Wu Ming - 54

When silence had been accomplished, the man rubbed his hands a few times, as though to charge them with miracle-making power. He stepped forward ceremoniously, pointed a finger at the various switches and selected one. He returned to his wife, almost running, clutched his chin, tilted his head on one side and waited. McGuffin gave no sign of reacting. He repeated the manoeuvre from the beginning, including the rubbing of his hands. He chose the switch next to the previous one, but as the result of some kind of electrical confusion, it was his wife who sprang to life.

‘That’s some crock they’ve dumped on you,’ croaked the shrew.

Toothpick didn’t lose heart. He tried every solution, including slapping the poor McGuffin like a disobedient child. As her husband waved his fist at the screen, uttering menacing words, the woman approached the precious machine, convinced that she could make an essential contribution.

But sadly there was nothing to be done. He had been damaged, that much was plain. Rattled from side to side in a van, without even a blanket around him, along the twists and turns of a potholed road, what else did they expect? He was solid, but not indestructible. And repairs would cost a pretty penny.

The witch’s nose brushed against the speaker grille. She had noticed something.

‘There it is,’ she said, beaming. ‘That explains everything!’

‘What’s that?’ asked Toothpick, stuck between the television and the wall.

‘Look over here for a moment: you see this writing? It’s American, you see?’

‘Yeah, so? What difference does that make?’

‘So? So it’s obvious, isn’t it? This machine can only pick up American programmes, and we don’t have them yet. And don’t you remember Maria, when she was sold that American fridge that didn’t work with the electricity we have here? It’s the same thing. We’re in Italy, you need an Italian machine.’

Toothpick’s perplexed eyes shuttled two or three times between his wife’s face and McGuffin’s lifeless screen. He read and reread the writing, took out the plug and put it back in again, clutched at various straws in response to her objections, tried out the remaining switches and finally had to yield to the idea that perhaps you should involve your fellow villagers when you’re choosing your television, the same way as you do with wives and cattle.

She was a beautiful woman, Marisa. Wasted on a guy like that, who never spat out his toothpick even when kissing. She must have had a good reason for cuckolding her husband with such a squalid individual. Certainly, gifts like a McGuffin Electric Deluxe, with a commercial value of 250,000 lire, for those in the know, were sufficient reason in themselves. But if you looked carefully, there seemed to be something else as well.

Marisa bent to straighten the sofa, her generous cleavage mirrored in the screen. Then she turned around and did the same with her bottom. Her thighs might have been a little fat, but apart from that they were in no way inferior to the athletic physique of some American women. Hard to say what age she was, perhaps about thirty, and she’d clearly looked after herself.

When her husband came home, she ran to the door to greet him, deafening him with some nonsense about some new thing waiting for him in the sitting room.

‘You know that raffle at the butcher’s, the one with a television as a prize? You remember you bit my head off because you said that ten tickets was money thrown away? Well, come on, look what I’ve won, when you were going to spend a 160,000 on that trash we saw the other day!’

Her husband came into the sitting room and opened his eyes and mouth wide at the sight of the McGuffin. Seeing him like that, a complete jerk with a dazed expression, his narrow sloping shoulders in his grey jacket and a fake leather bag in his hand, it was not hard to find another reason for Marisa’s adultery, given that Toothpick, coarse though he was, had at least a shred of manly fascination.

‘Darling,’ the milksop observed, straightening his glasses. ‘I take back all I said about the wasted money. While you prepare the dinner, I shall try and make it work.’

The woman placed a traitorous kiss upon his wan cheek and disappeared. Milquetoast loosened his tie, slipped off his jacket, rolled up the sleeves and, feeling like a little Einstein, faced his battle with technology.

Ten minutes later, as the squid simmered in the white wine, Marisa heard the first slaps. By the time she added the peas, he was on to the bloody-hells. Giuliano was not a patient man: his nerves almost always ended up on edge, and afterwards he became intractable, rough and rude. That was certainly the underlying reason why his wife could not bear him and preferred that man Ciro, who at least kept his hands in the right place and, when he lost his temper, didn’t shriek like a fairy.

As the tomato joined the other ingredients in the pot, Marisa heard him calling in an angry voice, ‘Marisa, damn it to hell, you’ve been screwed yet again!’

The woman gave a start. Squid and everything spilled over the stove. How had he found out? Hadn’t the sofa been tucked up nicely? Were there compromising traces? Could it be that the television also worked as a cine camera? Or perhaps Ciro had talked to the wrong people, people who worked in television?

‘Marisa, never mind first prize!’ the voice insisted, getting shriller and shriller. ‘This fucker doesn’t even work!’

‘What did you say? It doesn’t work?’ the woman put a hand to her chest, closed her eyes and sighed deeply. Could be worse.

She stayed like that for a while, before attending quietly to the squid, trying to return it to the pot with a wooden spoon.

Vincenzo Donadio lowered the shutters of the workshop just after seven. He had wasted more than an hour trying to fix a broken telephone, and hadn’t had time to look at that great pachyderm of a television. On the other hand, he couldn’t claim to know a great deal about such machines. They were new, complicated, specially for people like himself who really specialised in motor scooters. But Vespas and Lambrettas had only come out recently, you didn’t see very many of them around, and if a man wanted to work, he had to spread his area of expertise: radios, televisions, record players, pretty much everything as far as Vince was concerned.

He locked the big padlock in its iron ring and set off whistling ‘ Viale d’autunno ’.

Less than six hours later, in the dark, deserted street, enlivened only by quarrelling cats, a furtive outline bent over that same padlock, armed with a bunch of fake keys. It tried out ten of them, with nerves of steel, until it found the right one. It lifted the shutter just enough to slip inside, as the headlights of a small truck appeared at the end of the street.

McGuffin was on the worktop. It was no coincidence that the break-in occurred that very evening. Its arrival had not gone unobserved.

After sliding a large consignment of small radios into the street, the man poked his head out from under the shutter, checked that everything was quiet, exchanged a couple of words with someone outside and very carefully raised the shutter until it was almost halfway up.

He wheeled the first Lambretta around the corner and helped his mate to load it on. He went back inside to grab a second scooter and loaded that one on too. If you had wrung out his sleeves, you could have filled a glass. When he held out his hands, they were damp with sweat. But there was no point being fussy: this providential intervention saved McGuffin from Donadio’s quixotic attempts at repair, which would have compromised his delicate mechanisms for ever.

‘Bloody hell, an American TV!’ exclaimed the driver the moment he saw him. ‘Maybe it can pick up American programmes, what do you think, Nené?’