He’d grabbed Babi by the arm and dragged her off, amid Raffaella’s useless shouting and the best efforts of the good catch to stop him. That good catch had found himself suddenly flat on his ass with a fat and bleeding lip.
Babi had fallen asleep in Step’s arms, weeping. “How difficult it’s all become. I so wish I could be somewhere far away, without any more problems, without my folks, without all this craziness, someplace quiet, outside of time.”
He’d smiled at her. “Don’t worry. I know where we can go. No one will bother us there. We’ve been there plenty of times before. It’s enough just to want to go.”
Babi looked at him, her eyes full of hope. “Where?”
“Three meters above the sky, the place where people in love live.”
But the next day, she went back home, and it was from that point that everything started, or, perhaps, ended.
Babi had enrolled at the university. She’d started attending courses in business and finance and spent her afternoons studying. She’d started seeing less and less of Step now.
One time, she went out with him in the afternoon. They’d gone to Giovanni’s to get a vitamin shake. They were standing outside the café chatting when suddenly two horrible guys rolled up. Step wasn’t fast enough to realize what was happening. They were all over him in a flash. They started headbutting him, holding him helpless in their combined grips, taking turns slamming their foreheads into his face in an appalling, bloody seesaw ride. Babi had started screaming.
In the end, Step had managed to struggle free, and the two guys had made their escape on a souped-up Vespa, vanishing into traffic. Step was just lying there on the sidewalk, dazed. Then, with her help, he’d gotten to his feet. He’d tried to stem the flow of blood from his nose with paper napkins, but his Fruit of the Loom T-shirt was a bright red mess.
Later, he’d driven her home in silence, uncertain what to say. He’d talked about retaliation for a brawl long ago, before they were even dating. She’d believed him, or maybe she’d just badly wanted to.
When Raffaella saw her come home, her blouse covered with blood, she nearly had a heart attack. “What happened to you? Babi, are you hurt? What’s all this blood? This is all that hoodlum’s fault, isn’t it? Can’t you see that this isn’t going to end well?”
Babi had gone to her room and changed her clothes in silence. Then she’d lain down, all alone, stretched out on her bed. It had become clear to her that this wasn’t working. Something was going to have to change. It wouldn’t be as easy as taking off a bloody blouse and tossing it into the laundry hamper.
A few days later, she’d seen Step again. He had a new cut on his face. He’d been given stitches to his eyebrow.
“What else happened to your face?”
“Well, you know, to keep from waking up Paolo, I didn’t turn the light on in the hallway when I came home. I walked right into a door. You can’t imagine how it hurt. It was really painful.”
Exactly what she had invented as an excuse that other time. She’d learned the truth later from Pallina, by pure chance, while chatting on the phone. They’d gone for Talenti to Zio d’America. They were all carrying clubs and chains, and they were led by Step. A gigantic brawl, a genuine vendetta. There was even an item in the newspaper.
Babi had hung up the phone. There was no point in arguing with Step. He was going to do what he wanted to do. He was stubborn. She’d told him a thousand times that she hated violence, fighting, and bullies.
She’d started sorting out her bookshelves, pulling down a number of notebooks and dropping them on the wall-to-wall carpeting without any interest. Notebooks from years gone by, from high school of course, and old textbooks.
“What do you want to do tonight? Should we go to the motorcycle races? Come on. Everyone else is going,” Step had said.
“I certainly hope you’re joking. It’s out of the question! I never again want to set foot in that place. Maybe I’d run into Maddalena and I’d have to punch it out with her again. There’s an after-dinner party, if you feel like coming.”
Step had put on a navy-blue blazer. He’d spent the whole time sitting on a sofa, looking around, doing his best to find anything amusing in the things he heard and saw, but failing utterly. He’d always hated those college people. He’d crashed parties like that only to smash everything up, having the time of his life with all his friends as they stole things from the bedrooms, throwing things out the windows.
His friends. Who even knew where they were right now. At the Greenhouse, popping wheelies at eighty-five kilometers per hour, on their motorcycles with friends all cheering them on, with Siga taking bets, with the chamomiles riding on back and all the rest.
What a bore this party is. His eyes met Babi’s. He smiled at her. She wasn’t happy because she knew perfectly well what he was thinking.
Babi even managed to get her hands on the book that was higher than all the others. Then she remembered as if it had just happened.
The intercom buzzing insistently, insanely. The lady of the house rushing through the living room, the door opening and Pallina standing there, pale, horrified, bursting into tears.
It had been a terrible night. Babi stopped thinking about it. She just started picking up the books that she’d tossed onto the floor. She pulled out others and set them down on the table, and then, when she bent over again, she saw it.
There it was, light colored, brittle, yellowing, as faded as the times gone by. Broken, lying on the dark wall-to-wall carpeting, lifeless now for all this time. The little stalk of wheat that she’d put in her notebook the first time she skipped school with Step. That morning, in the wind that was announcing the arrival of summer, those kisses that smacked of skin with the scent of sunshine. Her first love. She remembered how certain she was that there could never be another one like it.
She picked it up. The stalk of wheat crumbled between her fingers, like some old thought, like gossamer dreams, like feeble promises.
* * *
Step leaned over the stove and examined the espresso pot. The coffee still wasn’t bubbling up. He turned the flame a little higher. Nearby, there was still a small pile of ash and one last piece of yellowed paper. His beloved drawings, the graphic novel panels, from the hand of Andrea Pazienza. They were originals. He’d stolen them from the newsroom of a new newspaper, Zut, when Andrea was still alive and was contributing to the paper.
One night, he’d broken a pane of glass in an upstairs window with his elbow and then climbed in. It had been easy. He’d only stolen the panels drawn by the legendary Paz and then made a quick escape out the door.
But just as he was leaving, someone had emerged from the adjoining room and had grabbed him by the shoulders. “Stop!”
Step had the panels pressed against his body, and he’d given whoever it was a shove, shaking them off and then throwing a punch. A hard, straight right to the face, followed by a bitter surprise. It was a woman. Her name was Alessandra, and she was an unfortunate graphic artist, an unlucky volunteer. She was working late, laying out the publication. That night she’d thrown in the towel early, but certainly through no fault of her own.
Step leaned over and picked up the panel that was supposed to be coming out in that week’s issue and made his way into the night, happy, with the drawings of his idol clutched tightly in his hands. It wasn’t long after that that Andrea Pazienza died.