Crocodiles

Milan, summer 2008.

Cold rain flogged the city and when William Fiorucci woke up, freezing numbness ran through him. He got up, stark naked, took a crumpled cigarette from the bedside table, passed in front of the bedroom mirror, ignoring his bleak, bony body, and went out on the balcony.

The hideous old street-walker from the flat below was already on her morning shift. Not even eleven o’clock and there she was on the game again. They had crossed paths but never been introduced; she had been living there for as long as he could remember, since he was a kid living there with his mom, before the doctors came and… well, before… before they found out mom was mad. Anyway – the old hag was there at the time, younger of course, but already as ugly as the plague. Who the hell would do her, for Chrissakes? he wondered. Especially now that she was sixty, with peroxide hair all done up in a bun, heavy make-up and itchy, skin-tight clothes – something meant to look sensual but in fact made her look like some huge crooked doll placed on the sidewalk in front of the Detroit Hotel.

She was a horrible creature, it was a horrible day, and William Fiorucci had to get back to his horrible job. He lit his cigarette, breathed in the cold, smog-oozing air, and thought of that bitch Luisa at the sea with the kid. Life sucked, that was his motto, and he repeated it mentally, like some cathartic mantra, as he breathed in his first dose of nicotine.

He slouched and swayed through his messy two-roomed flat, its walls plastered in damp, peeling, cream-coloured wallpaper with hypnotic, dark-purple patterns showing something... something vegetable, a sort of monstrous rotten cauliflower; something abnormal, similar to a carcinoma, with spiraling roots stretching out under him and intertwining with the head of two other cauliflowers, from which more roots sprouted, and these roots intertwined with other cauliflowers... and so on, all around the house; this was his mother’s wallpaper (and it was no coincidence that she had spent half her life at the local mental institution – no coincidence at all), and he hated her inherently, pervasively. He reached his desk, sat down, and moved aside the crumpled sheets on his typewriter, an old Olivetti (and whaddaya know, this used to belong to his mother, too!), desperately on its last legs, but it still got the job done. Tictictictictictictictictic, tictictictictictictictictic, tic-tic – a machine gun. He had to finish his piece but he didn’t have a fuck worth writing about; he had spent the night in Melchiorre Gioia among the trannies but all he’d come away with was an invitation in Portuguese to fuck off.

Nobody wanted to talk about the Zanoletti murder; they’d found him slit open like a fish, in a field where until not long ago there used to be the notorious Varesine Fun Fair, on the other side of the square. Rich and powerful, Zanoletti loved laying trannies; and something had gone awry, but that wasn’t enough for the Nera Meneghina, the Milanese crime news – no, the Nera Meneghina hungered for fresh information, gathered first-hand, with pictures, interviews and the lot. He had to kick all the other local crime-news rags’ asses, and he had always got the job done. But that wasn’t his dream. He was meant to be a great journalist. A top-drawer one. He even had a shot when they had called him up at the Europeo not so long ago (it was six years ago, you dumb prick) to see what he could do. It was the chance of a lifetime – the same paper that Oriana Fallaci, Truman Capote and other big names had written for... He was penning a book and he tidied up the notes scattered all over his desk; the cutouts from old newspapers, a book on Lombardy’s serial killers. The latest were the Beasts of Satan. The first was Boggia, the first psychopath killer Milan could remember and whose severed head was even examined by Lombroso but eventually disappeared into thin air... and in between, the many – too many – disturbing psychopath killers of the Po Valley: the horror house of dentist-killer Douglas Sapio Verdirame, who in 1960 killed his father-in-law and his housekeeper by crushing her skull and ramrodding a pair of underpants down his throat and choking him with his suspenders; the undiscovered murderer of 26-year-old Simonetta Ferrero, found in 1971 in the bathrooms of the Cattolica University, her body gouged with thirty-three stab wounds; the nine murders of the Pontoglio Monster, Vitalino Morandini, who killed his random victims with stones and pick-axes, breaking into their homes at night – old folks, women and kids alike... their homes turned into abbatoirs, with the blood spurting up to the ceiling; and many more.

But when the Europeo chance came up, he avoided it – no, his book was bound to be a boring ride of trite old stuff; he had to find something better, and yet he had a gift for writing...

Then the divorce came, Luisa went off with the kid, and oh yeah, that silly silly drinking problem, like that time they stopped him in his car and... and no, Mr. Fiorucci, you can’t keep the child, we’re going to entrust him to your wife, you don’t even have a fixed job, and so there he was at the Nera Meneghina playing the pro, writing random pieces on lunatic sons that choke their moms with their stockings, gerontophiliacs assaulting and raping paralytic ninety-year-old ladies, kids dicing up the neighborhood’s cats and taking pictures with their mobile phones to show their friends... this was the world that William Fiorucci, a would-be journalist (now forty), had chosen.

He moved aside the pictures of dead people, pools of blood and smoking guns and tried to get back to writing something with his Olivetti (his mother’s) but last night’s rounds of white wine in the Ortica Bar were still doing their thing. No, he just couldn’t put himself to writing. And, as usual, he wasn’t hungry. He peered into the pantry and then in the fridge. Nothing to drink. It was midday. The morning was dead and gone. And afternoons didn’t work well for writing – he’d rather go out. The Ortica Bar was waiting for him – so why keep the blameless thing waiting?

 

The usual crowd of old folks played cards outside next to the bowling court and speaking that strange language spoken by the Milanese elderly – that drawled, secret dialect: uè, ma cus’è che te vori, ciapa su la cadrega, moves, el Baracca l’è andà dal cervelé, te se dré a fa, te se minga bon, muchela!¹

Fiorucci was listening and drinking his round of white wine when his cell phone rang. It was Ianfascia, the editor. “Fiorucci, where are you? Haven’t you finished the piece on the Varesine yet? We’re printing tomorrow, you know? Fiorucci, I’m fucking sick and tired of you, you get it? I’m dropping you, Fiorucci, I’m gonna kick your ass so bad I’m gonna send you flying back into the same waterway I fished you out of, and I’m gonna kick you so hard that by the time you wake up Milan’s Cathedral will be a mosque for the Muslims, is that clear, Fiorucci?”

William, who had turned as white as the back of a bank statement, ended the call. How he hated Ianfascia! God, mother of God, Heavens to Murgatroyd, he almost hated him more than his ex wife. He wiped his face, rocking back and forth on the corner table and realizing that any stranger would mistake him for an alcoholic of sorts. He removed his hand from his face and saw the bartender taking away his glass. “Cerutti’s waiting for you in the other room,” the man said.

William stared at him blankly.

“In the pool room,” said the man. Fiorucci got up dazedly and went towards the pool room. It was four o’clock and the bar was deserted except for the elderly card players under the porch looking onto the square.

The pool room was an average-sized room round back; it had always given him a feeling of great sadness. Some people went there to drink, but not Fiorucci – he saw it as a sort of hyperbaric chamber, a last-hope room, a leprosarium, in other words a place where you went to kick the bucket. And now Cerutti had summoned him in there of all places, to talk to him.

Cerutti was used to calling the shots. He was a wise guy, a mobster; he had been a part of Francis Turatello’s gang and had lost an eye in a shoot-out with the cops. Legend had it that he had disfigured no other than Vallanzasca during a night brawl right there at the Ortica Bar. Now he spent all his time there, in the pool room, in that last stop before hell, its black-brick floor sprayed white, its walls a dirty gray, without a single painting, a crucifix, a few wood tables in the corners and in the middle a huge, green pool table, a sleeping colossus laden with omens. It was a room full of secrets, exuding a piercing feeling of emptiness. And here Cerutti looked out of the window, onto a group of adjacent houses overlapping like sudden mushrooms, straw yellow in color, wedged against each other, as if they were trying to pull themselves up to breathe, to break away from the concrete furnace around them. The old mobster faced the other way and on the table next to him sat an ashtray, a pack of Muratti cigarettes and an old copy of the Nera Meneghina.

He turned to face William Fiorucci and smiled a small, rotten, black-toothed smile. Even the fingers handling his lighter were black, pretty much – black and yellow with nicotine. He had a pair of glasses, the left lens transparent and the right one black. It was the eye the cops had shot out.

This would be a great article – one fucking hell of an article... an article that he would never have been able to write. The secret story of Ambrogio Cerutti of the Ligera, Milan mob.

“I liked what you did,” began Cerutti, smoking through his tight lips. “I read your work, you know? I read the Nera Meneghina and I like your pieces. I like sharp-witted people. Good work.”

“Thank you, Mr. Cerutti,” said William.

“Have a seat, man – we need to talk. Smoke?” he said, offering a pack of cigarettes.

“No thanks,” said William, but the old man kept his hand stretched out, motionless. He didn’t budge a fraction of an inch. Fiorucci could see what he was driving at and took a cigarette.

“That’s better. So, Fiorucci – whassup? Whatcha writing?”

“I’m... I’m writing a piece on... that man they killed... at the Varesine Luna Park,” he said, and then stopped. He stopped to think a minute. Was he saying anything... wrong? He wasn’t, was he? “You know, that tycoon who... who went with...”

“With the fags, that’s who he went with, Fiorucci!” yelled Cerutti, and burst out laughing like a yelping dog. “He wasn’t worth nothing, he wasn’t – he was a fag too, otherwise he wouldn’t have gone fagging, right?”

Fiorucci smiled. “Well, you can imagine how many folks beyond suspicion...”

“Oh no,” said the old man, putting out his cigarette and wagging his index. Fiorucci froze. “Some things are right and others are wrong. Zanoletti was a shady, hare-brained locch – he did bad things and he died like he lived and like he deserved – with his own cock in his mouth.” The old man took a light-brown envelope from underneath the newspaper, removing some pictures and spreading them across the table like a deck of cards.

Fiorucci leaned over to look at them. They were pictures of Zanoletti dead and naked at the scene of the crime. A bloodbath. Pure butchery. The pictures were merciless and showed a glimpse of his genital area – severed – and another photo displayed his face, ruby-streaked with blood, his mouth splotched red, wide open with something lumpy, swollen and dark purple inside. William Fiorucci looked at the pictures for a minute. Then he realized that Cerutti’s phrase wasn’t a bold figure of speech: the man’s wang had literally been stuffed into his mouth.

He stood up and felt like vomiting. He covered his mouth and turned around, grunting like a pig.

“Jesus tap-dancing Christ, Fiorucci, what the hell’s your problem – you rattle off crime gigs and puke your guts for a little thing like that? What’s the big deal?” said the old man as he gathered the pictures and put them back in the envelope. “You okay?”

“Yes, of course... I’m sorry. But – those pictures –”

“My boys back in the yard, you know – they weren’t cool with some of the shit that Zanoletti was up to. He was a douche. He didn’t live up to his commitments. And so – they did him in for good.”

“Your – your boys?”

“Yo, Fiorucci – don’t be a dumbass. You need names too or is this gonna do?” he said, handing over the envelope.

“No, no, you’re quite right – I just meant that.”

“There’s some stuff in there, a few dates and shit. It’s my gift to you. Two gifts actually, Fiorucci. You pleased?”

“But – two gifts for what?”

“With that stuff you can write a cool article – you’ll look awesome, Fiorucci. I want you to write a cool article like the one you did last year on that suicide girl, at the Giambellino. You remember, Fiorucci, right?”

“Sure I do.” and his thoughts turned over each other, trying to find the correct combination of ideas, like colored squares on a Rubik’s cube. What should he say? Was it a trap? An interrogation? The pictures of the dead body, the murder and now the suicide girl. “Sick stuff, Heavens to Murgatroyd.”

“It’s always sick stuff, but you gotta make your way through it somehow, right?” Cerutti breathed in tar from his cigarette and blew it out his nose. “Your article said that this girl got some bad marks at school and then hanged herself in her room. She was born there, behind those buildings – did you know that?” he said, pointing to the clutter of old houses. “Now they’re gonna tear it all down – it’s all been bought by one of those... what’re they called? One of those property companies that buy and tear down and rebuild everything, and old Milan is dying piece by piece. Fucking gentrification, you know. Look at me... I’m history, the last man standing of my race. Well, Fiorucci, you sure you’ve written everything you know about that girl?”

Fiorucci froze again. He thought of Zanoletti. They’d chopped off his wiener and stuffed it in his mouth. Cerutti’s boys. His boys. Right – but was that after killing him? Or... before? “Well, uhm... I think so...”

“Good old Fiorucci – I knew I could count on you. I really appreciated it. It’s your job to say how things stand, isn’t it? But that time you knew something you weren’t meant to. Make an effort, Fiorucci, don’t play the fool.”

William thought about the nice things in his life and the list was quite short. His wife had left him and had taken away Martino. His mother had been given a life sentence in two separate prisons – the mental institution in Gorgonzola and in her own mind, because of her Alzheimer. His boss was a son of a bitch who deserved to end up like Zanoletti. And yet now William Fiorucci was there, virtually shitting his pants, clinging the light-brown envelope full of pictures of a dead person, and the envelope was slipping ever so slowly from his sweaty palms... the old man’s black lens stared at him and kept him nailed there like fossilized maliciousness. “I – I don’t remember. Really, Mr. Cerutti – I – oh dear – I don’t feel too good...” He put his head on his hands, letting the envelope fall to the floor, his elbows on his knees.

“Chin up – chin up, Fiorucci! It’s going to be all right. There’s one thing you knew, wasn’t there, about that lass? Tell your friend Cerutti Ambrogio. Come on.”

“I can’t… I can’t remember, Mr. Cerutti…”

“You knew that girl hadn’t killed herself because of some bad marks – no, she killed herself because someone, some disrespectful, worthless son of a bitch had lusted after her… like one lusts after a woman, but she was still a little girl. She was a little girl and she was innocent. But he wasn’t – oh no, he wasn’t innocent at all. His friendship wasn’t innocent. No, it wasn’t.” The old man got up from his chair with a creak.

Fiorucci rubbed his eyes and stared. The old man was no longer in front of him – he was behind him now, outside of his line of sight. “That perverted bastard, that filthy pig, that walking piece of shit was no longer innocent – oh no he wasn’t – and that poor girl couldn’t stand the shame. You know who that man was, Fiorucci? You remember?”

Fiorucci didn’t say anything; he seized the light-brown envelope and moved to get up, but the old man’s hand, strong as a vice, clamped down on his shoulder and held him in his chair. “Let me pour you a drink, Fiorucci – maybe that’ll shake your memory,” said the old man, moving toward the liquor cabinet and taking out a bottle and two small glasses. Fiorucci kept his eyes half-shut, thinking that his fucking life was over – it really was over.

“This is what they call el vin dei malnatt,” said the old man, wielding a dark green bottle of red liquid. It was half full. There was just enough wine for two or three glasses. “I make it in my own vineyard – I’ve got a secret little vineyard, in the fields along the waterway, in the Greco area, round the old train station, the back in via Gluck – you know the place?”

“Yes. Yes.”

“But the real estate peeps took that as well, damn them, cold hearted, gentrificated bastards. They said I have three months to bail, then it’s all gonna be concrete. What am I meant to do, eh? Start a war at sixty-five against those fake-eyebrowed nippers? What’s up, Fiorucci? The cat got your tongue?”

“No, I…”

“This kinda wine’s never gonna be made again and believe me, this is special wine. Last vintage, last glass of el vin dei malnatt – a wine that can bring a drop of dream true. People who say wine’s bad for you should be locked up!”

William Fiorucci was looking at him in a stupor, drunk, unable to understand what was going on, in that pool room, so white, too white…

“That girl was my granddaughter, Fiorucci – my daughter’s daughter. You knew the truth but you didn’t want it to get around – you didn’t want to taint her memory,” explained Cerutti as he smelt the wine. It had a bitter-sweet aroma of musty old court houses, of red tiles falling and breaking, of black cats scampering across the balcony at night, of the waterways running hidden under Milan’s streets and coming into the open only to get moonsoaked. “And that’s not all. You sent the parents an unsigned envelope explaining who hurt the girl, and why, and a few weeks later you probably realized that sick motherfucker ended up tied to the railroad tracks behind Greco and the next day all they found of him was jam, or didn’t you notice, you-reporter-you?”

William Fiorucci saw what he was driving at and smelt the wine in the bottle Cerutti handed over. To him it smelt of the blackboard chalk from the Rinaldi Middle School in Via Pontano, behind via Padova, where there used to be Rosa, whom he was in love with, even though she was a goddamn southerner, and Luisa, who had an (unreciprocated) crush on him but her surname was Borgonovo, and in late-Seventies Milan these were things that mattered, so eventually he chose Luisa, married her at twenty, divorced her at thirty-five and lost his child; el vin dei malnatt smelt, to him, of the incense in the San Crisostomo church where they used to break in at night to steal the candles and use them to light up the touchlines of the soccer pitch for their night games, and it had that sweet smell of chlorine of the Cambini swimming pool, at the first bridge of Via Padova, where at night he and his friends would climb over the fence and swim away under the full moon.

“Well, Fiorucci, that was why my boys were able to get things sorted out.”

Fiorucci’s mind went back to the pictures of the short-dicked man in the envelope and he thought about the man whose name he had made and how the man had ended up jammed under the night trains. He lifted the bottle to his lips. He was dying of thirst. But Cerutti blocked his hand.

“Just a minute. You did the right thing. It took me a year to find you, to figure out who did it. You behaved like a man. You didn’t get anything out of it – in fact, you could’ve written a great piece but you decided to respect the memory of that little girl, God bless her soul. You deserve these gifts from me. The pictures are one gift – you can churn out a great article and if you get paid so much a piece, then you’re in the money. The second gift is el vin dei malnatt. It’s a real delicacy. There’s nothing else like it in the world. And I’m old, with little time left – I’m sick, I smoke three packs a day and I can barely breathe through my ass, if you see what I mean.

“Once I’m gone there’s nobody left to make this wine; I’m taking the recipe to my grave – my grandma’s grandma’s recipe, and she was a real charcoal-burning tencitt del Laghetto, but it’s a really special wine and it has special rules. The grapes must be grown and watered with blood three times. Twice I used cat blood. Old strays who died of disease. I don’t have the heart to harm animals. The third time I used a decent person’s blood; I don’t like hurting decent people, but sometimes you just have to. Then the grapes must be pressed under a full moon; and the wine must be left to ferment in a cask buried in mule manure. That’s the only way to make el vin dei malnatt. But don’t try making it yourself. You’re still missing a couple of ingredients and I’m not going to tell you which. Okay, so I’m going to give you this wine – I’ll just keep a little for myself, just to remember the old days with the ligera.”

Fiorucci took the bottle and observed its crimson color against the light. “Sip it easy – make it last, because soon there won’t be any left and there won’t ever be any more on the face of the earth. This wine can bring a drop of dream true.”

Fiorucci smiled a melancholic smile. “It would be great.”

“Like fuck it ‘would’ be – it ‘will’ be, I tell you. Or do you think I’m some sort of rambling moron here to make you laugh, you goddamn hack?” growled the old man, drew close to William’s face with his black lens. William hid the bottle in his coat. “Then take care of that wine, because once it’s gone it’s gone for good. This is my gift to you for what you did and now go screw yourself because this is a gift you should never say thank you for,” he ended, staring at William through his black lens. “Never – don’t you forget that.”

William Fiorucci got up and was about to say thank you but checked himself. He was going to hold out his hand but checked himself again. So he just smiled and said good-bye.

Cerutti followed him with his cyclops’ gaze as William left the pool room and once he was out, William’s breathing resumed its normal pace. It was over, if God so wanted.

 

His piece on the Zanoletti murder turned out to be a real cracker. Ianfascia decided not to axe Fiorucci from the freelancer list, for the time being at least, and gave him a pat on the back. “Good for you, Fiorucci,” he said as he looked at the pictures of the mangled body and chewed away at his enormous yogurt-and-harissa-drenched beef and onion kebab. After a rather large bite, he washed it down with some piss-warm beer. “Oh, know what you should do, Fiorucci?”

William gazed out of the greasy window on the first floor of the building in Via Padova, at the height of Ponte Nuovo, the supermarket, the kebab vendor, the triple-parked delivery vans driven by Peruvians with Latin American music pumping out and the drivers guzzling Heineken as if it were iced tea, the never-ending chain of real estate agencies and Chinese merch, agencies and Chinese, Chinese and agencies, in a hypnotic sequence and frightfully fixed, a rigged Fiat Cinquecento pimped up like a GTA racing car whizzing along at suicide speed. He hated this place. He hated this place, he hated the offices of the Nera Meneghina, such a bottom-feeding rag paper, he hated his boss, and he hated himself for coming to terms with this onion-and-smog-smelling world and its lame-ass music. “What?”

“We need crocodiles.”

Fiorucci half-turned towards Ianfascia. “You want me to write them?”

“Yeah… this year there’s shitloads of people in hospitals with one and a half feet in the grave. There’s Paul Newman in the States with just a few more weeks to go. Write me up a pair of crocodiles, will you?” He swallowed his last mouthful of kebab. He had turned his desk – which already suffered from chronic hygiene issues – into a diorama of a public toilet in Milan’s Central Station. “You choose. People who won’t live to see Christmas.”

William Fiorucci turned his gaze back to Via Padova and hoped deep down that Ianfascia would make it onto the list, too.

 

Fiorucci left the clinic, removed the padlock from his bike and headed for the cycle path along the Martesana, at the height of Gorgonzola, direction Milan. His mother had mistaken him for a cousin of his who died thirty years earlier. Not bad. Last time she’d called the nurses and accused him of being a stranger there to kill her. Her memory was completely gone and she said the same things over and over again, with a disturbing, conscious repetitiveness. Their exchanges took on a blurred appearance, reminiscent of a comedy of errors.

“How’s it going, Luigi? It’s great to see you, I’m so glad…”

“No, mom, it’s not Luigi, it’s me, Willy – I’m your son.”

“Oh, Willy dear… but where’s Luigi?”

“He’s not here, mom.”

“I see. And how are you doing, Luigi? Did you know that William, that moronic son of mine, has forgotten he has a mother and never comes to visit?”

“Mom. Mom. Look at me carefully. I’m William. Luigi isn’t here. He’s dead.”

“Oh. Poor dear… and how did he die? When did it happen?”

“Well, some… thirty years ago, mom.”

“Mom? How dare you? Who are you? Look here – I know you’ve been dead for thirty years, you moron.”

So William would cut off the conversation and say good-bye. He would replace the geraniums in the vase – his mother had always liked geraniums (and God knows why) – and then he left her there staring through the window’s iron lattice, at the other windows encircling the Martesana like a great wall. It wasn’t a bad place to… forget everything and wait for death. Well, his mother had always had problems. Three breakdowns during her marriage with his dad, who eventually fled. Depression, alcoholism, and then one day, a few years ago, William came home and saw two guests having lunch with his mother. “Who the fuck’s that?” he asked.

“Can’t you see? It’s Uncle Carlo and Aunty Maria – they’ve come to visit, after such a long time. Aren’t you pleased?”

They were Jehova’s witnesses.

So he had her admitted to the clinic, where she was bound to be better off, and he took over the house in Viale Abruzzi, since Luisa had kept their flat in Maciachini. When he said good-bye to her she showed him a picture. “Look – they took a picture of me. I came out really well,” she said, almost touched.

It was Pope Ratzinger.

William had kissed her forehead.

“But don’t kid yourself – I’m still not going to forgive you for disappearing for thirty years, Luigi!” she had shouted after him.

Williams sighed and rode down the cycle path. He barely heard his cell phone ring. It was Ianfascia. “Fiorucci, that you? Guess what? Funari’s just kicked the bucket!”

“So?”

“Whaddaya mean, so? That crocodile you sent me last week was yours, right? That one on Funari.”

William Fiorucci stopped. It was half past eight, the sun was setting, and there wasn’t a soul along that stretch of the Martesana.

“What?”

“They’re going to give the official announcement tonight but we got the news first, of course. He died two hours ago.”

Fiorucci was speechless. He had started writing those bloody crocodiles three days ago. He had seized a bunch of old gossip rags, found a picture of Funari and had written his crocodile in less than half an hour. And before that, for no apparent reason now that he thought of it, he had taken a sip of el vin dei malnatt. Now he was there along the Martesana, staring into space, the murky water sizzled by the dying sun.

“Write some more – who knows, maybe you’re a jinx!” laughed the editor on the other end of the line.

Fiorucci closed the call and stood there on his own. He thought about his mother’s geraniums, not knowing why. Those massive, awful-looking red flours, with their sweetish smell, shaped like some weird skinfold.

 

A couple of weeks passed.

Luisa called to say that the mid-August holiday with the kid was off. She couldn’t come back from the seaside for some obscure, fucking reason, so it was all off until September. William called her a whore, she called him a dick, and they closed the call. In that instant he felt a thirst – an avid thirst – and fetched the bottle Cerutti had given him; he poured himself an inch of that wine as strong as vodka mixed with rocket fuel and guzzled it down. His thirst disappeared and a pleasantly warm feeling spread through his gut.

He seized an economics magazine and opened it at random. He came across an article on a top player in Italian economy. His fingers were itching already – he wanted to write. To write one of those summertime crocodiles that Ianfascia had assigned him. He didn’t have anything else to work on so there was nothing left to lose. But the man in the article was rather young and healthy. The crocodile would be useless. And yet… and yet… William Fiorucci didn’t have anything better to do or write so he wrote the man’s crocodile. It was a muggy night and the whore below went in and out of the Detroit Hotel, waddling under the hotel’s green neon. Fiorucci wrote and looked at her, he looked at her and wrote, and his piece came along swimmingly. He worked well into the night.

At four he collapsed on his bed, his clothes still on, his shirt open, still wearing his shoes, and curled up with his arms crossed. He still felt that slight warmth in his belly and every now and then it shot up into his throat in mild shocks. It was that wine – that fine wine – that made his head spin just so, that gave him that pleasant feeling of warmth in his belly, a pale blue fire, persuasive and friendly. He fell into a dreamless sleep.

 

August came and Milan was drained. Less than the year before; every year a little less; in any case the hive had been abandoned – that was pretty obvious. William Fiorucci went back and forth between his home and the bar, the one at the corner under a new management now, and like half of Milan’s bars it was run by Chinese – they never busted anyone’s balls, never poked their noses where they shouldn’t, never minded other people’s business but just served and that was it. He was loaded now. He had written much, some of his pieces were interesting, and Ianfascia had bought the lot.

One night he got home in time for the night news and sat in front of the fan with a beer. The famous guy – the one whose crocodile he had written the week before – was dead. An accident – something monstrously trivial. He was filthy rich and went around on a scooter – and an old geezer had run him over. A nasty, unfortunate accident. Most of all, unpredictable.

But Fiorucci had predicted it.

William had written the crocodile – that piece you write for the potentially imminent death of a public figure – and that guy had actually died. He dropped his beer on that horrible white-sprayed black floor and for a few minutes the beer fizzled away on the tiles. William Fiorucci was powerless.

A few minutes later he shuffled his slippers on the beer, got up and fetched the bottle of wine. He looked at it for a good two minutes. He shook its content – that dark wine that felt like liquid fire when you gulped it down, and then stirred in your stomach and soothed you throughout the night, making you feel as if you were in some goddamn placenta, an unexpected and pleasant return to the womb (remember that your mother thinks you’re her dead cousin)… and yet… and yet…

His cell phone rang and Fiorucci jumped up, almost fumbling the bottle. His eyes went wild. If he had dropped it… if it had broken… an unspeakable anguish caught him in the pit of his stomach – that wine, that weird wine… what if it had gone to waste… he looked around for his cell phone, clinging to the bottle with both hands, like some pathetic fetish; he went towards his Olivetti typewriter and saw that the caller was Ianfascia (the display flashed “shit for brains”).

“Heavens to Murgatroyd.” he said. He didn’t answer. He was sure the editor had seen the news. No, no, for Chrissakes, no, once had been bad enough, but twice… Heavens to Murgatroyd for real… and now Ianfascia really would look down on him as some sort of first-class jinx. Who could blame him? He had written a crocodile and the subject kicked the bucket. He had written a second crocodile and again the subject kicked the bucket. The other subject, that is… well, that was how things were. It was appalling. “Heavens to Murgatroyd… fucking Heavens to Murgatroyd!” he cried, moving away from his typewriter as if it were a source of danger, a horrid alien appendix, alive, pulsing, endowed with…

No.

It wasn’t the Olivetti typewriter and it wasn’t him, either.

It was the wine.

It was the wine – he knew it and he always had. El vin dei malnatt, the “special” wine that short-sighted grandpa had given him at the Ortica Bar as a gift for saving his granddaughter’s honor… Oh God oh God, it was the wine!

He looked down at the bottle he was holding. His cell phone stopped ringing. No, no, no no, it wasn’t true, it wasn’t true, it was all a crazy-ass nightmare that… no, no, come on, come on, these things aren’t for real, they can’t happen for real, I mean…

This wine can bring a drop of dream true.

He peeped out of the window and saw the usual old whore under the usual green neon sign. It was people like her that ruined the neighborhood. Perhaps it was because of people like her that his mother, forced to see them day in and day out, had lost her mind. He took a sip of wine from the bottle. Just a sip. He stared at the whore, wincing, and felt that strange feeling in his stomach, that feeling he couldn’t describe.

He went to his Olivetti, slipped in a blank sheet, turned the platen, passed his fingers over the keys and, the bottle next to him, he started writing. The beginning of an article. The true story of a whore in Viale Abruzzi, in front of the Detroit Hotel, for at least twenty years; the story of her horrendous peroxide hair, even though she was well over sixty; of her crackpot customers, of the cars that honked at three in the morning to summon her, of her hysterical, drunken rows at six in the morning while people were trying to –

A deafening crash made him jump from his seat and press down with all ten fingers on the keys. Like a bundle of nerves the typebars snapped forward as one, becoming entangled. The line on the sheet became an unintelligible flow of unknown bold letters depicting a strange and slightly disturbing idiom. The ensuing silence was unnatural. William Fiorucci turned to the window and felt his ideas become as entangled as the typebars.

He got up, mesmerized, and walked mechanically to the window. He didn’t want to look. He didn’t want to see. But he did. He sure did. He took a good look, but kind of sideways, as if he were afraid of being seen, as if he should feel guilty. Why, though, since there was no reason – what a daft thought!

So he peeked out and saw. A Route 60 bus had just crashed – after a long screech of brakes, the orange monster had collided into the cars parked 100 feet ahead; its doors were open and the passengers were filing out, slowly, quietly, like a throng of zombies; the driver was speechless and holding his head in his hands. Behind the bus, a red streak – like a scarlet leak. Midway along the streak, a yellow blotch, a yellow, swollen and familiar blotch.

His peek turned into a full-blown gaze and William Fiorucci realized that it wasn’t a blotch – no, it was something solid, round, it was a head, it was what was left of a blonde head crushed by the bus.

The bus had run over the old whore, smearing her on the tarmac like pastry dough.

William Fiorucci drew back suddenly (as if someone could see him and think it was his fault – what mystical bullshit, enough to die laughing of!) and flattened himself against the wall, against his alien cauliflower wallpaper, his eyes slit, a hand over his mouth. The heat in his stomach was a raging fire now, and he threw up on the floor for seven feet before he got to the bathroom.

 

It was almost mid August when he got a call from the clinic in Gorgonzola asking him to go there at once to help them. His mother had flipped. She had spent days methodically pilfering potatoes from the kitchen. Then, once she had built up a good arsenal, she had locked herself in her room and, swearing at the patients in the garden below, had begun to pelt them with the potatoes.

One of them – an old lady on the verge of a hundred – had been admitted to the San Raffaele emergency ward with a severe facial trauma. A dry potato had struck her squarely in the face, crushing in an eye socket.

It was too much. It really was too much. Her mental illness first and Alzheimer then had wrecked her beyond recovery. It was an unbearable situation and it couldn’t be stopped – nobody could stop it. And he had put up with so, so much. During his youth, growing up with that woman, her illness getting worse and worse, gnawing away at her brain day by day, hadn’t been easy. Fetching her from the middle of the road when she rushed out to chase the passers-by, calming down the neighbours, convincing the cops to let her off, the screams, the swearing, the insults. The clinic had been the best solution but now even that wasn’t enough. William Fiorucci chained his bike and without even taking off his sunglasses went into the clinic, holding a bunch of geraniums.

The chief medical officer came toward him looking penitent and shook his hand (a lame, slimy handshake), then took him round the back, to the garden. A group of nurses looked at him and started whispering. The man offered him a seat. William sat down and lit a cigarette.

“Mr. Fiorucci, something has happened, I have bad news, I’m so sorry. You see, your mother…”

William Fiorucci stared out at the private garden looking onto the Martesana. An oasis of peace twenty minutes from the city center, proclaimed the clinic’s ads.

“You see,” he said, “while you were on your way here something happened… the nurses managed to ram the door open… you know, your mother, after the potatoes… she started with the furniture… and to be honest she was a very… a very energetic woman.”

The man stopped. William studied the Martesana river and didn’t say anything, concealed behind his sunglasses.

“Well, when they opened the door, at that point they… there… your mother, we think, we believe, we’re waiting for the results to come in, but we have reason to believe your mother had a heart attack. It’s the most likely cause.”

William Fiorucci turned his gaze towards the man. “She was very ill.”

“Oh yes, that’s right, yes, she really was,” the man replied. “We weren’t expecting it, we should’ve stopped her, but we didn’t touch her, nobody… I mean… we couldn’t know that…”

“No. No, of course you couldn’t,” said William as he got up. “May I see her? I’d like to leave these flowers with her. She liked geraniums.”

 

Twenty minutes later he was alongside the Martesana and stopped at a point of the cycling path where there was nobody around. He took a crumpled sheet of paper from his pants pocket and he spread it out; it had thirty lines typed out on it. He set it ablaze and held it by a corner until it was consumed by the fire. Then he looked around and pedaled on. In his stomach he could feel a warm and familiar tingling.

 

“I’m fucking sick of you! I said you can’t!” Luisa yelled at him over the phone. “I’ve got my own life, you get it? I’ve got my own life now and don’t you think for a minute that I’m gonna come back for… for what? You had eight years to spend with your son, eight years. And you wasted them – you boozed them all away! You listen up, Willy – listen up because maybe I’m the one who can’t hammer it home, in fact I’m sure it’s my fault, so you listen up and you listen good: go fuck yourself. This isn’t just about what the judge decided. We don’t want to hear from you ever again; we don’t want you to call us. The kid’s staying with me, and you’ll see him on Christmas and that’s it, but don’t you forget that it’s up to me, it’s up to me, William, up to me, you get it, to let you see him in other circumstances. Well, forget it. You never paid your family allowance and you never did shit to deserve anything.”

William Fiorucci listened to all this over the cell phone without saying a word, as he contemplated the moribund waters of the Martesana. It was August 14. Milan was a bottomless pit of heat and hostility.

“When he’s eighteen he’ll decide what he wants to do. I never talk behind your back to him, Willy. Think what you want, but know that I never talk behind your back to him. When he’s eighteen he’ll be free to choose who he wants in his life. For now I don’t want it to happen. Okay? Remember the middle ages, William, when they took a live man and a dead one and tied them up together? That’s what our marriage was, Willy. That’s what our marriage was,” said the woman again, her voice more and more broken. “And you were the dead body, William.” she ended, closing the call.

William stood there looking through his sunglasses at the Martesana’s waters were still, greenish. Eighteen? The kid was eight, so it’d be another ten years. Would he have to wait ten years to build up a bond with his child? No, he couldn’t make it. Ever. It was so long. And time passes slow for he who waits. He couldn’t wait any longer. If things didn’t work out the way he wanted them to then there was no point in things going on. For anybody.

He lifted his right hand, bringing the bottle of el vin dei malnatt to his lips. He drank the last sip, looked at the empty bottle and hurled it into the river. “No. You’re the dead body,” he whispered through clenched teeth. And perhaps, behind his sunglasses, his eyes were damp. But his mind was made up. And it was the right decision, but it was so hard, Christ, sometimes it was just so hard.

 

August 15, 2008.

William Fiorucci walked into the Ortica Bar and asked for Cerutti. The bartender looked at him as if he was some kind of psychopath and that was probably what William Fiorucci looked like. Shabby, unshaven, not a shower in days, reeking of wine. He asked for a glass of white wine and didn’t take his eyes off the bartender as the latter explained that Ambrogio Cerutti had died a few weeks earlier and had been ill for quite some time.

Fiorucci finished his wine and cycled off, zigzagging as he went.

 

He came to an isolated part of the waterway, close to old Greco train station, where there were several illegal vegetable gardens, the ones fenced off with sheet iron, makeshift stockades and rotten wooden doors dragged away from God knows where by God knows who. William Fiorucci had always found them disturbing, those illegal vegetable gardens that popped up in the most unexpected places with those weird, mangy, cantankerous old folks tending to their salad and tomatoes. He had asked around, discreetly, and had singled out Cerutti’s vegetable garden. He had been… enlightened. His crime reporter’s sixth sense, probably. The sure thing was that el vin dei malnatt was finished, and there wasn’t any more on the face of the earth, Cerutti had told him; but he had also told him something else, that he would keep some for himself, and these old greaseballs usually stash stuff in their secret vegetable gardens, maybe their porno mags, maybe stolen goods, who knows. And maybe a bottle of red nectar, that sweet, burning red nectar that by now was running through his every thought, in which his entire life had drowned. That wine – that wine was all he cared about. Because it wasn’t over yet – there were still a few things to take care of.

It was easy to get in, cross the vegetable patches and reach the small shack. Amazing. In the heart of Milan, a piece of illegal countryside. How hilarious – usually, you build illegal concrete in the middle of nature but here it was the other way around. He entered the makeshift wood-and-metal hut, looked around and it wasn’t long before he figured out that the metal cookie tin hidden underneath that stack of old papers contained what he was looking for. Ah, sciur Cerutti, dear old son of a bitch. Here’s the ticket to heaven, here’s that kind of special thing that can bring a drop of dream true, grapes grown with blood, the ferment of the dead, el vin dei malnatt. William Fiorucci laughed as he stroked the bottle. “Heavens to Murgatroyd,” he murmured as he uncorked it and savored its scent.

But it didn’t smell of adjacent houses or of black cats scampering across the balcony at night, it didn’t smell of Milan’s waterways or of the moon, of soccer games, of chalk or of parish youth clubs, of secret swims in the town pool; oh no – this time the wine smelt of cemetery dirt, it had the morbid stench of the grave, of headstones with monstrous moths circling above them, of embalmed corpses leaking their nauseous fluids… he held the bottle away but realized that was the wine’s real smell, that was what he had always smelt, the rest was just a lie… and he drank, he guzzled until his stomach was on fire.

 

His cigarette between his lips, breathing in its tar-laden vapours, he typed away while Ianfascia’s phone rang. He laughed when the man replied. “Hello, Mr Ianfascia.”

“Who the fuck is this?” said a raucous voice at the other end. “Fiorucci, is that you? What’s all that racket?”

“I’m typing, Mr I. I’m writing a crocodile.”

Silence on the other end. The typewriter was rattling away; Fiorucci typed without ever taking his glazed, swollen eyes from the sheet as he inhaled and exhaled the smoke from the cigarette dangling from his purple lips; he was naked – he was sitting naked at his desk, and outside was a torrid late-summer Milanese night.

“Fiorucci, we’ve already discussed this. You’re out. I’m never buying another piece of yours. I’m really sorry, shit, I’m really sorry for that… for that tragedy, I mean, that accident. I’m sorry about your ex wife and I’m sorry most of all about your son, Jesus Christ, he was eight… I’ve got two kids that age too and if they died, if they died that way, shit, shit, how the fuck is it that there was no goddamn fucking lifeguard nearby?”

William Fiorucci laughed and typed on, tictictictictictictictictictictictic, like a machine gun. “Nobody comes to save you when you really need it, Mr. I; your whole life you’re surrounded by dipshits, Heavens to Murgatroyd, and whenever you need a hand they’re all busy jacking off.” He grunted through the grey clouds of inhaled and exhaled smoke. “But Mr I, listen, you really gotta listen to this piece – it’s the bomb, Mr I.”

More silence, more machine-gunning. The sound of someone chewing. It was Ianfascia eating one of his kebabs. “Fiorucci, we’ve already discussed this. You need professional help… you’ve gotta… you’ve got a drinking problem, and I, we here at the newspaper, can’t help you. I realize you’ve had to put up with a lot of shit… I mean we’re all men here, first your mom, then that other thing, but… but I’m no fucking Snow White, Fiorucci, you’ve got to get this into your head, I can’t…”

“Listen, Mr I, just listen to how this crocodile kicks off – it’s awesome… Giuseppe Ianfascia was a great editor and most of all a great man, always ready to help others, always with a good word for everyone…”

“Hey, shitbag!” growled the editor on the other end. “Cut it out now, you hear me? If this is one of your smart-ass pranks then cut it out now or I’ll come there and kick your ass!”

“… he would sacrifice himself for everyone; his own well-being was always less important than that of his friends; he was a good, kind person… You like this crocodile, don’t you, Mr. I, you want to buy it, don’t you?”

“You crazy motherfucker!” Ianfascia screamed in his office in Via Padova, his two assistants frozen as they watched him turn red and flap his hands. “You sick fuck – you need to be locked up, you crazy psycho piece of shit, you’re done for, you’re never gonna write for any other paper in Milan, you hear me, you lousy piece of… ah… of… ah…”

“Kind, affable, a real gentleman – but let’s not talk about him in these terms just because he’s dead!” yelled back Fiorucci, his eyes spirited, his cigarette just a blazing ash in his mouth, his fingers hammering away on the keys with relentless, malicious fury. “But because he really was a special person, our dear editor was – our beloved editor…”

Ianfascia was livid; his kebab was jammed in his throat. His two assistants drew closer but he waved them off irritably – he wanted to finish his call and say what he had to say to that boozing piece of shit. “Fiorucci, you’re… you’re… you listen to me… damn you… ah… you…”

“You, you, you – never once did he say I, I, I. He never worried about himself, our dear editor didn’t. He was always giving good advice to his assistants; he was always patient, like a good father, with his aspiring journalists…” read William Fiorucci as he typed on.

“You filthy bastard!” wheezed Ianfascia, flushed and eyes bulging. One of his two assistants called 911; the other patted his back; but the editor turned around as he was choking, spun on his chair, as fat as a pig, his gaze frozen, and kicked him away; he didn’t want to be helped – he wanted to finish his fucking call!

“And what class, ladies and gentlemen. What class; what stylishness; what elegance, in his life and on the job; in his articles – pearls of skill worthy of Moravia, of Montanelli; and in his private life, what a gentleman, so genial, and with such a flair for language…”

“You lousy fuck... piece of shit... asshole... cocksucker... son of a... bitch...” the editor managed to moan, his two assistants looking at him in dismay as he turned purple, even more purple, then got up and vomited the three kebabs he had eaten, all out on the table, on his papers, on the keyboard, on the phone; he staggered backward, lost his balance and fell in his own vomit, under the desk, gasping for breath...

“It was a terrible loss,” ended Fiorucci on the other end of the phone. “A tragic, terrible loss, and it will affect us forever. Now we must go on without him, a bit sadder, a bit more alone than before. May the earth be your cocoon.” And he hung up.

 

Once again, silence reigned over his house. He seized the bottle by the typewriter, went over to the window and looked out. Cars were streaming into Viale Abruzzi – the masses were back from the holidays and once again the hive was teeming with life. A new streetwalker had replaced the old one. That was how the world turned. Everything turned, round and round, and you couldn’t help getting caught up in the vortex.

He smelt the wine. It had a scent of rotten geraniums, of moldy wallpaper decorated with alien cauliflower, of filthy seawater swallowing his eight-year-old kid, of Olivetti ribbon ink used to churn out run-of-the-mill articles no reader would ever read and no paper would ever buy. He took a long draught.

Outside the people passed by – in their cars, on foot, on their bikes. Life was beginning anew; the hive was thriving. There were plenty of interesting people and there was enough wine to write some decent stuff. Yes – his fingers were itching today; he watched a biker with a black jacket, a girl waiting at the traffic lights, a couple on a bench. Yes – he only had to choose. Eeny meeny miney moe and then back to writing new articles, new crocodiles – and they’d pack wallop, Heavens to Murgatroyd, they’d sure pack a hell of a wallop.

 

 

THE END