The storm announced itself with mysterious arrows that illuminated the incipient darkness, and the clouds thickened in a menacing way, as if a mysterious force sucked them towards each other, forming a single large mass.
The two girls hugged tightly.
"I'm scared," said Sabra, the youngest.
"Don't worry, it's nothing. It's just the storm,” Chatila answered.
But outside, the trees flexed in an effort to counter the wind that came from the sea, sweeping the waters furiously off Capri. Very high waves were going to break on the coast which fell sheer onto the icy slab of water, bubbling in excruciating undertows of wounded beasts.
The connections to Capri had been interrupted for days. A tanker was stationed on the quay, with metal rods extending from its belly, resembling oxygen tubes, making the cargo look like a ghost vessel.
At night yellowish lights filtered through the portholes.
Lightning from the sky fell obliquely on the bridge creating short circuits, like a strange experiment whose evil and supernatural nature was guessed. But to understand what cruelty was, one would have had to enter the belly of the ship.
The two men were now seated at the most prestigious table in Capri.
A guitarist, who was a plastic surgeon by profession, enlivened the evening with cloying chords that the men listened to distractedly, caught up in very different thoughts.
The women, on the other hand, appreciated it. Set up like Madonnas. With ex voto dangling from ears to ankles. Their necks, darkened by the lamps, were covered with jewelry, mainly ethnic, and very showy. The slender wrists were the end of very thin arms, dotted with light brown spots and skin stretched over the very long bones. Those women dreamed of romantic loves, and they also dreamed of taking off shoes that were too tight, sacrificed on feet that were too big. In their heads vanished by a veil of alcohol, they thought of when on the revolving bed of the hotel room, surrounded by mirrors, they would have been raped by their men, while cell phones scarred the night with ridiculous music.
Those ladies, from time to time, with an angry outburst, would go to smoke in the only corner of the room where it was allowed. From there they could see the stacks which in the night looked like watchdogs on a chain.
"How could you let them get away?" one of them said.
The other didn't answer. He just sipped a stout. Then, looking around, he seemed to have a rapacious flicker in his eyes. As if he was scouring the hall looking for something. He felt in the air the atoms of electricity that seek each other resembling animals that organize themselves for hunting.
The man was nicknamed "the Dark One". He loved to eat rare meat, nature documentaries, drink beer, and had many dead floating on his conscience waiting for rest and revenge. It was highly probable that a vacuum had formed inside him, into which everything that fell would dissolve into deadly acid.
He took soft drugs, grinned occasionally, and was fond of every variety of cage and aviary birds. He had a large collection, a small personal jungle. Now he thought about getting an iguana. He believed in extraterrestrials, with which he said, clicking his tongue, to be in contact, showing a scar on his right arm, a kind of cross engraved in the flesh. And furthermore, highlighting a mark on the neck, under the left ear, he said he had planted a microchip. But he was religious and had disconnected the IV from his old man to give him rest and eternal sleep, at the suggestion of Padre Pio.
«We'll take them back, don't worry» the Dark One finally answered, sighing satisfied.
He had finally identified his prey, and he wasn't going to let it get away. In fact, she called the waiter, gratifying him with a blatant tip.
The chosen woman, at the other end of the room, was with two other friends. They must have been from the East, Ukrainian or Russian perhaps. She looked at him as if from a very distant point in the universe, pulsing like a dying star. A little flattered, and a little lost. But she won the dying star. However, she greedily squeezed in her hand, discreetly outstretched, the money that the waiter had pressed into her palm. He too took a little piece of that woman looking for contact with her hand. Her smell, a mix of cheap perfume and sex, was a kind of electroshock to the errand boy. He went back to the kitchen euphoric and dazed, cursing with admiration, among the stoves, the throbbing sauces and the drops of fat that dripped from the walls and the blue tiles typical of Capri ceramic art.
They got up from the table, and the first, who was called "the Spider", he walked away crookedly, clinging to a fine wooden stick. He walked towards the dock, where the cargo ship Lucia was waiting for him.
The weather still threatened rain, and it was cold, even though it was late September. He was a very religious man, and that storm two days ago had disturbed him. He was thinking of the two escaped girls. To economic damage. In his heart, however, he feared the ax of God. The raging beast that raged against the wicked.
There was an air of expectation and fear in the hold of the ship.
Sabra had begun to whimper.
With a small sob barely held back. She clung to Chatila's long black hair, curled up in her hollow between her sister's throat and belly. She felt her breath mix with hers, and with her shoulders he pushed as if to enter her body.
In the local newspaper they had written about the dangers that came from the new rich who, together with money, brought death and corruption. They polluted the beauty of the Blue Isle. But it was news that was lost on the surface, among the news of VIPs, their loves, parties and some ceremonious feast of saints in procession.
In other articles it was said that climate change would not have spared even the most beautiful island in the Mediterranean. The effects were already being felt, especially at Villa San Michele, where some rare species of plants had already died. And then an infection, a sort of white ringworm, which made the maritime pines look like lepers bitten by the disease. Everything was traced back to the millennial date of 2012, of which we had a confused idea, but which ultimately encouraged us to seize all the propitious opportunities for pleasure in life.
But when night came, those suffering trees dripped a reddish liquid onto the ground. Someone had read the word "help" in that mud. Perhaps there were those who fanned the flames of fear and superstition, or skilful tourist orchestrations to create amazement.
The parish priest, however, maintained with conviction that the devil had moved to Capri in the form of a tourist bus driver, and was spreading the contagion. It was advisable to pray and receive communion often.
In fact, road accidents have not occurred so frequently on the island since time immemorial. Especially at intersections. There horrendous curses flew among the drivers, furious quarrels broke out over nothing, and in particular two buses had been stuck for hours in one of the narrowest streets of Capri, where a tabernacle of the Madonna stood out with her eyes veiled with tears.
"Stop crying," Chatila had ordered. "You'll end up getting us caught." And she had caressed the eyes that hadn't found sleep for three days now.
The kidnapping. Travel. The crossing
The journey to reach Capri had been very long. At the time of the abduction the children must have been drugged. They alternated phases of torpor with rapid awakenings in which, covered by hoods and with their mouths gagged, they even found it difficult to breathe. Even their recent past was lost in the mind, remaining confused in the folds of the brain. They only heard the constant beating of the heart, which autonomously marked the time. Reality and nightmare merged in accidental noises, in the mouth the bitterness of thirst, and a bitterness that came from the depths of the stomach, in the gloom of the cecum. The senses had contracted to an animal essentiality.
Chatila had dreamed of a giant spot – whose origin she couldn't identify – with a red color that widened in the darkness of her mind.
It had been a very short sleep, and he awoke abruptly pulling Sabra violently towards him, in fear of losing her.
Now the memory and all the violence of that crossing had come upon her, biting her by the throat like a wild animal. There was a slight ringing in her ears that kept her on constant alert.
It was the bottom residue of the bombs that had splashed around them, throwing small lapilli into the fiery air, red-hot eggs which, when in contact with the ground, emitted a strange smoke and a smell of burnt flesh. Just like the one he'd heard sizzling in the field where they'd been placed, or rather crammed together at first, like in a department store, after the tragedy, after they'd been left alone.
Later in the field, however, they hadn't been bad.
She and Sabra, her sister, were looked after by the pretty girls in blue uniforms. Of the volunteers. All very kind. One of them had taken them to hear the song of the desert.
As night approached, and a silent lethargy sounded in the camp, and the containers lit up with the dim glow of portable lamps. In the night those houses looked like hooded ghosts.
It was on one of those nights that suddenly, in an uncertain sleep, they found themselves dragged by weight with sacks that covered her head and half of her body, up to her waist.
Sabra and Chatila had sought each other in the dark, and Sabra had screamed, until, perhaps a punch, she had silenced, almost stunning her. Chatila called her sister. She heard the soft moan that she would have distinguished among a thousand.
She whined all the time, and could only calm her down by singing her old lullabies.
He understood that they had been kidnapped, and that they weren't alone in the truck that was carrying them. She felt a kind of collective breath weighing on everyone. A hot gasp that, despite her mouths sealed with duct tape, she greedily ate the air as if the air were a thing to eat.
Chatila knew no one would answer her questions, but crawling in the dark she had finally found Sabra's hand. He had squeezed her so hard it hurt. She had made out his spidery fingers, and the soft, pink nails she dug into her nose because they smelled of hair and bread.
The mothership had subsequently picked them up and brought them to the island. There they were expected.
In the hold, men, themselves masked in black, had freed them from their hoods. The scene seen from above was like a great mysterious awakening of hatching alien eggs. Glass beings were born, with smooth skin and big eyes, children and teenagers, who sniffed each other.
One of them, more audacious and daring, touched Chatila and murmured: "Do you know the clinic?"
It smelled of dirt. But Chatila liked that contact.
“The clinic? What is the clinic?” Chatila replied worried.
He abruptly silenced Sabra who had begun to repeat: 'Chatila, Chatila, I want to go away. I want mom..."
The boy in front of her stared at her. He was very thin. His shaved hair and huge gray eyes, on the bottom of him you could see like a red splinter of blood.
Chatila thought he had an eye problem. That look of hers frightened her, unsettled her, even if he was devoid of any threat.
The boy pulled a bottle of Coca-Cola out of his pocket, and inhaled, breathing greedily. A sour smell spread.
He felt like a bolt of lightning and stiffened his neck.
Then he offered the bottle to Chatila who waved her hand to say no.
In the belly of the ship the faces of the children had sprouted like mushroom spores. They looked around, and organized portions of space, making sure their shoulders were protected. Someone was dragging themselves towards an imaginary point making small collisions with the others.
A larger one, with a distended body and an old man's face, with one eye missing, had got up, approaching a porthole from which a strip of black sea was filtering.
The ship occasionally moved in whining little motions. Electricity in the air promised a thunderstorm.
The weather forecast spoke of an approaching dark cloud. And of the slow and threatening formation of a windy vortex. Perhaps a whirlwind billowing out of the deep sea. A recent cataclysm on the other side of the planet aroused in ordinary people a secret fear that the inhabitants passed on to each other in broken sentences. It insinuated itself, juxtapositions were made between the faults of the administration and the deterioration of morals and morality. Some prayer groups had gathered on a beach as if the fruit of sin were among them, and some timid protests had appeared in the local newspaper, where citizens called for the removal of foreigners who brought with them diseases.
“You will know the clinic. That's where we're headed. But don't worry they will treat you well. You're beautiful. But… your sister. How will she do it?" said the young man, showing that he knew a lot, suddenly serious and relaxed.
"Do not worry. She will stay with me. I'll take care of her» Chatila replied angrily. And she sat down definitively silent.
When the storm broke the ship rocked. A reddish light spread inside the hold as if following the path of a fire.
The big boy stuck his deformed eye into a crack from where cold water came that fell on the floor making it slippery. The little prisoners gasped as they spread around looking for an exit. The light of a lamp placed on a partition oscillated deforming the bodies, making them look like twisted wires.
The children fumbled on their little legs. The platform filled with water mixing with a blackish powder that had poured from a large barrel. Outside, high up towards a trapdoor, barking could be heard, and the children's feet splashed around like hysterical ducks.
Chatila, grabbed Sabra's hand with her, dragging her with her.
A roar disintegrated in the night.
The sky must have cracked. A roof that has fallen in on itself, swallowing its own body in a death grip.
Then a powerful wave, an anomalous wave, which seemed to have a precise and destructive design.
The barking of the dogs first increased, then a series of tormenting yelps were heard. In Chatila's mind, the image of her dead mother appeared. Her lifeless body of hers, standing there on the road, and she motionless, while the rotor blades of the helicopters wasted in the air a motion of energy that seemed unreal to her. Deadmother forever.
The trapdoor opened, and someone from above began yelling for the children to get up, and to do it quickly. But Chatila thought it was better to hide behind some ropes which, due to an unnatural balance of opposites, had remained still, anchored. Balls wrapped in the shape of a nest.
It rained screams and objects everywhere. A noise of wrong and defective things intertwining with each other.
Sabra and Chatila stayed there. Sabra like a little crab clinging to Chatila. When everyone was gone they slipped up through the trapdoor into the night, like animals resurrected from an ice age, as if from a cesspit. Only thunder to keep them company, escorting them in the dark.
«Chatila I'm cold, I can't run. Let's stop…” Sabra whimpered. Her small hand secured to her sister's holding her like a shell.
Sabra felt the sharp edge of plants and broken branches on her bare legs. The water fell on her mouth and she licked it trying to understand from that taste and from the wind that came on her face, where she was. She pricked her ears.
"Walk and shut up," Chatila snapped, trying to maintain a constant speed, having to tug at Sabra from time to time.
A little further on - but they could not see it - the small forest was bordered by a road. At its edges, on the edge the water began to create rivulets that flowed in the beginning of a river.
The darkness spread like a disease. Chatila felt her heart beating fast. She thought of the immensity of God that she could not imagine.
“Save us… save us.” She thought hard. But she remembered the bombs, their coming out of the sky, heavy-headed birds.
"I want mom. Mommy where is she?" said Sabra monotonously, like a broken doll.
Chatila did not answer. But he saw her on the smoking asphalt. She saw their mom. Motherdeadforever. She wanted to fly. To be like those cartoon heroes she had seen on television, when everyone in the camp crowded around the generator. And those young girls in blue were laughing and clapping. They looked happy.
"Don't worry. You will be happy. You'll get married and have lots of children and a nice house” the boy had told her as he sucked the air out of the Coca-Cola bottle.
But she thought of Sabra. And her heart tightened. What would she have done?
They came to a small shed. Sabra's legs were bleeding. With her fingers she collected that blood and sucked it, and she felt like vomiting.
The little knees had tripped several times, and were now mixed with mud, water and blood. The little disheveled and torn skirt had lost its colors. The child's face was burning with fever and scented leaves.
The smell of manure and rotting wood mixed in the shed.
A small table and the withered body of a bird that had gone there to die. The drawn beak, and the holes and black eyes.
They fell asleep in a mixture of fear and happiness.
For two days they remained hidden in an uncertain climate, with the thought of living, but with death looking down on them. They resisted working with their imagination as metals are worked, forming objects, delicate matter, smiling, separating each time only for a little.
Even if for Sabra, when Chatila left, it was an infinite wait.
The two
The two men entered the shed. They were dressed up, elegant.
The Dark One smiled satisfied.
The other, the Spider, who trudged on his stick, looked grumpy and thumped his rotten leg, which rang in Sabra's mind.
"Chatila is that you?" Sabra said.
The other didn't answer.
She was gagged and her eyes were filled with tears that burned her throat.
A dog was barking outside, and there was the sound of an engine humming at very low revs. The storm had finally subsided.
A red car, an old beat-up utility car where the dogs had slept, was parked outside. He smelled like excrement. Plants and sacks of fertilizer were stored in the trunk.
The driver tapped on the steering wheel and smoked nervously.
"I'll take the biggest one with me," said the one with the crutch. «She is a beautiful little girl…»
The Dark One looked at him dumbfounded, and thought to himself how much he would have gained with the other one, the smaller one. One like that it could be worth a lot. Very much…
And he was reminded of butterflies. Their short and ephemeral flight. He liked butterflies, and he clipped their wings to watch them agonize. He looked at them in ecstasy and almost felt an orgasm like when she was fucking. That long body shake, the black dots of his eyes. And finally the deadly tiredness.
«I'm selling the blind one to the Caliph. But the shitter has to pay me well.”
And looking at Sabra he said to himself, suddenly gloomy: "But what a shitty life." And she lit a cigarette.
At the door of the hut the last thing was the drawl of Sabra, whimpering for Chatila.
The next day a fiery sun was shining on Capri, and the stacks were red-hot blinded by the powerful light.
In the Piazzetta people indulged in brioche and cappuccino.
But in the upper part of the island, from where the clinic could be seen, two bus drivers, in the throes of convulsions, fought over the passage at an intersection that was too narrow.
But it wasn't the gateway to heaven. It was only the broken neck of the property left to itself. An electricity pole blown down by the wind had gone sideways, blocking one of the ways leading to the belvedere.
The sea was very clear, and the bottom could be seen with the naked eye. The Blue Grotto was darting with fish and blue foam that remained suspended over the clear water.
On the horizon, the cargo ship Lucia resumed its return journey, now emptied.
What in jargon was called "the clinic" was a sorting place, cleverly camouflaged as a wellness center where businessmen and respectable families detoxified themselves from poisons and stress. A river of human flesh that let itself be manipulated and smoothed by accepting the solitude of the world, but not the passing of time.
Below them, in the dungeons, an eyeless child wondered where her sister was. And she couldn't give herself an answer.
. . .
Nando Vitali was born in Naples in 1953, Bagnoli district, is a writer, editor and longtime teacher of creative writing and reading with the laboratory L'isola delle voci. He has collaborated, and still collaborates, with various magazines and newspapers. He is the founder of literary magazines Pragma e Ahab and he also edited the writings of Nicola Pugliese, Michele Prisco, Luigi Compagnone. Author of many short stories, he also wrote novels: The wide man (Tierra del Fuego Edition, 1987); Crooked nails. From Ponticelli to Central Naples (Company of Troubadours, 2009); The dead hold no grudges. Foibas. The adventurous story of the Captain Goretti (Gaffi Publisher, 2011); Ferropolis (Castelvecchi Editore, 2017).
