I am Simon Herzog. I am the hero of my own story.
The Camorra henchman turns back to Simon, who tells him: “Your father fought the fascists. He was a partisan. He risked his life for justice and freedom.” The two men turn to Bianca, who translates into Neapolitan: “Pateto eta nu partiggiano cà a fatt’a Guerra ’a Mussolini e Hitler. A commattuto p’ ’a giustizia e ’a libbertà.”
The politician becomes impatient, but the assassin signals him to shut up. The politician orders the second henchman to execute Simon, but the one with the rifle says calmly: “Aspett’.” And apparently the one with the rifle is the boss. He wants to know how Simon knows his father.
As it happens, this was just an inspired guess: Simon recognized the model of rifle, a Mauser, the weapon used by elite German marksmen. (Simon has always been partial to Second World War stories.) He deduced from this that the young man had inherited it from his father and this offered two possible hypotheses: either his father had come into possession of the rifle by fighting for the Italian army alongside the Wehrmacht, or quite the opposite: he had fought against them as a partisan and taken the gun from the corpse of a German soldier. As the first hypothesis offered him no hope of being saved, he gambled on the second. But he is careful not to reveal his reasoning and, turning to Bianca, he says: “I also know you lost family members during the earthquake.” Bianca translates: “Isse sape ca è perzo à coccheruno int’o terremoto…”
The politician shouts: “Basta! Spara mò!”
But the Camorra member, o zi—“the uncle,” as the “system” calls the young men it gets to do its dirty work—listens attentively as Simon explains the role played by the man he has been ordered to protect in the tragedy of the terremoto that struck his family.
The politician protests: “Nun è over’!”
But the young “uncle” knows it is true.
Simon asks innocently: “This man killed members of your family. Does vengeance mean anything to you?”
Bianca: “Chisto a acciso e parienti tuoje. Nun te miette scuorno e ll’aiuta?”
How did Simon guess that the young “uncle” had lost his family in the terremoto? And how did he know that, one way or another, without having any proof to hand, the “uncle” would consider it plausible that the politician could be held responsible? In his critical paranoia, Simon does not want to reveal this. He does not want the novelist, if there really is a novelist, to understand how he did it. Let it not be said of him that anyone can read him like a book.
In any case, he is too busy taking care of his peroration: “People you loved were buried alive.”
Bianca no longer needs to translate. Simon no longer needs to speak.
The young man with the rifle turns to the politician, who is pale as the volcano’s clay.
He hits him in the face with the butt of his rifle and pushes him backward.
The corrupt politician, so paunchy and cultivated, overbalances and falls into the boiling mud pit. “La fangaia,” whispers Bianca, hypnotized.
While his body floats for a moment, emitting horrible noises, the politician is able, just before being swallowed by the volcano, to recognize Simon’s voice, as toneless as death, telling him: “See? It’s my tongue you should have cut off.”
And the geysers of sulfur continue to burst from the bowels of the earth, billowing toward the sky and poisoning the atmosphere.