A Little Lumpen Novelita Read Online Free PDF Page B

of deep melancholy on the stylist’s face. But the look on the other girl’s face was malevolent, I thought. I was breathing hard, as if I’d run from one point to another in record time, and though the other girl laughed a few times, as if she couldn’t believe her own words, she seemed afraid. The stylist listened without getting up from her chair. It was as if the girl’s words were sliding off her face, a hard face without a hint of indulgence. That’s what I remember. And I remember the sunset, a sunset of rose and ocher that crept all the way to the back of the salon, but never touched me.
    That night I didn’t cry on the way home, which was something I’d been doing for a while. It was as if when I left work I walked straight into a wind tunnel that made me cry for no reason. A tunnel that at first seemed to have only a physical effect, bringing on tears and nothing else, but rather than getting used to it, over the last few days I had been struck by a feeling of enormous sadness, a sadness that I could only handle by crying.
    But that day, as if I glimpsed that my life was about to take a sharp turn, I didn’t cry. I put on my sunglasses, left the salon, stepped into the tunnel, and didn’t cry. Not a single tear.
    My brother and the two men who lived in our house were waiting for me. I saw them from outside. The three of them were standing in the window, like fish in a fishbowl, watching the street. It took them a while to spot me there on the sidewalk, watching them.
    I climbed slowly up the stairs. I closed the door and paused in the hallway. All of a sudden there they were, talking. I listened. What else could I do? Though I’ve forgotten what they said. They had a plan. That much I do remember. A hazy plan on which each of them, my brother included, had gambled his future, and to which each had added his bit, his personal touch, his vision of fate and the turns of fate.
    I remember I listened to them and then I pushed past them into the living room and sat down, tired of taking in so much information at once. They followed me and were silent, expectant.
    I said:
    “Don’t stop, it’s a good idea, keep talking.”
    Maybe I didn’t say it was a good idea. Maybe I said that I wanted to hear them out. (I thought we were all going to end up in jail, but I didn’t tell them that — I’m not a killjoy.)
    They smiled and obeyed. My brother seemed the most enthusiastic, as if it had been his idea, though I knew it hadn’t. The Libyan seemed the most skeptical. But the three of them were committed to the plan and they clung to it like shipwrecked sailors, laying it all out for me and presenting it in the best possible light. It was something that would require only the tiniest sacrifice, a plan in which cleverness was key. It was the perfect coup, a scheme that would open the doors of a new life to us, that would get us a house on the beach, or a restaurant in Tangiers, or a gym up north.
    When they were done talking I said that it sounded good to me. Then I got up and went to bed and fell asleep without eating dinner.
    At five in the morning I woke up. I turned on the light, I leafed through old magazines, and for a while I mulled over what they had explained. So this is the life of crime, I thought without fear.
    The next morning I didn’t go to work, I got up early, went out, bought bread, and called in sick from a payphone. I don’t know whether they believed me or not. I didn’t care.
    At midday, the Libyan and the Bolognan brought me to Maciste’s house. That wasn’t his name, but it was what everyone called him. To some he was Maciste, to others Mr. Maciste or Mr. Bruno, to others Mr. Universe. It depended. Most didn’t call him anything because Maciste never left the house and no one knew him and many of those who had known him, personally or by name, had forgotten him.
    The house was on Via Germanico. It was a two-story house, with a small, overgrown garden in front, flanked by two six- or