Anna - Niccolo Ammaniti

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of the side window she saw the dark shape of the dog jump up.

      She climbed into the back and crouched down in the boot, but almost at once the suitcase she’d jammed in the rear window came crashing down on top of her, followed by the enormous dog. She fended him off, using the case as a shield, and searched for some kind of weapon. There was an umbrella under the seat. She grabbed it with both hands and held it out like a spear.

      The dog jumped into the back seat, snarling.

      She jabbed the tip of the umbrella into his neck, and blood spattered her face.

      The dog yelped, but didn’t retreat. He advanced along the seat, rubbing his filthy back against the ceiling.

      ‘I’m stronger than you!’ She stabbed him in the side. When she tried to pull the umbrella out, the handle came off in her hand.

      The dog lunged at her, the umbrella sticking out of his ribs. His teeth snapped shut a few centimetres from her nose. She smelled his warm putrid breath. Pushing him away with her elbows, she climbed over onto the front seat, falling among the woman’s bones.

      The dog didn’t follow. His coat plastered with blood and ash, his mouth dripping with red foam, he looked at her, turning his head as if trying to understand her, then swayed and collapsed.

      *

      Anna was singing a jingle she’d made up: ‘Here comes Nello, funny-looking fellow; his trainers are pink and his whiskers yellow.’

      Nello was a friend of her father’s; he drove over from Palermo now and then in a white van to bring her mother the books she needed. Though Anna had only seen him a few times, she remembered him well; he was a nice guy. She often thought about those whiskers.

      The sun had risen among streaky white clouds, shedding welcome warmth on her skin.

      She shifted the rucksack on her back. The dogs had torn at it, but hadn’t succeeded in getting it open. The bottle of Amaro Lucano hadn’t been broken.

      Before leaving, she’d taken one last look at the big dog from the door. He was still breathing hoarsely, his dirty coat rising and falling. She’d wondered whether she should put him out of his misery, but didn’t dare go any nearer. Better to leave him to die.

      She started down a road which ran alongside the A29 for a while before curving away towards the sea through a retail park. All that was left of the discount store where they used to buy food were the vertical supports and the iron frame of the roof. The Furniture House, where they’d bought the sofa and bunk bed, paying by instalments, had been burnt down. The white stone steps at the front were now covered with a thick layer of ash. The handsome flowerpots decorated with Moors’ heads had gone. Inside there were only the skeletons of a few sofas and a piano.

      Anna crossed the forecourt of a Ford salesroom lined with neat rows of burnt-out cars and walked out onto the fields. All that remained of the vineyards were some vine supports, stumps of olive trees and dry stone walls. A combine harvester near the ruins of a farmhouse looked like an insect, but with a full set of teeth. A plough seemed to be rooting in the earth like an anteater. Here and there shoots of fig trees appeared among black clods of soil, and light green buds could be seen on charred trunks.

      *

      The low modern structure of the De Roberto Elementary School floated on a black sea among waves of heat which seemed to bend the horizon. The basketball court behind the building was overgrown with grass. Fire had melted the backboards behind the hoops. The windows had lost their glass; inside, the desks, chairs and lino were covered with earth. A drawing of a giraffe and a lion by Daniela Sperno still hung on the wall of Anna’s classroom, 3C. The teacher’s desk was on the dais by the whiteboard. Some time ago Anna had opened the drawer and found the register, the little mirror with which Signorina Rigoni used to check the hairs on her chin, and her lipstick. Anna usually went in and sat at her old desk for a while. But this time she walked on by.

      *

      The ruins of the residential village Torre Normanna appeared in the distance. Two long straight roads like landing strips, lined with small terraced houses, formed a cross in the middle of the lowland area behind Castellammare.

      There was a sports club with two tennis courts and a swimming pool, plus a restaurant and a small supermarket. Most of her schoolmates had lived in this village.

      Now, after the looting and the fires, the pretty little Mediterranean-style houses were reduced to shells of concrete columns, heaps of roof tiles, rubble and rusty gates. In those that had escaped the fire, doors had been ripped off hinges, windows smashed, walls covered with graffiti. The roads were littered with glass from smashed car windows. The asphalt of Piazzetta dei Venti had melted and thickened, forming humps and bubbles, but the swings and slide of the children’s playground, and the big sign of the restaurant, ‘A Taste of Aphrodite’, featuring a purple lobster, were intact.

      She walked quickly through the village. She didn’t like the place. Her mother had always said it was inhabited by nouveau-riche bastards who polluted the soil with their illegal sewers. She’d written to a newspaper to complain about it. Now the nouveau-riche bastards were no longer there, but their ghosts peered out at her from the windows, whispering: ‘Look! Look! It’s the daughter of that woman who called us nouveau-riche bastards.’

      Outside the village she took a road which followed the bed of a dried-up stream at the foot of some round, bare hills that looked like pin-cushions, pierced as they were by vineyard props. Reeds grew thickly on both sides of the road, their plumes rising up against the blue sky.

      A hundred metres further on, she entered the cool shade of an oak wood. Anna thought this wood must be magical; the fire hadn’t succeeded in burning it, but had merely licked at its edges before giving up. Between the thick trunks the sun painted golden patches on the covering of ivy and on the dog roses that swamped a rickety fence. A gate opened onto a path overgrown by long-untrimmed box hedges.

      Just visible on a concrete post was a sign: ‘Mulberry Farm’.

      2

      Anna Salemi had been born in Palermo on 12 March 2007, the daughter of Maria Grazia Zanchetta and Franco Salemi.

      The couple had met in the summer of 2005. He was twenty-one and worked as a driver for Elite Cars, his father’s private taxi firm. She was twenty-three and studying Italian literature at the University of Palermo.

      They noticed each other on the ferry to the Aeolian Islands, exchanging glances among the crowd of tourists crammed on the deck. They disembarked on Lipari, with their separate groups.

      The next day they met again on Papisca beach.

      Maria Grazia’s friends rolled joints, read books and discussed politics.

      Franco’s friends, all male, played football, challenged each other to games of beach tennis and showed off the muscles they’d built up in the gym during the winter.

      Franco’s approach was pretty clumsy. He kept pretending to miskick the ball, moving it closer and closer to the beautiful girl sunbathing naked.

      Finally Maria Grazia said: ‘Stop kicking that ball around me. You want to talk to me? Come over here and introduce yourself, then.’

      He asked her out for a pizza. She got drunk and pushed him into the pizzeria toilets, where they made love.

      ‘I know we’re very different. But it’s through their differences that people complete each other,’ Maria Grazia confessed to a friend who was amazed she liked such a vulgar lout.

      Back in Palermo they continued to see each other and the next year she got pregnant.

      Franco was still living with his parents. Maria Grazia shared a room in a student flat and had an evening job at a wine bar in Piazza Sant’Oliva.

      The Zanchetta family lived in Bassano del Grappa, in northern Italy. Her father had a small business that manufactured hi-fi equipment and her mother taught in a primary school. Their daughter loved warm weather, the

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