Listen, I think that I’d better . . . call the police,” I stammered, in the pathetic hope that such a clumsily expressed threat might dissuade Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo from his intentions, whatever they might be.
“There’s no need, they’ll be here before long. Now if you’ll excuse me,” he replied with the mechanical calm that comes an instant before launching oneself into an undertaking whose outcome is unforeseeable.
And he finally strolled off, nonchalantly trailing after Matrix, who in the meantime had reached us and walked past without so much as a glance, turning down the next aisle, where on the near side was stationed the refrigerator case full of dairy products and fresh pasta, and on the far side there was the fruit and vegetable section, with the self-service scales, the plastic bags, the cellophane gloves, and all the rest of the necessary equipment.
I stayed put, between the canned tomatoes and the boxed pasta, enlisted in spite of my own intentions, cursing the moment I decided to walk into that supermarket (where it was fucking freezing, moreover) to buy a jar of Buitoni Fior di Pesto, and anyway, I must already have at least eleven jars of Buitoni Fior di Pesto at home; in fact, Alessandra Persiano makes fun of me every time she opens the pantry and finds them lined up like toy soldiers, Look at this, you still shop like a single man, she says, and she laughs, Ha ha.
As if ever since she moved in all we’d been eating were delicacies from the hands of Chef Gianfranco Vissani.
And now I knew that the police would be coming. At least, that’s what I’d been told. Perhaps Matrix was a wanted criminal and Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo was an undercover policeman staking out the supermarket on a hunch that sooner or later his man would come in so that he could arrest him? That would explain the sketchy lesson on the operation of the video security system, to say nothing of the farcical move with his finger on the remote control: truly pathetic.
So was this a long-planned police operation about to be set in motion? From one minute to the next, would the supermarket suddenly be filled with cops, pouring in through the side doors with bulletproof vests and submachine guns, and would they haul off Matrix as he smiled, the way notorious wanted criminals always seem to do at the moment of their capture, at the photographers and television crews who promptly materialized?
It was a plausible hypothesis, but I didn’t believe in it past a certain point. A policeman with that kind of priority on his mind is unlikely to waste a lot of time chatting with people about his dead friends—at the risk of involving them in the operation, for that matter.
At that point I started taking under consideration competing possibilities, such as, for instance, that this was not a police operation at all. That it might be about an old settling of accounts, a private dispute, a retaliation between rival gangs, even. In that case, the arrival of the police foretold by Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo took on an entirely different connotation: the police would be coming, sure enough, but only to collect a dead body.
The more solid the alternative hypotheses became, the more I wondered whether the wisest thing might not be to rush out of the store and call the police myself. But by now Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo had almost drawn even with Matrix, who was coasting along the dairy case without paying him the slightest attention (something that only confused me further, because a fugitive, or in any case someone involved in dodgy or criminal matters, ought to be suspicious of his fellow man by definition, especially when his fellow man is following him), and I felt called upon to stay there, even though I didn’t know what was going to happen, much less in whose defense I was supposed to intervene. Among other things, at that hour of the morning the supermarket was practically deserted, so that, if needed, I wouldn’t have been able to turn to any volunteers for aid and assistance.
The thing that got on my nerves the most was the fact that Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo (if in fact that was his real name) must have figured out what kind of person I was, otherwise he’d never have been able to drag me so successfully into that fucked-up situation in the first place.
That’s why he’d gone to all the trouble of complimenting me on my inflexibility in negotiating his old friend’s settlement, and I, like a prime sucker, had gone along with it. Obviously I couldn’t take to my heels now—not after allowing myself to be praised as a man of principle.
In the meantime “Montagne verdi” had finished playing, and a few yards down the aisle there was a little old lady who kept shooting me glances, because she’d already tried three times to reach a jar of cranberry beans, without success.
I wondered: all those people who are always sticking their noses into others’ misfortunes—the rubberneckers who always cluster around when public disasters occur; those who, when a fistfight breaks out, don’t think twice about risking their personal safety just to elbow their way into the front row; the people who, when they hear two cars crash into each other, even if they’ve been standing in line for forty-five minutes at the post office, will happily give up their turns to run outside to enjoy the show live—where the fuck were they all right now, why didn’t they come nosing around, prying into the sinister intentions of Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo?
Now Matrix was moving along the metal rail running along the front of the dairy and fresh pasta case with the step of a prison guard inspecting cells on death row during evening shakedown, scanning the yogurt section with particular severity.
Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo was little more than a yard away from him, but unlike Matrix, he had his back to the dairy products, because he’d pulled the remote control out of his jacket once again and was now pointing it at two other monitors with the nonchalance of a technician testing an electrical system.
After the engineer had been playing around with the remote for a while, Matrix turned his head and looked him in the face (Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo gave him a perfunctory smile, which he did not return); then Matrix looked down at the hand that was holding the remote control, and from there back up, at the two monitors, after which he made a sort of approving expression with his eyebrows (kind of like: “Oh, I see”), and then went back to hunting for yogurt.
“Young man, excuse me,” the little old lady had, so to speak, asked me, seeing as her ocular solicitations hadn’t had much effect. And she tipped her head in the direction of the cranberry beans, which were in fact on a shelf too high for her to reach, short as she was.
That’s what old people always do when they need something: they mobilize you even before you realize what they want done. You have to make yourself useful without explicit guidance from them.
“Ah, certainly,” I replied, and I headed over to help her.
It was just as I was on tiptoes trying to reach the jar of beans for her (how long could I have taken, five seconds?) that I recognized the nearby voice of Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo as he said simply, in the calmest possible tone:
“Freeze.”
I turned around and saw, first, Matrix’s arms rising slowly over his head as if in response to a divine convocation, then his head with the ponytail, then a pistol aimed roughly at his temple, and then a hand gripping that pistol, in turn connected to an arm that ran straight into the side of Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo.
That’s exactly how I saw it, step by step, working backward, the way it looks when you hit REWIND on a camcorder without first hitting STOP. It’s incredible how fear circumscribes and amplifies one’s perception of events (which is why many witnesses, even when testifying under oath, will insist that they never saw the one specific thing that the judge keeps asking them about, because at that moment, even though they were right in the middle of what was happening, fear had selected certain details for them while canceling out all the rest).
In a situation like that, one thinks, who knows what speed the brain is operating at. How much instinctive philosophy it produces. What intelligent thoughts about the provisional nature of life, the discovery of what truly matters, and so on.
But the only question that kept drilling into my head as I was standing there was this: “How the fuck does he keep his hand from shaking?”
Get it? Not: “Where did he pull that gun out from? I didn’t notice any bulge in his jacket when we were talking before”; or else, following a slightly more paranoid line of argument (justified, I think, given the circumstances): “Now he’s going to shoot him and, while he’s at it, he’ll turn around and take me and the old woman out, too.”
Just, you know.
No: “How does he keep his hand so still?”
That’s all.
As if this were some tremendously important question. As if its answer would determine all further developments.
Okay: it was bullshit. One of those senselessly obsessive thoughts that you cling to in extreme situations.
But you should have seen Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo in action. He moved competently, calmly, as if he’d never done anything else in his life but throw down on people in supermarkets. If he wasn’t a professional, he’d at least practiced that operation down to the very last details.
Matrix, for that matter, now that I had a better look at him, was much younger than the engineer (at a glance he might have been somewhere between thirty and forty), wiry but brutal-looking, like an Extreme Fighting lightweight champion. The kind of guy I’d say “Sorry, my mistake” to if he cut in front of me, just to be clear.
“Excuse me young man, could you give me those?” said the little old lady, clearly out of patience by now. She was referring to the jar of beans that I was clutching by the lid with all five fingers of my left hand. She still hadn’t realized what was happening right behind her (which was a relief, because I was afraid she might scream).
I’d heard her, but my body was in standby mode. If I’d been able to move, I’d have handed her her inopportune jar and then urged her to get out of there as quickly as she could, perhaps making my escape with the excuse of ensuring that she reached safety.
Instead I stood there, incapable of tearing my eyes away from the scene that, just a little more than ten feet away, continued to intensify and deteriorate in that surreally deserted supermarket which people seemed to be consciously avoiding rather than coming in and buying groceries (and to think that I could hear the attendant at the deli counter rustling around in back doing something, just a short distance away), even though it would have taken practically nothing, a trifle (a child on the run from his mother suddenly appearing at the other end of the aisle, a slightly louder than average noise, any of an infinite number of microevents) to violently alter the progression of developments and unleash tragedy.
Pure pornography, clearly. Because when reality starts putting on a show, that’s the effect that it achieves. That’s why reality shows, which constitute only the feeblest attempts at imitating reality itself, are as successful as they are.
In fact it was not only my fear of the worst that kept my attention so riveted. The truth is that, although admitting this is not exactly a testimony to my integrity, a part of me wanted to know how it was going to end.
Matrix remained obediently motionless awaiting further instructions from Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo as if he were accustomed to this sort of contretemps.
“Turn around,” he ordered, moving the pistol barrel from his temple to his cheek. “Next to me. Slowly. Without lowering your hands.”
Matrix complied, but he came dangerously close to snorting in annoyance.
“Feh,” said the old woman, deeply annoyed that I still hadn’t made up my mind to give her her fucking cranberry beans.
Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo took a step back, continuing to press the barrel of the pistol into Matrix’s cheek.
“On your knees.”
For an instant Matrix hesitated, as if that order somehow deviated from police protocol for that kind of operation; then he put on an expression of visible tolerance for a rank beginner. He was probably hoping to make Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo nervous and provoke him into doing something stupid, so that he could take advantage and pull a counter-maneuver of some kind. But if that was his plan, it wasn’t working.
Once his kneecaps touched the floor, the next command was issued.
“Hands behind your back. Crossed. And lower your head.”
Matrix shot him a glare, as if to say that now he was taking things too far.
The only reply that Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo offered was to shove the pistol barrel a little harder into his cheek.
It must have hurt, because Matrix pulled his head back and emitted a moan that was immediately silenced, the way you pull away from the dentist’s drill at the first stab of pain.
“Move it,” the engineer commanded, with glassy indifference.
That was when the old woman realized that something was happening behind her that might be worth seeing and finally she turned around.
“O Maronna,” she said in a faint voice. And she covered her mouth with one hand (I wonder why, I thought to myself, people always feel a need to censor themselves when something scares them).
Whereupon I had the impulse to give her the beans, just like that, for no good reason, but this time she was the one who refused to cooperate.
Matrix crossed his arms behind his back and bowed forward. Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo followed his movements by moving the barrel of the pistol from his face to the back of his neck. With his free hand he lifted Matrix’s arms to the height of the metal rail that ran along the front of the dairy case. The leverage forced Matrix to bow even lower, as if he were supplicating the linoleum floor.
Now it looked like a wartime scene. A prisoner awaiting execution, kneeling before his executioner, deprived even of the right to look at him.
Matrix’s face, what little I could see of it, seemed to have lost the careless confidence it had worn until just a minute before. A loss that by rights I ought to have noticed with some satisfaction, considering how obnoxious I’d found him up to that point; but instead I was having a hard time accepting it. Seeing someone fall completely under another person’s control always has a unpleasant effect on me.
The old lady grabbed my arm. She was squeezing it.
I came that close to saying “What about the beans?” but I managed to restrain myself.
Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo pulled a pair of handcuffs out of his pocket. The appearance of such a distinctly police-related contraption reassured me of his intentions. In fact the old woman immediately asked me, “So he’s a detective?” as if I ought to know.
What I found most unsettling about that masterfully executed operation was the fact that, in spite of appearances, it still didn’t look like an arrest. At least, not an ordinary arrest. The impression one got from watching Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo at work was that he’d been waiting for that moment for some time. There was something excessively calculated, something . . . personal, in that display of bravura. That’s why I continued to refer to him mentally by the name and title with which he’d introduced himself. In other words, I didn’t believe (and hadn’t believed from the beginning) that he was a cop.
Matrix’s breathing was labored, defenseless and uninformed as he was with regard to his own future prospects. Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo snapped a handcuff around the first wrist, ran the chain around the metallic bumper that ran along the front of the dairy products case, and then proceeded to cuff the other hand.
Having successfully partially hogtied him, the engineer withdrew the pistol and, with the ultra-nonchalance of a consummate professional, turned on his heel and started walking calmly down the aisle, leaving his hostage behind him, as if he were done with him.
I was still standing there with the old woman clutching my arm, as if we were a pair of extras dressed for a film, waiting for the unit production manager to tell us whether we should stay or were free to go.
“Did he arrest him?” the old woman asked me.
“What does it look like to you?” I replied.
Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo looked me right in the eye and nodded, just once.
The old woman immediately released my arm and stared hard at me, just inches away from my face.
I started covering my ass like an idiot with such pathetic phrases as “Hey, surely you don’t think that . . .” and “Look, I have nothing to do with . . . ,” the end result of which was only to reinforce her suspicions of some association (whether of a criminal or law-enforcement nature was unclear: from the way she was looking at me I doubted that there was any difference between the two for her) between me and Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo.
After blundering along for a bit, I blurted out a generalized “Aw, fuck it” under my breath, and even took a backhanded swing at the air between me and the old woman; then I made a point of putting her damn-it-to-hell cranberry beans back on the top shelf (now you can climb up there yourself if you want them so much, you mistrustful old biddy).
She threw her head back in reverse, visibly horrified, and finally cut out the ocular inquisition she’d been conducting.
Having resolved our personal problems, we went back to our consideration of the hostage situation in progress.
Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo, with surreal nonchalance, had gone back to fiddling around with the remote control, once again aiming it at the two overhead monitors across from the dairy case.
Matrix, meanwhile, still down on his knees, finally managed to swivel his head in the direction of his handcuffer in search of some indication of what his fate would be; when he saw him madly engaged in what appeared to be a generic operation of product testing, an expression of genuine confusion came over his face.
I too had begun to wonder if Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo might not be slightly cracked.
I think I read somewhere (or else I’m completely making it up, who knows; regardless it strikes me as logical and even vaguely scientific) that when you really and truly screw up, whether involuntarily or intentionally, it sometimes happens that your brain is unable to come to grips with the immanence of your actions; in other words, your brain refuses to tell itself the story of what you’ve just done. The result is a temporary vacatio mentis, or perhaps we should say fugue state, after which for a short while we behave incongruously, just as, sure enough, once happened to me when it was handbags, so to speak, between me and a sort of girlfriend, and I ended up ordering her out of my car in a part of town that was clearly unsafe for a young woman on foot. I took off, tires screeching (I still remember the sight of her disbelieving face in the rearview mirror), but as soon as I had swerved around the corner I completely forgot where I lived and after driving around at random for a while (which was a real nightmare, now that I think back) I went back to where I’d left her, not so much to make up for what I’d done but rather because I hoped she’d give me directions, or at least to get her to say to me, “Where the fuck do you think you’re going? That way, you idiot!” (I don’t know how germane this example actually is; but anyway.)
“Nice work,” Matrix said. Referring to Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo.
The engineer didn’t bother to reply; instead he set down the remote control on one of the shelves where the fruit was displayed across the aisle, and appeared genuinely curious to see what was coming next. Matrix must have interpreted his silence as a sign of weakness, because he immediately launched into a crescendo of threats intended to win his release, like in a cop movie where coolheaded veteran detectives detect a hint of hesitation in the bad guy, so they walk toward him, unarmed, urging him to shoot as he backs away, trembling, until he collapses, breaks into tears, and hands over the gun.
“As long as you just handcuffed me, okay . . . but this, here,” and he clarified by shaking his hands and rattling the handcuffs against the metal rail of the dairy case, “this is taking it too far.”
What struck me was the way he managed, even from his helpless, hunched over position, to be so brazen, and clearly very confident that before long their roles would be reversed.
Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo must have thought the same thing because he immediately turned to look at me, flashing me a mocking smile that more or less translated as: “You hear this guy?”
Why the hell he kept shooting me those looks of connivance was beyond me; and aside from being intrinsically objectionable, it was starting to worry me, because the last thing I needed was for Matrix to think that I was in cahoots on this thing and come looking for me once the whole business was over.
“Tell me,” Matrix went on, “are you by any chance hoping that this will get you a promotion?”
Short pause, after which he got to the point, lowering his voice slightly and putting on a friendly smile.
“Tomorrow morning I’ll get out of jail, then I’ll come find you, wherever you might be, and first I’ll shoot you in both hands, and then in the face, you can count on it . . .” But he said it in the tone of voice of an old uncle who, upon running into the little nephew he hasn’t seen in forever, crouches down and says, “You’ve gotten so tall!”
Now then. I don’t know what sort of impression words like these make when they’re written down on a sheet of paper; but I guarantee that when you hear them live they induce the same kind of nausea that would beset you if, without any advance notice, they were to take you away and force you to witness an autopsy. Because they do more than just promise death: they give it shape and presence; they bring it close; they show it to you.
“And remember,” Matrix added, just to make sure he’d covered all his bases, accompanying his words with an obscene leer, “I’ll make sure and come personally; that way you’ll be able to introduce me to your family.”
It was after this abominable kicker that I felt certain that Matrix must be a camorrista: and not just a two-bit gangster, a heavy hitter. Not so much because of the tone of voice but because of the expressive power of his words, their ability to conjure up such frighteningly vivid images.
Camorristi are past masters of the art of ambiguity, expert communicators, ideal ad men. The messages they send do much more than merely intimidate their recipients: they take them straight out of a state of law. Their messages suggest a throwback to an earlier society, where justice has no power because the strongest make the rules. It is this authoritarian subtext that offends us so intimately, because it turns back the clock with such rude certainty that we question what century we’re in. It’s the possibility of going so far back in time that throws us off balance.
The Camorrese language is a reactionary form of Latin, as in ancient Rome, that sends us back to a world that we thought we’d left behind us forever.
I had a hunch that this threat of a transversal vendetta would send Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo over the edge. And so it did, in fact. Don’t ask me why, I couldn’t say. Sometimes you just get lucky and nail it, right when you’re on the precipice of a world of pain. As if the motives that two or more people might have for slaughtering each other, when it comes down to it, had somehow acquired an aesthetic all their own.
When Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo lunged at Matrix I almost missed it; that’s how fast he was. He grabbed him by the hair and yanked him to his feet, jamming the pistol in his face again with such fury that I was afraid that I was about to see Matrix’s head turn into a New Year’s Eve fireworks display any second now. In the scuffle a half-liter bottle of yogurt tumbled off a shelf, cracking open on the floor and whitewashing a section of tile. The old lady once again dug her talons into my arm. Matrix was unable to keep his balance on his knees and instinctively pulled up his right leg so that he could brace himself against the floor with one foot. Interpreting that move as a potential attempt to fight back, Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo slammed his knee into Matrix’s ribs, simultaneously pulling him toward him and forcing his leg to bend awkwardly. Matrix squeezed his eyes shut and clenched his teeth to keep from screaming and bent forward even deeper, crawling on his knees, sucking air and coughing. I—or rather, we, since the old woman was basically attached to me—we both recoiled in empathy, taking part in a simulation of the pain that Matrix must have been experiencing.
Now he was panting and biting his lips, perhaps suffering more from his helplessness than from the actual pain. Still holding him by a hank of his hair, Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo jerked Matrix toward him forcefully, claiming him as his personal property. Matrix made an attempt to say something, maybe an oath, or another threat; but all that came out was a grunt, something incomprehensible. The old woman was squeezing my arm at regular intervals, like a girl when you take her to see a horror movie (which in fact encourages physical contact), and any minute I expected her to throw her arms around me. Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo resumed his close-quarters battle with his prey, and now seemed intent on communicating something especially important to him.
I hadn’t imagined him like this. While he was immobilizing and handcuffing the man, he’d behaved like the suspect-apprehension equivalent of a dental hygienist. Now he was pure rage.
“Unfortunately for you, I’m no cop,” he said into the guy’s ear. But since he neglected to lower his voice, we heard it too.
Bingo, I thought to myself.
Ignoring the pistol barrel jammed into his cheek so hard that he was forced to keep his jaws open wide, and even though he was half-blinded by the extreme closeup of his captor’s face, Matrix stared right back at Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo, though he could hardly have expected to see anyone else at this point.
But perhaps he did see someone else. A tremendously unhappy person (just for an instant, an abyss), then a horribly empty one.
“Well, you’ve already taken my family away from me, piece of shit.”
The old woman turned toward me, to share the dramatic intensity of that moment.
A wince registered instantanouesly in Matrix’s glistening eyes, like a momentary drop in the tension. I thought I saw him hold his breath for a microsecond.
Finally Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo let him go. Matrix’s head seemed to rejoin the rest of his exhausted body, with a sort of rebounding motion. The, shall we say, poor man coughed convulsively, partly suffocated by the quantity of saliva that had flooded his mouth on account of his gaping jaws, and zigzagging aimlessly around on his knees he tried to hoist himself upright in order to make up for the constriction of his arms.
The engineer slapped at his clothes haphazardly, as if he felt it were important to straighten up his appearance before returning to check on his audience, which consisted of the old lady and myself, the latter even more aghast than the former. He then picked up the remote control and once again pointed it at the two monitors in front of him, pressing a series of buttons sequentially, or at least that was my impression.
A moment later an image of Matrix appeared on the two television sets, on his knees, his wrists handcuffed behind him to the metal rail of the dairy case. It looked like a video clip from Al Jazeera.
Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo shot me another one of his canny little glances.
I must have responded with an especially baffled expression, because a tiny oblique tremor in the old woman’s eyebrows gave me the distinct impression that she was revising her opinion of me. For that matter, all it would take was a smidgen of logic to see that if I had been in cahoots with Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo, at the very least I ought to have given him a hand instead of standing there watching while he handled everything on his own (okay, maybe that was too sophisticated a thought process for the old biddy).
I instinctively turned to look at the monitor behind me, or rather, above me, expecting to see a screenshot of Matrix done up as a hostage there too, and that is precisely what I saw.
At that point, my confusion began to dissipate.
Matrix hawked and spat some more. When he was breathing more or less regularly again and looked up, the first thing his eyes lit on were the two monitors looming over him on the facing wall. He looked puzzled, almost as if he’d seen someone he thought he knew.
At first he must not have believed his eyes, because he first looked down at his body (“Wait, is that what I’m wearing?”), after which he craned his neck like an expanding telescope toward the monitors, a move he accompanied with a quick right-left-right shimmy of the shoulders (a little like what boxers do when they’re sizing each other up during a match).
Once the movement test had chased the last of his doubts from his mind, he started grinding his teeth and hyperventilating, as if only then had he really begun to feel trapped.
At that exact moment, I recognized the voice of a female cashier in the distance asking generically, “What on earth is going on over there?” and then another voice, also female, perhaps a little younger: “Franco, Franco, did you see that?”
Then another. And another. And another one still.
“That’s impossible. Look, he’s on that other screen, too!”
“Oh my God, but where is he, inside the store?”
“Mamma, why do we have to leave?”
The populace of the supermarket had lifted their eyes to the closed-circuit television sets.
At last I started to feel a little less alone.