I don't try to justify myself. I just want to clarify why I did what I did.
Spain was getting worse. He was delirious all day long. He didn't stop until he was taken to the monastery of El Escorial to die there, among reliquaries, tombs of old kings he once knew, in the room where centuries before his King Philip II, who he loved a lot, died. The worst thing is I couldn't say to him he was exaggerating. His people seemed to be wanting to see him dead, and those who defended him did it shyly. Our people organized protests in front of our house to hold what our governments had decided against us. They put in inside our mailboz a photo of the corpses of Mussolini and Petacci hanged upside down in Loreto, along with a threat. I couldn't stand Veneziano. Even though Austria had been mean to him when he was small, when he died he lamented it as if he was his own father. He couldn't find confort in his soul sister, the potato eater, because nobody had heard from him in a long time, and all that was known was that they had found his car wrecked and his bodyguard dead. His friend France didn't seem available either: he called him every hour and he never answered. The frog seemed to be dead too, because nobody could get in touch with him. He was anxious, depressed, and there was only one thing that could calm him down, and it wasn't pasta precisely. It was his girlfriend. She was with him all the time, caressing his hair, hugging him, telling him everything would be alright. It wouldn't, damn it! Things were in the deepest of shits!
I went to the market to have a stroll. Veneziano insisted and I couldn't prevent him from coming with me. He talked and talked; I didn't listen to any word he said. It was her girlfriend's duty to listen to her idiocies, not mine. I just watched the shop windows looking for some whim that could make me feel a little better. The idea of getting a bottle of whine and drinking it in the bathtub was tempting me. Alone. With a CD of Rafaella Carrà playing.
But those stronzi had to show up and ruin everything.
"Hey, you two" I told Fanelli and Veneziano. "Cut it off, everyone's looking at us."
"Hi!" was what my brother replied, waving his hand, the moron. Only Fanelli got embarrassed. She turned red.
"Truth is, Feli" Feli! Oh, come on!, "he is right, it's a bit embarrassing for me to go on public…"
"I like everyone to see the pretty ragazza I have" Veneziano said, and he melted her heart with that.
Disgusting. But the thing is they were not looking at us because of that.
"Hey, you!"
It was a man who stared at us from the door of a bar, where he was smoking a cigarette.
"You should be kicking out all those corrupts you have in the government, instead of mingling with the ladies, like letches."
Fanelli took the hint and blushed even more.
"How much do they pay you for going to bed with those two?" he asked her.
"Please, signor, you're mistaken" Veneziano told him with a lot of tact, but getting between him and Fanelli.
"Sure, sure. That's what you always say. It's a mistake. Nothing but a mistake. You're so nice, it's the Press, who manipulates everything. I am old and I know all of those. We break our backs working to pay for your hoes."
That hurt Veneziano. He didn't understand why they talked about his fianceé that way. He freezed up. I think he didn't know whether to react with sadness or fury. Fanelli wanted to get us out of there. Rocco was about to tell him something. But it had to be me the one who reacted.
"Listen, clown, leave us alone, will you?" I told him.
"Or else?" that fatso got cocky, approached me and touched my chest with those sausage fingers of his. "You are a scoundrel and a slaphappy who can't resist a fight against my five year-old granddaughter. You and your friends won't get alive to the next year."
I couldn't take a fight with his granddaughter, he said. Well, I could fight him. I could wreck him. And I showed him.
Everybody around him started to scream. People walked out of the shops and the bars to look. They recorded me with their phones. Those who came with me tried to hold me and try to make me reason but...as I said, I was fed up, and that imbecile got to drive me up the Wall. Rocco pushed me aside and some of that guy's friends took him to the other side.
The man's nose was bleeding. He glared at me.
"Fligio di un cane!" he exclaimed.
"You are un fligio di un cane!" I replied.
"Fratello!" Veneziano told me.
"Mr. Romano, please!" Rocco said.
"Let them be, soon they'll become nothing but dust to step on!" grunted one of the guy's friends.
"They're not worth it, these pieces of shit!" another one said.
"Maybe, but I still have time to beat you up, you swines!" I yelled.
They dragged me out of there. All the street was looking at us, and there was not even one sympathetic look.
"What an embarrassment!"
"And you represent us?"
"You jerks!"
"Die already!"
"Easy, easy" I heard Fanelli say to my brother. "Get out of the way! Move!"
"We'd better go home now" Rocco said. Fanelli agreed.
I only regret half of what I did. It is true I shouldn't have beaten him. But that idiot deserved it for insulting us.
Still, there was no necessity to follow us to the car.
We had just got in when they hit the glass. They were kids who weren't even involved. I don't know if they were relatives or what. But they were mad at us.
"You're gonna burn, you pigs!"
"Sons of bitches!"
Rocco came out to shoo them away. I got heated once again and did what I thought was the best at that momento. I jumped to the driver's seat and started the car. I knocked that gang over.
"Romano!" Veneziano exclaimed.
"Piss off!" I said.
We left them and Rocco behind. Some time after I found out that, after it, they made Rocco pay and he ended up in the hospital with eight stitches in the head. I am very sorry for him. It was a bad day. I made a lot of wrong decisions.
The people in front of us did nothing but scream. Some insulted us. That worsened my bad mood.
"Wait, where are you…?" Fanelli tried to ask, and I didn't reply.
I had no idea of where I was going, but far away from there, as far as possible. None of them two said anything until I stopped, after almost an hour driving. Not even I know where we were. It was the countryside, filled with olive grodes, where the roads were unmade. It was peaceful, but because it was far from the province. I got out of the car and breathed deeply. Veneziano and Fanelli got out too. I stood there, simply breathing deep, watching the sunset with my hands behind my head.
"You're not what they called you, Carlotta. I love you."
"Thank you, Feliciano. Don't listen to them, either."
"I'm not angry at them, you know? Surely it was just a bad day."
"Yes, surely it was that."
Veneziano's phone rang.
"Oh. It's a message from—Canada?"
"Canada? What is that?" I asked as I turned around.
"It's a picture. Hey, Romano, do we play the lottery in the UN?"
"What are you saying?"
"Those are not lottery numbers, they are coordinates" Fanelli said. "63º 36' 13.99'' North latitude, 19º 45' 38.538'' West Longitude."
"And what does that mean?" Veneziano asked.
"I'm not sure. Doesn't it come with a message?"
"Only an emoji. Two hands together."
"I don't get it" I said.
"It seems like a...request?" Fanelli conjectured.
Veneziano replied to the text asking Canada what they meant, but got no answer. It seemed they hadn't even received the message.
"What if we go there?"
Fanelli and I finally agreed on something: we both looked at Veneziano as if he had lost his mind.
"It seems he or she is asking us to go there."
"Wait a moment" Fanelli checked her phone. "Feli! It's Iceland! Those coordinates correspond to some place at the West of the isle!"
"Whatever it is, it seems important."
"Or maybe they sent it to the wrong person" I said. "Come on, man. We have more important things to think about."
"Well, I'm going there. You've always been better than I on thinking."
"Feli! But you don't even know what this is about!" Fanelli took his hands.
"What is sure is that I'm doing nobody a favor being here. It'd be better if I left for some time, don't you think? You don't have to come with me. It is me who got the text."
"And you think I'm going to let you do this crazy thing" Fanelli smiled "alone? You're my fiance. And my protegé. I won't leave you alone."
"Oh, Carlotta...Hey! This could be our pre-honeymoon!"
"Yes!"
"And you, Romano..."
"Yeah, sure! I'm going to stay where people throw stones at my head! What you're about to do is crazy...But it's even crazier to stay here with everything going on now. Alright. Okay. We will go. Maybe we're still in time to get a plane."
Had I known what I was getting myself into, I would have rushed back to the city to face the mob and I wouldn't have let Veneziano and Fanelli go there. Fuck, I would have jumped into the shark tank at the aquarium.
