He was slight of build, with thick eyebrows perched over big, sensitive eyes, the kind of eyes that a dog flashes at you just after you’ve kicked it. There was a soccer match on, and a few other people in the bar, but we were the only non-Catalans. He asked me for a cigarette and I told him I didn’t smoke and he asked me where I was from and I said, “Peru,” and he said, “Ah, Peru,” and raised his eyebrows. “I’ve always felt a deep connection with the Incas,” he declared then, looking at me keenly.
The things you have to put up with from Europeans. He told me he was Italian, from Rome, and then later, out of nowhere, he said, “You must like perica,” and truth be told, I haven’t done much cocaine in my life, just enough to know it would be dangerous for someone of my personality type — and given that I’m having enough problems with this existence thing, I generally stay away. I shrugged and he told me, “Tonight we will do perica together,” as if this were a major step forward, as if he were proposing some sort of vision quest.
And then Luca told me that I seemed sad.
“A broken heart?”
I nodded.
“I thought so,” he said. “So maybe you can understand my problem.”
And then he told me he was in love too, and that it had all exploded in his face. That it was all ruined, a mess. I was a bit surprised to have someone open up to me like this. In fact, I almost felt as if I’d met my analogue, my doppelgänger, my mirror image. I listened attentively, hoping for clues that could help me out of my abyss.
But before I go on, I’d like to describe him a bit more. His laugh was sharp, almost a bark, and his face was intelligent and he had bright white teeth with, if I remember correctly, rather pronounced canines. His eyes were hazel-colored, and this I’m sure of, because when he died, I tried to close them, you know, like in the movies, but they just wouldn’t close, they kept popping open. This much I remember, in fact I can’t forget it.
He wore a wrinkled dark blue linen jacket (what they call an “Americana” around here) and blue jeans, and while we were drinking, I knocked over his beer by mistake and he caught the bottle in midair, just before it hit the floor, and then he went on talking like nothing had happened. He was the sort of person who didn’t move across the street, he darted; he didn’t look over at someone, he shot them a glance; he didn’t get up from a chair, he sprang to his feet. That was his energy, which I felt immediately — and this is what made what happened later so shocking.
After a while he told me he wasn’t from Rome but from Naples. He talked about Naples and his family and he called himself an exile, saying, “I can’t go back,” with a tone of finality. And when I asked him why, he ordered another round and told me it was a “problema d’ amore,” very, very complicated, and then he looked down at the bar and seemed to sink a little and then he held his head in his hands like a watermelon and then set his head on the bar and said, “CamillaCamillaCamilla.” And then he looked up and laughed. “You see, I fell in love with the wrong woman, like a stronzo, like an idiota. The daughter of a capo, my boss — and what’s even worse is that she fell in love with me too.”
He’d been a low-level front man for the Camorra’s real estate business in Naples. A crooked nobody. A white-collar foot soldier in the di Lauro clan. One day he’d received a call to show a flat to one of the capo’s lieutenants. The man showed up with a beautiful young woman. It was Camilla. She was small-boned and had short, curly hair and eyes that were shy and curious at the same time. The man was her bodyguard. In the middle of the tour, the man received a call on his cell phone and rushed away, telling Luca not to let her out of his sight, and to stay in the apartment. The Neapolitan mafia had been in a civil war for the last year and things were tense.
“The bodyguard was only gone for about an hour and a half,” he said, “but it was enough for me and Camilla to fall in love. We talked as if we’d known each other our entire lives. I know it sounds like a cliché, but what can I do? It’s there. I lived it. She was sublime. Perfect. We arranged to meet a few days later. And then, over the next couple of weeks, we made all sorts of crazy romantic promises, exchanged e-mails and text messages, met quickly and in secret. We said we’d die for each other, that nothing would stop us, that we would find a way, even if we had to leave Naples. It really seemed real. We convinced ourselves that it was going to happen. That it would all turn out alright. We’d have children, make a family, grow old — all the stupid things you promise when you’re young and in love and from the south of Italy. And we kissed only once, in a little bar by the port. But someone saw us.”
He banged the bar with his fist. My empty vermouth glass gave a little hop. He had big hands, long pianist fingers, and flat broad nails, bitten to the quick.
“What it comes down to is that I’m a coward. When I had my chance I failed. Or maybe it was doomed from the start. A month after we met, I was leaving the office when I was grabbed by three men and thrown in the back of a car. They took me to an abandoned building, and beat and kicked me until I just lay there bleeding and broken, half dead. And then they said, ‘You had better leave Naples, the boss doesn’t like you seeing his daughter.’ I had over thirty stitches” — here he pointed to some scars on the back of his head, his brow — “and two broken ribs, two black eyes, and a broken jaw. They told me the only reason they didn’t kill me was because Camilla had threatened to kill herself if anything happened to me. She told me this later, that she’d threatened her father with suicide, slashed at her wrists. After my beating I stayed in the house of a cousin in the country and then my family bought me a ticket here. Here, I’m like a ghost. I have no friends, no family. We managed to communicate by e-mail for a while, but not anymore. And today I found out why. She’s getting married to Giovanni Malatesta, another mafiosi. I am now officially nothing. It’s over. And I’m too much of a coward to do anything about it. I’m not a ninja, I’m not Arnold Schwarzenegger — I’m not even Woody Allen. This is not a movie. They would kill me. And I’m a coward and don’t want to die.”
Suddenly he let loose his barking laugh, “Ha ha ha!” He laughed for a long time, as if he’d just come to a realization, as if something had finally become clear to him, and then he stood up and said, “I must make a phone call.” He went outside, teetering a bit. There were a few old grizzled men standing at the bar, one was leaning against a slot machine. He was stout with large forearms and was smoking a stub of a cigar, while his potbelly pressed against the formidable stomach of another man and their heads were at least a meter apart. They were arguing about soccer and spoke in grunts and deep, aquatic bellows, like foghorns or something. It was as if these hard-living ex-fishermen had sprung from the floor of the bar itself, as if they were intrinsic to the place, like barnacles on a whale. A man came in with an empty plastic Coke bottle, handed it without a word to the barman who then went to a huge wood barrel on the left side of the bar, near the back, turned the spigot, and filled it up with a deep red wine. The man dug around in his pocket, stuck two coins on the table with a loud ringing sound, and then he took his Coke bottle and walked away. There was an ad on TV for Burger King. Luca came back in, he smiled. He sat. We continued hanging out. Luca was no longer talking about his girlfriend and I no longer talked about mine. The mood had changed. In fact, he seemed quite cheerful all of a sudden. We got the bartender to fill us up a bottle of wine, paid the bill, and strolled toward his house.