The Namesake Page 23

  Behind him, the baby was asleep in a stroller bed that his mother had secured with a crisscrossing of all three seatbelts in the back. She turned around, gave him a smile of reassurance, then slid the key into the ignition and turned the key.

  Nothing happened.

  It was as if there had never been a connection between the ignition and the engine. She turned it again, but the only sound was the soft breaths of Robertino in the back, the squeak of the suspension as she leaned forward and made a third vain attempt.

  Ruggiero plucked the house key out of his mother’s bag, which lay open on the seat between them, without her seeming to notice. He climbed out of the car and walked back towards the front door. His mother remained in the dark car, embracing the steering wheel.

  36

  Locri

  Ruggiero eventually coaxed his mother out of the car, back into the house. Robertino had dozed off in the back seat, then woken up when moved, and was now in no mood for further transfers. He needed feeding, comforting, changing, cuddling, petting, lulling and laying down again.

  As his mother carried out these rites, Ruggiero could see she was beginning to shake off the shock that had momentarily disabled her when the car would not start. In calming the baby, she had calmed herself. Even so, he felt the grip of her fear when, as he was passing, she suddenly grabbed him and held on to him, her hand hard like a claw, and said, ‘Get all our stuff out of the car and back into the house.’

  Detaching himself, Ruggiero said, ‘So Papà’s in trouble and we must flee?’

  She shook her head. ‘Something’s wrong. He called earlier, while you were asleep. He said he could not make the flight to Lamezia Terme, and might even miss the Polsi celebrations.’

  ‘He will never abandon us,’ said Ruggiero with total conviction.

  ‘Of course not,’ she said, her voice laced with doubt. ‘Will you please get the stuff out of the car back into the house? I’m going to lie down with Roberto now,’ and so saying she lifted the sleeping bundle, whose small fists were clenched in a communist salute, and took him upstairs.

  Ruggiero went out the front door, leaving it slightly ajar. Closed or open made no difference. If they killed his father, they might come looking for his family, but then again they might not. If they failed to find his father, however, they would inflict pain on his family to punish him or draw him into the open. Who would the executioners be? Who would know in advance? Basile, obviously, since not a leaf stirred in the town without his say-so. Pepè and his family were likely to know, and any one of them, Pepè included, would be capable of pulling the trigger, plunging the knife, tightening the wire, igniting the blaze. Or, as his father had intimated, Enrico’s family, the Megales? Not Enrico, because he was weak. Never Zia Rosa. That left Pietro. Yes, Pietro could do it, but he would not be capable of working alone. Pietro needed to be told what to do.

  Had his mother done something she should not have? She was acting fearful and seemed unable to find or bring comfort. She would never have gone to the police or anything like that, and her opportunities for an illicit affair were nil. Another possibility was that they were at the start of a new, wide-ranging feud. If it was a feud, the Curmacis would emerge as the winning faction: he could feel it. Soon he would command full respect from all of them. Magnanimous, he would extend protection to Enrico, set out rules for how young heirs to the Society should behave among themselves. Some of the old rules needed to be reinstated. The old stories needed to be heard again.

  If his mother wanted to flee, then it was his filial duty to help. But to help her to the best of his ability implied seconding her intentions, not following misguided orders. So he walked by the car, ignoring his mother’s instructions to empty it. He had a better idea to try out first.

  He left the overgrown front garden, which protected them from prying eyes, turned on to the unpaved and unlit side street, his thoughts as dark and deep as the night air. If there was a feud in the offing they needed allies, but Ruggiero had not registered any improvement in attitudes towards him. The afternoon in the bar without telephones had indicated the exact opposite. He had convinced himself that Enrico was the target, and the main point had been to teach Enrico not to be so soft and complacent. Before a large-scale feud, some people would change cafés, others would suddenly prefer one side of the street to the other, one petrol station to another, many would vanish. If there was a feud, some people would sit three-quarters turned from him, others would come up and warmly greet him in the street, make loud jokes and recommendations for all to hear, and move on. But no one had approached, no one had visited, and no one was offering friendship.

  He arrived at Enrico’s rusty gate. He lifted the deadbolt and began edging the gate inwards, pausing after every creak and crunch. Enrico, Zia Rosa and Zio Pietro had a dog, a vicious, sheep-mauling, sly mongrel that had arrived when he and Enrico were still toddlers. The dog, never allowed in the house, spent most of its day running after traffic, yet had never been hit by a car. Its unnatural luck had been noted, especially since it was assumed that some people in the neighbourhood must have deliberately tried to crush the beast below their wheels and put an end to its reign of terror over small children and other dogs. The animal had every reason to like him more than Enrico who had never treated it with any kindness, but it was still capable of emerging from the prickly mesh of bush where it lived, and growling and baring its teeth, just to say it knew he could not have a legitimate reason for being here at this time of night. But no white fangs and shiny eyes appeared in the darkness. The beast was probably off killing chickens somewhere.

  The car he was aiming for was parked directly in front of the kitchen window. It was an old, uninsured Fiat Ritmo, treated almost as badly by Zio Pietro as the dog. They used the old car to drive across fields and drag pieces of farm equipment around. When they wanted to arrive in style at church or in town, they drove the Range Rover with tinted windows and polished hubcaps that they kept locked in a cowshed.

  The door on the driver’s side did not even close properly, let alone lock, but on opening it creaked almost as much as the gate. The kitchen window in front of him remained dark as did the window above that, where Zia Rosa and Zio Pietro slept in separate beds. Enrico’s room was on the other side of the house, overlooking a disused vineyard, defined by a line of crumbling cement posts linked by sagging wires.

  Ruggiero climbed into the front seat, holding hard on to the door to stop it both from creaking open and from banging closed. He figured he could afford to slam it once he had the car out of the gate. Sometimes Zio Pietro left a few keys in the glove compartment, any one of which, with a bit of twisting and turning, could be used to turn on the ignition and engine: and there they were. Good. He would start the engine on the road outside, halfway between their gate and his own – or maybe he’d push the car down the last few yards of road as far as his own house, just to be on the safe side. The Ritmo had a shuddering motor that sounded like a two-stroke, and was audible from a distance. The important thing now was to freewheel quietly out of the gate on to the road. He eased the driver’s door inward towards himself with exaggerated care, and so when it struck the object that had invisibly interposed itself the impact, though soft, ran through him like an electric shock. The car door was being impeded by something heavy, dark and alive. Inches from his wrist a white smile of sharp teeth appeared at the same time as the dog growled.

  Ruggiero felt his fear melt into rage, which ran down his arm as sweat, and he knew the dog would smell it and react.

  ‘Shh. It’s me. Shh. There’s a good boy, you lousy stinking filthy animal, get away from here.’ He put out his hand, and the dog growled again and bared its teeth. ‘Me,’ repeated Ruggiero. The dog growled again, and Ruggiero pushed his upturned wrist into the mouth so that one bite could split his veins. ‘Me. It’s me, the only human who ever loved you, you fucking evil beast.’

  The dog pushed its head forward so that when it closed its mouth on Ruggiero’s
hand it merely massaged it with its blunter back teeth. Ruggiero ran his hand against the side of the hot mouth and then slapped the animal on the side of the neck. ‘Stop it, good boy, now move.’

  The dog backed away, vanishing almost at once, and Ruggiero released the handbrake and pressed down on the clutch. The car began to roll very slowly backwards, the driver’s door swung out and he pulled it in again. As he did so, he caught a glimpse of movement at the bedroom window. For a moment, he thought it was a reflection of the dog moving, but the image was pale, and the dog was dark. Besides the image had appeared on the second floor, at a height where the dog could not be. As the car gathered some speed and rolled away towards the gate, he imagined a face staring out at him from behind the glass, but he had to turn his head back to guide the car, which was moving faster than he had expected. It took all his force to avoid sideswiping the hanging gate. He spun the steering wheel to direct the car into the road, and the gravel below crackled and snarled beneath the bald tyres. Suddenly the steering column lock engaged, and the car, now losing speed, made a slow but inexorable turn towards the low wall. He braced for impact, but before he hit the wall, the back wheels dipped into a dry ditch, and Ruggiero was thrown backwards and then forwards, hitting the horn with his chest. The horn sounded for no more than half a second, but it was the loudest noise he had ever heard.

  He kicked at the stupid door till it opened. He was not going to be able to push the car out of the ditch, and revving the engine to get it out would simply draw a large audience. By now he was not even sure he knew how to break the lock without breaking the whole thing and whether he should have attempted this to begin with.

  It would be more manly to await his fate at home and defend his mother and brother there. Passing by the gate he looked up to Enrico’s house, and this time what seemed like an afterimage of Zia Rosa was watching him from behind the window. He almost lifted his hand to wave. If she had seen him, the next time he sat at the kitchen table eating one of her meals, she’d give him a significant look and say nothing, then, as he was leaving, she would ask him if he had anything he wanted to tell her. That had been her method when she had discovered his unconfessed misdemeanours in the past: a broken window here, a missing jar of Nutella there, or that dangerous excursion into the collapsing outhouses at the end of the garden when he had gone rat hunting. He never had anything to tell her, but appreciated the gesture and her discretion.

  By the time he reached his house, he was beginning to rethink the experience. It could never have been her. It was too dark and too far for him to have seen her face at the window as he was passing on the road. His imagination was playing tricks on him, because it was 4:15 in the morning, and his brain had decided to go back to dreaming without telling him. And now, finally doing as his mother had asked him, he lifted two suitcases from their car and took them back into the house, expecting her to be there waiting fearfully and angry at his delay, but there was no sign of her. He put them down quietly in the hall so as not to waken her, and went back outside to collect the other things from the car.

  It was on his fourth trip in that he heard his mother’s voice, speaking softly as if from far away. He moved quickly and quietly to the kitchen door, then walked in suddenly, catching her unawares. She swung her body sideways away from him, and clasped the phone closer to her ear. She seemed to express a few words of gratitude and clicked the phone shut and slipped it with mock casualness into a kitchen drawer. It was 4:35 in the morning and she was making or receiving secret calls. He felt he had a right to know.

  ‘Who was that?’ demanded Ruggiero.

  ‘None of your business.’

  ‘Of course it’s my business.’ He went over to the kitchen drawer. His mother shrank away for a moment as he approached her, which gave him a hard, righteous feeling of gratification for a second or two, before it was submerged by a sudden wave of panic, followed by sadness as he realized that she had just ceased to be the all-knowing source of total love on whom he could always depend. She should not be shrinking from him, she should be reaching out to him, pulling him into her embrace, and telling him everything would be fine. But as he looked at her, he realized that was what she was hoping for from him, which angered him all over again.

  He opened the drawer, pulled out the phone. ‘I’ve never seen this before,’ he said.

  ‘No?’ She was still trying to sound casual.

  ‘Who did you call, Papà?’

  ‘Nothing to do with you.’

  ‘It’s everything to do with me.’

  ‘You are not the only child in this house.’ She sat down at the table, brushed the back of her hand over its grainy surface, then rubbed it against her own cheek. ‘You didn’t wipe the table like I asked you, Ruggiero. You never do as I ask.’

  ‘Who?’ Ruggiero demanded again. ‘Was it a local call?’

  ‘No. Not local. Is that Robertino crying?’

  ‘No, not yet. But if you don’t answer, then I’m going to bed,’ said Ruggiero and went upstairs.

  His mother was still downstairs. Maybe she was making more phone calls, appealing for help, for he knew that was what she had been doing. He was ashamed of her, but he wanted her to succeed, too. He wished his father were there to tell him what to do next.

  Over five days in March, in the middle of which they celebrated his fifteenth birthday, his father had begun by telling him things he already knew, calmly and so slowly that he began to feel impatient. He was a giovane d’onore, the son of a man of honour. Ruggiero almost rolled his eyes at this. He knew whose son he was. He had an idea of where he fitted into the hierarchy, but he lacked the absolute precision of others like Pepè and even Enrico. They knew who should respect them more, who less, and who they need not even consider as entitled to an opinion, which included more than half the class and all the teachers, except for the coach. But in six visits over two years, his father had slowly started unpacking small and mostly unwelcome surprises, things Ruggiero thought he knew, but hadn’t. First, a giovane d’onore did not automatically become inducted into the honoured Society at the age of sixteen.

  ‘I know that,’ said Ruggiero, aggressive because he had failed to hide his surprise. ‘Everyone knows that.’

  ‘We may postpone the date, because study is also important.’

  ‘I’ll be the only one.’

  ‘Once in, you’ll move up quickly. There is no rush. I want to make sure that you are suited to it.’

  This made Ruggiero angry, but his father had been unmoved. ‘First I shall test your mettle. When we are certain about what you can do, then we can let others conduct the initiation rites. Think of it like knowing the answers to an exam beforehand.’

  ‘How will you test my mettle?’

  ‘Good question. I hope the occasion does not present itself too soon. But it will eventually.’

  Another day, his father told him, ‘Don’t always look for explanations. Sometimes there aren’t any.’

  ‘Explanations of what?’

  ‘Anything. A disappearance, an accident, an earthquake, a sudden violent death, the tragic killing of an innocent man. Don’t look for explanations.’

  On his second to last day before leaving, his father had told him that the important thing was to persuade people. ‘When you are persuading people, you must not distinguish between friends and enemies. Everyone must be persuaded. You yourself must be persuaded.’

  ‘What if it’s not true?’

  ‘Your belief makes it true. If you believe something to be true, then it becomes true.’

  He didn’t really get that bit. Nor did he quite understand his father’s claim, on the morning before he left for Germany, that things that were equal could also be different.

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘If I gave you two fifties,’ and here he handed him two 50-euro notes, ‘is that the same as my giving you five twenties?’ and here he handed him five 20s. ‘Or ten tens?’ This time he handed him nothing.

  ‘Sure.
Five times twenty is the same as two times fifty.’

  ‘Well, you’re wrong. They are different acts.’

  ‘OK,’ said Ruggiero, resolving to think about it later.

  ‘That money is for buying treats, not for clothes, shoes or any necessities,’ his father had said. ‘If you need new clothes, your mother will pay.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘I want you to spend three-quarters of what I gave you on buying things for your friends. If I’m not back by June, your mother will give you another €200. Three-quarters of the total on your friends, right?’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘And take good note of who always lets you buy and who never lets you buy for them. Beware of both extremes. The ones in the middle, who let you buy sometimes and then treat you sometimes, are more trustworthy.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘But don’t rely on just that. There is never just one trick, never just one answer.’

  ‘Supposing something bad happens?’ He had not meant to sound so childish and helpless. The words just tumbled out.

  ‘If something happens, your mother will let me know, and I’ll get here.’

  Or had he imagined that response?

  He unbuttoned his shirt, and stood there bare-chested, thinking of the car in the ditch, the opened gate. He often practised trying to overcome the feeling of vulnerability that being bare-chested gave him. Logically, it made no sense, since a knife or bullet wound inflicted through a shirt was exactly the same as one inflicted on bare skin, and yet he could not help feeling that it would be worse.

  His mother had stopped moving around downstairs. In the next room, Roberto sighed in his sleep. The effect was always comical when he did that, the sigh sounding so world-weary.