Pietro Grossi - Fists

Nico recognised Maria’s voice.

“It’s Nico,” he said, lowering his head towards the entryphone. The childlike euphoria he had felt earlier seemed to have gradually been dissipating, and to have vanished completely the moment his index finger had touched the brass button.

“Oh, great!” the entryphone crackled. “Come in!”

The huge gate trembled and started to open. There’s always something magical, something grand, Nico thought, in seeing a big gate open onto a private drive.

When Nico reached the top of the drive, Maria was already waiting for him in front of the big dark wooden door. It had been many months, possibly years, since he had last set foot in the villa, and he wondered how it was possible for it to look bigger each time he saw it.

Maria was even more beautiful than Nico remembered. She was wearing a pair of dark linen trousers which would have looked overly large on anyone else, her feet were bare, and above the trousers she had on a simple white blouse knotted at the waist, with the sleeves rolled up. The top buttons of her blouse were undone, giving a glimpse of the curve of her breasts, and her dark hair was pulled back and loosely held.

“Hi,” Nico said, pausing at the foot of the stone steps that led up to the front door.

“Hi,” Maria replied, with what seemed to him for a moment like a knowing air.

Nico wondered how it was that some people managed to appear elegant and charming even when they should have looked scruffy. He wondered if there were special courses for it, or if it was simply something in the genes.

Nico climbed the steps and let Maria embrace him. He realised it could well be the first time this had happened. In the more than twenty years that he’d been friends with Piero, it was the first time his sister had come within a metre of him.

“You’re looking good,” Maria said, freeing herself from the embrace and looking Nico up and down.

“You, too,” Nico said, smiling. Maria smiled at him again with that odd hint of mischief and turned to go inside the house.

“Thanks for coming so quickly. We’re really at the end of our tether. Who knows, maybe with you here …”

“Don’t mention it,” Nico said. He would have liked to say something more intelligent, but he couldn’t think of anything at the moment. All he wanted was to be taken to Piero and finally see how things really were. “Where is he?” he asked.

Maria turned and looked at him for a moment with an embarrassed smile. “He’s upstairs,” she said. “But mother said she’d like to see you first.”

Nico had no wish to see Piero’s mother, especially now. “Of course,” he said. “Me, too.”

Maria again gave an embarrassed smile and suddenly turned and tiptoed to the sitting room.

Through the big French window, the reddish light of sunset flooded the huge frescoed room, full of colourful abstract paintings and leather sofas. The whole room had a thick orange-yellow colour which did not match the furnishings and gave it an awkward air. And there in the middle, sitting up against the armrest of one of the big sofas, was the tiny figure of Piero’s mother, busy embroidering something.

“Mother,” Maria said, without expression.

The little woman raised her head and looked at her daughter gravely, then shifted her eyes to Nico. After a couple of seconds, her face broadened in a big smile and she stood up. “Nicola, darling!” she cried, opening her arms wide. “What an absolute pleasure it is to have you here! Let me give you a kiss.”

Nico smiled as best he could and walked towards her. “Hello, Miriam,” he said when they were close.

Piero’s mother put her hands out and drew Nico’s face to her to kiss him. “What a lovely surprise!” she said, boring into his brain with eyes that were too wide. “Piero will be happy.”

“I just happened to be in the area,” Nico said.

Piero’s mother nodded, again smiling broadly. “You did absolutely the right thing! Now tell me about yourself. Are you still working in the theatre?”

Nico had never worked in the theatre.

“Yes, of course,” he said. “It’s tough work, but someone has to do it.” He had always dreamt of saying that sentence, but had never found the opportunity before. Now, though, seemed the perfect time.

Piero’s mother burst out laughing and gave him a pinch on the cheek, then turned to Maria. “How sweet he is!” she said. Then she turned back to Nico. “And you’re still a …”

“Lighting technician,” Nico said.

“How nice! Did you hear that, Maria?”

Nico nodded, pursing his lips. Maria looked at him and at her mother and frowned.

Piero’s mother kept looking at Nico and smiling, Nico kept nodding, and Maria looked from one to the other a couple of times. Then Nico looked around the room.

“Everything’s still the same, I see,” he said.

“Yes!” Piero’s mother cried, her voice pitched too high. “Just like the old days!”

Maria put a hand on her mother’s arm.

“Such good times,” Miriam said, her voice trailing away.

Nico wondered which time Miriam was thinking of most: the time she had thrown him out of the house, beating him with a broomstick as she did so, or the time she had categorically forbidden Piero to see him.

“Yes,” Nico said. “Good times.”

There were a few more seconds of silence.

“Why don’t I go and see Piero?” Nico said, turning to Maria. “What do you think?”

“But of course!” Miriam said. “Maria, will you go with him?” She turned back to Nico. “He’ll be so pleased to see you.”

For a moment, it occurred to Nico that this was all a joke, and, as Maria walked ahead of him out of the room, he felt the impulse to look round for hidden cameras and fake mirrors.

Maria led him back into the wide entrance hall and up the dark wooden staircase. After a few steps, she turned her head slightly to one side. “You know,” she said, “she still doesn’t know how to handle it.”

Nico looked at her without a word for a couple of seconds, and suddenly wondered if inside that wonderful creature there was actually a person. “Obviously,” he said.

At the top of the stairs, Maria turned right into a long corridor and stopped outside Piero’s room, the same room where Nico had slept dozens of times.

“Here we are,” Maria said, and she placed her hand on the dark steel handle. For a moment Nico looked at Maria with a touch of embarrassed anxiety, and she gave a slight smile in response. Then Maria knocked lightly on the door and started to open it.

“Piero?” she said softly. “You have a visitor. Come and see. Nico’s here.”

The door, which still had a few Kiss and Depeche Mode stickers on it, opened to reveal the cream-coloured rugs, the single bed, the dark shelves full of discs, books and trinkets and the big window at the far end leading to the little terrace.

And there, behind the bed, in front of the window, backlit by the rays of the sunset, was a crouching figure, fiddling with something on the floor. Piero turned to look at Nico and Maria. He stuck his lips out in an O, grunted two or three times, his head swaying, screwed up his face and slapped his forehead twice. Then he looked down at the floor again and his body rocked slightly from side to side.

Nico stood there for a few seconds, looking gravely from a distance at what had once been his friend. “Hi,” he said at last.

Maria looked at Nico, her eyes on the verge of tears, as he stepped forwards into the room.

Nico walked past the bed and approached Piero. He was naked, crouching beside the bed, playing with a little pile of pistachio shells, just like a monkey. Piero looked up, and for a moment his mouth stretched, showing all his teeth, then he immediately looked down again, grunted and stuck two fingers in the little pile of shells.