Gabriele Dadati

Those without a home

My chances of victory are halved

Sun Tzu, The Art of War

 

The Monster is a monster because the skin on its muzzle is all scribbled

on with disease, its disproportionate limbs are fanned open around

its body and its tattered wings transmit a sense of wretchedness that

founders in pain. Seated on the ground with its back against the side of

the phone kiosk, head lolling on its shoulder, it seems to have lost any

awareness of existing. Perhaps it has been drinking or perhaps it is dying.

Because the idea that at a certain point we die is constantly in the air. Of

late, this thought has come to Fabrizio often and this is what he is thinking

now that he sets eye on the Monster for the first time.

The Monster’s body has lost consciousness against the phone kiosk

outside Fabrizio’s house. It is one of the last kiosks in town, so neglected

there aren’t even any obscenities written on it. The young man shivers.

It is two o’clock in the morning, the gloomy light from the streetlamps

illuminates the dirty snow piled up by the roadside. For a good half minute

he stares at the Monster as it struggles, unconscious, for breath. However

you look at it, there doesn’t seem to be anyone in viale Dante Alighieri,

where he has come to live a few months previously, after leaving his

parents’ home. Even the light from the fire station windows, even this

light which normally encumbers the pavement opposite, is feeble and as

if restrained. Fabrizio’s eyes shift from the Monster’s body to the sleepy

residential street. Even the Christmas lights throw off a cold brightness,

and Fabrizio makes up his mind. He approaches the Monster, kneels

down in the snow and slips an arm under the brown armpit. Then he

hauls himself and the unwilling body upright. The weight isn’t a problem,

at least not at the start: it is the slimy things that tend to slip out of his

grasp. But Fabrizio is decided and while one arm is wrapped around the

Monster’s torso, the other hand is pressed on its belly to keep it steady.

The four-legged beast (Monster+Fabrizio) crosses the few metres

of pavement that separate the phone kiosk from the entrance to the

building where the young man lives. Fumbling with the keys, he unlocks

the glass door and goes with the body he has taken charge of into the

all-marble entrance. For the first time at the end of this anything-butgood

day, Fabrizio smiles: his mouth curls upwards at the thought of

the slush invading the marble and the complaints that a disagreeable

neighbour will shower on him the next day. The young man has always

wanted to obliterate himself from the world. He’d like to live a quiet life.

Instead, every event is fraught with friction and he has argued with the

disagreeable neighbour almost every day since he has been in the

flat in viale Dante Alighieri. Not that Fabrizio has ever done anything

in particular apart from being unbearably young. The disagreeable

neighbour has made up his own reasons for quarrelling right from the

start. So that in the end, unable to avoid the war, Fabrizio has welcomed

the war and started being rude and behaving badly as often as possible.

There’s dedication in it. He doesn’t stop smiling at the slush making its

way onto the marble.

The four-legged beast goes up the entrance steps, reaches the lift landing

and presses the button. The lift comes, Fabrizio slides the Monster’s

body in and realizes there’s no room for himself. He thinks for a second,

presses two and whips his arm out to avoid blocking the closing door. He

takes the stairs two at a time to get to the floor first - a wasted effort, the

Sixties lift is slow and its pulleys creak. But Fabrizio is an anxious sort,

always has been. When the lift door opens he looks the unconscious

Monster in the face, reaches out (the position of the body is identical to

when it was lying up against the phone kiosk) and straightens out one

of its legs so that it falls between the photoelectric sensors. He goes to

throw his front door open and comes back to get the Monster. He drags

it along, leaving it prostrate in the corridor and goes into the bathroom

to get a cloth to clean the landing. Fabrizio doesn’t want to make it too

obvious that the slush in the entrance and lift is his doing. If you are

obviously guilty you can’t sustain a bitter row successfully. You would

have to be completely irrational, which he isn’t. Instead he prepares the

battleground for a reasonable conflict. The neighbour will accuse him and

he will be able to deny.

When at last he is back in his flat, has turned the lock three times and

seen the Monster again, he thinks: all right, but what am I going to do with

the Monster now?

Fabrizio decides it is best to take precautions. Everything he knows

about monsters, what little he knows, comes from films and a few

books. He doesn’t know how much of it is true, but in the end there is

only one lesson and it’s always the same: monsters are dangerous.

So Fabrizio seats the unconscious body up against the kitchen wall

before proceeding to tie it up. Tying up a body is precisely one of those

things that is easy to do only in films and books. Where do they get all

those ropes from? In reality there’s never any rope available. Which is

why Fabrizio has to go out onto the kitchen balcony and cut the nylon

twine running along it that until now has been used for hanging out the

washing. Back in the kitchen, with effort he joins the wrists (wrists?) of the

Monster’s disproportionate slimy limbs and ties them together. Two more

cords wind around a shoulder and one around the thighs, the last one is

for the ankles (ankles?). One thing reassures Fabrizio as he is tying up

the Monster: the regular breathing he hears in its lungs. The Monster’s

regular breathing fills him with an oceanic calm. The ragged wings remain

free.

A clock chimes. The neighbour’s pendulum clock uses Fabrizio’s flat as a

sounding board. It must be half past two.

While waiting to decide whether to try and resuscitate the Monster or

wait to see what happens, as they say, the young man remembers the

Scarecrow Competition. The following day Nibbiano will be holding its

winter scarecrow competition (the snowman’s competition is held in mid

August. How will they imitate a snowman at the height of summer, without

the snow? But that’s a different competition, a different problem, this

is another matter. On the other hand though, who needs a scarecrow

in December?). By ten in the morning you have to be there with your

scarecrow, pay the enrolment fee at the stall and go through the streets

of the village until you find a place you like to leave it in. The scarecrow

can be any shape and made of any material. There is only one condition:

it has to be self-standing. The village teeming with scarecrows popping

up out of the snow. The village that celebrates all day: everyone eats

together, there are the Christmas stands, you listen to music, and when

the sun sets the jury reunites and appoints the first three winners.

Fabrizio goes into the bedroom to get the coat stand. Monsters, he thinks,

mustn’t get in the way of our plans. Monsters have no right to send away

those who are not monstrous at all. And the coat stand is the closest

thing to a scarecrow he has in the house. It is brass and dented here and

there. If anything should happen to it, it won’t be a great loss. He takes

off the jacket hanging there and throws it on the bed, lifts the coat stand

and takes it into the kitchen. He hasn’t got any clear ideas about what he

wants to do. The Monster hasn’t moved. It is breathing against the wall

and every so often it gasps, but less than it did in the street, half an hour

ago. The young man takes from its corner the shelf he never put up over

the radiator. He never put it up because he hasn’t got a drill. He looks at

it. The first thing to do would be to cut it lengthwise to get two arms to fix

across the coat stand at the top, so as to form a Latin cross. Because,

if you look at crosses, you can see how much you can build on them.

Constructions, symbols, stories of humanity, scarecrows.

For the moment, at least, the story of the construction of the scarecrow

ends here.

 

Fabrizio takes a shower and comes out of the bathroom. His muscles are

toned by the warm night water and his skin is perfumed. As he puts his

pyjamas on the neighbour’s pendulum clock strikes three. The whole time

he is under the shower his imagination has been conjuring up an even

more savage version of Psycho’s most famous scene: Anthony Perkins/

Norman Bates has been replaced by the Monster that has freed itself and

burst in, while he has replaced Janet Leigh/Marion Crane. There is no

need for a long knife because the brutal blows from the Monster’s paws

have thrown him to the ground, crushing his chest and mutilating his

face, not without pain. Fabrizio is resigned to the idea of leaving the beast

alone in the kitchen. After all, what else could he have done? Perhaps

it would have been better to take it back into the street, but no better

than bringing it into the house. And any action needs to wait patiently for

its outcome before being evaluated. Anyway after a day that had been

anything but good, a shower was absolutely necessary.

The young man goes to the storage room at the end of the corridor, lifts

the curtain that acts as a door and goes in to get the toolbox his father

lent him a month earlier and that he hasn’t found a need for yet. He

goes into the kitchen, where the Monster seems not to have moved. At

last he decides to get cracking on the scarecrow. He takes the shelf he

has never put up and places it on the granite kitchen surface where he

normally eats, in search of the best position to saw it in. He wants to split

it in two lengthwise to make the scarecrow’s arms. After a couple of tries,

he positions it so that it sticks out from the unit. Holding it steady with the

palm of his left hand, he grips the bow saw in his right and starts making

a notch to indicate where he will start sawing. After a couple of tries

where the blade gets stuck, Fabrizio manages to get a constant rhythm

going and soon he has got the arms of his scarecrow. He raises them

to eye level and considers them for a moment before turning his gaze

towards the Monster that is struggling for breath in reply. As it gasps, its

eyelids (eyelids?) flutter like whiskers. The effort of eyes used to staying

shut.

Seeing as he doesn’t have a drill but needs to make holes in the ends of

the scarecrow’s arms-to-be, to then connect them to the trunk-to-be (the

brass coat stand, dented here and there), Fabrizio digs a long iron nail

and a hammer out of the toolbox. He puts one of the halves of the shelf

back on the granite top, the other stays on the floor, and starts planting

the nail. He stops at the second blow: the Monster seems to be reacting

to these dry sounds and the death rattle rising from its throat is getting

louder. Immobile, hammer in hand, Fabrizio looks at the Monster. The

gasping dies down again, then suddenly its jaw snaps open to reveal

a rack of teeth that are all, without exclusion, sharp canines. With each

breath, the Monster’s dark heavy tongue gives a start. Fascinated by the

sight of the gaping mouth, the young man does not move until the beast

swallows and shuts it again, letting itself go once more. About a minute

passes without anything happening. The Monster’s eyelids have stopped

trembling and Fabrizio gives another couple of blows of the hammer.

Then he stops and bends down to search the toolbox for a pair of pliers

to pull the nail out. He wants to knock it in again beside the first hole

to widen it up a bit. And it is while he is here, bending over his father’s

toolbox in search of a pair of pliers, in his kitchen, a scarecrow in the

making, before half past three strikes, a Monster unconscious against the

wall, it is while these are the circumstances, that someone knocks loudly

at the door, repeatedly, flat handedly, one would say.

 

Fabrizio opens up. Framed in the doorway, the disagreeable neighbour

emerges in the background of the dim landing. From the doorway,

a fraction of a second after Fabrizio has opened up, the neighbour

assails him, striking him in the chest, eyes mad with rage and shouting:

“What the hell do you think you’re doing? It’s three o’clock in the

morning, for Christ’s sake”. So saying, he pushes forward with his

body, knocks Fabrizio out of the way and plunges into the kitchen. So

it is the neighbour, fifty-odd and fit, who is the first to meet the gaze of

the Monster, at last fully awake. “Christ”, says the man again, stopping

suddenly. The blood in his veins, his muscles, even his lungs, all turned

to stone. Snarling, the beast breaks the pathetic nylon cords. A second

later it is on top of him and there is bloodshed. As its heavy paws claw the

man’s shoulders it sinks its muzzle into his chest, snapping his sternum

with its teeth. It gets up again and aims for the jugular, but the heat of the

moment and the hours spent in a daze hamper its accuracy and it ends

by clamping its jaw onto the man’s face, which crumples up with a cry

of pain. This soon stops though, replaced by a strangled gurgling that is

rapidly extinguished by the blood. Meanwhile, Fabrizio has no option but

to turn and look on helplessly. Now that the Monster has completed its

bloodbath and is crouching greedily over the neighbour’s body, Fabrizio

can shut his eyes, like a frightened child.

Soon there is silence. The young man opens his eyes again and goes

back into the kitchen. His sense of bewilderment mounts. There is

no Monster, and even less the aftermath of a broken body. Just his

scarecrow waiting to be finished.

 

Later, when the pendulum clock next door strikes four, Fabrizio stretches

his neck muscles. He runs his rough tongue over his teeth as if feeling

them in his mouth for the first time. Finally, at this point in time, his eyes

have become enormous and this story is at an end. A happy ending, no

doubt about that.