Джанрико Карофильо - Rome Noir

A few drops on the side of the car, if he had a match it would all be easy.

He gets in and drives off, now she’s staring at him.

I don’t know... I think we should talk about it.

He thinks that with a little luck he could make the car crash against the guardrail in just the right place so that the window would shatter and the corner of the trailer would pass right through her without leaving even a scratch. A couple of spins and he’d come to a stop there, straddling the lanes, in a state of confusion. Ready to start again.

He doesn’t want to listen and raises the volume on the radio, she turns and looks silently at the dark outline of the hills, the fires burning on the smaller parallel roads, the shadows of the whores running along and jumping in cars like theirs.

He passes the truck without signaling, locks his jaw, one step away from cramping his facial muscles.

The radio is playing The Police.

This is the song you need. Learn to leave me alone, learn, she says, happy and exasperated at the same time.

Don’t stand, don’t stand so close to me.

He shakes his head. He’d like to have cascades of words ready to pour out of his wounded mouth, legions of truth endowed with conviction, like Christians in the middle of a crowded arena. But not a thing, he can’t say a thing because grief strangles him, and to have imagined her dead has upset him even more.

Weak, he feels weak, and the light of the dashboard projects an orange stigmata on his shirt.

Finally he manages to mutter, Then why are you still with me?

His eyes are shining.

Again she pauses for a long time while she pretends to hum. She knows it, the why, but she says, I don’t know.

He accelerates.

He thinks about jerking to a sudden stop while she’s unbuckling her seat belt: She would hit her head and with a little luck some interesting scenarios might open up.

But he repents.

There is no revenge, there is no redemption, only tears.

You’re driving worse than a blind man, watch out.

She is so beautiful that looking at her makes him feel terribly immoral, like someone spying through the chinks of a confessional.

She shouldn’t exist.

That old adage that the higher you go the harder you fall sounds more and more real.

He thinks of his friends, all absent spectators at this farce. They, too, are ready to stab him, because basically it couldn’t last.

Life is a serious business — if you start thinking about how much pain, you risk swerving off the road. If he weren’t crying silently he would have thought he’d fallen asleep at the wheel.

Five hundred meters to the Autogrill on the ring road.

He downshifts and with his left ring finger engages the right turn signal. He goes into neutral for a moment in the emergency lane because he’s always liked hearing the wheels spin freely, out of control, for a few seconds, it lets him breathe.

He steps on the clutch and puts the car in gear, takes his foot off, and the engine screeches while the revolutions get slower and the wall approaches a little too quickly.

It could end like this. She’s right, everything is unfolding badly, tiredly, for the worse.

He heard her say to a friend, Do something for him, he’s gotten heavy and boring.

He saw her smile several times at another friend.

Friends, how many infiltrated in the ranks of the good...

An abrupt turn of the wheel, and he is calmly controlling the approach to the brightly lit bar.

They get out of the car and separate.

He leans on the hood, which is hot, and peers at the sky; she heads, hips swaying, in the direction of the rest room.

She walks the way princesses of ancient Egypt must have walked.

Slow, sinuous, she glides over the asphalt without touching it, without hurrying. You need nobility of soul or an extreme lack of control to walk like that.

The same voice from before tells him that now, right now she can’t see him, he could take off and leave her there.

Or he could set fire to everything, run away, and let her burn. It would be the bonfire of vanity, the fire of catharsis.

Would a fabulous cunt like her be transformed into a phoenix as she runs maddened into the night, he wonders.

Would the gas station explode?

Would he die too?

Would the poor attendant survive or join his former colleague of a few kilometers and a few minutes earlier?

Would there be a big bang?

And what if he were saved but disfigured for life?

He doesn’t have the stuff of a pyromaniac, not him.

He turns on the engine while she touches up her makeup in the passenger-side mirror.

He puts it in first, drives off with a little jerk, and brakes suddenly after a dozen meters.

She screams.

A deafening, terrifying sound, like a trumpet. A noise not human stops his heart while a divine light floods the car’s interior.

The biggest truck in the world passes by with its horn blasting a few centimeters from his door.

Then it grows distant in the night.

Her makeup is all smeared and she is weeping hysterically, out of fear.

Sometimes it simply happens that the whole universe plots against you.

He is silent, dazed, the car stops along the edge of the road, clouds of gnats in the headlight beams and brave crickets singing of lovely death.

The silence hurts more than death’s scythe.

It’s toxic and humiliating, terminal.

Sorry, sweetheart, he stammers.

Shut up and take me home, she says.

The words bounce first against the window on the passenger side, reaching him only on the rebound.

But they are faraway words, he is alive and this for now is enough. Fear, the sudden terror has distanced him from her. Now it’s as if he has grasped the good and the bad, the drama and the farce. His love finished, and his love with makeup smeared like a clown or a whore at the end of the night.

He scratches his nose.

He starts off again.

He turns up the music a little and, out of the corner of his eye, lets himself glance at the cheap imitation of the woman he’s in love with. He hums, he tries to stay in tune to show that he can do something well.

You lousy shit, you practically got me killed. I can’t deal with you anymore, I’m not happy.

She says she’s not happy and he somehow understands.

To be in love does not imply being completely stupid.

In his new privileged position he manages to feel opposing feelings at the same time, the joy of survival and the torture of abandonment.

He struggles to swallow the knot that rises in his throat, he would like to be able to tell her that everything’s fine, that they’ll be happy, that there won’t be any room for sadness between them.

But again nothing comes out.

He would like to tell her that he’s been struggling for a lifetime, that he’s felt bad for a lifetime, that the only time he feels good is when he sleeps with her, tightly embraced.

If he took the key out of the ignition while they’re hurtling toward the curve they could talk about it in the afterlife.

Now he has so much darkness in his head, so much that she wouldn’t be able to find his face to hit him.

Sweetheart, I’m doing everything and the opposite of everything to make you happy, but it’s so complicated, it’s incredibly painful to never see you happy, I don’t know what to do, he says all in one breath.

She laughs in his face.

Now he stops talking.

Homicide can also be an evolved feeling of mercy, even if he’s not thinking about it anymore.

He downshifts, puts on the turn signal without listening to the music anymore, and musters courage.

Why are we stopping?

She might have said it, he doesn’t know with certainty because he’s not listening.