‘I’ll be only too happy to remain here as long as you wish,’ he replied.
29
Rodolfo Mattioli sat on an obdurate chair in a waiting room on the third floor of the hospital, a pile of magazines much thumbed by other hands on the table beside him. He was wearing a suit, his best shirt and tie, and had polished his shoes.
That afternoon, he had walked the streets and ridden the buses at random for hours before ending up in Cluricaune, where he had been approached by some bearded wrinkly who wanted to score cocaine. Normally Rodolfo wouldn’t have got involved in anything like that, particularly with a stranger who might well be a nark, but after what he had already done, nothing seemed to matter any more. He’d feigned a near collapse at the bar and then, while apparently clutching him for support, had not only got rid of the incriminating pistol into his prospective client’s overcoat pocket but also lifted the man’s bulging wallet. After that he left the bar and ran back to the apartment he shared with Vincenzo.
There was no sign of the latter. Rodolfo peeled off the leather jacket he’d borrowed and flung it on to the pile of assorted clothing scattered on the floor of Vincenzo’s bedroom, then quickly showered and changed into his most respectable outfit. He knew now, and with overwhelming certainty, what he needed to do, but there was no time to waste. He had been just about to leave when his mobile rang.
‘I’m in deep shit, Rodolfo,’ a dull, self-pitying voice declared. ‘My dumb parents just called. Apparently the silly bastards hired a private investigator to find out where I was living and what I was doing. Now he’s trying to blackmail them by claiming he has proof that I committed some crime.’
‘What crime?’
‘It’s all bullshit, of course, but with a record like mine the cops will be after me in a Milan moment if he spills what he has to them. So I’m going to have to hide out for a while.’
‘This all sounds a bit weird, Vincenzo. Are you fucked up?’
‘No! This is real, God damn it! And what really pisses me off is that it’s all my lousy parents’ fault. Anyway, like I said, I’m going to have to go into deep cover for a while, only there’s some stuff I need and I can’t risk going back to the apartment. Can you meet me tonight with a bag full of clothes and some spare shoes?’
‘Where?’
‘Doesn’t matter.’
Rodolfo thought a moment.
‘Do you know a place called La Carrozza? Opposite San Giacomo.’
‘I can find it.’
‘I’ll be there after nine with your stuff.’
Typical Vincenzo, thought Rodolfo as he hung up. Despite his denials, he was almost certainly on a paranoid stoner. If the cops did come round to their apartment asking questions, those questions would concern not Vincenzo but himself.
But that wouldn’t happen, because he was going to forestall them by making a full and frank confession to the victim in person before turning himself in to the police right after seeing Flavia that evening. On the phone she had sounded guarded, almost cool, understandably enough after the way he had treated her the night before, but had agreed to meet him at La Carrozza. It would be tough to say goodbye to her, almost as tough as the inevitable prison sentence he would have to serve, but there was no other way to put a definitive end to the madness that had swept over him in the past few days.
In retrospect, Rodolfo conceded that Flavia might have been right about Vincenzo being a bad influence. Certainly his own behaviour had been unrecognisable, first taking the pistol that he had found hidden behind the books in his room, then following Edgardo Ugo back from the university lecture hall to his house in the former ghetto. For a moment it had looked as though he would be foiled by bad luck, when Ugo was involved in an accident with some woman who had come running out of a restaurant and collided with his bike. In the end, though, everything had gone according to plan. Well, almost everything.
Outside his town dwelling, Edgardo Ugo had caused an art work to be (re-)recreated, the high concept behind which he recounted to anyone who would listen-which necessarily included all his graduate students-at every possible opportunity. The house to the left of his stood slightly proud of the general alignment in the street, leaving a dark corner just beside Ugo’s front door where drunks and homeless people were wont to urinate. A man as influential as Ugo could certainly have persuaded the city authorities to bar it off with a metal grid, as was normally done in the case of such illegal facilities, but he had instead come up with a typically witty and post-post-cultural solution.
Marcel Duchamp’s 1917 ready-made Fountain, consisting of a mass-produced glazed ceramic urinal rotated on its horizontal axis, had long been an icon of the modernist movement. Ugo’s stroke of genius had been to subject this signifier itself to a further stage of semiotic transformation (invoking the process of ‘unlimited semiosis’ and Lacan’s ‘sliding signified’) by having it reproduced in the finest white Carrara marble and finished to the intense, glossy sheen associated with the sculptures of Antonio Canova-or, for that matter, mass-produced glazed ceramic ware. As with Duchamp’s ‘original’, the finished piece had been mounted at ninety degrees to the vertical, in the filthy corner where derelicts went to pee furtively. But thanks to them this object functioned as a literal fountain, the urine pouring out through the aperture for the mains inlet pipe on to the miscreant’s trousers and shoes.
When Rodolfo had fired the pistol, while Ugo had his back turned to unlock his front door, this sculpture had been his intended target. The gesture was intended to be purely symbolic, a way of saying, ‘Fuck you and your clever jokes and everything you stand for!’ Instead, the bullet had deflected off the polished marble and must have ended up somewhere in Ugo’s body. The victim had screamed and fallen over, while Rodolfo had taken to his heels. But now the time for running away was over.
A nurse came into the waiting area and approached him.
‘Professor Ugo will see you now.’
Head bowed like a man on his way to the gallows, Rodolfo followed her down a long corridor. The nurse knocked lightly at one of the doors.
‘Signor Mattioli is here.’
‘Va bene,’ said a familiar voice within.
The nurse withdrew.
‘Ah, Rodolfo,’ the voice said languidly. ‘How very good of you to visit me. You of all people.’
The room was in almost total darkness. After the bright lights in the waiting area and corridor, Rodolfo could discern nothing.
‘On the contrary, professore, it’s very good of you to receive me,’ he replied haltingly. ‘I’m sorry to disturb you, only…Well, I’ve come in a hopeless but necessary attempt to apologise for…’
The answer was a soft laugh from the figure on the bed that Rodolfo could now just identify as such.
‘That’s all nonsense,’ Ugo said.
Meaning, who cares about your apologies when I’m going to have you arrested the moment you leave, thought Rodolfo.
‘Sit down, sit down!’ Ugo went on. ‘There’s some sort of chair over there in the corner, I believe. I’ve been ordered by the powers that be to lie on my right side, so I can’t turn to look at you, but we can still talk.’
Rodolfo found the chair and seated himself.
‘Giacometti,’ said the voice from the bed.
‘Alberto?’ queried Rodolfo, utterly at a loss.
‘What do you know about him?’
Rodolfo scanned his memory.
‘Italian Swiss, a sculptor and painter, born around 1900. Died some time in the 1960s, I think. Famous for his etiolated figures which express, according to some commentators, the pain of life.’
Ugo’s laugh came again, louder and longer this time.
‘ Bravo! You were always my best student, Rodolfo, although of course I never told you that. Unless perhaps I did, by barring you from the class.’
‘I want to apologise for that too. Absolutely and without any reservations. I think I must have gone slightly mad recently, but you see…’