Another cold and foggy morning, Berto thought absently, moving the duvet from his chest and feeling an icy shiver as his sweaty pajamas came into contact with the cold air of the bedroom. He thought better. It was no longer so obvious that winter mornings were supposed to be cold and foggy, given that the previous year it hadn't snowed even once and he had almost forgotten what the frost-covered fields looked like.
But now a whitish and milky light filtered through the window and he was sure that when he looked at the mountain he would find it covered in snow and thickly surrounded by dense clouds. And it was a good thing. The water crisis that had begun in the summer had continued into the autumn and had not yet been resolved. The melting of the snow would have refilled the dry springs and he wondered if those from SASI - the public company that took care of the water supply in the area - would continue with their evening closures. Some towns in the surrounding area didn't even have water at Christmas, and Berto hoped that sooner or later someone would get seriously pissed off. He hoped that someone would lose their shit and engage in some "demonstrative action".
Vain hopes. Those were a community of sheep people and the authorities were free to take a dump on their heads, and those people would have just looked up with mild eyes as if to say "Well, that's how it always goes, just another bucket of shit on our heads.”
But from what pulpit could Berto ever preach? Was he not himself a model sheep of that stupid flock?
With a grimace, Berto reached over to take his cell phone from the bedside table and took a glance at the day's news. As was to be expected, no one had set fire to the bins in front of the SASI headquarters, no one had scratched the president's car or anything like that. But among the local news, one managed to catch his attention.
A fisherman had found a body on the bank of the Sangro River, just beyond Brecciaio. A middle-aged man in hiking clothes. On the corpse, there was just a clean shot to the head. There was no clue as to his identity, the police were still carrying out their investigations.
Cool, Berto thought, placing the phone on the bedside table, while a stupid laugh echoed in his mind. As macabre as it was, that was the first exciting thing happening after months in that God-forsaken place.
Berto stretched his legs and took a deep breath. A stressful day awaited him. It was Friday, and he had several deliveries to make. But the evening would inexorably arrive and then he would enjoy a long, quiet weekend with his friends.
*****
Under the greenish-white streetlights of Umberto Primo Avenue, Berto's sports jacket, made of a synthetic material similar to rubber, glittered with reflected light. He liked that jacket a lot. It was warm and looked damn cyberpunk. It had a high collar of yellow fabric, it was made of striped black segments interwoven with red segments, and fluorescent yellow pendants hung from the zipper sliders.
Once upon a time, the street lights on the street had been orange - sodium lamps instead of LEDs - and they would have given his jacket an even cooler '80s look. A lot had changed since he was a child. Some shops had opened, and many more had closed. The square had changed its name: it was now named after the "Maiella Brigade" and he no longer remembered what it was called before. There had been a pine tree at the entrance to the square and they had cut it down, and there had been a petrol pump in the upper part of the square and they had closed it and replaced it with some very simple flowerbeds.
Not even the bar next to the petrol pump had completely escaped the flow of time. It had changed management and had been renovated, but the name had remained the same and even the slots where certain respectable workers spent their wages every single afternoon were still in the same place.
The Fraschetta bar, an institution of the small town.
Berto had grown up in that bar, and that wasn't hyperbole. When he was a child he bought there the slices of pizza he would eat at recess and as a teenager, he drank his first beers there. At times he had gotten so drunk he had to reach the nearby public toilets to puke his brains out. On Christmas Eve too many years ago in the park next to the bar he had kissed his first and only girlfriend. Gianna. They had both had more than a few shots of vodka and before kissing him she had said something like “I'm about to do something very stupid”.
They broke up a few months later and then Gianna was swallowed by mists very different from those that enveloped the buildings at the edge of the streets that evening. What the fuck had happened to Gianna after that, Berto didn't know. And she wasn't the only one. Countless faces that had hung around the Fraschetta bar had disappeared. Some had died, others had fled the province to work in the big cities, and others had just stopped coming. Berto and a few other diehards were still there.
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As Berto approached the step that led to the glass door of the bar, he couldn't help but dwell on that philosophical idea of fog. So soft, so nostalgic. So delicate but so distressing that it caught the breath in his throat. Berto was a prisoner of that bank of fog that enveloped the Sangro and Aventino valleys, and although he had the impression that Gianna was living a new and exciting life outside the fog, Berto could neither see nor reach her.
Or maybe he was just overthinking: the world was shit even outside that town with no water and streets full of potholes. A jumble of wars, famines, and wicked political choices. They were different hells: the one in which Berto lived was a type of hell that kills with an interminable and very boring agony.
Berto pushed the bar door open with his shoulder and entered with his hands in his pockets and a casual step. He was greeted with total indifference. The place was full of teenagers who would be skipping class the following day and old geezers who downed their beers or snored with their heads bowed on their enormous bellies.
None of his closest friends were there. It was to be expected: apart from him, everyone worked on Saturdays.
So Berto went to the counter, paid for a 66 cl Peroni beer and looked around for someone to chat with. At a small table on the sidelines sat all alone a crazy old man. Giovanni, called Vanni Bretella by the people of the town.
Even though many avoided the crazy guy, Berto liked him.
Of course, Vanni wasn't a nice person. He very seriously called himself a conservative, and this basically meant that he was racist, misogynistic, religiously bigoted and, even if Berto had not yet had the opportunity to explore his opinions in that specific field, he was probably also homophobic. He had a great passion for law enforcement and said he had been a financier. And then he was garrulous and fucking narcissistic. But in his own way Vanni was also good. He was the kind of person who could help a migrant in need by buying him lunch with the last money left of his disability pension while feeling visceral contempt.
The reason why Berto found Vanni entertaining was that Vanni had a whole series of bizarre theories and, if you had nothing better to do, listening to him for about twenty minutes could be an idea to turn the evening around. He was crazy after all, and probably forgot to take his pills more than once a week. He looked like a character from South Park.
To name a few of his weird conspiracy theories, Vanni believed that there was a demonic miasma that enveloped the industrial area of Atessa that possessed the workers forcing them to carry out obscene acts in public places, or that in the center of the city of Lanciano there was a secret club that had organized a pizzagate in Italian style.
Anticipating the moment when Vanni would reveal to him that in the woods of Palena there was a wild tribe dedicated to cannibalism of organs taken from unsuspecting tourists or something of the sort, Berto approached him with beer in hand and called him, “Hey Vanni! How come you're still at the bar at this time? It doesn't happen often!”
Vanni took his eyes off his mug of beer and looked into Berto's. In his pupils there was the crazy sparkle of his manic phases and his half-open mouth was bent downwards, like that of a bricklayer who stops halfway through the work to admire the work done up to that moment. “Berto, finally! Someone I can talk to! It's a miracle you're here tonight. It's God who sent you, I know,” Vanni slurred with comical seriousness.
“Huh?” Berto replied dumbfounded. The crazy old man had decided him to be the man of providence, and that was not a development Berto could have expected.
“Berto, something very serious happened today,” Vanni continued, agitated, “Do you know the man they found dead near the river? I knew him, he was a friend of mine. He had a hunting and fishing shop in Montemarconi, I went to see him every day.”
“Wait a second, pal. From what I know the man hasn't been identified yet, maybe you're wrong and –" Berto started to answer, but Vanni interrupted him by theatrically placing a local newspaper on the table, open to a specific article.
It was similar to the article Berto had already read on his phone, but here it was written that the man had been identified and that his name was Quintino Liberatore and he was from Montemarconi. Vanni was lucid after all and the guy was really dead.
“Fuck, I'm sorry Vanni… I don't know what to say,” Berto continued, trying to express all his dismay.
“The fact that I saw him, Berto. He's alive. Quintino is alive. I saw him this afternoon under the bridge between Altino and Piane D'Archi. I shit myself so I ran away, but it was him. I can swear to you on my mother, and you know how much I care about my mother,” Vanni explained, raising his voice about ten decibels. A couple of teenagers nearby stopped their makeout and turned to look at him.
“Huh?” Berto asked again, even more confused. Vanni certainly cared a lot about his mother, but no, he wasn't lucid for shit.
“It was him, damn it! He's resurrected I tell you! He was sitting on the gravel, under a pillar of the bridge!” Vanni screamed.
“Come on Vanni, don't be silly. His death struck a nerve and you seemed to recognize him, but he was a different person," Berto tried to explain to him in a reassuring voice.
“No, no… Berto, you don't understand, I repeat that it was him,” Vanni insisted with a trembling voice, “And I have to go back under that bridge, but I can't do it alone.”
Berto didn't know whether or not he liked where this was going. “And you want me to accompany you, right?”
Vanni just looked at him with wide eyes. Crazy eyes. He didn't even nod.
A trip on Vanni Bretella's legendary old white Fiat Panda. A wreck with seats encrusted by liquids of dubious origin whose odometer showed a number higher than two hundred and seventy thousand. “Arbre Magique” car air freshener and rosary and holy card of Padre Pio hanging from the rear-view mirror. Maximum travel speed: fifty kilometers per hour. Hell, yes, just what we needed on that boring Friday night.
Before Berto's brain could fully consider the implications of his choice, he replied, “I'm fucking in. Let's go and see what the dead man has to tell us!”