Читать книгу Lilith - Armando Lazzari - Страница 11

Angela

I keep moving up and down the room, thinking of a thousand and one possible scenarios of what could have happened: the absurd ones far outnumber the normal ones.

I look at the clock for the umpteenth time: 17:15. I really think I could call her now.

The phone rings: once, twice, three times... come on, damn it, what are you waiting for to answer!

Fifth ring: "Hi, I'm not home at the moment, if you want you can leave a message..."

And no, damn, another damn answering machine! Come on, let's talk like a moron with this thing.

"...beep!"

"Hi Angela, it's Davide. We met last night at the club...sorry, but you said to call you after five. When you come back you can call me anytime at 06..."

What the hell! I hung up the phone unnerved, both by Angela's absence and by the feeling of complete idiocy that envelops me every time I talk to an answering machine; and I was hoping they had become extinct like dinosaurs!

By way of ballast I throw myself heavily into the chair. Hypnotized, I follow the hand of the pendulum, which inexorably marks the minutes. It's not one of the best pastimes, but it works.

6:20 p.m.

Driin! Driin!

I make a quick dash toward the device. The edge of the table finds me unprepared and I hit it with my shin. Pain in the ass.

"Hello?"

"Hi Davide, it's Angela. I just got in the house, my daughter Elisa has been wasting my time around, sorry to keep you waiting."

"No worries, I've had a few things to do myself anyway..." Like stare at the pendulum for about an hour.

"I've been thinking all day about the fact that my behaviour toward Roberto has not been very fair. Partly I feel guilty for what happened to him, but mostly because, out of fear, I abandoned him when he needed it."

"I'm sorry, Angela, but I'm a little confused, what really happened to him? I would need you to tell me everything from the beginning. Would you be willing?" I try to be calm, but in fact mine is not really a question.

"Yes, you're right, it's better to start everything from the beginning, but I'd rather talk to you about it in person. I don't live very far from the Canvas, would you like to meet me at home?"

"Sure, that can be arranged."

As he gives me directions, I can't help but smile at the thought of Buba and the blow he'd get if he only learned about the appointment.

It takes me ten minutes to get to my destination and twenty to find a decent parking spot that is discreetly out of the obsessive reach of some easy-pencilled vigilante and/or auxiliary with the sensitivity of a hungry crocodile. Maybe I exaggerated, hungry crocodiles are much more sensitive.

I ring the doorbell and a cheeky little voice asks me who I am. This should be the daughter.

"I'm Davide, a friend of mom's. Is she home?"

She'd be missed.

"Wait a moment, I'll go ask her if she's in."

Perfect secretary sorting visits.

A sound of deadbolts makes me assume that Mom has answered that she is home.

The door opens and the figure of a maybe three-foot gnome appears, her arms clasped at her sides.

"You're lucky, Mom said she's there and you can come in. She's in the bathroom right now, go ahead and have a seat."

She points to the doorway with her hand as she catches her breath from the long sentence she just displayed.

I thank her and smiling I enter the house. I notice that she looks at me grimly. All of her mother.

"Well? How long does it take you to say that?"

The first Gift of children is to displace adults.

"Say what?" I ask her curiously.

"Like what? You have to say: excuse me?. Mom always says that when you enter someone else's home, you have to ask for permission!"

The second Gift, is to make them uncomfortable.

"Elisa!"

Saved in the corner by mom Angela who, despite having the towel tied around her still wet hair, appears in all her glory.

"Sorry about her, but when she gets into it she's awful! Now be a good girl and go to your room and play, and the gentleman and I will sit in the lounge and talk."

With a polite pout, she obeyed and walked to her room.

"Good, now we can talk quietly. Would you like some iced tea?" I humour her and make myself comfortable on the couch.

She is tense, I think the tea is more for her than for me.

She returns to me after a few moments, carrying a tray with an iced pitcher of tea and two glasses. Angela's shaky gait almost makes me bet on a disastrous end of the tray on the floor. Luckily I'm wrong and I manage to sip a little. It's homemade: too much lemon and not enough sugar, ideal for a woman like her who always has to keep in shape. I don't want to press her, but I have to find a way to get her going. Let's start with the basics.

"Have you known Roberto long?"

She unties the towel from her hair and begins to gently dry it, patting it dry.

"Not long, but just long enough to say that he's a good person and that maybe I should have helped him...or at least, insisted that he not make the mistake he did." I frown at such mystery.

"Did he use any particular drugs?"

We begin the elimination game.

"Drugs? Who, Roberto?" She smiles in amazement.

First guess eliminated.

"I don't think he even knows what drugs look like," she adds to punctuate.

"I see, but then explain to me how he got that way?"

She picks up a cigarette and nervously lights it.

"Do you believe in the existence of good and evil? In the sense of a physical embodiment of the thing, I mean?" She's damn serious.

"I don't know, I've never had a chance to personally test either one." What's your point?

"Well, I am, and so is Roberto, at least the part about evil." I raise my eyebrows.

"You don't think I'm entirely sane, do you?" You'd have to give me at least a little sketchy, though.

"I'm not used to judging without having a broad view..." Go with the courtesy.

"Maybe it would be better if I told you how things went from the beginning." Hoping at least that there's a more earthy, less mystical logic to it.

"Back in the day, before Elisa was born, my husband and I were not having a happy marital time. Perhaps precisely because children are a glue for a family and we didn't have any yet. Anyway, to break the boredom, or just to forget the now daily fights, we went to all sorts of parties that were organized, sometimes even by strangers." All good living.

"One night, I don't even really remember who invited us, we attended one of them, where there was an obligation to wear a mask for the entire party. Believe me, it wasn't even among the strangest of requests."

I dare not imagine the others.

"We went to a villa with the usual dull enthusiasm that had reigned between us for some time now, with the only difference being that during the trip we had not yet quarrelled once. On the contrary, my husband, Diego, drove in reserved silence, aided by the three glasses of whiskey he had already drunk at home."

Odd that you got there safely.

"The party itself didn't differ from those of previous weekends: music, buffet, Diego still drinking, Diego being silly with everyone in his way, and me trying to pretend everything was going right."

Basically a nightmare.

"Basically the usual nightmare." Exactly.

"I'd knocked back my martini fix, too, but I could control myself better. Out of the blue, what was supposed to be the hostess announced that the hour was upon us and the real soul of the party was about to begin. Having said that, she urged us to follow her and we all went to what at first seemed to be the cellars of the villa, but then we realized it was the exit to a large room."

Sipping more tea, we are about to get into the thick of the story.

"There was music in that room too, but it had changed, it almost sounded like classical music. I looked for my husband and noticed that he was stranger than usual, but I didn't think anything of it, I thought about the alcohol. The music suddenly stopped and everyone, as if following a well-designed script, first stopped and then arranged themselves in a circle. I began to worry when I realized that I was at the centre of this human chain. I thought it was some sort of prank and didn't want to show my discomfort." In your place I would have run like hell!

"Perhaps, I told myself, I had missed something of the landlady's speech, and so I made to enter the circle too, but every attempt of mine was thwarted and unknown hands pushed me inwards. It quickly went from simple annoyance to outright concern as everyone began chanting a strange litany. Tired, I angrily took off my mask and started railing against everyone in front of me, repeating in a firm voice that I didn't like that kind of game and that I wanted to leave, but no one gave me an answer: they seemed to be in a trance state." I remain silent, astonished, listening to the continuation of that incredible story, so reminiscent of Eyes Wide Shut, and I try to imagine its conclusion.

"When I decided to break the barricade I was slapped violently by a guy and then pushed to the ground in the general indifference. I began to cry in despair, calling for my husband's help..."

She hastily wipes away a tear she couldn't control. I fully understand that such a memory must not be pleasant.

"...When I spotted him in the crowd, I was incredulous to see that not only was that bastard doing nothing to help me, but that he was in cahoots with everyone else!"

"Do you think they plagiarized him, or drugged him in some way?"

I interrupt the story, only because sometimes memories can become more vivid than they should, and it seems like a good point to bring her back to the present time in part.

"Clearly something had been done to him, because his gaze was practically blank!"

It worked, she seems to have calmed down.

"I was on the ground with no strength, they had probably drugged me too. Diego came up to me and picked me up like I was weightless. There was a moment when I thought he was taking me out of there, but I was quickly disillusioned when I saw that he was walking on the opposite side of the exit, towards the centre of the room. Stunned, I realized that I had been placed on an altar only when I saw my clothes, torn with force, flying on the ground."

He looks up and stares at me coldly.

"He raped me in front of everyone, as if nothing had happened." Speechless.

"Eventually I must have blacked out, because all I remember is waking up in a wooded clearing covered only in the shreds of the clothes I had on at the party." Satanic cult stuff.

"I take it you filed a complaint." Husband or not, I would have sent them all to jail and more.

"Of course. Too bad, though, that they all disappeared! Including Diego, who I haven't seen since. God knows how long I looked for him, but in vain. Not for nothing, but just for the sake of smashing his face in!" More than fair.

"And the owners of the villa? Didn't they track them down?"

"From the investigation it turned out that they had moved to the Canary Islands for more than two years, without ever having returned to Italy, and that for six months they had entrusted a real estate agency with the sale of the villa. Six years have passed and now everything has fallen into oblivion."

Six years! Am I wrong or is that more or less how old little Elisa should be? She reads the question in my face and I don't have time to formulate it.

"Yes, Davide, Elisa was conceived that night. She is the only good thing in my life."

Certainly a tragic experience, but I still don't understand how this story can connect to Roberto.

"I had long since, if not forgotten, at least put that day in a corner, until I met Roberto in a chat room."

"The spirits, I guess."

"You know it?"

Right, the one made up of the exhausted group.

"Vaguely... Roberto had told me about it once."

Lately lying is becoming more and more natural to me, maybe I'll run for office in the next election.

"I had started dating her thanks to a friend who had almost forced me, but for Roberto it had become a mania: he was looking for particular information."

"What kind of information?" I pretend to be oblivious to the whole Lilith myth thing. I want to see if he's hiding something from me.

"There's one detail I left out in the story earlier..."

She hesitates. Come on, tell me the whole truth, just the truth.

"When I was in the mansion and those fools were chanting that strange litany, they were doing it to invoke Lilith: the black goddess." Bingo! The stories are finally channelled on the same track.

"Have you ever heard of it?"

If you're referring to that nonsense I read on the PC, yes!

"I know roughly the story..."

"Good, then you'll save me from talking about it. Anyway, the fact is that Roberto's obsession was actually Lilith."

And here I thought it was you who had stupefied him.

"He confided in me privately about the strange dreams he was having. For my part, however, the recondite hope of knowing what had happened to Diego pushed me to delve into the subject.

I thought Roberto might be a link in solving my mystery."

If there weren't idiots on this world....

"He never told me about it. What kind of dreams did he have?"

As I formulate the question, I think of my own and a slight shiver runs down my spine.

"He said they were always fuzzy when they woke up, except for Lilith's name, which invariably rang out in the darkness." That he drank my own beer?

"I provided him with all the material I had collected over time about Lilith. There were also instructions in the handouts to perform an invocation ritual, but I strongly advised him against it."

"Let me guess: he didn't rest until he did it, did he?" I know the chicken and she lights the bonfire for the spit.

"He had convinced himself that only through ritual could he bring to the surface something that was inside him, but which he could not yet bring into focus."

Wouldn't it be better to pay for a good psychologist?

"With the excuse that everything had to be prepared in the right way, I convinced him to at least do it in my presence. In doing so, I hoped to slowly dissuade him."

"What happened during the ritual?"

At least he burned himself with a candle.

"I couldn't witness it." She lowered her gaze.

"Why? He wouldn't let you anymore?"

"Not him...but the man who threatened me. I got a phone call in the middle of the night. He told me he knew everything about me and my daughter; where we lived and especially what I was trying to do, finally advising me to forget everything and disappear from Roberto's life forever. I don't know who he was or why he did it, I only know that the threat was far from veiled and I was scared to death." Another conundrum.

"I only found the courage to phone Roberto one last time to warn him. I was terrified and didn't tell him anything about the threats, but I think he understood that something wasn't right. I begged him to drop everything and said goodbye, doing as the man had told me."

With the responsibility of a daughter, she's hardly to blame.

"Not entirely, though. It was you on the bike the night I had him committed, wasn't it?"

"Yes. I sensed something was wrong and then when I saw you, thinking you were the man in the threats, I fled. I contacted a friend who works as a nurse at the hospital, and she filled me in on your condition, and from what she reported, it's certainly not the best."

And you haven't even seen him.

"He's in rough shape...the doctors still don't have much figured out and I, hearing your story, even less so."

I close myself off for a few moments to reflect.

"I even followed you home, to see how far you were involved." I would add that you're not much of a stalker.

"So, if you told me everything, I guess you cleared me of the charges?" I smile at her.

"To be fair, you don't look dangerous."

She reciprocates, but with style, my smile.

"What about the famous meeting with the chat people at the pub instead?" Let's see if you know anything about the famous dream woman.

"Which unfortunately you'll have to ask others: I never went there. After the threats, it would never have crossed my mind to see Roberto again. However, you can ask Patrizia, aka Carmilla in chat. She was there for sure, since she had an unrequited crush on Roberto."

Dear Roberto, you should have settled for a normal woman instead of getting involved in this whole mess.

"Do you have any way to contact her?"

"I could try to arrange an outing somewhere quiet, where you could ask her all the questions you want, obviously without going into too much detail." Wake the girl up.

"Great! So, I'm just waiting for you to tell me when."

Would right away be too soon?

"Let's do it later in the week, as soon as I have a night off and can arrange a babysitter for Elisa." I'll wait.

"One last question."

I stare into her eyes searching for an honest answer.

"Why did you decide to help me now despite the threats?"

Be careful not to lie to me...

"Because I feel guilty with Roberto and I would like to help him; because I know that you will be the one to expose yourself, thus limiting the risks; because I often think back to when I needed help and no one wanted to give it to me; and because I would like to close the accounts with my past for good. Is that enough motivation for you?"

I suppose so, but let's just say I want to trust.

"Has anyone ever told you you're a piece of work?" I chant.

"Why, did you ever doubt otherwise?"

A shiny Miss Toothpaste smile lights up on her face.