It’s Saturday night in the exurban city (actually, Sunday morning), and no one wants to go to sleep. The stars have disappeared, there’s too much brightness down here; the sky is purplish and there’s no moon, but it must be clear … there’s no humidity, I have my windows rolled halfway down. I should know this intersection by heart now, but, apart from the factory (I’ve grown as fond of it as if it were my own house), I’ve never really observed the other structures: the gravel area where I’m parked, next to the yellow arrow pointing to the Renal estate, is ringed by a white railing that’s almost completely swallowed up by the bushes of forsythia and ceanothus lilac growing behind it. There must be a house back there, though I can’t see it. But I can see the house on the other side of the road, and, while I try to figure out why it never caught my attention before (because it’s like all the others, because it’s not noticeable), the silver Audi A8 turns out of the driveway and flies down the main road.
I turn my engine on instantly; I didn’t see whether the Ka was in front of it, I didn’t see who was sitting next to the driver, but it seems to me that, if Elisabetta Renal isn’t already asleep, she must be in that car. It’s not easy to follow Mosca, though, and I make some fresh enemies by passing on the right side of a truck and failing to yield while merging into a traffic rotary. No matter what I do, the A8 keeps getting farther away, and, seeing it accelerate like that, I wonder whether it’s escaping someone — me, for instance. Maybe Mosca saw me, or maybe Elisabetta did, or Giletti, posted as a sentry in the backseat. So I let them get even farther ahead, for fear they’ll get mad and stop to ask me for an explanation. For fear they’ll jump me and beat me bloody — with that snub nose, Giletti is like a gorilla, or one of those superstrong dwarves out of a fairy tale.
For ten minutes I followed their two red lights, losing sight of them at every curve and then catching up again, until I thought I saw them blink off to the right at a fork, so I very carefully turned right myself. The road ran through ghostly poplar forests and anonymous industrial sheds of reinforced cement, and I began to imagine that up ahead was an enormous tuft of black cotton, which I would plunge into and get swaddled up in and be smothered to death. I didn’t know where I was going and didn’t see any lights up ahead or in back of me; if they were hiding in some excavation, I would lose them completely and forever … shouldn’t I just go home and slip into bed or do something else more interesting than this? After a mile or so I stopped, with my motor running, in the middle of the road. All I needed was to see her for an instant, but that wasn’t possible. So okay. I turned back.
When I get back to the intersection with the main road, the first thing I see is a gray Clio with my brother at the wheel; he drives by without turning his head and disappears into the night. What’s he doing out here — maybe he’s looking for me — something happened to the kids — but why didn’t he call my cell phone — after all, I switched it back on after the book presentation. While turning onto the main road to follow him, I check the phone’s screen to see if there are any messages that I didn’t hear coming in; I bring his number up, and I’m about to call him, but then I stop dialing and begin to brake. Maybe he’s not looking for me, maybe he wouldn’t want to know that I saw him here. And I start to doubt it’s even him … after all, I couldn’t read the license plate.
I keep following him, but more carefully, and slowly I come to understand where he’s going (or maybe I’d grasped it right away).
The girls gather around the campfires on the turnouts that open up along the shoulder of the highway, little groups of three or four; at this time of year the flames serve not so much for warmth as to let them be seen, especially the Nigerians, who occupy the area just before the railroad bridge: on moonless nights they’re almost invisible. And in every group, behind the exhibitionists who bare their breasts at you or gesture obscenely, you can glimpse the shadowy figures who wish they weren’t there, sitting off to the side on a curb, the ones who never step up to the cars that halt, who never bend down to talk through the rolled-down windows, never, unless they’re the last ones left at the fireside. The closer I get to the bridge, the bigger the groups get, and the traffic chokes up in honking lines with flashing rear lights: it’s like a wedding party. It’s market day under the bridge, and on the far side are the Albanians, the Macedonians, the Bosnians, the Kosovars: the white girls.
I slow down to examine the girls in their thigh-high white boots, see-through white lace, nearly white bleached hair; the blacks dress in black, and the whites dress in white: maybe Carlo has a ready explanation for prostitute fashions too. But he can’t explain it to me now, because he’s disappeared: I lost him … surely he wasn’t coming here, that was only my idea — it’s not like him to have to pay. But now that I’ve begun, I continue my rounds, and even stop a few times to look more closely at the girls who knock on my window, trying to make me roll it down. Cute, young.
After accumulating a strong enough dose of excitement and despondency, I decided it was time to go home, and I wheeled onto a deserted-looking stretch of roadside so that I could back up and turn around. Framed in my rear window, in the white glow of my backup lights, I saw a threesome that looked like two women sitting and one standing. But the sitting ones’ heads were too small for grown women; they were actually kids, a boy and a girl, and they weren’t seated. I rolled down my window and leaned out to see them better: the woman wasn’t dressed as a hooker, and she couldn’t possibly have brought the children along while she worked; their car must have broken down … maybe they needed help.
She came over to me smiling, holding the children by the hand. She wasn’t wearing makeup, she wasn’t pretty.
“Let’s make a family?” she asked with a Slavic accent.
I didn’t understand. I kept following my own line of reasoning, completely autistically.
“Do you need a ride? Where do you have to go?”
She shook her head.
“Let’s make a family,” she declared.
“What does that mean?” I murmured.
She shrugged her shoulders, and her smile vanished; she was disappointed I didn’t understand. Other cars had stopped; wide-open eyes observed us through the windshields. They stopped because they’d seen someone else stop, and the more people pulled over, the more others would stop, for the same reason that no one goes into a deserted restaurant. Anyway, I couldn’t leave the children on that road; I told her to get in.
She directed me to the outskirts of the nearest semiurban area, a few miles away. She didn’t say a word, and the kids sitting in the back looked out the window. We stopped in front of a four-story apartment building, and we went into an apartment on the ground floor. It wasn’t particularly bare; it didn’t seem temporary. The rooms were all lit up, the table in the kitchen was set, and in the kids’ room there were toys on the floor. The girl lay on one of the beds to read a Pokémon comic; the boy took my hand and gestured for me to sit down on the red rug.
He wanted me to drive a truck along an imaginary road while he bombed me from above with a fighter plane. I nodded — this was a role I knew well. Then the woman appeared at the door, saying “Hello?” as if she were answering the phone. She had me sit at the head of the table, where she had laid out a supper of fatty, spicy stew; it was tasty, and I had seconds. They sat at the table but didn’t eat, and the kids muttered and looked at me, laughing. The wine was crummy. I didn’t want coffee; it was 3:30 in the morning.