Benzina
Gasoline. A man, a Harley, a gun in his bag, and a revenge that is not what it seems
Even a dead man can write a book. He can confess, he can take his revenge, but he does not notice the stars watching him, the same stars that are uselessly waiting outside the window tonight. In the half-light, blood looks a lot like ink.
The book
Rome, the fourth of June, midnight. Alfiere Nero, "Black Bishop", is chatting on Facebook with Paola, a woman who lives in a village in Umbria and cannot pick up her son from school tomorrow: the boy will walk home alone, eight or nine hundred metres. Alfiere Nero does not exist. He is the profile behind which Ruggero Landi, forty, tailored suits and a house with a Mercedes in the garage, has spent months winning that woman's trust with copied poems, because "poems love women, women love poetry, women love men who love poems". In the top drawer of the desk there is a cold shape with a smooth barrel. He will act tomorrow.
The novel is that tomorrow. Ruggero shaves to Metallica, pulls the cover off the Harley Davidson his father gave him fourteen years earlier, stops at a cemetery to look for a grave from 1972, and rides out along the Via Flaminia with the gun in his shoulder bag. On the road, as on every journey, the plan gets dirty with life: a petrol-station customer in a pink shirt spitting at the recession, a Romanian girl behind a bar counter, a jealous carabiniere, and Laura, the mechanic's daughter, who keeps Pessoa and Baudelaire on her girlhood dressing table and climbs onto the back of the bike. Then a dog with honey-coloured eyes at the bottom of a ditch, rain under a café's umbrellas, an abbey where time slows down, and a friar who has been waiting for something for forty years.
The revenge comes, but it is not the one the reader has imagined, nor the one Ruggero has told himself; and the envelope handed to a boy in a Dallas Cowboys tracksuit opens an ending in which every line of the book, the rainy robbery of 1972, the father in the blue blazer, the "cunning" country girl, the gasoline running out, closes on the others. Benzina is a sensory noir, alternating third-person narration with italic chapters in which Ruggero speaks in the first person, between the rage of Céline and the geometries of Borges, the two models the author names. The book is published in Italian only; the quotations below are English renderings, with page numbers from the 2021 Italian edition.
Quotations
Translated from the Italian. Page numbers refer to the 2021 edition.
Poems love women, women love poetry. Women love men who love poems. The next step is that men who write poems on women's walls are rated as sensitive, and sensitive men are nothing to be afraid of. Facebook is a gold mine, if you can put two words together.
If only it could wash my brain, my memories and the future, which is a pen forever dipped in the past.
The tie, I have always hated the tie. It always made me feel like a dog on a leash.
Why love Harley Davidsons? Perhaps because you feel like a god, on a reduced scale.
Beautiful, the broom stubbornly leaning out over the road and over life: it seems to wave its thin green arms and shake its flowers in a little wind. Strange thoughts, for someone who, before evening, will have killed somebody.
I am the edge of the road. Insignificant; I would mean something only if I got up from the chair and crossed the road without looking; the background would become the main subject of the painting, a cut in the canvas like Fontana's.
When you are shipwrecked, anything will do. At sea, on a raft, all you have is a handkerchief? Fine, you try to use it as a sail; it is all you have.
Ruggero thought of "lonely as a dog". So that was what it meant! To be at the side of a road, invisible, unable even to speak, unable to tell.
Teach me to love / You who did not flee the first fire. / Teach me to love / You who gave up insulting God / by fleeing the word.
When you approach an abbey, time seems to begin slowing down, as if a piece had been cut out of the rhythm of a great slow movement, a heart beating measured and solemn.
I feel like a ghost; no place should be identified by a name; a village is a village and that's all. Just as a man is a man and that's all.
What difference does it make, living half an hour more or less? Perhaps only this: the longer the gasoline lasts, the more you hope to die in a beautiful place, a beautiful place and in peace.
And when the day comes that you look at everything in the rear-view mirror, everything becomes one great missed opportunity.
You chased a ghost, you found a ghost, you found yourself.
Dante wrote that the damned know the future.
Chapters
Nineteen chapters, in the original Italian.
- Roma, 4 Giugno
- Domenica
- Mattino
- Laura
- Chilometro zero
- Il cimitero
- Il viaggio
- Il lavoro
- Dal meccanico
- Chilometro 100
- L'ombrellone
- Il cane
- Notte
- La fuga
- Mattino
- Vendetta
- Il viaggio finisce
- La Fine
- Elia
Where to read it. In Italian on Amazon (Kindle and paperback) · Goodreads · Apple Books. Italian page: Benzina.
How to cite
The author
Lucio Freni is an independent Italian writer based in Rome. His books span noir, dystopian satire, philosophical grotesque and epistolary fiction, and include Cronache dal Sistema, Il libro del Nulla, Non torna mai nessuno da quaggiù and È tutta colpa di Dio. All titles are published in Italian. Author record on Wikidata.