  Dino looked at Rosa, wondering how she would take it. “Grecia,” he said.

  Rosa gave him a puzzled look. “Oh,” she said. “All right, now, do you understand what to do?”

  “Yes,” Dino said.

  He took two steps forward and took hold of the bunch of flowers and the bottle. “I don’t know anything about children, Rosa,” he said looking at her with vaguely frightened eyes.

  “Don’t worry, Dino, they know it all. There were a lot of things I didn’t know, and I’m still here.”

  Dino gave a little nod, then tried to smile to thank her, said goodbye, and turned, taking with him the bunch of flowers and the bottle.

  After a few steps, he stopped and turned again to Rosa, who was clearing the dead leaves off the counter. “Rosa,” he said.

  “Yes?” Rosa said, stopping what she was doing and half turning to look at him.

  “Do you still have the three-wheeler you used to use for delivering flowers to
people’s houses?”

  “Yes, the building manager has it in his garage.”

  “Would you sell it to me?”

  Rosa frowned and looked at him for a moment. “If you’re prepared to take it off my hands, I’ll give it to you.”

  “All right,” Dino said. “We’ll talk about it again. Bye, Rosa.”

  “Bye, Dino,” Rosa said, and went back to doing what she was doing.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  ONCE HE GOT HOME, Dino took a vase from above one of the cabinets in the kitchen, half-filled it with water, cut the string with a knife, and put the bunch of flowers in the vase. Then he put the vase and the little bottle, which he was still holding, on the table in the living room, and after moving the flowers around a bit it struck him, for the first time in that very long day, that he was hungry.

  He went in the kitchen, sliced half an onion, and put it to heat in a frying pan with a little oil, then took three eggs, broke them in a bowl, and started beating them. As soon as they were ready, he poured them into the frying pan with the onion and watched to make sure they cooked the way they were supposed to. That was how he had always seen Sofia make them, and he hoped it was as easy as it looked.

  When the eggs were almost completely hard, he took the lid of a pot out of a cabinet, and used it to turn the eggs over in the pan. He thought they were going to break completely and it would be a disaster, instead of which everything went fine, and when, soon afterwards, he plunged a fork into the eggs and lifted it to his mouth, it struck him that, all in all, he would manage somehow.

  He ate standing in front of the window where Sofia usually stood. It was in fact a lovely view, and maybe if he found out how to read it he might discover something in it. He felt a kind of throbbing in his ears for a moment, and as he ate his eggs he started walking around the apartment, lost in thought. He stopped for a moment by the shelf on which over the years they had arranged their travel books. They were all there, lined up like real books, and Dino took one out as if everything was normal, as we might take out a photograph album in a friend’s house. It was funny, in all these years he had never reread them, in fact now that he thought about it he wasn’t sure he had even pulled one out before. As he put a forkful of egg in his mouth, with the other hand he opened the book on a page at random, just to see where he and Sofia had been fantasising about visiting more than a dozen years earlier. He read a few sentences. It wasn’t really like a note at all, it was as if she was talking about places they had really seen. Dino ate the last mouthful of his eggs, then put the plate down next to him and started reading again with more attention. He couldn’t quite figure out where they were, but Sofia’s round handwriting definitely seemed to be describing the two of them in an inn, and a fat host who told them funny jokes in a language they only half understood. Other customers of the inn were also described, as well as Dino’s expressions as he laughed at the host’s jokes. Dino frowned a little, then skipped a few pages and resumed reading. Now, Sofia was talking about being very tired, and that missing that train had been a great bother. But that was the great thing about travelling, she said—you were constantly coming up against situations that you weren’t entirely in control of. Dino and Sofia had never missed a train, nor had they ever planned to miss one while travelling, nor had they ever made comments and considerations about what travelling ought to be like, seeing as how they had never travelled. Dino looked up and examined the page from more of a distance, then looked at the row of books that had been put there over the years, which suddenly seemed like an encyclopaedia of something that Dino had never managed to grasp.

  Dino took out the first of the books. He remembered very well the first journey they had started to dream up stories about, a journey to those countries in the north where the dawn seemed to last all day.

  “We could go north,” Dino had said.

  “Yes,” Sofia had said after a while, “we could go and see those places where they say the dawn never ends.”

  “We could,” Dino had said more softly.

  Instead of which, the notebook began like this: “At last we made up our minds to set off.” And for some reason it struck Dino that it wasn’t a bad idea to begin with an at last. But there weren’t any we coulds. Instead, there were lots of details, lots of descriptions, as if Dino and Sofia had really been to those places. First, there were the descriptions of the preparations and the long journeys to get to those places, descriptions of the places where they had slept and eaten, even at one point a description a foreign couple with whom they had travelled for two days talking to each other only with gestures. It was quite funny, and a couple of times Dino caught himself laughing.

  It was only after two or three hours, and quite a few pages, did Dino reach the moment when he and Sofia had finally seen those dawns that never ended, and for a moment, trying desperately to hold back the tears, it seemed to him that the sun would never again set, never again rise, but stay trapped forever in the limbo of dawn.

  By now, he was sitting on the sofa with the notebook open on his knees. He closed it and for a moment sat there listening to his own sighing and looking at the black cover which contained secrets that he had never been able to solve.

  He stood up and went to the window and as he stood looking out at the sun starting to illumine the roofs of the houses, he knew what he had to do. He took a deep breath, moved his neck again until it cracked, put on his jacket, picked up Rosa’s little bottle and the book and left home. It struck him that he was tired, but that this wasn’t the moment to rest.

  He went back to the hospital, pressed the big red button, went up to his daughter’s floor, went in through the door next to the window and was about to go straight into the room where the incubator was.

  “Excuse me,” a nurse said as he was going in. “Stop.”

  As if what he was doing was quite normal, Dino took a chair from one side of the room and moved it close to the glass box where his daughter lay, nice and quiet, surrounded by her wrinkles.

  “You can’t stay here,” the nurse said from the door of the room.

  Dino looked her straight in the eyes. “Go and call security if you want,” he said. “I’m not moving from here.” He took Rosa’s little bottle from his pocket, put it down on the floor, took the top off, and as the nurse went out muttering something he opened the book and started reading.

  This was what he would do. As Sofia had decided to go away without revealing part of herself to him, he would force her to give him a hand in bringing up the baby. Suddenly the emptiness felt like less of a weight.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  TOWARDS EVENING, it struck Dino that now he was really tired and that the hour had come to rest, and he blew his daughter a kiss and left the hospital.

  He started walking as if everything was normal, and once he got close to the centre of town, instead of going home, he turned in the direction of the town hall.

  The big old building stood out in the air of the evening like a fat, squat man. To the right of the big dark wooden main door, next to what must once have been a big earthenware jar, there was a circular mark, as if it had been struck by a fist, and above this mark was a big black stripe that went up as far as the broken windows on the first floor. It was as if a big ball of heated stones had come from somewhere, and what remained was a strange burn mark that would be hard to erase. There was something sinister and fascinating about that circle of damaged wall and that vertical black brushstroke and those broken windows, as if there was something hidden in every loose piece of stone that drew you like a magnet.

  Dino stood looking at that wound. He would have preferred it if it didn’t have anything to do with him, and yet for some reason he felt proud to be a part of it. Maybe, all things considered, everybody likes to have the illusion that they belong to something great, something absolute.

  After a few minutes, though, it struck him that maybe this was how things were—they were destroyed, and it didn’t matter very much
how, and above all there wasn’t much that anybody could do about it. Then it struck him that before going home he wanted to drop into the billiard parlour for a moment, and he set off again as if everything was normal.

  He walked in with barely a greeting for anyone, walked up to the table at the far end of the room, took his cue from the display case, took off his jacket, rolled up his sleeves, took the little tray with the balls, put it down on the baize, picked up the chalk, gave a few strokes to the tip of the cue, moved one of the balls closer to him, and after a moment’s concentration, getting a clear idea of the ball’s position, stretched across the table and put the tip of the cue on his bridge hand. He let the cue move backwards and forwards a couple of times, then released it. Clack. The ball set off calmly towards the opposite cushion, rebounded off it and gradually slowed down as it came back, until it had ended up in what seemed to be the exact same point from which it had started. Dino looked carefully at the ball sitting there, where he had always thought it ought to be. He leant forward and took a closer look at it, first from one side, then from the other. He straightened up and looked at the ball again. Then he went around the corner of the table and crouched next to the long cushion, carefully observing the ball from that angle and slightly tilting his head to one side. After a few seconds he straightened up again and, still looking fixedly at the ball, gave a few more strokes with the chalk to the tip of the cue, and again stretched out across the baize. The ball set off again, as before, towards the opposite cushion, hit it again in the same place and gradually came back and settled in what seemed to be the exact same place as before.

  Dino looked at the ball again, and an almost imperceptible smile crinkled the corners of his eyes. He again turned the corner of the table and again crouched at the edge. He again tilted his head slightly to one side, and kept it in that position for few seconds, observing the smooth surface of the ball lying on the green baize. He could almost distinguish the single microscopic filaments that formed the material of the baize, and if he had been even more patient he might even have identified who had been the last person to touch the ball. For a moment, the lines of the material seemed like dunes in the desert, and as he looked at them in the shadow of the huge ball he shook his head and let out a little laugh.