When the officer again pointed and raised his arms in total surrender at a move so unnimble as Mario’s, Mario fell to his knees and sculpted giant breasts in the air before his chest as he had seen Greek sailors do many times when they danced in the port bars.
He was overcome by a passion that had not seized him so in the car — he suddenly knew why men had broken a foot off a river god when they saw l’onorevole Cicciolina’s tette. “Her tette were credimi, eccellente — grande, pesante—”
“Whose?” the officer said.
“L’onorevole Cicciolina’s.”
“When?”
“Now.”
“Now?”
“She was in the taxi with me — it’s why I took the bad turn—”
“Where is she now?”
“Disappeared, apparently. You did not see her?”
“No.”
“She’s fast. It’s almost incredible, but I think she’s in trouble with the law. That’s why she vamooshed. Is she wanted by the law?”
“You were in a fantasy,” the officer said.
“I doubt it.” Mario met the officer eye to eye. He held his ground. “I doubt that extremely.”
The officer pursed his lips. “Good for you. No ticket today. Buon viaggio. I’d like to meet her, too. Here’s my number.”
“Ciao,” Mario said. He doubted that l’onorevole Cicciolina would consort with polizia but he held his tongue. Let the officer dream.
He sped homeward, thinking that if the officer had not been one policeman but a whole band of carabinieri with Uzis, and they had opened fire, he and Cicciolina would have looked a lot like Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway in Bonnie and Clyde, except his Fiat was a little smaller than Clyde’s coupe, and Cicciolina’s tette were a lot larger than Bonnie Parker’s. He threw the officer’s number out the window, an act he would regret when he got home.
At his house the first thing he saw was a man looking into his windows. Fearing he might be an assassin, perhaps some new form of competition among taxi drivers, he circled the block until the man disappeared, discovering in his revolutions that his Fiat, though now getting on in miles, still got good rubber going into both second and third. When the man had gone, he realized that a taxi-driver assassin would not linger in the absence of a taxi, so he was probably fantasizing a bit, but still, you could not rule anything out these days. You have CIA, the Israelis are back-to-the-wall, look at Libya, and the French can be so snotty. Mario had had nightmares since hearing in childhood about tiny Frenchmen with wires who had been deadly on Germans who were caught patrolling lines — from behind, total surprise, wire through neck. There was an air of lunacy about it, but Mario thought it just could have been a lost Frenchman looking to kill him for some fantastic reason, kill him with a wire, if it was still true that they were good with the wire.
Getting out of his car, Mario stepped on a wire. This nearly gave him an infarto. But he saw, before he stopped breathing altogether, that it was only his radio antenna that he had yanked two mornings ago from the red hands of the neighbor’s six-year-old. He had given the child a very stern talking-to about antenna stealing leading straight to bank robbing and jail, gesticulating with a razor motion at his throat. The child, still holding the snapped-off antenna, did not seem to understand, so Mario choked himself until blue to demonstrate the effects of hanging as he had seen them in Westerns. At this the child dropped the antenna and ran off laughing. Mario left it there. It was not sightly to reconnect a ripped-out antenna, and less sightly to stick in its place a coat hanger. Besides, his radio did not work. It had blown out one night as he passed a nuclear power station. He had a vaguely dishonest feeling after scolding the child, because the radio was useless and because he had himself wanted to be a bank robber before circumstances led him into taxi driving.
He approached his house with caution. Seeing no one, he entered. The house was wide open and well lit. It looked to have been robbed. Drawers and closets were open, some of his wife’s dresses were on the bed, others hanging askew on their hangers half out of the closet. He checked immediately beneath his pillow for his pistol, a German officer’s Luger which he had purchased from a man at a flea market who had restored the finish expertly and filled the barrel with lead. His gun was there. So, for a heist, they had not been cleaned out. The scum had missed the real treasure.
In the kitchen he expected to find the pasta water on and, by extension, his wife, but she was not there. There was a note on the kitchen table. He looked under the kitchen sink to see if the bastards had found his shoeshine kit. They had not. It was safe. The little kiwi birds on the brush handles looked at him serenely, as if to say, We held our ground.
He wanted to get the pasta going but couldn’t decide on what type. He stopped just before salting the water, sat down at the table absently eating rock salt, and looked at the note. It was, apparently, from his wife. The salt was very salty, he noticed. He decided to secure the doors and windows against a return of the scavengers and sit in the dark waiting for them. He had seen the American detective Mannix and perhaps Jack Nicholson in Chinatown do this. They couldn’t tell where you were, but you could see them by the streetlights outside. What was dangerous in this case was that they would not be able to see his Luger. If he lit a candle, perhaps they could see the gun, and maybe just enough of him, like Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now, that he would look terribly menacing and slender. Also, he could read his wife’s note. It was beginning to interest him.
By the light of the candle, his wife’s note, weighted down attractively by his Luger diagonally across it, was a pretty thing. It was note-sized, a handsome cut stationery, not a hastily torn-off scrap of something larger. His wife’s hand was neat, clear, strong for a woman. She had written, apparently, if this was her writing — he thought it was — that she was leaving, that she had found another man, and that he, Mario, didn’t know beans about large size. Mario shook his head: it was just like her. She was always carrying on about large size. She was the one who didn’t know beans about large size. A boyhood friend of his had been called Hannibal in Gymnasium, “because he comes over the mountain with an elephant between his legs.” But Mario had been called Scipio, “who surrounded Hannibal.” That was large size. “She not to know no bean about no large size,” Mario said aloud in the dark, pointing the Luger at the neat note. “She needs a hole small-size in her brainpan small-size.
His English was at its best, he felt, when he was stressed by something, and he liked to exercise it in non-conversational modes like this. The feeling it gave him was that of writing poetry. With English, he might have been Petrarch. He had heard that a very similar liberation had visited the writer Joseph Conrad.
He ate some more salt and thought further of the assassin. Was he this alleged lover? The carrier of large size? He was not the burglar. The burglar would not have been looking in at the mess he had himself made, unless he was looking to see if he had missed something. But what could you tell you had missed from outside when you had missed it inside? That was fantasy. What if the man had not been a taxi assassin or a thief but a voyeur, looking to get a peek at him and his wife having their frequent relationships?
This was of paramount concern to Mario. The sanctity of their marriage would have been sullied by interloper’s eyes. Holy images would have been bootlegged by a common criminal into the street, perhaps for the amusement of the pervert’s colleagues in scum. He could see a gang of purse thieves in Naples sitting around about three hundred purses talking about his large size and his delirious wife. The delicate sculpture of their fond embrace — joined as artfully as marble, her legs perhaps thrashing over his clenched back — would be dislocated from its hallowed pediment and carried like spoils into the mean secular minds of the equivalent of marauding Gauls. They were the same people who whapped the genitals and noses off all the sculpture of Italy. He had seen sculpted infants mutilated by these people who had looked into his house.