A Pike in Flanders E-Book

Daniel Chavarría

• Herausgeber: RUTH
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 624

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

"A Pike in Flanders" is a novel enriched by a catchy suspense plot with comic and even erotic touches. More relevantly, we find on each of its pages a message of denunciation and condemnation of the national and world policies the United States have engendered. Making use of three main characters, this detective story shouts at the top of its lungs that we need to attempt to fix the world we are living in.

Leseprobe

Original title in Spanish:Una pica en Flandes

Edition:Elisa Pardo Zayas and Maritza C. García Pallas

E-book-edition:Claudia María Pérez Portas

Design:Enrique Mayol Amador

Desktop publishing:YamileidisViney Machado

E-book desktop publishing and design:Alejandro Fermín Romero

First edition, 2011

E-book edition, 2014

© 2014, Daniel Chavarría

© 2014, Yvonne Indart

© 2014, EditorialJosé Martí

ISBN: 978-959-09-0612-1

INSTITUTO CUBANO DEL LIBRO

Editorial JOSÉ MARTÍ

Publicaciones en Lenguas Extranjeras

Calzada No. 259 e/ J e I, Vedado,

La Habana, Cuba

E-mail: [email protected]

http://www.cubaliteraria.cu/editorial/editora_marti/index.php

No part of this publication may be reproduced by any means, electronic, reprographic, or otherwise, or transmitted through either public borrowing or rental, without the prior written permission of the Copyright owners. Details of licenses for reproduction may be obtained from CEDRO (Centro Español de Derechos Reprográficos, www.cedro.org) or www.conlicencia.com. EDHASA Ave. Diagonal, 519-52 08029 Barcelona. Tel. [phone]. Spain. E-mail:[email protected] The complete annotated catalogue of Edhasa is available at: http://www.edhasa.es More Cuban digital books at: www.ruthtienda.com Follow us: https://www.facebook.com/ruthservices/

To Antonio, Gerardo, Fernando, Ramón and René, prisoners in the United States for having penetrated the Cuban counter-revolutionarygroups in Miami, whose terrorism against the socialist homeland they were trying to prevent.

For Hilda, myzoon politikon,as always.

Author’s Note

In my action novels I tend to construct a plot line for which I then design the necessary characters. In this novel, I did the contrary; I set myself the experiment of first creating the characters without having designed the story. Using broad strokes, I planned an adventure novel where the good folk, generous, simple, and sincere souls with no aspirations for power or wealth, having exceptional intelligence, recruited for the cause of truth and justice by way of a highly original competition, would confront those too well known bad guys of all times within a plot that I had not yet sketched out. But when I finished conceiving my good characters, I fell in love with them; I didn’t want to misuse them against ordinary enemies. So, I got rid of the capi maffiosi, mercenaries and killers that I was counting on a priori and I decided to confront them with the crème de la crème of international banditry, amongst whom, as we know, shine the presidents of powerful nations, vice presidents, prime ministers, owners of news networks, CEOs of huge transnationals, bankers, speculators, etc. And soon I made a calculation; I saw that such an ambitious novel, with such big-league characters, would never fit into the modest space of the 500 pages I was allotting myself at the beginning, but it would require 1500 to 2000 pages and that would put me in hot water with my editors. So I opted to convert my initial novel into a trilogy—or pentalogy, or hexalogy, depending on how things were going. For that reason, in this first volume, I have limited myself to present good characters who, as my dear reader shall see, become the protagonists of three amusing novellas, full of action and suspense. Later, the memories of two old men bearing the imprint of a World War II adolescence, and the enigmas present all the way through the plot, still without the agon required by Aristotelian precepts, seem to me to be more than enough to fill a good novel, I mean, this novel. Then, in the next ones, Deo volente, we shall find those same characters struggling against the bad guys, very evil ones, whom they have gained as their rivals.

1 CHAMBÉRY Tuesday, May 20, 2003, at 11:48

With Oscar, Ambrosio erred seven times. When he saw him come into the restaurant car, he assumed he was a southern Italian, and a few minutes later, a French playboy. He was wrong on both counts. He knew that when they had barely started their first conversation.

In a little while, he thought he had discovered in his personage a romantic Byron-type, in love with a Greek woman. Third and fourth errors.

Later yet, when Oscar mentioned to him that he had just inherited some money, he imagined a well-heeled gentleman, and if he was traveling by train it was only because he was afraid of planes. And finally, seeing him get off suddenly with that heavy suitcase, he feared that he was a train robber.

In total, seven failed conjectures.

Between Paris and the Italian border, the High Velocity Trains (TGVs) stop only at Chambéry and St-Jean de Maurienne. But before enjoying the delights of the Jura or recalling the prowess of Hannibal negotiating the Alpine abysses with his elephants, the passenger must put up with the monotonous lowlands where the Loire, the Saône and the Rhône flow.

“As boring as Buenos Aires Province,” thought Ambrosio.

Rural France south of Paris under a cloudy sky with a grey drizzle, seen from the restaurant car of a TGV, offers an invitation to drowsiness, ill humor and, in Ambrosio’s case, anxiety-provoked drinking and eating.

Landscape doesn’t exist; especially for a fat man measuring one meter eighty-five; because seated in front of the large sliding window, Ambrosio’s eyes were at the exact same height as the chrome horizontal band dividing the large panes of glass. In order to observe the exterior, he had to stretch to see above the chrome band, or he had to torture his stomach and neck into a scrunch so as to be able to see beneath it. Even so, the trench through which the TGV cars snake their way, practically hidden, only allow you to see the sky and its fugitive slopes from below.

On the other hand, the grande vitesse would give you no time to read the signs at the stations, not even to kill boredom by looking for them on the map. And neurotic people, accustomed to read-ing in silence, couldn’t even take refuge in their books. By the third page, Ambrosio had closed his. The constant brushing against his elbow by the swaying to and fro movements of passengers in the aisle distracted him. And a fat man weighing 130 kilos had no way of pulling his elbow back to safety. He was also distracted by the furiously paced gusts of air and their repeated roar whenever they passed through the tunnels. It made reading impossible.

A girl, an employee of the French railroad company, came up to him with an invitation to take part in a survey about the trip. Ambrosio limited himself to saying: “This trip is boring and it’s making me gain weight. Never again as long as I live am I going to travel on the TGV. I prefer a stagecoach or a plane.”

The girl taking the survey scribbled something down and smiled indulgently.

“Je vous remercie de votre sincérité, Monsieur.”

And with her hand already on the door, she turned to smile at him again. Two hours into the trip and that fat man had been the only passenger who had given her an honest and amusing answer.

Ambrosio flashed her a hostile glance, not understanding that the girl was thanking him for his pinch of salt on the pointlessness of her job. The girl had barely left when a man entered the car, followed by a bang of the sliding door and thus occasioning several reproachful looks.

The train was passing over a stretch that had it rocking and made it difficult for people to walk in the aisles. Nevertheless, watching how the man was balancing with a series of Chaplinesque grimaces and pirouettes, the irritation of the passengers and readers, interrupted by the banging of the door, turned into smiles; and judging by his burlesque of raising his knee and twisting his neck around, he was overacting his difficulties on purpose just to amuse everyone.

Dark skinned, fiftyish, slim, very dapper; he was dressed with bold and careless elegance—a red shirt without a tie, beige jacket and grey trousers. In his loose-limbed balancing act he tousled a beautiful head of black hair that had touches of grey. When, in the midst of his prancing, the man finally arrived at the counter next to the kitchenette and he grabbed onto the edge with the cross-eyed grimace of a drowning man, the two Italian waitresses broke out in a guffaw. At that, the man began kidding around with them in their language. When he saw that the girls didn’t stop laughing, Ambrosio supposed that he was quite the wit. That was the kind of company he needed in order for him not to bore himself to death all the way to Milan.

Due to his outgoing and friendly nature, the color of his skin, the fluidity with which he spoke to the waitresses, it was logical that Ambrosio assumed he was an Italian from the mezzogiorno.

Minutes later, the man came up with a little tray to the large window where Ambrosio was throwing back a beer. In his other hand he clutched a panino con prosciutto e provolone. 1

1. A ham and provolone cheese sandwich. (All notes have been taken from the first Spanish edition, Letras Cubanas 2004, except otherwise indicated.)

In excellent French, the man asked if he could sit down and he placed his tray on the only free space left on the table, between Ambrosio and a lady. So as not to take up too much space, he took the small bottle of Bordeaux and a quiche Lorraine 2 from the tray and placed them directly on the table.

2. A pie originating in Alsace-Lorraine, filled with scrambled eggs and bacon.

His mastery of the language and the quiche—that wouldn’t be eaten by any southern Italian on a train selling panini—, added to the age and histrionics of the character, led Ambrosio to change his idea. Perhaps he was more of an aging playboy, very likely French.

Using the excuse of asking what the next stop would be, Ambrosio started up a conversation that revealed a splendid conversationalist to him. His name was Oscar. The guy was a veritable box of surprises.

The first surprise was his nationality: English. With his dark skin and black hair, nobody would have guessed it; even less after hearing him speaking French and Italian so fluently and with such a great accent.

Right from the beginning Oscar informed him that he was headed to Athens where he lived.

“Oooh, la la . . . to Athens, from Paris, by train?”

“Well really, from London.” And he explained that his tickets took him right to the south of Italy, to Bari, where he would board the ferry.

Because of his clothing and manners, he didn’t seem to be short of money.

And if he was well off, why then was he traveling by train, and in second class?

“Don’t tell me you’re afraid of planes . . . ,” probed Ambrosio.

“Nothing of the sort; I adore planes. But I’m a bit short of money and flying to Greece would cost me four times as much.”

When he learned that Ambrosio was Argentine, he praised Buenos Aires, an adorable city, and above all, the south, the Magellan Strait, the southern Andes, and, Ah! Oh! Nahuel Huapi, Bariloche, unforgettable spots. After excusing himself as an Englishman for what he described as that “perfidious Falklands War,” he spent some time ranting about the “American-British alliance in Iraq.” To Ambrosio’s great amazement, in the presence of a stranger like himself he used expressions like “crime against humanity,” “end of civilization.” According to Oscar, Bush and Tony Blair were “war criminals,” “oil thieves” who, moreover, were destroying Baghdad, its history and its culture.

He was speaking smoothly and with passion.

Ambrosio thought he looked somewhat like Omar Sharif.

So, the southern Italian, the French playboy he imagined at the beginning, was an Englishman residing in Greece, and to all appearances, a leftist. Life sure gives you some surprises . . .

When he repeated that he was living in Athens, Ambrosio couldn’t resist asking what interests had prompted him to move there.

“Love of the country and . . . other loves.”

“Ah! Another Lord Byron!” quipped the Argentine.

“No, just a modest archaeologist.”

Ambrosio, fifty-eight years old, professor of French Literature at the University of Buenos Aires, bestowed a gesture of admiration his way, eyebrows raised.

Oscar explained that he lived in Athens, but he only spent the weekends there. The rest of the time he supervised excavations in the Cyclades Islands.

“I had no idea that the English were still over there, filling Greece with holes.”

“Privileges from our colonial heritage,” Oscar commented, making a guilty gesture.

Interested in his training, Ambrosio learned about his years studying at Cambridge, Trinity College . . .

“Scholarship?” he hazarded a guess when it was already too late to be discrete.

“No. My family had means.”

Bloody hell! What a blunder! Here you are, almost sixty, and you keep on being the same damned idiot as always. Just because the guy is short of funds today doesn’t mean that he has always been a bum . . .

In order to change the subject, he asked about his skin color, way too dark for an Englishman.

“I owe that to my mother . . . ”

“Italian? Greek?”

Ambrosio preferred not to guess, wanting to save himself from another faux pas.

“She was born and raised in India.”

He was English, but in no way was Oscar an introvert. In just a few minutes, Ambrosio learned that the Indian lady, coming from a Brahman family, after she married an English colonel, “my father,” became a rather successful writer in the 1940s and 1950s with her India-based novels.

“Nostalgia sometimes produces good writers.”

“Not her; and furthermore, she became quite a shameless Anglophile.” Oscar commented.

“We didn’t get along. She ended up hating me. Nonetheless, she remembered me in her will.”

“Has she been gone long?”

“No. A couple of weeks. I went to London to pick up my inheritance.”

Ambrosio imagined an evil mother, capable of sadistic posthumous jokes, such as having Oscar go from Athens to London to cash in an inheritance that wouldn’t even cover a return flight to Athens. But the Englishman must have noted something in his face and he hurried up to add:

“Really, I went to cash it in, but I haven’t touched a penny of it. I gave it all away.”

That was the first thing that didn’t ring true to Ambrosio and he was about to let loose an aggressive comment, but he succeeded in toning it down.

“I confess that when someone I have just met expresses such scorn for money, I have a tendency to get my guard up.”

“That’s the best thing, especially on a train.” Oscar smiled indulgently. “But I made a break with my parents when I was a child and now I would feel humiliated if I had to accept their money.”

Without beating around the bush, Ambrosio asked him how much the inheritance was worth.

“It was only 35,000 pounds; but I gave it all away in one night, to some nameless Limey drunks.”

“I feel like a character in a novel,” commented Ambrosio flinging out his arms to indicate the setting.

Oscar just looked at him, disconcerted.

“Bear in mind that in real life, the absolute majority of people have never been in a TGV, talking to a fellow tourist-class passenger who has been capable of giving away 35,000 pounds sterling to a bunch of drunks. Would you allow me to buy you another quarter liter of wine?”

“Of course, I’d be delighted.”

Ambrosio got up with unexpected agility and when he returned with his beer and the wine, he came intending to squeeze the most out of that unusual dialogue.

“And wouldn’t it have been much more human to donate that inheritance to some pauper’s orphanage?” He looked him in the eyes as he opened his beer.

He was hoping that provocation would motivate the Englishman.

“Maybe, yes . . . But that money was scorching my fingers, and I wanted to get rid of it as soon as possible, without getting any thanks in return, or any benefits . . . That’s why I aimed to give it away to people I didn’t know and who would never thank me for it: ‘Hi there, Tom, great to see you, look, here’s what I owe you . . . ’ I would throw a thousand or two thousand pounds on the table and then disappear, without any time to remember faces, looks of surprise or anything.”

“So you gave away the money only to drunk guys?”

“Yes. I would go into a pub, sit at the bar, look the place over and walk right up to the chosen one.”

“And why just to them? Some sort of special preference?”

“The thing is drunks are always more accessible and trusting.”

“Yeah, that’s true,” Ambrosio admitted; “it’s not easy to walk up to a sober guy and give him money. Right away he’s suspicious; he thinks it’s a trick . . . ”

“And since mine were truly anonymous alcoholics, I was guaranteed my own anonymity as well.”

By now, Ambrosio had no more doubts. The gestures, his voice, everything seemed genuine to him. That guy was transparent like glass and lacking any kind of reticence. The perfect companion for a long boring trip; and perfectly opportune when there were still more than three hours before they arrived in Milan.

The new surprise, and not the biggest nor the last, came when he wanted to ask about the person who had enticed him to Athens.

“Was she Greek?” he asked him.

“No. He was a young Libyan,” Oscar confessed and looked him straight in the eye.

Ambrosio, ungainly, no chin, fat, myopic . . . was sorry he didn’t have that physique, charm and personality. If he had wanted, even at his age, Oscar could have had an army of beautiful women running after him.

But suddenly, without any transition, the Englishman’s smile turned into a grimace of pain; and as two copious large tears trickled down, the rim of his eyelids reddened. He lowered his head and started running his hand through his hair.

Ambrosio stayed silent to give him time to compose himself. When he recovered, he smiled an apology. His dark coloring, suddenly pale, imbued his gaze with pathos and depth; nobody could possibly fake that.

He didn’t cry again. A lock of grey hair fell over his forehead. With his eyes lost among the snowy heights of the Savoyard Alps, he confessed how much he had loved that boy, Abdel.

“But at the end of last summer, he left me.”

One day, Abdel walked out of the apartment they shared for several years in Athens and left him a letter informing him that he was returning to Libya. He wanted to get married, have children and give his parents a good old age. He still loved Oscar; but he was now twenty-five years old and he was thinking that their union had no future. For the good of them both, he would be starting a new life.

“Finally, he said goodbye with the news of his wedding in Benghazi, the following week. His father would take care of everything and his father-in-law would be giving them an apartment.”

Oscar shrugged his shoulders in grief.

“Very inconsiderate,” Ambrosio commented. “He ought to have told you earlier, and in person.”

It was all he could think of to fill the sudden anguished silence.

“Yes, very inconsiderate. Even Abdel recognized that in his letter; he begged my pardon for not having had the guts to say goodbye to my face; and I forgave him. He is such a fragile boy . . . ”

By then he was calmer and he revealed that from the beginning of their living together in Athens, Abdel would travel every two or three months to Libya to see his family, especially his father, whom he worshipped; but he returned from his last trip very strange, evasive and somewhat gloomy. Oscar wasn’t able to find out what was going on with him.

That note allowed him to understand. When he saw that Abdel had packed up all his belongings, Oscar reacted with serenity. That night he went to sleep with the aid of a strong dose of sleeping pills, and the next day his sense of self-preservation forced him to return to the Cyclades to bury himself in his work and to forget his misery. For seven months he worked under the sun, excavating from dawn to dusk. He took long walks and tired himself out on purpose. In the afternoons he would collapse from exhaustion. But he couldn’t forget.

By mid April, when he returned to Athens and entered the apartment he had shared with Abdel, his broken heart sent him into a tailspin. He flung himself onto a sofa and wept for a long time, disconsolately. The omnipresent traces of his lover created a stinging sense of emptiness inside him. He chose to leave and he slept that night in an alcoholic haze in a seedy Piraeus hotel. He spent eighteen horrible days there, strung out between pills and wine.

In a sordid little room, he tried to kill himself twice but he couldn’t do it. Both times, seconds before downing a fistful of pills, he was stopped by a feeling of pity, painful pity for his own person and repulsion for his suicidal other self that had emerged to murder a defenseless being.

Finally convinced that he wasn’t going to kill himself, he pulled himself together to exit out of his lethargy. He shaved for the first time in more than two weeks and put on some fresh clothes.

He returned to his apartment in Athens and moved everything around. He got rid of undesirable mementos and erased the traces of Abdel. And since he received the news of his mother’s death on the next day, he borrowed some money and left for London. The inheritance did not interest him. Twenty years earlier he had sworn never to accept anything from his family and he was a man of his word.

His trip to England was especially motivated by the hope of finding some job there that would allow him to get far away from a scenario where Abdel’s memory would haunt him. He wouldn’t return to his beloved Greece until his heart was at peace, even though he doubted that such thing would ever happen.

“Judging by your evident good mood with the waitresses as I came in, it would seem that the trip to England did you a world of good.”

Oscar smiled again and let out a sigh with a nod that Ambrosio was at a loss to decipher.

“Something I wasn’t expecting happened.”

“Abdel called you,” Ambrosio broke in.

“Exactly. On May 17, three days ago.” And Oscar sighed again with another enigmatic nod which was a mixture of uncertainty, happiness and fear. “He’s back in Athens and wants to see me.”

“That’s great. And how did he know that you? . . . ”

“When the building’s doorman told him I was in London he called my friend’s little hotel, where I always stay, and he left a number for me to get hold of him.”

“And you called him?”

“Yes. I sensed something serious in the air. In fact, he sounded very lost, desperately needing money . . . He was talking about 70,000 euros to protect his father. He says that he is about to do anything crazy just to get the money.”

“And does he have what it takes to do that?”

“No, he isn’t a violent person. But I’m upset because he must be really desperate to talk to me about money. He was always very reserved on the subject.”

“In any case, I suppose that the call cheered you up a bit, am I right?”

“Yes . . . Just knowing that he needs me was a relief. He has taken me out of my depressive depths . . . I’m joking around again and smiling; but I still have my anxious moments.”

“Are you worried about what Abdel could do?”

“Not so much . . . It pains me to know that I cannot help him in his great hour of need.”

His eyelids began to bother him again.

“And you aren’t sorry that you wasted your inheritance?”

“Yes. But I’m also glad.”

Ambrosio stared at him.

“Handing over my inheritance to Abdel would have been using it for my own benefit . . . I would have betrayed an oath. Believe me, I’m very hard on myself.”

He bit his lip again and shook his head, worried.

“Surely some solution will come up.”

“It’s just that I have never heard him so desperate . . .” he sighed. “I can’t wait to get to Athens . . .”

With that, he glanced at a newspaper that someone had left on the next table, opened at the middle. Frowning in surprise, he grabbed the newspaper and started to chew on his thumbnail, consumed by that opened page. Absorbed by his reading, he cut Ambrosio off. Having forgotten Abdel and his return to Athens along with any basic good manners, he got up slowly, like a robot. He went off a few steps, still reading; rested the newspaper on a high counter attached to a metal column, and continued, more and more wrapped up in it.

Ambrosio was amazed, more embarrassed than offended. He turned around to watch him. What could he have possibly discovered in the paper? A sudden bolt of hope led him to wonder if the Iraqis had not summoned Aladdin or some other genie from Arabian Nights to make the invading army disappear.

Oscar was now alternating his frantic reading with frequent interruptions. His movements were becoming very rapid, spasmodic. He would look up at the ceiling; he would press his chin, bite his lips or stare at the price list hanging above the counter as if he were in a trance. He also saw him looking intensely as if he were deep within his own being, and after a grimace of disgust, he punched the column a couple of times. Then he turned his head towards the window and perused the grey skies of France with an expression that suggested a stubborn effort to remember something.

As they drew closer to Chambéry, the braking action had him swaying, but his eyes never left the newspaper nor did he return to the reality of the restaurant car until a few minutes later, when he was brought back to consciousness by the immobility of the train as it stood in the station.

He bent over a bit and inspected the platform to figure out where he was, but he continued to ignore Ambrosio. Making another rapid gesture of distress, he looked at the time and pulled on his ear. So did Ambrosio motivated by a mimetic reflex. It was 11:48. From the Gare de Lyon three hours of travel time had gone by.

Without saying goodbye, Oscar hurriedly left the restaurant car. A few seconds later Ambrosio saw him come back in, rummaging through his pockets with the newspaper under his arm.

“It was a pleasure; thank you for the company and the wine. It was very good talking to you. Good luck.” And after shaking his hand and leaving him his business card on the table, he slipped off without waiting for any answer.

Ambrosio learned his name was Oscar Abecromby. There was a string of academic abbreviations following his name and his Athens address.

A few seconds later, as the train was starting off again, Ambrosio saw him crossing the platform in front of his window. He was walking very quickly and carrying a heavy suitcase.

Ambrosio was relieved it wasn’t his.

Oof!

At any rate, he wondered whether the Englishman had not gotten off with a stolen suitcase.

Was he really English?

Was that really his name? Was his story true?

During the rest of the trip to Milan, Ambrosio was attempting to unravel the unusual behavior of that individual, whoever he was.

He didn’t give the impression of being a pick-pocket, a train robber, one of those guys who snatches a suitcase from some distracted passenger seconds before the train starts moving again. But his trapeze artist pirouettes, joviality and histrionics turned on for his entrance into the cafeteria also didn’t jive with the abandoned, tragic lover that he later confessed being.

What mysterious article in that newspaper had led him to get off the train in an isolated city in Savoie, at the high cost of missing his much desired meeting with Abdel in Athens?

In any case, if he was indeed a stellar liar, he deserved kudos for imagination and originality.

2 ROME-CAMPO DE’FIORI Tuesday, May 20, 2003 At 12:00

In 2002 Manfredo Pirotto gave his first class in a classical secondary school. He was lacking experience dealing with girls below the age of seventeen. Such young things filled him with fear. Fear of himself. Twenty-year-olds were less dangerous. Yes; his frequent escapades with them had smoothly livened up almost a decade of university teaching.

Girls of courting age attracted him because, whatever her age, a consummate woman is, above all, a woman. And his hesitation in accepting a job at a high school stemmed from how well he thought he knew himself. His sensuality had gotten him into hot water right from childhood. And if now he started hanging around girls between the ages of twelve and sixteen, he would be running the risk of getting into really serious trouble. He would have difficulty treating consummate females as little girls, no matter what their age. Female students, like fruit, mature early or late; but all of them would have their point of ripeness indicated by odors, a steady gaze, the audacity of slightly parted lips, the swinging of hips sauntering by.

For Manfredo Pirotto, the legal age by which the civil code determined citizen rights and obligations had nothing to do with the age of a ripe female.

At forty-seven he was still an attractive man; attractive enough for any high school girl. From childhood he was used to women chasing after him; and he had a sweet tooth. He didn’t know how to abstain, nor did he try. Whenever a beautiful, determined woman offered herself to him, he didn’t wait to be asked twice. No matter who she was.

He arrived in Sardinia twenty-three years ago to devote himself to the Sardinian language and traditions. He set up house in Cagliari and married Sandra. At the end of 1981 Giorgio was born, and in 1987 along came Claudia. By then Manfredo had earned a teaching position in the faculty of Classical Literature at the University of Reggio in Calabria.

Sandra stayed on in Cagliari, heading Viaggi Orsini, her little travel agency and the main source of support for the family.

Manfredo would stay in Cagliari from Thursday night to Monday morning. On the other three days, he would live and work in Reggio and environs. It was the perfect place for his research projects. From the Strait of Messina he had easy access to many communities whose origins were Greek, Arab and Albanian, all immigrants to Italy and Sicily several centuries ago. In remote villages, using the method he had inaugurated in Sardinia, he would research the relics of oral literature, still alive in the ancestral tongue spoken by the peasants, but condemned to die as victims of urbanism and being dealt a death blow by television.

But by mid-2001, after having fallen into disfavor with the Calabrian rector, who accused him of docere quod non decet,3 following his entanglement with a beautiful Literature professor, Manfredo hurriedly fled Calabria and concocted the story of a nonexistent academic dispute for his family. He alleged that the intolerance of the university authorities was conspiring against his research program. He exaggerated his indignation with the rector, branding him a retrograde imbecile.

3. Teaching indecent subjects.

“You are a fossil,” he would bellow during the fake scene. “They should embalm you and donate you to the museum.”

He ended up swearing he wouldn’t stay one day longer in Reggio, and he convinced Sandra and the kids to give up an already organized holiday trip. He was certain that in a few days the gossip about his affaire with his colleague would be all over both shores of the Strait of Messina and the neighboring cities. At all cost, he had to prevent these tales from reaching the ears of his family. Well known for his causticity, the rector, sotto-voce, used to call them “ Priapus and Poppaea;” and on the walls of the university some graffiti alluding to the “erudite adulterers” was beginning to make its appearance.

Having returned to Sardinia, Manfredo took up his investigations on improvised oral poetry. He was able to stumble through several Sardinian dialects and could understand the archaic Catalan that is still spoken in the area of Alghero; but since he was not able to find a position teaching Greco-Latin languages and literature in any of the universities on the island, in September 2002, in spite of his usual reservations, he ended up accepting that job at the Liceo Classico Massimo Fois.

Of course, the inevitable happened: his height, his attractive appearance and his Cisalpine-Gallic ruddiness, created an explosion of instant passion among his little Punic students. They would stutter in his presence and, hiding behind the screen of their long pitch-black straight hair, they would covertly admire him. If the omnivorous Manfredo had any preferences, for sure it was those dusky women with rosy skins, predominantly of Mediterranean ancestry. He liked them best short, tiny-waisted, manipulable, so that he could exhibit his formidable biceps in brilliant erotic acrobatics.

From day one, in a third-year Latin group, where the average age was fifteen, several of the girls showered him with timid flirting; but Gloria Mundula, just turned sixteen, waged a battle with him that was worthy of the decisiveness of an experienced condottiere. When she focused on him with her huge dark eyes, he felt he was being battered by wide-mouthed cannons, and all he could do was get befuddled.

She was very bold and, for that very reason, very exciting. Two weeks after the course had begun, Manfredo was projecting some numbered slides, examples of Roman sculpture. It was a routine quiz, to see if the students could recognize the periods and styles that he had explained to them in a recent class. Gloria, unable to recognize a thing, started to write nonsense about the wide shoulders of a seated boxer: his Greek profile, his leonine head and, with all respect, hoping that “one day I might tug on those crazy blond curls, like the ones the boxer has, which, by the way, are so like those of my professor.”

Faced with that kamikaze attack, Manfredo was reminded of Garibaldi’s conquest of Sicily. He raised his eyes and looked around, to assure himself that nobody was standing behind him, reading what he was reading. Absurd: his wife and children could only come in through the front door.

After rereading the fragment, he once again reacted in alarm, surprise and with an instant erection. He imagined his blond curls being pulled and his ears being compressed by Gloria’s mighty thighs in the midst of lascivious groans. But firm in his decision to keep out of trouble, he decided to go to the kitchen, pour himself a glass of white wine and rub an ice cube over the back of his neck so that he could continue marking another student’s work.

On Gloria’s paper he wrote an average, undeserved mark, and he resisted commenting on the raunchy final paragraph.

Gloria was not just bold, she was right on the mark with her amorous intuition, like all femmes fatales. At sixteen years old she understood men better than most adults. From a very young age she manipulated her cousins, neighbors and fellow students.

Right away, she understood that her professor was a sure thing. Perceptive and self-assured, she knew that he was faint-heartedly afraid of getting involved with a teenager, but that at the same time he wanted her. That was why he avoided a comment on the paragraph about the pulled curls, so that he wouldn’t be closing the door on something that might yet happen. And so she decided to redouble her artillery.

In her written assignments, she sent him new bedroom messages. Manfredo had to control new erections and he ended up accepting the girl’s challenge as a simple game of seduction, one that wouldn’t go any farther. Kept under control, it would be fun and stimulating.

Unfortunately, Gloria didn’t love Literature or intellectual wit, just concreteness; and this represented an obstacle for Manfredo, who was an expert in the exercise of educated seduction.

At the university, it was the girls who would seduce Manfredo, and generally they were the most talented ones, bedazzled by his erudition. Already more mature, they were very vulnerable to the elegance of his language. But Gloria was a piece of savage femaleness. Whoever could observe her poses and her flashes of breasts and knees there in the front row, would immediately realize that she preferred the certainty of an embrace by the gorgeous hunk to a display of the professor’s cultured wit.

For the first mid-term exam Gloria increased the caliber of her artillery. Without giving up on the parabolic, indirect shot, she intensified her frontal advances.

Manfredo began correcting the papers on a Friday, late at night. Just as he expected, in her translation of the Tacitus fragment, Gloria had cooked up her usual minestrone. In a passage where Cicero was mentioning the “mercy of the Roman Senate,” she translated the term with excruciating literalness. Manfredo wrote a note on the back, “An organ as repressive as the Senate of Cato the Elder did not use to practice mercy. You ought to have translated ‘liberality,’ ‘indulgence,’ ‘soft touch,’ or something of the sort. Bear in mind that ‘mercy’ comes into the Italian language far too loaded with Christianity and it becomes inapplicable to the aggressive Senate of the Republic during the Punic Wars.”

In order to make it even more ostensibly clear that he wasn’t docking her marks, Manfredo marked her errors with abundant notes. Such mildness certainly did not obey any merciful impulse, and he was well aware of it.

“Careful,” he advised himself that night when he realized his maneuver, “you are getting into trouble all by yourself . . .”

Really, Manfredo didn’t know how far he was implicating himself. In that exam, at the end, Gloria saved a surprise for him. As he was marking the etymological exercise, he couldn’t believe what he was seeing in front of him. In her analysis of the adjective sincere, Gloria repeated word by word what he had said in class: “It is a term coming from ancient apiculture. It comes from sine + cera; that is, sincera, or ‘without wax;’ and in archaic language it was used to denote the purity of honey, but in the metaphoric evolution of the word, the purity of honey is extended to the sphere of feelings. Today, therefore, the term is applicable to the purity of friendship, or to the purity of the love I feel for you, Manfredo Pirotto.”

He read that daring declaration several times to assure himself that it wasn’t a mirage.

As luck would have it, on the next day, Sunday, Manfredo would run into her in Villacidro, where Signore Battista Mundula, her father, had some olive groves.

They discovered each other in the middle of a queue, in front of a fontana with medicinal waters that were very highly thought of in the region, and where Gloria had gone in her Yamaha to fill up some canteens.

The alarm activated by Manfredo from the moment he entered that school, prevented his impetus from reaching excessive proportions.

Having to renounce Calabria and Sicily was not the only unpleasant situation caused by his lechery. When he was eight years old, hiding behind a wardrobe, he was surprised copulating with his eleven-year-old cousin Marcella. That turned into a family tragedy. His aunt and uncle never again spoke to him, even when he was an adult; and it had been Marcella who had started everything with her provocations.

As a teenager, he had been expelled from a high school in Padua for having shut himself up with a school mate in the Chemistry classroom in order to “perpetrate acts of indescribable immorality;” and these too were instigated by his female class mate, not by him.

Manfredo was no saint, but generally speaking he refrained from attacking. It was the girls who provoked him. When faced with women of courting age, who were hot and aggressive, he delivered himself up meekly. And giving them their due, he was hardly ever as enterprising as it was presumed.

When he let himself be seduced by Laura, in Calabria, it was the same. A gorgeous woman, passionate, he couldn’t resist her and she implicated him in suicidal scrimmages. Once, her husband was just about to surprise them. Manferedo fled naked through the attic. He had to jump almost three meters and spent several autumnal night hours outside, until Laura could finally throw him his clothes. That resulted in the beginnings of pneumonia. Afterwards, when he overcame the tragedy, Alberto didn’t believe that Manfredo had done everything in his power to avoid her. But, cazzo, he wasn’t made of stone . . . He had limits . . . Nobody can resist a beautiful, excited woman who strips naked in front of you and starts touching you . . .

Sandra earned enough with her travel agency to round out a decent income, to have a lovely home and a new car that they were paying off. The incomes also paid for annual vacations for the four of them, sometimes transoceanic flights. They were living, if truth be told, far above the status of a modest high school teacher, but they were always caught up to date, following a reasonable household budget, trying to save on their shopping and not allowing themselves to waste a thing.

Manfredo wondered one day whether, if he were to take all the suitable precautions, just one skirmish with Gloria would land him in any danger. In that case, the encounter could not happen in Sardinia. But the flight to any city on the peninsula, plus a good hotel room for the girl . . . he didn’t have the means to pay for all that. Well, just this one time he could borrow some small sum and he would pay it back later, little by little, without affecting his financial balance too much . . .

But . . . what if the escapades would go on?

Wouldn’t his wife notice that something strange was going on?

Well . . . if he were to get some extra money . . .

“Don’t be stupid,” he chided himself. “If you were to get some money, you would have to give it to Valerio.”

That was true.

The most recent of his frustrations were certainly related to his insolvency. Valerio was a childhood buddy, and Manfredo adored him. Some weeks earlier Valerio had gotten out of jail, very depressed after an accident that had left him paralyzed. His old friends from the Veneto passed the hat around and planned to buy him a house and ensure support for his wife and child, until he was able to look after himself. But Manfredo hadn’t been able to contribute one single lira. Where was he going to get money from?

Meanwhile, Gloria wasn’t letting up. She kept on tempting him. Instead of answers to his exam questions, she wrote him poems that were getting more literally scandalous; sitting in the first row, she would cross her championship knees, unbutton her blouse, wet her lips, show him her tongue and she would rub her breasts with all the abandon of a whore.

At night, Manfredo would see her rosy, porcelain-doll flesh. He caressed his fingers with the image of her silky hair, he would bite her fleshy lips and play with them, he would delight in her exciting and cruel smile; and he would sniff her exotic aquiline nose, reminiscent of the Carthaginian rule in Sardinia.

For God’s sake, he wasn’t made of stone; and during the nights he started dreaming about her in the middle of erotic pirouettes.

One day, Manfredo read in the paper that Gloria was the daughter of Batista Mundula, a political boss from Nuoro, in the violent region of Barbaggia, accused of bribing the legal administration and of having mafia connections. In those days, the leftist press was involving him in a notorious scandal and Manfredo had no intentions of pissing off that kind of individual. Corrupt, a drug dealer, inclined to taking the law into his own hands, it would be better not to cross his path. Moreover, because of his geographical and social origins, he would surely be as jealous as a Sicilian and even capable of paying assassins to defend the onore of the family. Manfredo could imagine terrible reprisals if he were to discover an affaire with his daughter. And the daughter was perhaps more dangerous, given her boundless recklessness. Manfredo called himself to account. That weekend, after meeting Gloria at the Villacidro fountain, he forced himself to calmly reflect on everything, and on Monday he awoke prepared to cut that little game off at the root. He was determined not to let himself be tempted. He was forty-seven years old, his children were grown and he had a loving wife. If Sandra was to discover this, it would be catastrophic. Once, because of an insignificant little escapade with a tourist in Mexico, they had been on the brink of a divorce; and he wasn’t going to allow his lechery ruin marriage and fatherhood for him.

Faced with the new attitude Manfredo brought with him to the next class, Gloria saw a red light go on. For forty-five minutes, Manfredo didn’t look at her once; and to make matters worse, he remained standing close to the second row, with his back turned to her. Finally, when the bell rang, instead of taking his time to collect his things like he used to do so that she had time to come up to him, he grabbed his briefcase where he already had everything stashed and he walked out, practically at a run.

Gloria didn’t give up. She sensed the gesture of a drowning man. Her seduction schedule would be carried out, come hell or high water. When next Wednesday’s class ended, Manfredo found an envelope with his name on it beside his briefcase and he put it into his pocket without reading it. But consumed with impatience, he went to the washroom and there he opened it.

This time, Gloria opened up with all guns. With the lack of inhibition of a veteran hooker, she confessed that just seeing him that day in Villacidro, that Apollo descending from on high with his basket full of mushrooms, she . . . ooh, ahh, transported by his appearance in shorts, bare-chested, sweaty, and, oh, the perfection of his legs, mammamia, the strength of his biceps, and she, on the verge of passing out, ooh, the unbearable heat scorching her, Santa Madonna, and seeing him drink from a bursting udder, with his Adam’s apple avidly bobbing up and down, she surrendered to ecstasy; and that very night she dreamed she was running through the fields near the Villacidro waterfall. She was covered only by a veil, and that was where he surprised her, oh, delicious apparition, and he took her by the waist with his Herculean arms and lifted her up to drink from her, oh, delicious, she-udder, she the source of all that would quench his thirst . . .

In spite of the cascade of schmaltz, that image put him into a sweat. The udder detail, for sure, one of his favorite fantasies, something he could only do with women who were light enough. Despite her youth, it was obvious that the girl had clocked quite a few miles. Many more than he had imagined at the beginning.

Once again he said to himself that he wouldn’t allow Gloria Mundula to ruin his life. Two days later, adamant that he would forbid any new attacks and would threaten her with taking any new billet doux to the principal, he ran into her in the courtyard and pulled her aside. But just seeing her turn and face him, smiling, sure of herself, one eyebrow arched, lips half parted, more lascivious and whorish than ever, he knew he had been defeated, defenseless, completely at her mercy.

So, fine, he shrugged his shoulders, looked at her with more complicity than censure, and the drastic words he had planned on using to finish the dangerous affaire were reduced to announcing that he would call her in some other time to deal with the exam.

It was then that she understood that she had wounded him to the quick. She had him at her feet. And in a few days, she would deliver the coup de grace.

Meanwhile, Manfredo loosened the reins on his lust and started to imagine the fine details of what he would do in Gloria’s company. Rereading the letter with the udder scene, he received a retroactive blow that destroyed any instinct for self preservation. He knew that from then on he would only be obeying his hormones. And there would be no convenience, no moral, no fear of old Mundula, nor would there be any will to stand in the way of his exacerbated desires. Just like in his youthful forays.

During those days he surprised Sandra with new original wiggles and positions.

First she was pleased and then somewhat intrigued. Hmmm . . .

He attributed the novelties and rejuvenated vigor to some sea urchins he was eating a while ago at a spot on Lungomare when he was returning home.

“It’s the iodine, my love . . .”

Finally resolved to enjoy Gloria, he nevertheless spent the next weekend not daring to call her. As a form of psychotherapy, he endlessly repeated to himself that one single encounter with that woman would not bring him any problems. And nobody could accuse him of immorality: she wasn’t delivering herself up for better marks; nor was he going to be debauching anyone because, in spite of her sixteen years, Gloria was more of a woman and much more worldly-wise than many thirty-year-olds.

Yes, but at any rate, a huge danger was still lurking. If he was keen on the escapade, other moves would follow; and in Cagliari, an affaire like that would not remain a secret long. They would have to meet elsewhere, far from Sardinia: in Rome, Genoa, Milan; and again he started agonizing about the money he didn’t have. Certainly, it would end up distracting him from his research; of course it would be affected, he would barely have enough . . .

At that point, entirely tyrannized by his hormones, power and good intentions had lost their voice, their vote and any shred of influence on his behavior.

However, he promised himself that his naughtiness with Gloria would happen just one time, one single time, just to get it out of his system. He swore to himself that if he joined that dance, there would be no seconds or thirds. This time he wouldn’t allow himself to get tangled up in some conflict. It was his last attempt to resist lust.

And stunned, the absolute slave of desire, on Sunday night he opened up his cell phone: “Whatever God wills.”

Ready.

He was ready to dive, eyes closed, into the turbulent waters.

He called her at her home.

At first she appeared somewhat reticent. But she managed to let him find out that the following Friday and Monday she would not be attending classes; she would be going to Rome to help in a cousin’s wedding preparations. As soon as Manfredo suggested that they meet in Rome, she changed her attitude and proposed seeing each other on Tuesday at noon. The wedding would be on Monday afternoon and she wouldn’t be returning to Cagliari until the last flight on Tuesday, practically at night.

“Of course, my cousin can lend us the keys to an apartment near Campo de’Fiori,” she told him.

There was no doubt about it. The girl went right to the grain without missing a beat.

They set a date for Tuesday, May 20 at 12:00 in the Vineria de Campo de’Fiori, to the left of Giordano Bruno.

“Will I be able to touch your blond curls? It isn’t just a dream of mine? You’re not leading me on, professor? Look, if you aren’t going to go, I’ll never go back to your classes. I’ll ask them to move me to another school.”

He was about to suggest that she use the familiar form with him, but he preferred to keep the treatment respectful. It wouldn’t do to have an indiscretion slip out in class some day.

“No. Of course. I’ll be there.”

Of course he would, even though they would incinerate him afterwards, just like Giordano.

As she answered the phone call in her room, Gloria didn’t notice that Signore Battista, who by now was back home, had picked up the phone at that same moment in the living room. And that after hearing the entire conversation between his daughter and Professor Pirotto, his eyes fixed on a spot on the wall, he murmured:

“Figlio d’un cane . . .”4

4. Son of a dog.

As on other occasions, the onorevole preferred not to clear up anything with the girl; he would just let her go ahead. First he would catch her with her hands in the cookie jar and then he would apply the punishment.

Next day, Signore Battista sent one of his henchmen to the liceo, and he discovered that on this year’s staff his daughter had five female teachers and two male teachers, one of whom bordered on almost sixty years old. The other one, Manfredo Pirotto, was a blond Venetian, good-looking and forty-seven years old.

Signore Battista was not in the least pleased to confirm that Pirotto was a mature man. But young or mature, he was going to get his lesson. He would settle up the score with him in Rome. He would order three of his compaesani from Barbaggia to give him a beating, the likes of which he wouldn’t forget for the rest of his life; and the puttana Gloria would receive exemplary punishment.

On Monday, Sandra made a plane reservation for her husband, who wanted to travel to Rome on Tuesday at 8:30. He was going to spend that afternoon and Wednesday morning discussing the last two chapters of his essay with a scholar: Formulaic Language among Sardinian Improvisers, was something he had been working on for the last year.

That Tuesday he killed some time in Piazza Navona until 11:30 and from there he walked to Campo de’Fiori. He took a table in the Vineria, asked for a Campari soda and started getting excited. He half-closed his eyes and pictured what would soon be happening in a nearby unknown apartment.

Staring at Giordano Bruno’s profile, he repressed all speculation about what would happen if Signore Battista Mundula, mamma mia, should walk in . . .

If she doesn’t go nuts and tell him . . .

It was highly improbable.

For that, he was much calmer.

And on the other hand, the obsession about violating teaching ethics no longer worried him either . . . They could accuse him of lustfulness, but nothing else.

Furthermore, cazzo, it’s impossible to live without violating something every day.

Yes, to violate, to lie, to be unfaithful.

Call a spade a spade: he would be unfaithful to Sandra and he would lie to her to justify expenses and absences . . . And so what? What else was he to do?

But that was no reason to stop loving her as always . . .

The day before he had risen above all his cowardly scruples. There was no retreat possible. Welcome to the cascade of lascivious images that were unleashed by Gloria’s omnipresent vision.

After the voluminous tourist at the next table had paid for his drink, he had to suck in his gut to stand up. The Vineria tables were sometimes so cramped, that customers would get their belongings mixed up. It was outrageous.

“Excuse me,” said the tourist with a smile as he collected his belly and a guidebook of Rome that he had left on the chair closest to Manfredo’s table.”

“Prego . . .”

Manfredo, with a polite gesture, lifted his hand that had been on the back of the chair, moved a knee to let him go by and bent over to pick up a newspaper that had fallen at his feet.

Straightening up again in his chair and gazing upward, the giant ad for a Japanese motorcycle, on which a rich broad in a bikini was grasping the driver from behind, had transformed for him into the obsessive image of Gloria Mundula giving him exquisite digital caresses and stimulating love bites on his back, from behind.

Suddenly, he remembered his days of political affiliation and a noisy fight started by Valerio in that same spot. Two city street cleaners, dressed in their green uniforms, with tall rubber boots and powerful hoses, were sweeping up discarded fruits and vegetables after the Saturday market had concluded; all of a sudden, Valerio grabbed a hose from them and turned it onto a notorious group of Fascists gathered under the awning of the Vineria, with the subsequent scandal, a mess of glasses and bottles, a handful of terrorized tourists, and a giddy flight through the neighborhood streets.

From that time, Campo de’Fiori became a forbidden place for his group, fearful that someone might recognize them.

With the newspaper shielding his eyes, Manfredo looked over at the statue of Giordano. From the moment he saw it for the first time, his heart went out to him. He would have liked to see a larger statue erected to him, and not placed right there, where he burned to death on the pyre. A man of such philosophical and moral stature deserved a statue that would be seen from far away, and not squashed into that narrow section of the market. Giordano was worthy of one of the elevations of the Seven Hills, the summit of the Quirinale, the Aventine. But of course, as a detractor of scholasticism and Aristotelism, no one was going to grant him such glory on Papal lands . . .

And speaking of Gloria, it was already 11:48.

As a tactic for this first date, Manfredo would appear jovial right from the start. But above all he would try to act with the nonchalance of a habitual encounter between adults. If he pretended not to see her as she approached, seeming to be surprised would help him to act spontaneously.

At 11:52, Manfredo opens up the newspaper that he picked up off the floor, and he feigns interest in the sports section. From that angle he can look out over all the access points to the square.

He takes a sip of his Campari and tries to appear interested in his reading.

Almost immediately, he sees her enter the area from the Piazza della Cancelleria. When, without taking his eyes away from the paper, he realizes that the girl is walking towards him, he gets nervous. Suddenly, as he flips over a page, something catches his attention and for a few seconds he forgets about Gloria . . . about himself . . . and about the date.

Oblivion prolongs to a minute, to two, three.

Gloria, of course, has seen him at the table right from the first second.

She looks at him now out of the corner of her eye, his head buried in the paper, but she also pretends to be distracted, and she starts looking at the crafts being offered her by a Senegalese, at the foot of the statue.

She is wearing a mini-skirt and she turns her back to the Vineria, so that he can see her bend over and admire the point of her erect ass.

At 11:57, Manfredo looks at his watch and hides behind the newspaper.

He has changed his mind.

A different urgency dominates him now.