A solitary oil effigy hung on the wall. The outline of its pale features, once praiseworthy for the severity of its gesture, was blurred by the comforting gloom that reigned in the room. An opaque cerulean curtain of fine golden arabesques covered most of the only window that allowed access to natural light. With adequate brightness, one would have distinguished between the facial boundary of Abraham Rupert Spencer's long, straightened, atramentous hair, down to the collar of his white shirt, and the beginning of his onyx, shoulder-length, bushy beard. In his absent presence, the brown eyes of Oswell Ernest Spencer's father made their terribilità felt in his former office.

With his back to the bay window and in front of a wide oak desk ornamented with vegetal reliefs on its uprights and mythological scenes on its back, Oswell fantasized about emulating the way Abraham Spencer had sat managing his estate. As he would have done, he rested his arms on the velvet armrests. His attitude, however, was contemplative; glancing at a series of paintings and portraits. His father on the right, between two bookcases with glass doors, and a bucolic Patinir on the left, to the left of the antlers of a stag hanging over a finished baroque fireplace. A portrait of himself had been placed at the opposite end from his father to the right of the Patinir.

Oswell had admired his progenitor with deep delectation, being to him a virtuous benchmark who had managed both his family and his fortune with an iron hand. He was not particularly aggressive or affectionate. When his mother, Margaret, committed suicide, Abraham let the public know his sorrow with a brief semblance. Oswell was just ten years old. The day after her funeral, the widower sat back in his office chair without shedding a tear.

Oswell kept his emotions to himself in order to feign an imposture toughness to win his approval. His performance did not have much effect because he learned that Abraham's validation was earned by actions, not words or gestures. These actions were due to a very simple rule: the end justifies the means. The end was the prosperity of his lineage, Abraham's obsession, and the means of anything within his reach. On the sly, he began to analyze his father in relation to his subordinates. He memorized his way of speaking and, at times, came to imitate his gestures. However, because of his young age, he could not show him the fruits of his learning. He had no choice but to test himself at the boarding school he attended as a teenager.

He realized then that he was not as imposing as Abraham. Unlike Abraham, Oswell was a skinny kid and destined to be shorter in stature, well under a hundred and ninety centimeters. He lacked the cavernous tone of his voice, his stiff manner, the unpredictability of his character, and his fixation on taxing dismissal of the superfluous. On the contrary, Oswell stood out for his diplomatic and peaceful character. He remembered the smallest details and put understanding before inclemency. However, if there was one trait he inherited from his father and his father from his grandparents, it was impiety. No mercy, no forgiveness, they prayed in his lineage.

The first to experience the qualities cultivated by young Spencer was his roommate. That individual was an insufferable youngster who despised him because, he said, he was weak and effeminate. Abraham's first-born son hardly got more than the obligatory exercise and would spend the day reading alone or sneaking off to town, where the boarding school was located, to mingle with the small-time adults who worked in the local businesses. No one knew what the hell Oswell was doing with that rabble except himself.

A baker lit him his first cigarette and a housekeeper told him the gossip that his roommate had been seen licking the boots of another senior behind a shed. He returned to school first thing in the morning. He preened as best he could and reported to class. Before noon, he worked out his plan. With patience and guile, he ingratiated himself with the senior student who had forced his roommate to lick his boots over a superfluous argument. Oswell made up a rumor about how his roommate intended to humiliate the senior's manhood.

The senior beat up his roommate. The next day he left the dorm he shared with Spencer and was never heard from again. Because of his good friendships with the senior, Oswell became his protégé, becoming part of his circle of flunkies. Emboldened by the victory, he claimed intellectual authorship of the misdeeds committed by the select clique. He implicated himself in the suicide of a student and in the abuse of many others. He robbed the mayor's house and, with his share, bought his first carton of cigarettes. He grew an imperceptible beard and began to dress as he pleased, and not in the obligatory frock coat, much to the chagrin of the faculty. He graduated at the top of his class.

In '39, World War II broke out. Abraham contacted a British army general to have Oswell struck off the draft list and bought his escape ticket to the United States of America. There, in secret, he enrolled for a degree in physics, the discipline that had discovered cutting-edge phenomena such as radiation. Science was his vocation. The ability to transform matter at will fascinate him far more than a nondescript career in economics as Abraham demanded of him.

He loved his father, but his individuality won out. Taking advantage of Abraham's inability to travel because of the war, he disobeyed. Settling in California, he fell in love with a young woman with whom he accidentally got pregnant. He paid for her abortion and they separated. Two years before Germany's second capitulation, he received a telegram: Abraham was dead. Grief-stricken, he returned to Britain to preside over his funeral.

Numerous relatives and friends attended the mournful event. One of these friends, Arthur Ashford, Earl Ashford, was a scrawny, red-haired man who worked for Downing Street. Abraham met Arthur at a party hosted by a London tycoon in the mid-1920s. The tycoon was seeking donors for a charitable cause and the Ashfords, he was told, were eager to invest whatever they could to improve their public image in Northumberland. It seems that Arthur's father, an industrialist named Stanley, figured as a bogeyman in the Northumbrian imagination.

Ambivalent was Abraham's opinion of the Ashfords.

On the one hand, he saw Arthur as a self-serving jock who didn't give a damn about Britain, or England, regardless of the blue blood running in his veins. Once, drunk and in private, he accused him of being a traitor to the Crown. What was really happening was that Abraham was irritated by Earl Ashford's disdainful gaze and lukewarm academicist discourse. If Abraham demanded action and movement, Arthur appeared to be a typical bookworm who knew about the outside world from encyclopedia illustrations. On the other hand, Abraham found his guilty pleasure in that red-headed snobbishness. First, because of the detail that Arthur never patronized the Spencers when he learned that they came from the gentry. Second, Arthur worked in the propaganda section of the Foreign Office. Without stating his position, he claimed that he was responsible for ideologizing the population or inculcating the social mass with the official ideology of the state. Abraham enjoyed every word Arthur said on this matter, even if he did not quite understand what he was saying.

In '38, Abraham invited Arthur to The Spencer Estate, his manor house. Arthur introduced them to his own firstborn son, Edward, a thirty-something as fond of encyclopedias as his father. His second son, George, lived in the Borders. Edward was a budding college professor married with a son, while Oswell was a fifteen-year-old pubescent boy who had not finished school. Luckily, Edward acquitted himself as a lively, youthful-thinking fellow, able to make Abraham laugh with his jocularity.

He did not hear from the Ashfords again until Abraham's funeral. Arthur, accompanied by his wife Laurent, offered his heartfelt condolences and excused Edward's absence because of the illness of his son Alexander. The cause of death had been accidental lead poisoning.

Oswell returned to the United States of America as the third Earl Spencer. He broke up with his second lover and graduated in Physics. Repentant, he pursued a second degree in Economics. His second valedictorian speech was dedicated to his father. Back in England, he reopened the legacy office of his predecessor. As the second earl would have done, the third covered the old-fashioned desk with mountains of typed papers. The border of some of these papers bore the logo of a company: Anzec Pharma.

Anzec Pharma was his debut as head of the family. The Spencers were already dominant in the automotive industry, so he turned his attention to pharmaceuticals, which were booming with the rise of the welfare state in Europe. First, he opened a generic drug factory in London. Then a second one in New York. At the same time, he moved from Essex to Luxembourg, where he set up his tax residence. He alternated his room at The Spencer Estate with a cousin of his mother.

Because of the success of Anzec Pharma, Oswell had begun to ruminate on the idea of a more serious, bigger, more interesting project, but he needed advice. On the desk, he had laid out his address book. On one page he marked his lucky number: Edward Ashford.


Notes:

Terribilità is an Italian word that the contemporaries of the artist Michelangelo Buonarroti, in the 16th century, used to define the grandiose style and powerful force that the artist demonstrated especially in his sculptures, with a vigor and a terrible look full of anger as seen in the figure of David or in the Moses.

Jock: UK slang. A man who comes from Scotland. This word is considered offensive by some people.