Джанрико Карофильо - Rome Noir

I was dripping with sweat; I had slept more than eight hours but I was still exhausted. It was an effort to get up. I ate breakfast listening to the same things the radio had been repeating every day for I don’t know how long. The daytime temperature never went below 110 degrees. The health department recommended not going outside before sunset.

I looked out the window as I finished drinking my coffee. It was getting dark, and throngs of foolish Chinese had begun to invade Via Veneto. I observed the rows of red lanterns and the signs crowded with ideograms whose meaning I didn’t know. Another torrid night of hell awaited me in the city of the apocalypse. Hardly the Dolce Vita. Now there was only summer, and Rome had become a world upside down, an enormous Chinatown where the heat forced people to live like vampires, sleeping by day and working by night. I should have left like everyone else when I still had the chance.

I went back to the bedroom and discovered that, just as they say, the worst has no limits. A girl had appeared out of nowhere and was lying motionless in my bed. She was half-naked and lay inert, on her stomach, her legs slightly spread, her arms extended along her sides, palms turned up, her face sunk in the pillow. She certainly looked dead. I hadn’t the slightest idea who she could be; it had been quite a while since I’d been intimate with a woman.

When I tried to turn the girl’s head I made another crazy discovery. Her face seemed to be stuck to the pillow. I tried several times. I finally took her by the hair and pulled her head, pressing the pillow against the bed. Nothing, the face wouldn’t come free. And in continuation of this theme that the worst has no limits, just at that moment someone knocked on the door.

With a corpse in the room it would have been wiser to pretend not to be home. What in the world would I have said if I had found myself facing the police? But I opened it anyway. Something compelled me to. Don’t ask what because I don’t know. Luckily it was Signor Ho, the manager of the hotel.

“I have the bill for the overdue rent,” he said. I glanced at the papers and gasped. He had nearly doubled the rent, holding me responsible for, among other things, the air-conditioning. I protested. The increase was robbery. As for air-conditioning, the system had never worked. Almost nothing worked in that lousy hotel.

“There are new rules now,” said Signor Ho. “Everyone pays for the cool air now. If your system broken, my worker fix it. If you don’t like new rules, you out. If you don’t pay, you out.”

It was pointless to argue, that Chinaman had a head harder than an anvil. Not to mention the business of the dead girl in the bed. I certainly couldn’t risk having him call his lackey in to repair the air-conditioning. So I tore the papers from his hand and told him not to worry, I would take care of everything as soon as possible.

“When is as soon as possible?”

I told him I didn’t know, but before he could reply, I said, “Tomorrow.” Then I slammed the door in his face. I went back to the bedroom with the hope that the corpse had disappeared. Maybe I’d had a hallucination. Unfortunately, the girl was still there. So I lay down on the bed next to her. I realize that lying down next to a dead woman may seem depraved. But I was exhausted from the heat and the stress. I needed to stretch out to get my ideas in order, and that was the only bed available. I spent several minutes staring at the girl’s hair. It was smooth and long. The shiny black made me think she was Chinese or one of the many other Asians who hung out in the neighborhood. Suddenly it moved. The hair, I mean. At first I thought it was the fan. But when it rose, and began to wave in the air like tentacles, I realized that there was something alive in it. The tentacles became an enormous octopus wrapped around the girl’s body. The whole room was now immersed in a blood-red ocean.

The thought that I was still dreaming barely surfaced; fear had gotten the better of me. I would have liked to get up and flee. Go I don’t know where. But I was paralyzed. I don’t mean metaphorically. I couldn’t move in the literal sense of the word. It was terrible being present at such a spectacle while having to remain as still as a statue. Then everything went dark and when I reopened my eyes the girl had disappeared.

There are people who give dreams a lot of weight. They believe all dreams have a meaning. They waste time analyzing them, thinking they’ll discover something or other about themselves or even their future. Nonsense. For me, dreams are only dreams, images that the mind seizes randomly in sleep, like the numbers that blindfolded children pick out of a lottery wheel. This has always been my opinion, at least. And, in fact, that night I got up without attaching too much importance to the strange nightmare I had woken from. I went to the bathroom as if nothing had happened and washed my hands and face. I avoided meeting my gaze in the mirror as I stretched my arm out for the towel. I knew I didn’t look good, I almost never do when I wake up. The deadly heat of the Great Summer didn’t help; it made me seem at least five years older, and, considering that I was no longer a boy, this bugged me.

I tried not to think of the heat or of the years gone by and wasted. I tried not to think at all. It wasn’t difficult; with the weather I had become quite good at emptying my mind. Not that I didn’t have things to think about. Money, for example. I was drowning in debts that I couldn’t pay. Someone else might have gone crazy. Not me. I took bills, requests for payment, injunctions, and all the other papers in which money I didn’t have was claimed from me, and I stuck them on one of those gadgets you used to see in trattorias. They’re called check spindles, I think. Or something like that. They consist of a big metal pin fixed to a wooden base, and you feel an almost sexual pleasure in sticking a bill on them. Don’t think badly of me, but it was like deflowering the economy. For me, there’s never been much difference between the economy and a woman. In the sense that I have never understood either one.

Yet I was very fond of my pin. I kept it in plain sight on the table in front of the window. I still have it, in fact. Only now it’s on the night table. If I spoke in the past tense it’s because I wish I had thrown it away. Things would have gone differently without the pin in the picture. On the other hand, not necessarily. Basically, the fault is not the pin’s but mine and the dream’s. Why in the world did I go around telling it? To Yin, in particular. I knew very well that there’s nothing to joke about with girls like her. And yet... Wait, I’m going too fast. I should begin at the beginning. Yes. But is there really a precise moment at which things begin? Like the Big Bang, so to speak.

I knew a guy years ago. I’ll spare you the details, but I saw him go downhill overnight. Let’s say he went to shit. I was surprised, because he had always seemed to me one of those people who know what they’re doing. I asked him how he’d gotten into such a state, how it had happened. “The way everything happens,” he answered. “Little by little at first. Then all of a sudden.” I wasn’t sure I understood. But now I know. Now it’s clear to me. Little by little at first, then all of a sudden. It’s like the Great Summer. Now it seems normal. The heat was infernal, the Romans had all escaped to the north, and here there were only Chinese and Bedouins. Plus some unlucky jerks like me. If I look at Rome now, it seems as if it was always like that. But when I think back to how this city was before the famous summer, I wonder if maybe I’m crazy. It seems to me that I live in a nightmare. And yet no. It’s all true. It was all true before and it’s all true now.