The Loneliness of the Spider

Chapter 11

No one moves. A corpse on the ground and the police investigating. They’d let themselves be buried alive for a show like this. The policeman is unfazed, he knows his stuff. He adjusts his gloves and stares an undefined point.

I pull out the pack of cigarettes. I light one. My feet are soaked with water and the cold has entered my bones. I’d like to be in my bed. Resting my belly against Giulia’s warm butt as she sleeps. A guy in green loden, there in front, has the expression of a dog trotting behind a female in heat. It’s his first corpse for sure. I throw the butt away and watch it float in the middle of a puddle. I approach the policeman.

"Excuse me."

"Yes?"

"Who called 118?"

"An anonymous phone call. Someone who didn"t want to get involved, I presume. Anyway, if you have other questions, it’s best to ask the inspector. I"m not authorized to talk to journalists."

"Who is it?"

"Sulcis."

Pietro Sulcis. I"ve known him since school. We played football every afternoon in a field that, I don"t know why, we called the crooked field. He was fairly chubby. We put him in the goal. One day his father embarked on a thirty-footer that did charter trips to La Maddalena. He disappeared from circulation. Things got pretty bad for him. They were difficult years. For everyone. For him they were more so.

At just eighteen years old he enlisted in the Police.

The guy in loden stares at me through the thick lenses of his glasses. He is not ashamed of his impudence. I disappear and take shelter in Piazza Azuni. A black boy is selling umbrellas under the arcades. He cracks a smile with the uncertain air of someone who is accustomed to being shunned.

"Umbrella, brother?"

I run a hand through my soaked hair.

"Give me one."

"Red, blue?"

"Whatever."

He bends over the pile.

"Eight euros. It"s usually ten, but for you I’ll make it eight."

He claims he’s seen me around here before, that he never forgets a face. I don"t give him any slack.

"Do you know anything about what happened?"

"About the one killed?"

"Who says they killed him?"

"Of course they killed him."

He has a pair of gloves with cut out fingers and a striped cap. He hunches over, blows on his hands.

"No wallet. No keys. Killed."

"Do you think he was robbed?"

"Yes, of course."

He rocks on his feet. He seems to have nothing more to say to me. I take a look at his stock. Who knows if he will be able to get rid of it all, on a night like this.

"How do you know he had no keys and no wallet?"

He laughs, showing a row of tobacco-colored teeth.

"What a lot of questions, brother..."

"You don’t have to answer me if you don’t want to."

He examines me suspiciously. He"s trying to figure out who I am, what I"m doing here at this hour, wet and cold.

"I"m a journalist," I enlighten him.

He doesn’t react.

"Umbrella, brother?" he asks a passerby.

The man doesn’t even deign to look at him.

"That’s what I heard."

He points to the cops.

"They’re stopping people, they show them the dead man."

"Could you not call him the dead man? What do you think?"

"Why? What should I call him?"

"Whatever you like, but not like that?"

"Do you want me to call him the living, by any chance?"

"Forget it."

He turns around.

"A dead man is a dead man..." he mumbles.

I think he’s right. You can’t dance around it. I don’t believe in God, nor in an afterlife. There is nothing decorous about death.