Unfortunately the refuge proved necessary. Very much so. You couldn’t hear anything from in there, because there was a great silence after Mauro De Cortes stopped inviting Zia over and I learnt that my vet had now taken in that other puppy. This time Zia didn’t lie down on the floor and she didn’t run around the house hitting her head against the walls. She washed, ate and went to her university classes. She didn’t make reference to any battles, nor did she compare us to the victors or the defeated. After the atomic war, we were simply wiped from the face of the earth.
The refuge, a kind of shark’s belly, contained all the things the sea had brought after millennia of history; the only thing was, the life of a survivor brought no satisfaction. And above all, we couldn’t understand what had caused the atomic bomb to explode.
Nonna would come to see us and keep asking, ‘But what did you do to him?’
‘Nothing.’
So Nonna would try to understand it, speaking aloud in long soliloquies. She said maybe Zia had behaved like a madwoman. Or maybe Mauro De Cortes didn’t want to go out with a woman who’d been with so many men and Zia had then confirmed this perception by giving herself to him too quickly, without ever making him work for her. Or maybe she hadn’t been sufficiently clear and he hadn’t understood that she truly loved him and instead he had thought that since she played around, so could anyone. Or maybe she had been all too clear and had ended up giving him her whole life story and he’d got bored because there was nothing more for him to discover. Well, she must have done something. Because Mauro De Cortes is a good, delightful, normal person and he doesn’t do things for no reason.
I thought that in the end it wasn’t Mauro’s fault if for him, having sex, laughing and talking weren’t love. And didn’t he have the right and the duty to look for it elsewhere? He surely wasn’t causing all this hurt on purpose and he certainly hadn’t been the one to press the button on the atomic bomb. And nor had my vet, or the ballerina. I reckon no one pushed it, not them, not us. Maybe some object had fallen on it and the bomb had exploded, or maybe it was God who had organised things badly and now there was nothing left, just the belly of this shark, all full of junk.
Nothing left. It got to the point where my brother realised one day that his trousers were torn and full of holes, his belt had no buckle, and his watch had no batteries and always showed the same time, so he went out to see what he could find. Even the Upim store in via Manno, where he’d always shopped, was gone. He came home empty-handed and began to cry, for the first time since he was a child. He cried and said he wanted his mother and father. And maybe a mysterious God felt compassion, because a letter arrived from Papà, the first since he’d left.