Read A Little Lumpen Novelita for Free Online

seven-story buildings. There was a tall metal gate. The shutters were closed, as if no one lived there. The paint on the façade was peeling in places, which made the place look even more neglected, if possible. And yet as we walked up to the door, we didn’t see mail on the ground or trash in the garden, which meant that someone did come occasionally to clean. Sometimes Maciste made an appearance at a gym on Via Palladio, according to the Bolognan, and sometimes someone was sent from the gym to fix a piece of Maciste’s exercise equipment.
    “In there,” said the Bolognan as we were leaving, “he has a huge private gym set up just for him. Once I came with another guy to fix a weight rack and we got to be friendly. I came back twice, but I couldn’t get past the door. Maciste doesn’t trust anybody.”
    Then, as we talked that afternoon about what we would do, they told me that for a while, probably before my brother and I were born, Maciste had been a movie star and his movies were seen all over the world. Then he’d had the accident and retired, and after that he’d gradually been forgotten.
    But Maciste wasn’t the kind of person who’s easy to forget. I, for one, know I’ll never forget him. No matter what happens, I’ll never forget him.

IX

 
    His real name was Giovanni Dellacroce. This was something that neither the Bolognan nor the Libyan knew (let alone my brother, who because of his age and lack of skills plays a marginal role here, I’m afraid). His stage name was Franco Bruno. People called him Mr. Universe, because he had won the title twice in the early sixties, or Maciste, which was the name of the character he played in four or maybe five movies, all huge hits in Italy and around the world. He was born in Pescara, but had lived in Rome since he was fifteen, in Santa Loreto, a suburb that he thought of as home and for which he was sometimes nostalgic, though when luck was on his side, he bought the big house on Via Germanico where I met him the night I was brought there.
    A night that was like high noon in August and was one of the strangest nights in my life.
    The Bolognan rang the bell several times. A voice over an intercom asked who was there.
    “Friends,” said the Bolognan. No answer. The intercom might as well have been broken. After a while he rang again and said the name of the gym and the name — or so I thought I understood — of a mutual friend, and as if this weren’t enough, he announced our full names, mine included.
    Then the gate opened and we were let into the little garden where even at night the plants struggled for scarce living space. More than a garden, it was like a cemetery.
    There were three stone steps up to the porch. For a long time we stood there waiting for someone to open the door.
    The tension on the faces of my brother’s friends, the tension and at the same time the joy, a primordial joy, pure and unwavering, is one of the things that comes back to me whenever I remember that night, and each time it does I try to brush it away, because it’s a joy that I want neither for myself nor anywhere near me. It’s a joy that comes too close to beggarliness, an explosion of beggarliness, and also to cruelty, indifference.
    Then the door opened and we got a glimpse of a dark threshold where I seemed to see a shadow move very quickly, and a foyer, also dark, into which we stepped and out of which we backed like frightened children entrusted with a mysterious responsibility, and into which we stepped again, sheepishly, and out of which we inevitably backed again, until I took three steps inside, this time alone, and bumped into a piece of furniture and asked whether anyone was there.
    A voice — Maciste’s — told me to stay where I was, not to move forward or back, and then he greeted my brother’s friends, hello, how are you? And in that brief
how are you
I sensed an incredible fragility, a fragility like a manta ray falling from the ceiling, the dark foyer