Thus, when Stefano Saggese went to retrieve a ball that had ended up outside the fence, the scoreboard with which he mentally covered the distance that separated him from match point shattered in the face of a different sort of calculation. One, two, three, four, five police cars... He raised his head and shared with his clone the same conclusion that receivers of stolen goods come to before vanishing silently through one of the many service doors available to those who — in an immense kingdom of speculators, small-town whores, and drug addicts such as Rome was in the ’80s — appreciate a certain discretion along with the flow of cash.
“Something is happening...” Stefano Saggese said.
Since at a certain point the number of kids with no police record was not sufficient even for a bridge tournament, I never really understood the procedure. Ten cops surround a neoclassical-style villa full of expensive junk. While two or three approach the gate, two more take down the license number of the Ferrari, one maybe communicates with headquarters, but who is authorized to talk to the passersby? Whoever this nameless man is, his job is even more monotonous than that of the person playing the role of the herald in a Shakespearian tragedy. Two lines and exit: Usually passersby haven’t seen anything, and the cop has to let them go.
But this time the script was twisted. The cop who was assigned to interview the passersby, and whose gaze up to that point had been drifting among high-cylinder still lifes, saw the sunny desert of the street disintegrate because of two figures in movement. Spontaneously they advanced toward him. Neither was more than five-six: red Lacoste shirt, blue shorts, each holding a Maxima Corrado Barazzutti racket. If you looked closely — the herald in uniform was tempted to squint — it was the same person.
“Need help?” asked the optical illusion.
It wasn’t curiosity that impelled the Saggese twins toward the police cars. They were not fans of adventure, and they would not have approached the Canditos’ house even if they had found out that a UFO had landed on it. Another force was pushing them, an impalpable feeling of rancor nursed for years, serve after serve after volley after serve, a grudge fueled by the hypnotic monotony of white stripes on a red background, a revenge that the cowardly little twins could satisfy only with the weapons of an informer.
“Yes,” the policeman smiled. “Does the Candito family live here?”
“This is their house,” one of the boys confirmed, coming dangerously close to the first orgasm of his life.
Then love of pedantry overcame love of betrayal. Stefano Saggese felt compelled to add: “But Mr. and Mrs. Candito aren’t home. They’re on vacation in the Canaries.”
“We aren’t looking for Mr. and Mrs. Candito,” the policeman explained. “We’re looking for Saverio, one of the kids. Do you know him?”
Stefano Saggese turned pale, and from that moment he was unable to distinguish the explosion of joy from an abortive experience. His twin lowered his eyes and assumed the thoughtful expression of one who can never enjoy a victory. If it had been Pippo Candito, Saverio’s father, who in a few minutes was to come down the steps of the villa with handcuffs on his wrists, his face swollen with shame, the Saggese twins would have received living proof of that maxim which their father would never tire of repeating with stylized gravity, even if it had concerned a Pilgrim just off the Mayflower: the same maxim that the fruit of those loins believed to be confirmed when, shut in their room, they read comics whose every detail — including the name of whoever did the lettering — they grasped, except for the subtle ironic streak (“Crime doesn’t pay,” Dulls reflected, behind bars at the end of an episode of Alan Ford, only to be found, a few issues later, safe, relaxed and smiling, in a presidential suite surrounded by women in leopard-skin jackets). But the police wanted Saverio. Which, logically, should have made the Saggese twins even happier: Up to a certain age a sense of competitiveness emerges only between contemporaries. But the thought that someone their age, in fact someone who, along with five or six others, had been able to win for himself a disproportionate amount of chaos and diversion, had now used that same mysterious magnet to attract to the driveway of his own house five police cars — well, that was a very complicated thought to come to terms with: The Saggese twins felt the dizzy sensation of envying even the downfall of their bitterest enemy.
“We know him,” Cristiano Saggese confirmed. “What do you want him for?” he added, his cheeks completely red.
“Pushing heroin. Is this him?” The policeman showed them a small salmon-colored rectangle.
The twins nodded. The cop asked if they had seen him in the past hour, hour and a half, and the two boys shook their heads no. At that point they were dismissed, and they vanished obediently into the haze, just as, probably rightly, they exit from this memoir as well. I don’t know what happened to them. Usually, small concentrations of rancor and servility condemned to burning defeat on the playing field of youth re-ascend the slope, with the passing of time, to discover a tenacity, a sense of struggle... they find themselves with the entire armamentarium needed for nursing what the MBAs call “ambition.” So I can imagine them in the role of financial consultants, as, in their office in Prati watched over by images of the Pope and fake Campbell’s soup can silk screens, they inundate a potential client with patter. Neither debilitating tumors nor fifteen months in jail for price-fixing: My only wish for them is that at some point during one of these informal encounters — in order to hook the wallet of their prey, the postgraduates cunningly offer some sort of anecdote — the potential client feels free to depart from the subject long enough to ask: “And how was your adolescence?”
“Good, thanks,” one of the Saggeses would answer.
Then he would go out to dinner at the Cavalieri Hilton, return home, and wake up in the middle of the night covered with sweat, believing that he still has in his ears the sounds of a hundred thousand tennis balls that won’t stop rebounding off the walls of an empty room.
The plaster discus throwers were nothing. After having made vain use of the intercom and then the doorbell, the police went over the gate, slid a thin object very much like a credit card along the front door lock, and faced the semidarkness of a hall tiled in pink marble. One of them loosened the cord of a curtain. The spectacle that met their eyes outdid the murkiest fantasies of a prop man with an unlimited budget.
The shutters let in thin streams of light that would be transformed into clouds of multicolored dust when they touched the peacock feathers that, grouped in bunches of ten, greeted the visitor, peeking out from the mouths of amphoras as tall as a standing greyhound. Not that real dogs were lacking: Ten examples of an eccentric dog lover’s passion in white porcelain, five on one side of the room, five on the other, exchanged aquamarine glances, thanks to large turquoise gems embedded at nose level. First Communions at the church of San Giovanni in Laterano and other sacraments were guaranteed remembrance in massive silver frames, just as an unintentional colonial tribute was given life on the ceiling (white tiger skin) and on one of the carpets (stuffed crocodile). It was as if two irreconcilable images had found a point of contact: The humor of a Barberini tormented by vice and bombast matched the happiness, the innocent exultation of joy, the expressive apex of one who, stuck until the day before among anonymous ragpickers, could say to himself, Now I am a rich man.