In an Italy crushed by the financial crisis, for that sunny and windy May when we momentarily shared an apartment in the neighborhood of San Giovanni, things had gone more or less like this: I was depressed because I was depressed, and Nicola was depressed because—behind on life, without even a shred of the starving artist’s mythology to act as a motivating balm, and on top of that, driven neurotic by his own feelings of guilt—he blew the little money he made from a web agency shooting up. I watched him with my eyes gleaming, unable to hide my amazement: he prepared all of it right there in front of me, the cellophane baggies, the cotton-wool filters, the teaspoons . . . The many pulpits I should have climbed up on to object or at least to criticize him seemed too high and grueling, and besides that I was convinced he would be okay because he had a girlfriend, Betta, who loved him in spite of everything, just as he was sure I would make it because I had a family that would always be a mattress if I slipped down into the deepest crevices. And no, we didn’t say any of this to each other.
But now—like in the worst stories—two and a half years had passed. I had gone back to live in Tuscolano with my parents, who, I admit, had always been protective, ideological in their notion of family. My now-retired mother beat me over the head from the moment I sat down for breakfast until I went to bed about how important it was to hold a family together, whatever that meant. I hadn’t been able to see Nicola for over a year, the entire time he had spent in rehab, where the doctors had ordered him to cut all past ties—with everyone who’d been guilty in their indulgence—until he came to the point where he knew he was clean.
That’s how, in the inertia of our living together in San Giovanni, I had found that I’d lost a friend just about overnight, though with the vague promise that he would come back. And now, having climbed every bend of Purgatory, it seemed that the horizon was at least visible and that the two of us—giving in, or maybe just older, or nostalgic—could reconnect: Nicola came to see me, he’d accept one coffee after another, and he’d talk, asking for my forgiveness, often without a connection to any clear fault.
What else had happened in the meantime? Betta had been like a rock: she had patiently counted the times that he had gone in and out of rehab, and, so as not to wear herself out in empathetic waiting, had moved to Lisbon for a year to finish a Ph.D. in Lusitanic studies. The year passed, the two of them saw each other again to find out to no great surprise that their time alone in pottery studios or in libraries buried under the rhetoric of the new Europe was not enough to refute the fact that they loved each other. So they got married, and now Betta was expecting a child.
Nicola was happy. That’s what I thought, but it wasn’t exactly the case.
Even just a few days after he’d settled into his new home, I started receiving morning phone calls. He’d call me around 8:10. He’d say, “So?”
As the city sun melted, I’d mostly stay shut in my room, nestled between the shapes of old familiar furniture which created a placental stillness, translating French and American comics, and talking in online chat forums to comic aficionados scattered throughout the world with the excuse of asking for an elucidation of some term or another. Nicola was now the voice that would wake me in the morning, telling me to look out the window, asking me if I’d had breakfast. He’d question me about the day’s mood. And then, after inquiring pro forma about what I had dreamt, he’d tell me about his own dreams. He’d confess to me, devastated. His dreams were extremely complicated, intricate, endless, but they came in spurts, with the sleepy ebb of the morning left to piece them together. “It started the first night of the honeymoon, I thought it was normal, like nervousness, or everything we’d had to drink, because, shit, you know what I dreamt? I dreamt of Pinelli, not Pinelli while he’s falling from the window of the police station, but the newspapers from the time, from the 1960s, I dreamt of Il Giorno saying how the anarchists are to blame, I dreamt of the meetings in the factories with the workers saying: we are never doing another strike again in our lives if it means causing a mess like this with people killed. I dreamt of Camilla Cederna, and I don’t even know what the woman looked like.”
I spent my days hunting for a real job, at least that’s what I told myself. In the morning, after being woken up by Nicola, I’d call the bank to ask if any money transfers had come in. The girl at the Banca Etica was really nice on the phone, like a friend. If I had a stuffy nose she’d recommend a remedy for inflammation, she suggested propolis. But she’d always end up reaffirming, “No, I’m sorry, only twenty euros.” I’d keep saying to myself time to find something to do, and I thought about how I’d like to work on a documentary project about the producers who had changed Italian cinema in the 1960s and '70s (Bini, Grimaldi, Rottieri), or start gardening like Chance in Being There, or I’d flip through Porta Portese underlining listings like, “Seeking personal pony express—payment upon agreement.” So yeah, really bleak stuff.
I even would have slipped back into the groove of that depression which makes you wake up at one in the afternoon and ruminate for an hour on the newspaper Repubblica’s website where some authoritative European institution has condemned the situation in Italy with increasing harshness for being disastrous and irreversible, if it hadn’t been for Nicola trying to reach me with his usual 8:10 call.
“I dreamt about Cicconi, you know the photojournalist who followed Craxi around everywhere? I dreamt that he got a call from Hammamet and then he was going around Milan writing on the walls, ‘Craxi’s coming back,’ because Craxi asked him to.”
“And . . . how are things with Betta?” I’d ask.
“Everything’s good with Betta,” Nicola said, “but I don’t know. I don’t understand. What the hell am I supposed to do? Do you think I should see a psychologist?”
My experience with psychologists had been a failure. I’d always go to the first session because it was free. I’d cry, I’d feel ashamed about my life, my vicious idleness, and my heaped-up dreams, I’d mumble half-formed character explanations, smile hysterically, open myself up completely, and then the second time I wouldn’t show up because I didn’t have the money, or because I was sure they wouldn’t believe me if they saw me bursting into tears a second time.
“Just as long as you don’t start shooting up again,” I’d reply to Nicola, completely out of place.
In my head the days trickled by like lumpy grains of sand that couldn’t find the opening between the two bulbs of an hourglass. I’d say I wanted to free myself from everything that was paralyzing me. And while I couldn’t pay for a psychologist, I’d jot everything down in a notebook: the dead time, the grievances and insinuations, the psychological pressure, the emotional blackmail, the veiled accusations, the compulsive obsessions, the insomnia, the continual budgeting, the unhealed wounds, the neurotic kicks, the tension beneath the skin, the regrets, the relationships with past ghosts, the looks of disgust, the useless attempts to be spontaneous, the despicable scheming, the out-of-whack dynamics, the disappointments. My life of interpersonal relationships.
Then one day I thought that to save myself, I needed to dedicate my time to other people. I beat Nicola to it and I called him at a quarter to eight. I asked him, “Any better today?”
“No.”
“No?”
“I dreamt of a body. A body, and I don’t know whose it is.”
“Well, sure, that’s dark, but it’s a normal dream.”
“It’s someone’s body. It’s somewhere near Tarquinia.”
“I don’t understand.”
“It’s the second time that I’ve dreamt it. The second time. I dream of a collective of people, some group of people who, I don’t know if they’re comrades, fascists, freemasons, the fuck I know, but they’re at, like, a bar in the center of town, and they’re talking, and they say something about a friend of theirs who died, who wasn’t buried, and how he needs to be buried.”
“And?”
“I don’t know what the fuck I’m supposed to do! It’s like they’re talking to me. In the dream they even refer to me by name, they say: we need Nicola to do it.”
“Do what?”
“Bury this guy’s body.”
Could the dead possibly show us the way? For some time—in the vanity of time—I had been obsessed by what I called the potential life, by the unluckily sterile existences whose potential for everything doesn’t lead to a true identity or, least of all, to happiness: Faust or Don Giovanni; and then with the people like Goethe or Kierkegaard who, on the other hand, tried to exorcize the risk of squandering oneself and spoiling our reason on this Earth by focusing on the philosophical analysis of this life-parable. Kierkegaard was the one who scared me the most. His unrevealed love for Regine Olsen, which tormented him for all of his days. Who after a year sent the engagement ring back to her, writing a letter “of an incurable melancholy.” For a mysterious “thorn in the flesh,” he added. For the “great earthquake” that his father’s recent death had been for him, his revered, adored father, who he discovered, following his death, was guilty of a terrible crime, it too left mysterious.
*
Then another bombardment out of left field: Nicola called me at two in the morning, but he didn’t wake me. I had been twisting all over myself for at least an hour. I had tried to fall asleep in every way possible, I had padded myself with chamomile, taken melatonin drops, gulped down a valium, but the single, icy and crystal-clear image that stayed stuck in my head was a pulsing black griddle, an object whose mental origin I couldn’t discern.
“His name is Pianesi! Danilo! Danilo Pianesi!” Nicola yelled. “Do you hear me? Did I wake you?”
They had told him once again in a dream; they had—how to put it?—presented him with the mortal remains.
“Take a shower, get dressed. I’ll be there to pick you up in half an hour.”
“Huh? A shower?” I was catatonic.
“We have to go bury him. We have to go now, tonight.”
“What?” I asked. The only clear-headed thing I added was, “And what did you tell Betta?”
“I told Betta. Everything.”
“Nicola . . .” I said. And half an hour later I had crashed down in a pre-sunrise Rome, with only the vans out delivering newspapers and the honey light which seemed to drip like sap from the dull stars in the metropolitan sky.
“Nicola,” I said to him, “this is too fucking much. I swear . . . my relationship to reality is, okay, maybe not the most linear. Maybe I’m still in a funk, still depressed, maybe I’m just confused, I’m trying not to take meds, but clearly you also have your own shit you need to figure out. Please, I think this thing, this eerie paranoia, could make us lose our minds, we’ll end up totally burned out like four years ago.”
He had burst out laughing, but then he sniffed, dried his tears, and: “Michi,” he stuttered, “I don’t know if there’s really a body, I don’t know why I keep dreaming all of these people, murdered figures from the past and all these awful stories . . . Paolo Di Nella, Raul Gardini, the Mattei brothers, Calvi . . . and I swear I never cared about that stuff, I don’t even fucking know who these people are, never heard of them, Rumor, Nardi, never had any kind of morbid interest in political conspiracies or true crime . . . I don’t know why this is happening, but now you have to come with me. I’m begging you.”
He had printed a map from online with all of the directions to get to this phantom destination, which actually existed and was called Porsenna, a run-down little town high up in the Lazio region, where we were supposed to find a bar with a sign saying “Lappy Caffè,” behind which a trail would lead us, after about a kilometer, to the body. Everything in the conditional, everything according to his dream.
I was the one driving, he was navigator. As if sleepwalking, I had driven us out of Rome on the Aurelia highway, passing the Martian outline of the Malagrotta garbage dump and the American Hospital where my grandfather had died of cancer two years before. I was nervous and my hands were sweating, a symptom that usually had only manifested at university exams and job interviews. But I didn’t say a word to Nicola: I was afraid his possessed expression would morph under an even wilder demonic influence. I was genuinely terrified that at any second he would admit—I don’t know—that he was being guided by the dream and therefore we needed to go hurtling off of the overpass with the car running.
What happened was worse. A little before Civitavecchia, when I was already getting used to the idea of simply spending a shit night outside of the Raccordo highway’s orbit, Nicola suddenly ordered me to turn onto a dirt road without any signage. I silently obeyed, and when after less than five hundred meters we were engulfed in the thick dark of the Roman countryside, he signaled for me to stop. He turned on the light inside the car, then he leaned back and pulled out a bag. And cellophaned syringes, a candle stolen from some church, a few brand-new latex tubes, cotton wool.
“It’s smack.” He looked at me. “Yeah, it’s the real shit,” he said. “We have to take it.”
He had the expression of a retarded child who’s still miles ahead of you.
“They told you in the dream?”
“You’ve never done it.”
“I’ve never done it.”
“And you never helped me to stop, so . . .”
“So?”
“So now you’re going to shoot up. It’s good cut stuff, nothing to worry about.”
I translated American comics, making barely enough for the tubs of cold cuts that made up eighty percent of my diet; many days I was too lazy even to waste time daydreaming of continually hazier memories of meager fucks from months earlier; I owed six thousand euros to my diplomatic uncle who would be coming back from Mozambique in a couple days: why couldn’t I accept ten milligrams of this brownish powder, so seemingly innocuous, ethereal like dandelion pollen?
Nicola searched for my vein the way my mother might have done when I was little to inject penicillin. He didn’t say anything, besides, “No. I have no fucking memory of things from when I’d get high, I just have the automatic memory of the motions, like how you remember how to ride a bike, maybe you know what I mean.”
The smell outside was like damp embers, the whistling of nature (wind, leaves, insects) cracked against the humming of the cars coming from the opposite direction. The kick hit me from below, as if my belly was suddenly being massaged by one hundred hands, as if an invisible woman had crouched down between my legs. “You don’t remember, you don’t remember,” Nicola laughed, “you don’t remember anything from when you get high, and what could you remember? The color of the peeled ceiling that you looked at for two hours, or the fucking shoes covered in mud you had on.” For me, a first-timer, there were no physical comparisons for that feeling of pleasure if not sexual memories, tactile blueprints of far-away orgasms, maybe from my teen years, when sex is truly the privileged entry into the real world. I was saying to Nicola, “Nice.” I was repeating: “Nice.” Or simply: “Nicola”—really, just like when you screw. And then I’d ask some non sequiturs: “What is this?” And then: “Isaac,” I said, “was the only son, Isaac, and he gets told to get up, get up early in the morning, take your beloved son, what?, Abraham asks him, your son, your favorite, the one you love, the one you waited for your whole life, he told him get up early, and Abraham really did get up early, your favorite son, and he had to sacrifice him. As in he was asked to sacrifice him, and he said yes. He didn’t dillydally. God gave him to him and then asked him explicitly: take your son, your only son, the one you love. Then they get to the mount, and his son Isaac asks him: so, where is it? Where is the lamb to be sacrificed? Where is it?” while Nicola turned the keys in the dash and shifted the gears, each one sliding into the next. I wouldn’t have been able to drive. “I can’t drive now,” I said, “but maybe it’s just a matter of believing, but to believe there needs to be God to ask you something, a God who’s already given you land, and a son in old age, but I’m blasphemizing. Am I blaaasphemizing? Mixing everything together with you drugging me and Abraham being asked to sacrifice his son?”
“I drugged you? I drugged you?”
“Maybe I’ll never be as brave as Abraham! I’ll always find excuses! What does he say . . . not those that say Lord! Lord!, but those that do my Father’s will . . .”
“And even, we,” Nicola said, “can bury not just the one guy, we can bury everything that comes in our sights. Everything that needs to be buried!”
The road in front of our magnetized eyes was a dark line which we seemed connected to, as if on a track. I wasn’t afraid, I wasn’t at all afraid.
Nicola’s phone had started ringing and ringing, but even if I registered this phenomenon taking place—the ringtone—I could not recognize its function, it was an abstract alarm. Nicola was sniggering, completely focused on his driving, as if the dotted line in the middle of the road was a trail of confetti left by some little Hansel who wanted to lead us to a party, and he was yelling at me a heartfelt speech that had to do with one of the old massacres, I couldn’t tell which one: Peteano? Italicus? Bologna train station? “Look how many there are! They all came for the funeral! You hear them?” he asked me, “you hear them whistling? All of them?” I was in a fog, a sleep of clouds that wasn’t sleep, I was noticing the little pieces of glass on top of the dashboard. I took sheets of paper out of my pocket and read what I had jotted down.
Until Nicola started to lose control, voluntarily. He was no longer pushing the gas, he kept an eye on the car but he was letting it go of its own accord. We were somewhere that didn’t seem very different from the outskirts of Rome, low houses structured like the Roman suburban projects, and huge, broken, luminescent store signs, with their neon hearts clearly visible. But I wasn’t sure if what I was perceiving was faithful to reality or if I was superimposing my memories, now elaborated for the occasion. “And Moro Moretti and Morucci? And Moretti Morucci Moro?” Nicola was laughing to himself. “Is Curcio doing okay? We need to call him and make sure he’s okay. I’m getting out.” He slammed on the brakes and jumped out of the car, as if his seat had caught fire. What was I doing? Or, more appropriately, who was I? I wasn’t sure how to figure myself in all this. I was receiving information on a delay. I had seen him go off and thought that he had to piss, and since I also had to piss, deep down I hoped that he, my rediscovered friend, at that point, after we had taken drugs together, after I had gone with him to look for a clue of his own personal madness, that he would in return do me these favors: that he would piss for me too, that he’d spare me the fatigue of getting up and going into the woods, and that he’d thereby finally let me go peacefully to sleep. And that’s how it happens. Seen from above, seen from outside of me, this scene unfolds about 110 kilometers from Rome, ten kilometers from Cecina, and two hundred meters from a pig. I had actually fallen asleep, wrapped up in a goofy, tender narcosis I’d have even described as edible. The temperature was eleven degrees Celsius, our bodies registering a constant twenty-five. I dreamt I was itchy, or maybe I actually was. Nicola was sneering like a character actor who has finished his repertoire but is still flying on energy. He shook me and woke me up from the circularity of sleep. His phone was ringing, he went on not responding. That buzz was the om of the world, finally granted to us poor humans. “We’ll go, kill, bury,” he said. And I replied: “Why did he leave Regine Olsen?”, a question leftover from my dream.
Nicola said to me, “No one left anyone. We’re all here.”
He had in his hand the same syringe we had used to get high just before, and another small lump of dope in a little ball like the ones you win by turning a dial at a carnival. Would I have agreed to getting high again? I wanted to get high again. Instead he pulled me out, while I scraped from the bottom of my stomach: “Now we’re friends, right, Nicola? Now are we or aren’t we friends? Do you trust me? I went with you where you wanted to go.”
*
The pig was tied to a rope that was tied to a barbed-wire fence. The darkness, or maybe my eyesight, made him seem smaller than he actually was. A creature weighing hundreds of pounds was sleeping standing up in front of us. It’s been here for centuries, I thought.
“I’ve found him,” Nicola said.
“He’s been here for at least a century,” I said. “Look at how calm he is.” Nicola got the syringe ready. Now he was no longer a diligent parent, he was a doctor. A doctor in an emergency situation, who was using the dumb light of his cellphone to see, making sure the needle sucked in the drugs. I fell to my knees. I was in disbelief. I was a sack. I was happy. And Nicola projected a golden glimmering ray onto the animal’s back, looking for a less sensitive spot on the rind.
