It was a nice feeling: sometimes some man or boy would visit the gym and after a while I would see Gigi, the other trainer, point at me. They would take a few steps and stand there looking self-conscious like someone coming in to see a head of state, and they always stopped for a few minutes and watched me train. God knows what they later told other people. Apparently one day a schoolmate told his friends that I was the Dancer, that he had seen me in the gym.
“Who?”
“That guy who always dresses like a nerd and carries a leather satchel.”
“The one wandering off alone over there?”
“Yes.”
“Fuck off.”
“I swear!”
“Get away!”
“I know it for certain, I saw him yesterday in the gym, you should have seen how fast he was.”
“I wouldn’t believe it even if I saw him.”
No one doubted that I would win against any of the guys around me, not even me. It didn’t take much to realise that that clumsy, clodhopping bunch who wasted most of their punches were powerless against a lean, winged animal that danced in the ring like a butterfly.
God knows what they would have thought if they had known that I didn’t fight because my mother didn’t want me to, what they would have said if they had known that behind my mysterious, fascinating reluctance stood the slender figure of my mother, that apparently inoffensive lady whose hair was already starting to turn white. They wouldn’t have believed it. Or else they would have split their sides laughing and I would always have remained ‘the Ballerina’, however many punches I landed, however many titles I won, however many Olympics I competed in.
Every now and again, though, things happen to you that change your life. And then you want to turn back the clock and say no, I liked it better the way it was before. But the vase is broken and whatever was inside is now on the table, gradually drying, and showing the world as it really is, with a bit of colour, maybe, but the way it is. One day, you see the anger and discover what sweat is.
I only fought once in my life. I mean seriously. Referee, corner, audience, bets and all the rest of it. People still remember it. There are still some who say it was the best fight they ever saw.
I HAD ONLY SEEN HIM FIGHT ONCE. There was a big fight meeting at the Teatro Tenda, and I went with Beppe. I told mother the school was taking us to see a play by Pirandello. She swallowed it, so I got my friend Beppe to pick me up outside my house and give me a lift on his old three-colour Ciao moped which was always so difficult to start. He was one of the few people at school who knew about this boxing business, but somehow he didn’t want to believe that I was really good. I think he thought I’d made it all up, that I didn’t even go to the gym, that it was all a fantasy in order to make me seem less of a nerd than I was. The first time he started to suspect it might be true was when he came over to my place one afternoon to study and on the way we got caught in a downpour and ended up as soaked as dishcloths. We undressed in my room, which wasn’t something that happened often, because I didn’t have many friends. Anyway, Beppe and I were in the bedroom when I heard him cry out, “Bloody hell!”
I looked up and saw that he was looking at me with a stupid half-smile on his face.
“What is it?” I said.
“Fuck,” he said. “What a body.”
I looked down at those prominent pectorals, those chequered stomach muscles and those sinewy arms. When I was dressed, you’d never have guessed that beneath those trousers and those over-large nerdy shirts there was that knot of muscles, small but nice and taut.
“Thanks,” I said.
“But how do you do it?”
“I told you, I box.”
“Yeah, right.”
I didn’t care if he didn’t believe it. Outside the gym, I usually didn’t believe it myself. Outside the gym, everyone made fun of me, I never had a girlfriend, always said the wrong thing, got good marks, played the piano and didn’t have a moped, and so even I ended up forgetting that there was a damp, stinking place where I was a sensation.
After the night of the fight meeting, though, all Beppe’s doubts vanished. It was as if I was back in my world, even though it was outside the gym. There was the Finger tearing tickets at the entrance — the same Finger who’d got out of prison six months earlier, the same Finger I’d been telling how to deliver decent hooks a couple of weeks before.
He saw me from a distance at the back of the queue and started waving his arms.
“Hey, skinny! What are you doing back there? Come here, I’ll let you through!”
We squeezed through the other people and when we got to the front the Finger smiled and shook my hand and slapped me on the back a couple of times and told me how pleased he was that I had come.
“This is Beppe, a friend of mine,” I said, and the Finger shook his hand, too. Still smiling, he told us to go through.
Inside, there were lots of people going back and forth under the neon lights, between the bar and the red curtains which led to the stalls.
Beppe and I had two cokes at the bar as if they were bourbon on the rocks and went into the stalls. The symmetrical fortress of the ring rose like a wedding cake under the spotlights.
One by one, the guys from the gym came up to me and greeted me. They hugged me, slapped me on the back and greeted Beppe as if he were one of the gang. And during the fights they nudged me with their elbows every now and again and said, “You should be up there.” Which wasn’t, in fact, a bad idea: I could easily see myself up there under those spotlights, dancing around an opponent, covering him with straight punches like mosquito bites, and then in the end having my hand lifted by the referee to thunderous applause, or looking down at the other man lying on the ground after a good straight right to the chin.
But my mother didn’t want that, damn her, so there I sat, watching the fights, content with the certainty that I would have won and the slaps on the back from my pals and the glances from Beppe, who was starting to look on me as a bit of a legend.
Whether they won or lost, the kids up there in the ring were all small-timers. All awkward, lumbering guys completely lacking in class. With one exception: the Goat.
He got up in the ring with those eyebrows of his hanging over his eyes like kitbags. As he sat there in the corner, with a towel round his shoulders, he held his dark-red gloves close to his chin, moved his head from side to side and hit himself on the jaw as if to remind himself that he’d soon be taking punches. I sensed immediately that he was good, that he was in a different class.
I leant over to Giano, a tall, well-built young guy with the body of a swimmer who was pretty scary in the ring but was too crazy to fight.
“Who’s that?” I asked.
Giano turned and looked at me in surprise. “That’s Mugnaini, the Goat.”
“That’s the Goat?”
“Yes, that’s him.”
“I didn’t know he was fighting tonight.”
“Neither did I.”
I sat back again in my seat and watched him skipping in the corner, while his second massaged his shoulders.
“Who’s the Goat?” Beppe asked.
I couldn’t take my eyes off him. “Someone who’s never lost a fight,” I said, lost in thought.
Beppe looked at him for a few seconds then turned to me again. “And why’s he called the Goat?”
I leant forwards and placed my elbows on my knees. “Because he always keeps moving forwards with his head down,” I said.
Beppe nodded again. I couldn’t stop staring at him. It was as if his skipping and the streak of shadow under his eyebrows had hypnotised me and dragged me up there into the ring to get a closer look at him, to see if I could find out whether, in that darkness beneath his forehead, somewhere behind those eyes, there was someone who could beat me.