Bruno Arpaia: »Something, out there«
Translated by Brian R. Moore »Qualcosa, là fuorri« (Guanda, 2016)
Translated by Brian R. Moore
»Qualcosa, là fuorri« (Guanda, 2016)
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<strong>Bruno</strong> <strong>Arpaia</strong>:<br />
<strong>»Something</strong>, <strong>out</strong> <strong>there«</strong> (Excerpts)<br />
Translated by Brian R. Moore<br />
<strong>Bruno</strong> <strong>Arpaia</strong>, born in Ottaviano (Naples, Italy) in 1957, he<br />
now lives in Milan. Graduate in Political Science, he’s a journalist,<br />
an editorial consultant, and a researcher and translator<br />
of Spanish and Latin American literature. He has written<br />
seven novels so far. Qualcosa, là fuori, published by Guanda<br />
in 2016, is a novel set in an international scenario modified by<br />
climate change. His latest novel, Il fantasma dei fatti, was published<br />
in 2020 by Guanda. His work has been translated into<br />
Spanish, Catalan, French, English, Dutch, Greek, Portuguese<br />
and Korean and it has won numerous awards, including the<br />
Campiello Selection, the Comisso Award and the Naples Prize.
Maybe it was a fire, or perhaps a lantern, that reddish flickering at the top of the hill. If<br />
the dark mass that he could make <strong>out</strong> in the east was actually a hill. It stood blacker than<br />
the darkness surrounding it, a thick, oozing dark with<strong>out</strong> shades. Livio looked around,<br />
uselessly scanning the night; only his other senses made him aware of the multitude of<br />
bodies lying down next to him on the dry and dusty earth. When he pulled <strong>out</strong> the binoculars<br />
and faced them to the east, there was not a trace left of that flickering, not even an<br />
afterglow. He might have been mistaken, and he might have been the only one who had<br />
seen it, but he had to tell the guides right away anyway, even if he was dead tired, if he<br />
couldn’t manage to get up, if he was thirsty, cold and hungry.<br />
Above him in the night sky, he saw a new moon and clouds that hid the light of the stars.<br />
The same unmoving clouds that for months and months – since they had begun their<br />
journey – had soaked their days in gray, in dull colors and thick, hot air, while the nights<br />
were tinted with an endless darkness, solid and icy. He let himself fall back on his back<br />
and closed his eyes as he rested his head in the dust. Five minutes, he whis-pered to<br />
himself, five minutes and I’ll go.<br />
The first thing he found in front of him when he reopened his eyes was the tangle of curly<br />
hair of a little girl bent over him, then two dry and cracked lips that greeted him.<br />
“Good morning.”<br />
“Good morning,” he murmured.<br />
Only then did he realize that in the meantime, it had actually become morning, that<br />
behind the girl’s face a line of feeble light was already daubing the sky above the ridges.<br />
“You were sh<strong>out</strong>ing,” the girl said, “I got worried.”<br />
Livio nodded and got up on his elbows. The people around him were waking up. Some<br />
were yawning, while others stretched or walked around, hitting their feet hard to knock<br />
the night’s cold <strong>out</strong>. The unvarying color of dust on their bodies and their clothes made<br />
them look like an ochre sea, tossed by waves as unrestrained as the curls he still had in<br />
front of him, as those dark eyes that asked him if everything was okay.<br />
“Oh yeah, was just a bad dream… Thank you, in any case.”<br />
“My name’s Sara,” she said, getting back to her feet.<br />
“I’m Livio. Thank you again.”
“Everything is all right now? If you need anything, I’m four rows back.”<br />
He saw her move away through the crowd, climb over a couple of sleeping children and<br />
disappear behind the tank car. Only then did he remember that light at the top of the hill.<br />
He got up with some difficulty, rolled back his multilayered compressed camp bed, put<br />
it in his backpack and looked to the sides of the encampment. Where had those damn<br />
guides gone to? Yasmina, Blanca, Selam, Thérèse, Irina… any one from their unit would<br />
do. He went on examining the area with his eyes as he drank his ration of water, trying<br />
to savor every drop fully. He would save his breakfast bar for later though. He closed<br />
his backpack, loaded it onto his shoulders and set off in search of the guides toward the<br />
filtration tanks, passing the first four groups, up to the area that divided his unit from the<br />
fifteenth one. It was at that point that he saw them: a clump of light blue uniforms covered<br />
in dust under the large guard tent. They were arguing, but he couldn’t hear them.<br />
When he tried to get closer, a look<strong>out</strong> came from behind a tank and stopped him, pointing<br />
an old pistol at his chest.<br />
“Halt! This is off limits. You have to go back in line.”<br />
He tried to insist: “I’m bringing a message. It’s urgent.”<br />
“For who?”<br />
“For one of the guides, any one of them from my unit… The sixteenth.”<br />
“No, no, can’t be done. I told you to turn around and go back,” and he kept his weapon<br />
pointed at Livio as he walked backwards a couple steps with his arms in the air – okay, all<br />
right, don’t worry, I’m going – until he turned around and headed off: but slowly,<br />
looking back every now and then to check what was happening under the tent. He stopped<br />
on a bump in the earth, in basically a no-man’s-land between the units, and turned<br />
to watch. From there he could still see the guides who were gesticulating, the explorers<br />
who were coming and going with their threadbare camouflage <strong>out</strong>fits, the look<strong>out</strong>s who<br />
were gathering together and then went to their places at the sides of the column. Someone,<br />
seeing them pass by, complained: why haven’t they given any orders?, what’s happening?,<br />
we should already be on the move by now.<br />
Livio went back to his place, the fourth of the sixth line, between Ms. Vargas with her<br />
son and old Aziz. A few minutes after, they heard some quick orders, and the column
trembled as in a shudder and started moving again toward the north. There were maybe<br />
tens of thousands of them, a three-kilometer-long centipede, slowly advancing along a cracked<br />
plane that seemed to have no end. Under their feet, the earth crumbled into a fine,<br />
yellowish powder, which rose and fell with their steps, covering up their footprints. Here<br />
and there contorted metallic structures loomed like bramble bushes, and abandoned farming<br />
machinery formed sharp-boned sculptures. They crossed whole fields covered by the<br />
carcasses of livestock, their hands on their noses because of the stench. Then, finally, they<br />
found a paved path. It must have been an old country road. It was half-covered in dust, but it<br />
was easier to walk on the asphalt. The guides signaled to head more to the northwest, and<br />
after midday, they reached a small town. Chignolo, it was called. The name was written on<br />
a rusted sign riddled with bullet holes.<br />
“Halt!” ordered Yasmina, when the explorers gave the go-ahead.<br />
There were sh<strong>out</strong>s, gasps, but the column stopped all the same. Livio looked around. Ahead<br />
and behind him he saw only heads, arms, shoulders and tanks. The side of the road was<br />
strewn with empty cans and large tins. Rows of abandoned vehicles were parked under the<br />
dead plane trees and there was earth, still dry earth, covering the seats and the car bodies.<br />
In the large openings of former fields, garbage bonfires burned with no one to keep an eye<br />
on them, while dark rivulets of smoke wandered above the roofs of the houses. Who knew<br />
what they would find in Milan… Maybe the guides would avoid passing through it. In the cities<br />
there were still gangs ready to attack them. Livio shook his head: this journey of theirs<br />
was an almost desperate undertaking, and yet, the only possibility was to keep marching<br />
north. Getting all the way to Scandinavia – if they managed to survive – would still take<br />
many months, but by now they had no other choice.<br />
“An hour break,” the guides sh<strong>out</strong>ed. Livio sat down on the ground and took <strong>out</strong> his breakfast<br />
bar. He had his two m<strong>out</strong>hfuls looking at the sun as it glimmered in the sky behind the<br />
faint grey of the clouds, spreading a muted, gelid light. For a moment, he almost felt an urge<br />
not to get back up, to stay there to die, to become dust too, like all the others who had already<br />
been left behind. But, instead, when the order to move came, he got back to his feet. He<br />
looked around, clapped his hand on old Aziz’s back, and started walking again.<br />
(...)
It happened in October. Leila remembered it well, because they were the days when a<br />
strange polar storm had sent the temperature plummeting all the way to ten degrees below<br />
zero, levels that were unheard of in California. Even if the climatologists went on repeating<br />
that it was another effect of global warming, deep down people hoped that the cold<br />
meant the beginning of a change in direction, a symptom of things going back to normal.<br />
It was not. Meanwhile, violent waves were beating against the coasts, and, when it wasn’t<br />
raining, gusts of icy wind swept over the roads. Ahmed called her one night, after dinner.<br />
It had barely stopped snowing <strong>out</strong>side, and the still spotless blanket was glistening under<br />
the light of the streetlamps along the avenues of Stanford.<br />
“Dad says that, well… if you two come back to Italy and get married, he’ll forgive you.”<br />
Leila did not respond for a couple seconds. She limited herself to staring at him, her eyes<br />
like two thin strips, her breath cut short.<br />
“What? What did you say?” she eventually asked.<br />
“Come on… You understood. And don‘t look at me like that. I’m only a messenger…”<br />
“Ah, he’ll forgive me? And for what? For coming here to do the work that I like, for being<br />
with the person I love? And did your father think ab<strong>out</strong> what we would do in Italy? He’ll<br />
take all of us to work in his store?”<br />
“He’s closed the store,” Ahmed mumbled.<br />
Leila turned her eyes away from the built-in screen in her glasses and looked <strong>out</strong>side. A<br />
bundled up man and a dog were walking hurriedly while light snow started to fall again,<br />
passing slowly through the dark on the other side of the glass. There was something definitive,<br />
irreparable ab<strong>out</strong> that silence.<br />
“How long ago?”<br />
“Four or five months. It was getting more and more difficult to stock, it had already been<br />
held up a couple of times, and he was spending more time at the bar or at the<br />
mosque than behind the register.”<br />
“Why didn’t you tell me?”<br />
“What would have been the use? It only would have made you worry…”<br />
“And you, what are you doing now?”<br />
“Me? Nothing, for now… But Juan de Fonseca might have me work in his workshop soon.”
When they ended the call, Leila was furious. What a tyrant her father was, and how pigheaded.<br />
Right after, however, her rage was joined by her concern for him and her brother,<br />
and then in her head peeked <strong>out</strong> a feeling of guilt because she was living the good<br />
life at Stanford while her family was sinking into chaos and poverty.<br />
A couple days later, when the temperature had gone back up and the heat had begun to<br />
envelope them again – just as suddenly as it had left some time before – Leila and Livio<br />
were sitting sunk into the couch and had the solar-battery fans blasting at full force, dazed<br />
by a heat that was so draining it seemed it had been dragged there to die. Their eyes<br />
were tired, their faces sticky, and they were discussing the possibility of giving a more<br />
concrete hand to their relatives, of saving up to send some dollars to Italy every month.<br />
“But we can’t also cut back on the scientific reviews…” Livio was saying.<br />
It was then that the virtual reality projector turned on with a buzz, and following the<br />
national anthem, there emerged in their living room a female figure, President Bradley.<br />
First the glow of a tracer flew over them, lighting up the night with a harsh flash, then<br />
they heard the first grenade. It wasn’t from a mortar, but it was an aimed, slightly sidelong<br />
shot. Livio also threw himself to the ground and heard it passing over his head with<br />
the sound of ripping fabric and explode by the shopping mall ab<strong>out</strong> a hundred meters<br />
away.<br />
“Stay down, stay down!” Aziz yelled.<br />
Now the firing was coming from every direction. To the right and to the left, they heard<br />
the crackling of a dozen machine guns and the deep blows of a couple mortars. Aziz had<br />
been right, it was a trap. Those looters must have been following them since Italy, from<br />
when Livio had seen the first lights behind the hills. He raised his head up a bit and glimpsed<br />
a handful of blue uniforms running in single file to take cover behind a wall. From<br />
there they shot blindly, responding to the blasts with<strong>out</strong> knowing where to aim. He could<br />
make <strong>out</strong> some of his companions’ face from the tracers flickering in the dark. They<br />
looked like they were the passengers on the Titanic: horrified, disbelieving. Something<br />
like this couldn’t happen, not to them… Then fear got the better of them. Panic, yelling,<br />
people moving frantically through volleys of shots and explosions.
“I’m going to retrieve Miguel and Ms. Vargas,” Aziz sh<strong>out</strong>ed at him.<br />
Livio reached <strong>out</strong> his arm, but it was already too late to stop him. He watched him get up<br />
and run at breakneck speed, disappearing amid the darkness and the violent twinkling<br />
of gunfire. Now he was left alone with Marta and Sara, who had remained on their backs<br />
next to him, their arms on their heads, terrified. He was crawling to get closer and protect<br />
them with his own body when the apartment block in front of them lifted silently,<br />
vibrating in an orange blaze. Livio didn’t hear any noise, he only felt the impact of a blast<br />
of thick, almost solid air, which hit him in the chest and in the ear drum and rumbled<br />
back in his head and through his lungs; only after did the boom come, and the building<br />
collapsed into fire and smoke, while earth and plaster came falling from the sky.<br />
“Hey, are you all in one piece?” he yelled, with<strong>out</strong> hearing himself.<br />
It took some time for him to get his hearing back, for him to see Sara and Marta moving<br />
in the soil that covered them, but he only needed to think with his eyes, to put together<br />
the points of the already hit targets to understand that the next shot would be for them.<br />
Now he could sense the crying of the wounded, the calls for help, the frenzied orders of<br />
the guides, the smell of burnt flesh mixing with the odor of smoke and dust. He needed<br />
to do something, to get moving. He got to his feet and helped Marta and Sara stand up,<br />
then he ran with them toward a dilapidated stairway that led down to what seemed to be a<br />
cellar. They slipped into the building as explosions shook the walls and made the shards<br />
of glass tremble in the emptied window frames that ran along overhead, just below the<br />
roof of the building. For a moment, the flickering of a tracer lit up the gloom of broken<br />
plastic chairs, heaps of busted boxes, unusable tools and mattresses, folded up umbrellas,<br />
piles of old paper books. Then there was darkness again.<br />
“Quick, over here!” Livio said.<br />
They hid themselves behind two nearly decomposed mattresses. The stench was unbearable.<br />
Another extremely close explosion, the one intended for them, sent the whole<br />
building rocking. Then a tracer lit Sara’s face purple, and Livio saw the horror branded<br />
onto her pupils, as they heard shuffling feet, yelling and shooting coming closer and closer.<br />
He covered her m<strong>out</strong>h with one hand and stroked her hair with the other.<br />
“Shhh,” he whispered.
When the steps and the firing had moved away, Livio risked taking a look <strong>out</strong> from the<br />
crack between the two mattresses: everything seemed calm in there, even if the shots<br />
and the blasts were still going on <strong>out</strong>side. He stayed still for another minute, then he<br />
cautiously stood up, snuck to the window and got on his toes to see <strong>out</strong>side. Out there<br />
were people dressed in tatters, roaming through the camp wildly and hungrily, shooting<br />
at everything that moved; <strong>out</strong> there was a huge, bald type going around with a grenade<br />
launcher, there were hundreds of armed men and women, there were long beards and<br />
tattoos, there were women from the command group moving forward protected by two<br />
cordons of veterans, there was the bitter odor of dust, there was a veil of smoke that<br />
burned the eyes, there were corpses and blood. It was enough to make Livio turn back,<br />
shaking, and take refuge behind the mattresses. He waited in silence, squeezing Marta<br />
and Sara’s hands.<br />
The nightmare might have lasted another half-hour, but to them it felt like an eternity.<br />
And in that eternity, Livio could only think obsessively ab<strong>out</strong> two things: first, that emotions<br />
alter the temporal perception of the brain, that fear slows down time, and it was therefore<br />
normal that he had the impression that the minutes never passed; second, that in<br />
the end, besides their weapons, those people weren’t so different from them. He thought<br />
them over and over again, those two thoughts, as if they were a protective suit, a defensive<br />
barrier to shield him from being overcome by further distress. Until, all of a sudden,<br />
a strange silence fell, punctuated only with the sh<strong>out</strong>s and cries of the wounded and the<br />
first orders from the guides. After a little more time in his hiding spot, Livio recognized<br />
Blanca’s voice, then Selam’s, and only then did he decide to come <strong>out</strong>, to face the door<br />
and go back up the stairs, followed by Marta and Sara close behind. They both had damp<br />
eyes, but they forced themselves to hide it so as not to burst into tears.<br />
The night was still night, but an incomprehensible crescent moon had raised itself above<br />
the devastation, seeping into the haze that hovered over what was left of the encampment.<br />
In the thick air, the smell of burnt and blood floated stagnantly due to the lack<br />
of wind. In the trembling light of the fires that burned here and there amid the rubble,<br />
Livio, Marta and Sara roamed through the open space like sleepwalkers, tripping over<br />
the dead, calling <strong>out</strong> to Aziz and Ms. Vargas, their eyes searching for the guides’ blue uni-
forms. The first one they met was Thérèse, who had been wounded in her leg. Her face<br />
was filthy with dirt and blood, and she was lying next to an elderly woman. The woman’s<br />
dress was lifted obscenely high on thighs covered in bluish veins, and her burst head was<br />
lying in a pool of blood. Marta planted herself in front of Sara, she hugged her and turned<br />
her away to make her not look.<br />
“She doesn’t need anything any more,” Thérèse said, pointing to the woman with her<br />
chin. “And I don’t need anything either. It would be better if you take care of the others.<br />
When Rocío passed by, he said that he would set up a first aid station in the factory<br />
entrance… But come back to get me after…”<br />
They spent the rest of the night looking for wood, camp beds, paper and trashcans to<br />
light up the infirmary, building emergency stretchers, gathering old fabrics to use as<br />
bandages, carrying the wounded; until the dawn began to cover some of the sky in white,<br />
mercilessly illuminating every corner of the calamity. They continued to work, but they<br />
kept having to fight back the nausea, the b<strong>out</strong>s of horror and dejection, hiding the relief<br />
that it hadn’t been them.<br />
Sara was the one who found old Aziz. He was still alive when Livio and Marta reached<br />
her. He was lying against a wall, curled up onto himself, and he wasn’t even complaining<br />
any more. He had been taking the whole night to die. He must have been hit several<br />
times at the beginning of the attack when he had gone to search for Miguel and Vargas.<br />
He had probably kept running after the first bullet, as if he hadn’t felt that blow to the<br />
back that would have left him breathless, seeing as he had left a trail of blood behind him.<br />
After the second shot, he must have yelled, but perhaps his voice didn’t come <strong>out</strong>. He was<br />
brought down by the third bullet. Then he must have managed to lean against that wall<br />
and, in some mysterious way, escaped the mercy shots of the looters. Now he was dying<br />
in silence, slowly. His breathing, which was becoming progressively weaker and more<br />
labored, finally passed in a gurgle of his own blood that clogged his throat.<br />
Up above their heads, the light of that ghastly dawn widened in the sky with a bluing<br />
malice, pinning them down like lost and motionless objects, left on the earth’s crust by<br />
travelers from another planet. After a long breather, Marta closed his eyes and they carried<br />
him all the same to the infirmary, even if it was now useless.
They had just settled him in the middle of the other bodies, which had been thrown<br />
pell-mell into the square, when Miguel saw them. He was beside the guides, at the first<br />
aid point, and he called to them. Just in time, Livio thought, for the boy not to notice anything.<br />
He, Miguel, had only fractured a finger, but Ms. Vargas was lying on the ground<br />
and was having trouble breathing. She stared at them as if she didn’t see them, as if her<br />
body demanded all of the attention that her brain could offer.<br />
“Where was she wounded?” Marta asked.<br />
Miguel shrugged his shoulders. He didn’t know: it didn’t seem to him like she had been<br />
hit, she wasn’t losing blood… But at a certain point, she had sat on the ground, and he<br />
couldn’t get her to move or to speak any more.<br />
Livio felt her pulse: it was beating as from a thousand miles away, weak and irregular,<br />
almost stopping in the long intervals between her rattling breaths. He pulled her up a bit<br />
and slid his backpack under her head to help her breathe better.<br />
“You have to stay calm,” he said softly. “Keep her company. I’m going to go see if they<br />
have medicine.”<br />
They saw him come back an hour later, dragging through the smoking mess one of the<br />
makeshift stretchers of rags and iron rods from the night before. His face was tense, his<br />
eyes barely open, a crooked grimace on his lips. Vincenzo, one of the three healthcare<br />
aides in the column, who was over a meter tall and had a lot of hair and few teeth, had<br />
told him that those sons of bitches had also stolen their medical tank. So they were left<br />
up the creek, with<strong>out</strong> any medicine. Then Livio had wandered discouraged through the<br />
first aid point, and near the guard tent he had run into a small group of guides arguing.<br />
Rocío, at the middle of the gathering, was giving instructions to the others: he was saying<br />
to assemble the column near the river, to take only the wounded who were able to walk,<br />
and to leave right away.<br />
Afterwards, while the guides moved off to their units like ducks in a pond, Livio had<br />
pulled Yasmina aside and asked her what they planned on doing with the others, the<br />
seriously wounded.
“We’ll take care of it,” she replied, curtly. “What matters is that you all get going right<br />
away. This isn’t a place to hang ab<strong>out</strong>, it’s dangerous.”<br />
“What do you mean you’ll take care of it?” Livio persisted.<br />
“It means that we’ll deal with the wounded while you all keep moving. That’s it. Now<br />
hurry.”<br />
There was no way to get another word <strong>out</strong> from her m<strong>out</strong>h. So Livio had grabbed an<br />
abandoned stretcher and went back to Ms. Vargas. He laid her on it carefully and asked<br />
Marta to help him carry her.<br />
“What is it, what happened?” Sara asked.<br />
“Nothing, we have to go. And fast.”<br />
He didn’t speak until the column had passed the stretch of stones of the Danube and was<br />
once again in the sun, on the plateau devoured by the heat as far as the eye could see, the<br />
spire of the Elchingen Abbey bell tower still standing on the ridge.<br />
“No…” he murmured when he heard the firing, the echo of thousands of mercy shots<br />
that followed them, rolling down the hill.
»survivors of a winter of bad news now the long vacation«<br />
European Climate Fiction<br />
Digital Essay<br />
lcb.de/programm/european-climate-fiction<br />
<strong>Bruno</strong> <strong>Arpaia</strong>: »Qualcosa, là fuori« (Guanda, 2016)<br />
Foto: © privat