Numero Zero (3 page)

“All right, seeing that both of us are men without qualities—if you'll excuse the allusion—I accept the terms.”

“I like dealing with people who are loyal and say what they think.”

3

F
IRST MEETING WITH THE EDITORIAL STAFF.
Six, that should do.

Simei had told me I wouldn't have to traipse around doing bogus investigations, but was to stay in the office and keep a record of what was going on. And to justify my presence, this is how he started: “So gentlemen, let's get to know each other. This is Dottor Colonna, a man of great journalistic experience. He will work beside me, and for this reason we'll call him assistant editor; his main task will be checking all of your articles. Each of you comes from a different background, and it's one thing to have worked on a far-left paper and quite another to have experience of, let's say, the
Voice of the Gutter
, and since, as you see, we are a spartan few, those who have always worked on death notices may also have to write an editorial on the government crisis. It's therefore a question of uniformity of style and, if anyone is tempted to write ‘palingenesis,' then Colonna will tell you not to, and will suggest an alternative word.”

“Deep moral renewal,” I said.

“There. And if anyone is tempted to describe a dramatic situation by saying we're in the ‘eye of the storm,' I imagine Dottor Colonna will be just as quick to remind you that according to all scientific manuals, the ‘eye of the storm' is the place where calm reigns while the storm rages all around.”

“No, Dottor Simei,” I interrupted. “In such a case I'd say you should use ‘eye of the storm' because it doesn't matter what science says, readers don't know, and ‘eye of the storm' gives exactly the idea of finding yourself in the middle of it. This is what the press and television have taught them.”

“Excellent idea, Dottor Colonna. We have to talk on the same level as the reader, we don't want the sophisticated language of eggheads. Our proprietor once said that his television audience had an average mental age of twelve. That's not the case with us, but it's always useful to put an age on your readers. Ours ought to be over fifty, they'll be good, honest, middle-class folk, eager for law and order but desperate to read gossip and revelations about other people's misfortunes. We'll start off from the principle that they're not what you'd call great readers, in fact most of them won't have a book in the house, though, when they have to, they'll talk about the latest book that's selling millions of copies around the world. Our readers may not read books, but they are fascinated by great eccentric painters who sell for billions. Likewise, they'll never get to see the film star with long legs and yet they want to know all about her secret love life. Now let's allow the others to introduce themselves. We'll start with the only female . . . Signorina, or Signora . . .”

“Maia Fresia. Unmarried, single, or spinster, take your choice. Twenty-eight. I nearly graduated in literature but had to stop for family reasons. I worked for five years on a gossip magazine. My job was to go around the entertainment world and sniff out who was having an affair with whom and to get photographers to lie in wait for them. More often I had to persuade a singer or actress to invent a flirtation with another celebrity, and I'd take them to the appointment with the paparazzi, the two walking hand in hand, or taking a furtive kiss. I enjoyed it at first, but now I'm tired of writing such drivel.”

“And why, my dear, did you agree to join our venture?”

“I imagine a daily newspaper will be covering more serious matters, and I'll have a chance to make a name for investigations that have nothing to do with celebrity romance. I'm curious, and think I'll be a good sleuth.”

She was slim and spoke with cautious gaiety.

“Excellent. And you?”

“Romano Braggadocio.”

“Strange name, where's it from?”

“Ha, that's one of the many crosses I have to bear in life. Apparently it has a pretty unattractive meaning in English, though not in other languages. My grandfather was a foundling, and you know how surnames in such cases used to be invented by a public official. If he was a sadist, he could even call you Ficarotta, but in my grandfather's case the official was only moderately sadistic and had a certain learning. As for me, I specialize in digging for dirt, and I used to work for
What They Don't Tell Us
, one of our own publisher's magazines. I was never taken on full-time, they paid me per article.”

As for the other four, Cambria had spent his nights in casualty wards and police stations gathering the latest news—an arrest, a death in a high-speed pileup on the highway—and had never succeeded in getting any further; Lucidi inspired mistrust at first glance and had worked on publications that no one had ever heard of; Palatino came from a long career in weekly magazines of games and assorted puzzles; Costanza had worked as a subeditor, correcting proofs, but newspapers nowadays had too many pages, no one could proof everything before it went to press, and even the major newspapers were now writing “Simone de Beauvoire,” or “Beaudelaire,” or “Roosvelt,” and the proofreader was becoming as outmoded as the Gutenberg press. None of these fellow travelers came from particularly inspiring backgrounds—a
Bridge of San Luis Rey
—and I have no idea how Simei had managed to track them down.

Once the introductions were over, Simei outlined the different aspects of the newspaper.

“So then, we'll be setting up a daily newspaper. Why
Domani
? Because traditional papers gave (and still give) the previous evening's news, and that's why they called them
Corriere della Sera
,
Evening Standard
, or
Le Soir
. These days we've already seen yesterday's news on the eight o'clock television news the previous evening, so the newspapers are always telling you what you already know, and that's why sales keep falling.
Domani
will summarize the news that now stinks like rotten fish, but it will do so in one small column that can be read in a few minutes.”

“So what will the paper cover?” asked Cambria.

“A daily newspaper is destined to become more like a weekly magazine. We'll be talking about what might happen tomorrow, with feature articles, investigative supplements, unexpected predictions . . . I'll give you an example. There's a bomb blast at four in the afternoon. By the next day everyone knows about it. Well, from four until midnight, before going to press, we have to dig up someone who can provide something entirely new about the likely culprits, something the police don't yet know, and to sketch out a scenario of what will happen over the coming weeks as a result of the attack.”

Braggadocio: “But to launch an investigation of that kind in eight hours, you'd need an editorial staff at least ten times our size, along with a wealth of contacts, informers, or whatever.”

“That's right, and when the newspaper is actually up and running, that's how it will have to be. But for now, over the next year, we only have to show it can be done. And it
can
be done, because each dummy issue can carry whatever date we fancy, and it can perfectly well demonstrate how the newspaper would have treated it months earlier when, let's say, the bomb had gone off. In that case, we already know what will fall, but we'll be talking as though the reader doesn't yet know. So all our news leaks will take on the flavor of something fresh, surprising, dare I say oracular. In other words, we have to say to our owner: this is how
Domani
would have been had it appeared yesterday. Understood? And, if we wanted to, even if no one had actually thrown the bomb, we could easily do an issue
as if
.”

“Or throw the bomb ourselves if we felt like it,” sneered Braggadocio.

“Let's not be silly,” cautioned Simei. Then, almost as an afterthought, “And if you really want to do that, don't come telling me.”

After the meeting I found myself walking with Braggadocio. “Haven't we already met?” he asked. I thought we hadn't, and he said perhaps I was right, but with a slightly suspicious air, and he instantly adopted a familiar tone. Simei had established a certain formality with the editorial staff, and I myself tend to keep a distance from people, unless we've been to bed together, but Braggadocio was eager to stress that we were colleagues. I didn't want to seem like someone who puts on airs just because Simei had introduced me as editor in chief or whatever it was. In any event, I was curious about him and had nothing better to do.

He took me by the arm and suggested we go for a drink at a place he knew. He smiled with his fleshy lips and slightly bovine eyes, in a way that struck me as vaguely obscene. Bald as von Stroheim, his nape vertical to his neck, but his face was that of Telly Savalas, Lieutenant Kojak. There—always some allusion.

“Cute little thing, that Maia, no?”

I was embarrassed to admit that I'd hardly looked at her. I told him I kept my distance from women. He shook my arm: “Don't play the gentleman, Colonna. I saw you watching her on the sly. I think she'd be up for it. The truth is, all women are up for it, you just have to know which way to take them. A bit too thin for my taste, flat boobs, but all in all, she'd do.”

We arrived at Via Torino and made a sharp turn at a church, into a badly lit alley. Many doors there had been shut tight for God knows how long, and no shops, as if the place had long been abandoned. A rancid smell seemed to hang over it, but this must just have been synesthesia, from the peeling walls covered in fading graffiti. High up was a pipe that let out smoke, and you couldn't work out where it came from, since the upper windows were bricked up as though no one lived there anymore. Perhaps it was a pipe that came from a house that opened on another side, and no one was worried about smoking out an abandoned alley.

“This is Via Bagnera, Milan's narrowest street, though not as narrow as Rue du Chat-qui-Pêche in Paris, where you can't walk along side by side. They call it Via Bagnera but once it was called Stretta Bagnera, and before that Stretta Bagnaria, named after some public baths that were here in Roman times.”

At that moment a woman appeared around a corner with a stroller. “Either reckless or badly informed,” commented Braggadocio. “If I were a woman, I wouldn't be walking along here, especially in the dark. They could knife you as soon as look at you. What a shame that would be, such a waste of a pert little creature like her, a good little mother happy to get fucked by the plumber. Look, turn around, see how she wiggles her hips. Murderous deeds have taken place here. Behind these doors, now bricked up, there must still be abandoned cellars and perhaps secret passages. Here, in the nineteenth century, a certain artless wretch called Antonio Boggia enticed a bookkeeper into downstairs rooms to check over some accounts and attacked him with a hatchet. The victim managed to escape, and Boggia was arrested, judged insane, and locked up in a lunatic asylum for two years. As soon as he was released he was back to hunting out rich and gullible folk, luring them into his cellar, robbing them, murdering them, and burying them there. A serial killer, as we'd say today, but an imprudent one, since he left evidence of his commercial transactions with the victims and in the end was caught. The police dug down in the cellar, found five or six bodies, and Boggia was hanged near Porta Ludovica. His head was given to the anatomical laboratory at the Ospedale Maggiore—it was the days of Cesare Lombroso, when they were looking at the cranium and facial features for signs of congenital criminality. Then it seems the head was buried in the main cemetery, but who knows, relics of that kind were tasty morsels for occultists and maniacs of all kinds . . . Here you can feel the presence of Boggia, even today, like being in the London of Jack the Ripper. I wouldn't want to spend the night here, yet it intrigues me. I come back often, arrange meetings here.”

From Via Bagnera we found ourselves in Piazza Mentana, and Braggadocio then took me into Via Morigi, another dark street, though with several small shops and decorative entrances. We reached an open space with a vast parking area surrounded by ruins. “You see,” said Braggadocio, “those on the left are Roman ruins—almost no one remembers that Milan was once the capital of the empire. So they can't be touched, though there isn't the slightest interest in them. But those ruins behind the parking lot are what remains of houses bombed in the last war.”

The bombed-out houses didn't have the timeworn tranquility of those ancient remains that now seemed reconciled with death, but peeped out sinisterly from their grim voids as though affected by lupus.

“I don't know why there's been no attempt to build in this area,” said Braggadocio. “Perhaps it's protected, perhaps the owners make more money from the parking lot than from rental houses. But why leave evidence of the bombings? This area frightens me more than Via Bagnera, though it's good because it tells me what Milan was like after the war. Not many places bring back what the city was like almost fifty years ago. And this is the Milan I try to seek out, the place where I used to live as a child. The war ended when I was nine. Every now and then, at night, I still seem to hear the sound of bombing. But not just the ruins are left: look at the corner of Via Morigi, that tower dates back to the 1600s, and not even the bombs could bring it down. And below, come, there's this tavern, Taverna Moriggi, that dates back to the early 1900s—don't ask why the tavern has one
g
more than the road, the city authority must have gotten its street signs wrong, the tavern is much older, and that should be the correct spelling.

We walked into a large room with red walls and a bare ceiling from which hung an old wrought-iron chandelier, a stag's head at the bar, hundreds of dusty wine bottles along the walls, and bare wooden tables (it was before dinnertime, said Braggadocio, and they still had no tablecloths . . . later they'd put on those red-checked cloths and, to order, you had to study the writing on the blackboard, as in a French brasserie). At the tables were students, old-fashioned bohemian types with long hair—not in the '60s style but that of poets who once wore broad-brimmed hats and
lavallière
cravats—and a few old men in fairly high spirits; it was difficult to tell whether they had been there since the beginning of the century or whether the new proprietors had hired them as extras. We picked at a plate of cheeses, cured meats, and
lardo di Colonnata
, and drank some extremely good merlot.