Wu Ming - 54

Angela replied that she didn’t know either, and added, ‘Pierre, if you like, we can get up and go, but we’ve paid for our tickets, at least let’s try and see the other two episodes. But if we’re going to stay here, please try and control yourself.’

Third episode, bad to worse: Isa Miranda, overacting like mad, had the audience splitting their sides. Same tune as before: my life is empty, I am denied so many simple little pleasures, I’d be better off doing another job, but there’s no going back now, and then there was a little boy too, who had hurt his arm and was forever going ‘Ayayayayayay,’ and from the middle rows someone had shouted, ‘For Christ’s sake kill him somebody, put him out of his misery!’

Finally Anna Magnani appeared and got into a taxi carrying a sodding lapdog. Pierre would cheerfully have strangled her with his bare hands, the kind of woman who makes working people waste their time and doesn’t pay an extra penny for the fucking dog.

Pierre’s tone changed, and he murmured to himself in a low voice choked with indignation: ‘Go fuck yourself.’ It was his final comment. Pierre and Angela got up and sneaked out of the cinema. Anna Magnani hadn’t even finished singing.

In the centre of the city they never walked side by side: Angela was on the other side of the street, one of many things that left Pierre feeling bitter. Even from the opposite arcade you could see that she was sulking. At the end of Via Indipendenza, Pierre crossed over to her.

‘Listen, I’m sorry, I’m not blaming you. We’ve been unlucky: Brando caught the flu, we chose a rotten film, and ok, I wanted to be with you, but on our own. In the end my nerves got the better of me. I’m sorry.’

‘Pierre, you talk too much,’ said Angela, looking round. Another habit imposed by circumstances. What got on Pierre’s nerves more than anything else was that she was always giving sudden starts and jumping away, every time she heard footsteps in the corridor, keys in the lock, car horns down in the street. The atmosphere suddenly

worsened, passionate kisses were interrupted by a return to reality.

Angela took his hands. She never did that in public.

‘I know it’s not easy. It’s even harder for me, can’t you see that? Oh, and I nearly forgot, we’ve had a piece of good news.’

Pierre looked at her. Angela smiled at his surprise.

‘At the end of April Odoacre is going to be away from Bologna for at least two weeks, at a conference. We’ll have as much time as we like to be together, just think, more than we’ve ever had before! Are you pleased?’

Pierre nearly kissed her, right there, in front of everyone. Angela looked up a little and brushed the tip of his nose with her lips. Then she broke away from him and smiled again. ‘I love you so much! Well, bye, I’ve got to go, but promise me you’ll call me the day after tomorrow, I’ll be alone in the house all afternoon.’

‘I promise,’ said Pierre. Angela headed for home (‘Odoacre’s house’, as she called it), in Via Castiglione. Pierre thought that, however you looked at it, half a kiss on the nose wasn’t a fuck. He decided to go and have a hot chocolate, then he would go and see Brando. He already had his line ready: ‘You may be sick, but I’m the one who’s taken the medicine.’

Chapter 20

Bologna, Cirenaica district, an hour and a half later

‘I’ve got a temperature of thirty-eight and a half, my bones ache, I’ve got stomach pains and diarrhoea, I won’t be able to go to work for who knows how long, so just try and imagine how much I care that you haven’t been able to fuck Montroni’s wife today!’

Brando spat into the chamberpot at the end of the bed, and then continued: ‘. and by the way, if someone sees you going in or out of my house, the sky will fall, listen to me Pierre, it’s time to call it a day, he’s the big boss, everyone speaks well of him, if you’re caught no one, I mean no one, will be on your side, your brother will come after you with his Bren gun, and what can you offer Angela? She was an orphan, she was on her own with a brother you could hardly call normal, Montroni saved both their lives, he actually took the spastic in, and he’s looking after him at his own expense, whereas what are you? A part-time barman and the only thing you know how to do is a filuzzi pirouette! Then there’s the fact that Angela and Montroni have been married for so long, and you’re not as young as you were, and even I don’t want to act like an idiot any more, fuck, do you see yourselves hiding away in my house as though I had nothing to do with it, do you think things can drag on like that for ever? Pass me my dressing gown, come on, and let me make myself a cup of coffee. And wipe your mouth, you’ve got a chocolate moustache.’

Pierre smiled and did just that. Brando had been feeling peevish already, and Pierre’s remark had merely unleashed his anger. In his patched pyjamas and his worn-out slippers, sitting on the edge of the bed with his tousled curls falling over his eyes, and at least three days’ worth of stubble, Brando no longer looked much like the actor, and more like an old beggar.

Yes, Brando wasn’t entirely wrong, but he didn’t like it when people referred to Ferruccio, Angela’s little brother, as ‘spastic’ or ‘abnormal’. That was just Brando’s way, he enjoyed making fun of mad people, cripples, invalids. Perhaps it was because he was a barber — with all those hours spent listening to dull chat, recriminations and endless moaning — perhaps it made you a bit jaundiced, and if you were like that already, who knows what you would turn into. On the Via Libia, a few metres away from Brando’s shop, there was a fruitseller with no hands, he had lost them on the Russian front, and now he had claws instead. With the help of his wife he managed to do all the work, carry the boxes, weigh the fruit, put it in the bags, count the money and give out change, holding the coins tightly between the two claws and pouring them into the customer's hands. He was a fine person, and no one had ever heard him complain, but Brando had taken one look at him and nicknamed him ‘Houdini’, saying that if he was put in handcuffs he would be able to free himself in no time at all. Every now and again, when he was cutting someone’s hair, he told sniggering imaginary anecdotes about ‘Houdini’, saying that he always had blood pouring out of his nose from scratching himself with his claw, and nonsense of that kind. Yes, Brando could be unbearable. But he was a friend.

Ferruccio was the same age as Pierre. Ten years before, his and Angela’s mother had been killed in an air raid. He had survived by a miracle, after being trapped under the rubble for hours, clinging to that lifeless body, feeling it grow cold and stiff. Angela hadn’t been there, she had gone to get some flour with the ration card.

Her father, who had been recovering in a sanatorium for some time, had died of TB a few months later. Ferruccio had never recovered from those tragic events. He became anxious over trifles, he was afraid of thunder, once he had even hit Angela, and then there were also long periods when he never got out of bed and refused to talk to anyone. By day Angela worked, cleaning in Sant’Orsola Hospital, in the evening she returned to the little council flat and found herself alone with Ferruccio again. Sometimes he was totally distant, at other times quick to anger. It was a bad dream from which she was unable to awake.

One day, at the end of ’47, she had met Odoacre, who had by that time been a respected doctor for a number of years. Always an anti-fascist, of liberal family, during the Resistance he went secretly to treat injured partisans. After the Liberation he had joined the Communist Party and immediately become a member of the Federal Committee of Bologna.