LI

You don’t know my father. You have no idea what he’s like.
My whole life, I’ve felt that damned pressure crushing down on me. If he’d demanded something, if he’d hammered at me, maybe I would have been capable of defending myself, of living my life. But he never did. He just looks at you, nothing more.

He has a gaze, you know, that stings the flesh worse than ten cracks of a bullwhip. A bitter, pained, sorrowful gaze. A gaze that tells you: I understand, you hate me. You have it in for me. That’s why you don’t excel, that’s why you’re not the best.

I’m the only son of a great man. I’ve never had anyone else to share the burden with me. In that, Biagio was luckier.

Seems ridiculous, doesn’t it? To call someone lucky who practically never even knew his father just because he had a sister. And yet I’m sure of it, he was the lucky one. He actually had a family.

My father isn’t a family, he’s a great man. He’s a genius. Did you know that he was shortlisted for a Nobel Prize a few years ago? They informed us of the fact privately. He’s world-famous in a sector as small and restricted as ours. That’s right, in our sector, because there was never the slightest doubt that I was bound to follow in his footsteps.

I liked music, do you know that? When I was a kid, I played the guitar, strictly self-taught; it might have been the only thing I felt I was really good at. I asked him if I could take a few lessons. He told me that he wouldn’t tolerate the slightest distraction from my studies. He had a look on his face, when he said it, that I wish I could show you. The face of someone who’d just been stabbed in the back. And so from then on, no more guitar lessons, Renato. Nothing at all.

I met Biagio in my second year at the university. Let me tell you one thing: I know how to study. When it comes to memorizing things, spending time with my nose in a book, staying up all night to prepare for an exam, I’m outstanding. But I don’t have a speck of intuition. No. I have no imagination, I don’t get special or innovative ideas, I don’t see things that other people miss. Biagio did. He’d understand things in a flash, then he’d reconstruct them with proofs: and they were identical to the ones in the book.

Like nearly everyone, he would have liked to be a doctor, but he didn’t even bother to take the admission test. I have no doubt he would have pulverized that test, he would have gotten the highest score in the whole country, but he couldn’t afford to study medicine. It took too long, you had to buy too many books, the fees were too high. Biagio didn’t have a cent to his name.

He chose to major in Biotechnology because he thought that meant he could start working earlier. To make ends meet, he did any work he could get. He was even a moving man, can you believe it? He transported furniture and boxes. And he managed to send some money home to his sister.

We met at a final exam. We talked a while and decided to study for the next exam together. And since then we remained fast friends.

Until Grazia arrived.

It was all going great, you know?

I gave him money, true. In fact, I paid for everything.

We’re pretty wealthy. The great man earns a good salary, but he doesn’t care about that: he works for the glory of it, there are certain things he pays no mind. So I could just take all the money I wanted and give it to Biagio. To make sure he didn’t have to go find a job, to keep him from going away and stranding me here.

We were a team, you understand? A team. He would intuit things, establish the overall guidelines, and then I would follow up on them stubbornly. We signed our articles jointly. Every so often I’d sign them alone; he’d let me do it, for money. That way, the great man could be proud of his genius son and forgive him his eccentric notion of hauling along a little bit of extra Calabrian ballast on his journey. He had no idea that things were actually the other way round. In the end, it turns out that the great man makes mistakes, sometime.

We’d have gone on like that for years. I’d have undertaken my university career, and once I had built a foundation, with a teaching position somewhere, Biagio would be able to choose whether or not to follow the same path or instead look for a job in manufacturing. In the meantime, the great man would enjoy his retirement, and we would be free. Yes, we’d have gone on like that.

Then his sister arrived.

She had won the statuette at a beauty contest when she was sixteen, at the beach. And she’d given it to her brother. Biagio was prouder of her than of our publications. He was subjugated by Grazia, who was like a cross between daughter, sister, and girlfriend. When he introduced her to me, you should have seen him, he seemed out of his mind with joy. What an asshole.

Then he started telling me about her idiot boyfriend who wanted to become a reggae singer; and his father, the murderer, who sooner or later was bound to show up to take her back home. Which is what happened, isn’t it? In the end, that’s what happened.

He’d got it into his head that he needed to straighten out his sister’s life. He didn’t know how, but he was going to straighten it out. I certainly couldn’t finance the dreams of glory that he had for her. Even the great man would have gotten mad about that, if I’d spent too much money. I told him to be patient, the academic competition for the position would take place in a year or so, he’d help me to win it, and after that he’d be free to choose more remunerative activities.

But he wasn’t willing to wait.

I should have figured out that he’d started working on his own. I should have figured it out. He had an old idea about an industrial yeast, something that, if it had worked, would be able to almost double the output of ethanol, with the same energy output. He’d come in to the laboratory, stay until late, gather up his data, and then go home to work on them further. And I, idiot that I was, believed that he just wanted to be able to keep an eye on his sister.

I wonder where he got the money for the patent. It costs, you know. You need almost four thousand euros, and he didn’t have anything like that amount of cash. She must have got her hands on it; maybe she worked as a whore. No doubt about it, she was pretty. That’s a fact. Biagio said that she looked exactly like his mother as a young woman.

Then that interview came out, and I understood. You know when the veil falls off your eyes? Everything was suddenly clear. The photograph, what he was saying about patents. The possibility of earning through research, and so on and so forth. I understood why he’d stopped coming to the university, why he was no longer working on new articles, or on our joint projects. He was dumping me. He was leaving, ready to earn his own money.

So I went to talk to him. That was my apartment, you understand? My own home. He was robbing me of my future, my prospects, out of my own apartment. I went there and I asked him to tell me honestly what he was doing.

He didn’t deny a thing. He didn’t even dream of it. He told me that he’d had no choice, that his sister’s life was at stake. That there was no time to spare, otherwise Grazia would go off with that guy and she’d ruin her chances. That’s what he said: she’d ruin her chances. And his father had arrived, too. The only way he had to resolve that impasse was the patent for his yeast.

His yeast.

He had discovered it and formulated it in my father’s laboratory, with the resources and tools I’d put at his disposal, while living in my apartment, eating the food that I brought him, and yet he insisted that the yeast belonged to him.

I couldn’t even bring myself to speak. I just looked at him and said nothing. And at a certain point, he turned away from me and started checking an equation as if nothing had happened.

I think I lost my mind there. But I was cold. I could see myself from outside, as if in some movie. I turned around and took the statuette off its shelf. One blow. Then more. I don’t remember exactly.

I’d just finished, I would have left the place calmly, and she would have survived. She was as guilty as he was, but she would have made it out alive. Instead, the door swings open and in she comes.

I realized I was done for when you said that she had the earbuds in her ears. How could you have known that? Did you see her? Some outside security camera, is that it? You always read about that in the newspapers.

I put my hands over her face, I was wearing gloves; with the brutal cold we’ve been having, my hands go numb. Then I choked her, and I only stopped once I was certain that she could no longer scream. I put her on the bed: maybe it would look like someone had come in and had tried to rape her. It’s full of immigrants around here, and she is so pretty. She was so pretty.

I’m not sorry for what I did. He was a damned thief. I thought he was my friend, my best friend, but I was wrong. He was a backstabber.

A weasel, a goddamned traitor. Say so, to the great man, tell him that it wasn’t my fault. I’m innocent.

I miss him, actually, though. After each exam, after each journal article, after every success, you know what we would do? We’d hug. I never hugged anyone, but he and I would hug. Damn him.

Damn him.