He took the receiver and put it back to his ear. Now he was alone before the ocean. What in the offices of police headquarters might be perceived as interference was, to the eyes of Pippo Candito, the watery wake raised by two motorboats challenging each other a few yards from the shore.
“Fucking hell, go to hell!” he said.
He was silent for a few seconds. Maybe someone was suggesting that he calm down. But at some point his daughter stopped playing with the summer dresses bought in the market in Las Palmas: The shouts had penetrated the barrier of glass. His wife again left the wicker chair, and she, too, headed for the balcony.
The policemen slid open the door through which the noises could still be heard. They found themselves looking at a small horseshoe-shaped room from which a stairway led down, curving to the right. Meanwhile, the men who had searched the bedrooms without finding a soul had also descended to the basement. Four to keep an eye on Saverio and Danilo. The others ventured over to the stairs that led down another level. The stairwell was a sort of narrow tube with white walls, onto which at a certain point a luminescent wave was projected, a pale-blue spot waving like a flag, giving a slap in the face to anyone who thinks that certain kinds of ambience can be experienced only in movies.
At this point the Heavenly Father was called in. Or rather a silent widening of the eyes, hands groping for support. I wasn’t there with the police but I was familiar with the reactions of people arriving for the first time in the underground part of the villa. In the shouts of boys there was astonishment; adults, on the other hand, wondered how much money it must have taken to set up something like that. With their eyes they measured the ceiling, then gazed along the surface of the water for more than twenty-five meters.
It wasn’t an Olympic-sized pool. An Olympic pool would have been twice as long. It was a hymn to waste in four lanes separated by the typical floating ropes, with overflow grating and backstroke turn indicators. Along the right wall were the doors leading to the bathrooms and changing rooms. On the side opposite the diving board was a piano bar: a half-circle of concrete livened by tiny glass tiles, behind which an old mirror retrieved from some second-hand dealer gilded the reflection of the whiskey bottles. On either side of the diving board stood two monsters: enormous papier-mâché statues taken from the carnival in Ronciglione that were supposed to represent the grandeur of ocean divinities. Scattered around the PVC-vinyl floor was everything that could further subvert the cold sobriety of indoor sports into the no-holds-barred games of an opium smoker: leopard-covered sofas, old pendulum clocks, miniature galleons, and so on.
The underground pool was something new. They had seen Mercedes cars transformed into mobile discotheques, ox quarters filled with video recorders, but not this thing here. Yet there was no time to be amazed. The policemen surrounded the pool and stood staring, without saying a word, because what was happening in there surpassed in strangeness the entire scenic display.
A human figure. The body of a boy. He was swimming. The small atoll of a back emerged, a portion of flesh illuminated by neon lights that ran in long tubes forty-five feet up, a burnished oval that broadened and then offered itself to the flow of the water. One arm after the other cut the blue field as a pin suspended above a dead swamp would have done, leaving behind a ripple that disappeared in a dawnlike silence.
They were used to men who, to avoid capture, threw themselves into the Tiber and then, undone by panic, floundered, begging for help amid the tracery of foam. This boy was something else. It was impossible that he could be unaware of their arrival, but he swam as if he would continue infinitely: His style didn’t reveal the least disturbance the whole time they watched. They probably wondered if it was the expression of a particular form of fear, a panic that instead of exploding in every direction was compressed into a single obsessive gesture. (Once, they had raided the office of a city councilman who hadn’t deigned to look up, but had remained bent over his desk, writing; when they got closer, they noticed in the registry he was holding a series of calculations that at a certain point came to an end in incomprehensible scribbles similar to the product of a seismograph.) Or maybe it was a strategy of desperation: As long as I keep swimming, no one will catch me.
They didn’t know, they couldn’t know, that Giancarlo Colasanti, that was the boy’s name, had an infernal brother. Not a blood brother or, worse, a twin: something more intimate and at the same time more distant. They were in constant contact. They were aware of each other’s presence, they talked to one another in their sleep. Every action undertaken by Giancarlo was a challenge, a mutiny, and a desperate attempt to gain the approval of this presence. He paid attention to no one else, nothing mattered to him that did not have to do with the pursuit of this relationship that we all knew about. They never made peace but they never separated. And in particularly difficult moments they entered the arena as adversaries and, fighting, became a single thing.
He reached the edge of the pool, executed the turn, and continued in the opposite direction. To swim so well, and so long, he must have had tremendous physical strength and perfect control of his breathing. But he couldn’t stop, because someone else was doing the same thing in the waters of the Styx, surrounded by volcanic vapors and the sound of drums. He completed another length, and another, and still another. It was something more than a simple contest with himself. And at the same time, the sound of his passage, amplified by the resonance chamber of the enormous subterranean structure, was a distillation of rage and starlike solitude.
When the contest was over, the policemen saw a shockingly thin, sensual body climbing up the ladder. And, amid the streams of water descending from his curls, a smile that spoke of illness and contagion. They covered him with a bathrobe, as if it would serve more than anything else to protect him. They led him upstairs.
I arrived later, when it was all over. Simply, a girl had kept me all morning and so that day I hadn’t gone with them to sell. One might say that in this way I was saved. But time is a master capable of destroying even its favorite students, and the slender profile of the ’90s was ready to spring the trap. I didn’t see them again for some years, my best friends. And when I did see them again we were no longer us.
About the contributors
Boosta is well-known in Italy as both a writer and a musician. His real name is Davide Dileo and he was born in Turin in 1974. He has released four albums and performed over five hundred concerts with his group Subsonica, which won MTV’s Best Italian Act at their European Awards. He has also become a major producer and mixer for various artists. His first two books are Dianablu and Un’ora e mezza, which will soon be made into a film.
Gianrico Carofiglio is a former anti-Mafia prosecutor based in Bari. He is the author of the international best sellers Involuntary Witness, A Walk in the Dark, and Reasonable Doubts. The Past Is a Foreign Country, a darker and more personal novel, is currently being made into a film. He is the only Italian crime writer whose full catalog has been translated into English. While not writing, he works as a consultant to an Italian parliamentary commission investigating the Mafia.