The ideas that are evoked by the totality of the Card and its context are rather those of slavery, in which two personages are found who are attached to the pedestal of a monstrous demon. The Card does not suggest the metaphysics of evil, but rather an eminently practical lesson as to how it happens that beings can forfeit their freedom and become slaves of a monstrous entity which makes them degenerate by rendering them similar to it.
A wave moves under the black covers, a lump rises, forms a hill, the small pyramid aims at the ceiling, tosses and turns, and finally reveals itself: it’s a beast, and it’s groaning. That pyramid is the snout of an animal.
Nicola raises himself on his elbows, pushes the covers away, and finds a bloodstained white cat staring at him, meowing, begging him for words, and, while he longs to, he can’t teach it any alphabet. He keeps digging with his hands, digs with the little strength he has in sleep, until he disinters a second cat, striped, with scratches all around the tiny eyes; the mouth is cut, surrounded by small wounds, cuts. But it’s alive. It meows and meows. A miracle that it wasn’t suffocated to death under the other one, which blocked it, crushing its head, lacerating it with bites and claw marks.
Now both animals are free, the dominant white and the other, the wounded tiger. The blanket that enveloped them is far away, the bleeding cat scratches on the tiles, the violent cat’s cries are transformed into a tingling that travels along the palm of Nicola’s hand, into a whistle in his ears so loud the child has to wake up.
It happened every night. Once he was alone, rather than sinking into an isolated unconsciousness, Nicola began to suffer from the ropes around his wrists. He let his fingertips challenge the limits of flesh. While the darkness ate the air in his lungs, an invisible force shook his body, and a presentiment of death flooded the cellar. He fell asleep like that, between visions and terrors, until, punctually, the nightmares arrived.
He woke that night, too, alarmed by a child wailing. He tried to pull himself up to save the child, but the ropes reminded him that he couldn’t, and the lament turned out to be a meow: somewhere on the earth’s surface a cat was howling like a wolf at the moon. Nicola struggled to separate the pounding of his heart from the sounds and contours of reality. Was there really an animal outside the cellar? Where were the cats he had dug up in his dream? Were there creatures whose footsteps he was hearing? The damp air was saturated with little noises.
In some of the fables Maria read to Nicola, you had only to clap your hands to move from one country to another, from a house to a castle, from a prison to freedom. A clap of the hands was enough for an act of magic. At night, however, with his wrists bound, not even that simple movement was possible; only his eyelashes were free. He opened his eyelids and closed them, reopened them and closed them again, and continued until he was awake and conscious. Then he imagined expanses of air, water, land; he saw himself planting his palms and his neck on a meadow, pushing down on his toes, raising his heels to the sky, and letting go in a crooked somersault while the sun obstinately pierced his bones. He felt his legs getting hot, but it wasn’t the sun, it was the blankets, and he felt like crying. Hold it, hold it in, he repeated to himself, feeling his mother’s murky gaze on him, but the harder he held it in, the harder the force of muscular contraction pulled in the opposite direction, dismembering him, so that he felt one with the air. Centimeter by centimeter Nicola yielded under a weight that was crushing him to the bottom, until he realized that without the ropes he would bore into the bier and end up a dead weight on the floor or even farther down. If he had been untied, then, yes, he would have been in danger, falling disjointedly, his body twisted and awry.
The nightmares, his personal nighttime dirt, Nicola recalled one by one. A knife stuck in the railing of the balcony, the night he’d fallen asleep after reading a pirate story. A small, bug-eyed girl with a man’s hoarse loud voice returned often to visit him. A furry animal whose cut-off tail kept moving on its own, near the stump. The shed on a terrace that concealed a newborn: Nicola opened the door, dusted the furniture, and the sun cut the room in two, leaving space for a wail, while at his feet lay a bundle of blankets. Finally, two opposing, complementary cats that, fighting, sketched out on the ground games of power and subjugation.
Now Nicola could open his eyes. No blinking of eyelashes, no journeys in his head, the sweet darkness became the unpleasant voice of Maria. Her closed vowels echoed with rancor, her drawn-out words, as long and smooth as corridors, forming sentences whose meaning Nicola couldn’t grasp but only the tentacular sound of a clanging, roaring monster. A creature half jellyfish and half snarl arrived above the bier and, stopping a few centimeters from his face, opened a gigantic mouth full of sharp teeth. His mother’s voice devoured him. Then Nicola felt nothing, and afterward a heap of bristly hairs ran over his neck, the tips of Maria’s dry blond hair. The nightmare was over, he was in his mother’s arms. Nicola pulled on the ropes in an attempt to free himself, this time to surround that small thorny body, but again he was defeated. Salvation, like damnation, was only an illusion. He tasted the hot chocolate of Caffè Spinelli on winter afternoons when, after Mass, Maria took Nicola to drink his reward. They entered together, his mother took off his coat, hello Signora, how the picciriddu has grown, hello, what weather this is. Chat of women above the smoke of important people sitting fixed at their tables, making a show of reading the evening papers. The stagnant smell of cigars and cakes pierced by Fera perfume, so Maria always presented herself, reminding everyone of who she was and her power; Nicola felt disgust at that scent of bergamot and stuck his nose in the cup of hot chocolate, licked it with the tip of his tongue, and for a moment was far away and happy.
Blink of the eyelids, another round, another oasis. Summer at the beach, the euphoria of the salt air, and here he is climbing up the monument to the rebels. But childish games and shouts weren’t supposed to disturb that serious tribute; Maria had sighed with relief when the mayor put up a bar to keep children away from the statue.
Another blink, another round. The night Maria and Vincenzo argued about the phylloxera that was devastating the vineyards. They were so impassioned they skipped dinner. Nicola was at the table, and for once he had been able to eat without someone looking at his plate: the taste of freedom was the taste of prosciutto and oil, without the bread that every night Maria put in front of him saying that it had been blessed by God. He didn’t like divine bread, even though he was ashamed to confess it even to himself.
Final blink, final happy moment: Vincenzo had been invited as a guest of honor to the inauguration of the new electric lighting system and had brought him along. The switching on of the electrical system seemed like a conjuror’s trick, and, while his father was busy greeting his acquaintances, Nicola admired the way the colors tinted the air over the Strait.
Maria and Vincenzo, Vincenzo and Maria: the oppressors were two, but they presented themselves as one, like the figure that appeared on the table the night his mother had taken him to the fortune teller.
Let’s go see a lady who will help us, she had said on the afternoon of Christmas the year before, because I can’t do it alone, and your father doesn’t give me enough help. A wind was blowing in the dry air, and as they went farther from the city center there were fewer people and the sirocco grew stronger. They were bundled up, in clothes too heavy for that warm wind, and when they reached a low house, with dark windows, they took off scarves and hats. Maria put them in her purse, which became distended and heavy. She knocked three times at the door. My cousin is in the other room, she’s expecting you, said a woman with a long bumpy nose, and mother and son found themselves in a living room with flowered chairs set around a gilded iron table. Madame, so Maria addressed her, had come from Marseilles a few days earlier; she was a robust woman, with a large chest and lively almond-shaped eyes, dressed all in white lace. She knew the Arcana, she’d known how to read them since she was a child. She was the granddaughter of fortune tellers, but, rather than the nighttime appearance of a magician, she had a fresh laugh and an intense and frank expression. She appeared amused by the commotion in the house of her relatives, and still a little dazed by the journey. She uttered her words with a French accent, but her Italian was excellent, her voice a mixture of honey and cinnamon.
“A girl your age was just here,” she said to Nicola. “Do you like girls?”
“He’s very shy,” Maria quickly answered for him.
“So, what’s the problem with this child?” Madame asked.
“His father and I love him above all else, but Nicola doesn’t understand that; and he doesn’t realize that the world is full of dangers, he thinks he can go around by himself.”
Madame had observed mother and son and shuffled the pack of cards, then she cut it in two and displayed the card: the Devil. Maria jumped up triumphant: I told you, see, see if you run away what will happen to you?
The fortune teller’s eyes then fell on Nicola, Nicola’s on the card: he saw a creature with horns and wings, half devil and half angel, with a woman’s breast and between his legs the sex of men, sitting on a throne with chains around his ankles, which reached the feet of two small helpers, a male devil and a female, both in miniature. The little devils looked at the big one as if they expected to receive orders from him. Nicola looked up at Madame. She returned a gaze full of compassion and started to say something.
“How much do I owe you?” Maria intervened, with uncontainable delight.
“The consultation doesn’t require money,” Madame answered, rendered silent.
Maria opened her purse and left a bottle of Fera perfume on the table. Then she said goodbye and, trotting along the street with Nicola following, reminded him at every step: “Did you see that the Devil wants to get you? Now you’ve seen it, too.” But Nicola couldn’t stop thinking of the Devil’s two small helpers: male and female, Vincenzo and Maria.
Who knows if Madame was in Reggio Calabria that Christmas, too. Who knows if now, in the night of cat-wolves howling at the moon, she was in the low house, if she had received people, if she had cut the cards for them. Who knows what was drawn on the other cards, the ones they hadn’t seen, and what it would have been like to cut them, throw them all on the table and be able to choose one’s own.
Nicola returned to perceiving his body. His buttocks were stuck to his underpants, the underpants stuck to the sheets, while the ceiling no longer existed, and he could see the sky and the sweetness of the moon.
He had wet the bed and the night wasn’t over yet.