Step started shoving back against the door. As he was pushing, with his face pressed against the cold, dark wood, through the opening between door and jamb, he saw it. The purse sat on an armchair, next to a fur coat.
Suddenly it all came back to him. He and his brother had given their mother that purse for Christmas.
Then rage and despair and a burning wish that he could be somewhere else, that he could disbelieve what his own eyes were seeing, increased his strength a hundredfold. He threw the door open, hurling the young guy to the floor.
He stalked into the living room like a baleful fury. And his eyes wished they could be blind rather than see what they were seeing. The bedroom stood open. There she was, amid the tangled sheets, with a different face, unrecognizable to him, although he’d seen it thousands of times. His mother was lighting a cigarette with an innocent expression.
Their eyes met, and in that instant, something snapped, a flame died out forever. At the same time, that last remaining umbilical cord of love was severed, and they gazed at each other, silently screaming, sobbing, and weeping.
Then Step walked away while she remained there, on the bed, speechless and burning steadily down, just like the cigarette she’d only just lit. Burning with love for him, with hatred for herself, for the other guy, for that situation.
Step walked slowly toward the door and stopped there. He saw the delivery boy out on the landing, next to the elevator with the tray of pastries in his hand, who was staring at him in silence.
Then, without warning, a pair of hands were laid upon his shoulders. “Listen…”
Step whirled around. It was that young man. What was he supposed to listen to? He no longer felt emotion of any kind. He laughed. The guy failed to understand. He just stood there looking at him, baffled. Then Step slammed a fist right into his face. Destiny.
The strange words of Lucio Battisti, an innocent party, guilty of that unwelcome discovery, rose into the air on the landing or else, perhaps, they just chanced to pop into Step’s mind. Forgive me, for so much, if you can, Lord. I beg her forgiveness too.
At that moment, he realized that he didn’t know anything anymore.
Giovanni Ambrosini lifted his hands to his face, covering them with blood. Step grabbed him by the shirt and, tearing the fabric, hauled him out of that filthy, illicit love nest.
He punched him over and over in the head. The guy tried to run. He started down the stairs with Step right behind him. With a precisely aimed kick, Step knocked him forward, making him trip and fall. Ambrosini tumbled down the stairs.
As soon as he came to a halt, Step was all over him. He kicked him repeatedly, in the back and legs, while the guy clung piteously, suffering, to the railing, trying to haul himself upright, to escape his wrath.
Step was slaughtering him. Step started yanking on his hair, doing what he could to make him release his grip, but even as Step’s hands started filling up with tufts of hair, Ambrosini still clung there, holding on to those iron railings for dear life, shouting in terror.
The doors of the other apartments started to open. Tenants, variously curious about and scared by those screams, emerged. They huddled together in shared concern.
Step stomped on his hands, which were starting to bleed. But there was no loosening Ambrosini’s grip. He held on, certain that it was his only possible salvation.
So Step did it. He swung his leg back and, with all his strength, kicked him in the head from behind. A violent, stunningly precise blow. Ambrosini’s face stamped itself right into the railing with a dull thud. Both his cheekbones were shattered, the flesh lacerated. Blood jetted forth. The bones of his mouth fractured. A tooth dropped, bouncing far away across the marble. The railing started to vibrate, and that metallic noise reverberated down the staircase, along with Ambrosini’s last shout before he lost consciousness.
Step ran away, galloping down the stairs, passing quickly by all those terrible, curious faces, smashing into those flaccid bodies that tried in vain to stop him. He wandered through the city and didn’t return home that evening. He went over to Pollo’s for the night. His friend asked no questions. Luckily, Pollo’s father was away that night.
Pollo heard Step thrashing in his sleep, suffering even in a dream. But the next morning, Pollo acted as if nothing had happened, even though one of the pillows was drenched with tears. They ate breakfast together, smiles on their faces, talking about this and that, sharing a cigarette. Then Step went to school, and at the chemistry exam, he even managed to snatch a gentleman’s C from the jaws of disaster. But that day, his life changed forever. No one else knew why, but nothing was ever the same after that.
Something evil had come to roost inside Step. Some filthy beast, some terrible wild animal had built its lair inside his heart, ready to emerge at any moment, ready to strike, the progeny of suffering, the fallout of a love destroyed.
From then on, life at home became impossible. Silences and fleeting gazes. No more smiles, with the one person he’d loved more than anyone else.
And then came the trial. The guilty verdict. His own mother had not testified in his defense. His father had shouted at him, denouncing him. His brother had been unable to understand. And no one had ever known a thing, except for the two of them. Hate-filled guardians of that terrible, heavy secret.
That same year, his parents had separated and Step went to live with Paolo. The first day he moved into that new apartment, he looked out the window of his bedroom. There was nothing but a peaceful meadow. He started putting his things away. He pulled a few sweaters out of his duffel bag and put them away in the back of the armoire on an empty wooden shelf.
Then he pulled out a sweatshirt. As he pulled it out, the garment tumbled open in his hands. For a moment, it seemed as if his mother was there in the room. He remembered the time he’d let her borrow it, that day they’d gone running together along tree-lined boulevards. How he’d slowed down just to be near her. And now he was in that room, so far away from her, in every sense of the word.
He clutched the sweatshirt tight in his hands and lifted it to his face. He smelled her perfume, and he started to cry. Then, foolishly, he wondered whether, that day, he ought to have told her that she’d put on too much of it.
Chapter 16
The front wheel sank slightly into the deep sand, and the motorcycle swerved rebelliously to one side. With a precisely calculated shove of his feet, Step straightened the bike. The back wheel spun free, kicking up the darker sand behind it, in a rooster tail. Babi held tight to him, scared. The motorcycle swayed a little more, fishtailing.
Then, having reached the harder sand, everything went back to normal. Step downshifted. Gently, he gave it gas, and the motorcycle broke into a stable, regular cruise along the water’s edge.
Off to the right, below them, little waves slapped and slowly subsided. They came and they went, the regular breathing of the sea as, deep and dark, it watched them from afar. Babi looked around. The moon, riding high in the sky, lit up the Feniglia shore. The beach stretched out into the distance, between darker patches of the mountains. To their left and above them, the sand dunes, pounded and torn by the day’s strong winds, now slept quietly in the night, covered by a wild blanket of greenery.
Step turned off the headlights. Shrouded in darkness, they continued to race along like that, on the soft, wet carpet of sand. All around them, the sound of distant trees, the suck of the outgoing waves, the silence of nature at night. When they reached the middle of the Feniglia shore, they stopped. Step picked up a chunk of wood, still wet and ravaged by the waves, and placed it under the motorcycle’s kickstand, sideways, to keep it upright in the sand. Without a word, they found themselves walking along, alone and side by side, enveloped in all that peace.