Let the Games Begin. Niccolo Ammaniti

      4

      In the conference hall of Villa Malaparte there were people everywhere. Many stood along the side corridors. Some university students were sitting cross-legged in front of the speakers’ table. Others were perched on window sills. It was surprising that nobody was hanging from the Murano glass chandeliers.

      As soon as the first photographer spotted the writer, the flashes started popping. Three hundred heads turned and there was a moment of silence. Then, slowly, a murmur rose. Ciba walked down the aisle while six hundred eyes watched him. He turned backwards for a second, lowered his head, touched his ear lobe and put on a fearful expression, trying to appear slightly awkward and embarrassed. The message his body language sent out was simple: I am the greatest living writer on earth, and yet even I can run late because, despite everything, I am a normal person. Just like you all are. He looked exactly the way he wanted. Young, troubled, with his head in the clouds. With his tweed jacket worn through at the elbow and his baggy trousers two sizes too big (he had them made in a kibbutz near the Dead Sea), with his waistcoat bought in a charity shop on Portobello Road, with his old Church shoes, which had been given to him the day he graduated from university, with his nose that was just a little too big for his face and that wild tuft of hair that fell over his green eyes. A star. An English actor who had been given the gift of writing like a god.

      As he moved towards the table Fabrizio studied the components of the crowd. He guessed that ten per cent were officials, fifteen were journalists and photographers, at least forty per cent were students (actually female students popping with hormones), and thirty-five per cent old bags on the verge of menopause. Then he added up the percentage of these wonderful people holding a copy of his book or the Indian's book to their chest. Easy done. His was a powder-blue colour with the title written in a bright blood red, while the Indian's was white with black writing. More than eighty per cent were powder blue! He managed to make his way through the last few bunches of people in the crowd. Some shook his hand, some gave him a brotherly slap on the back as if he had just returned from a stint on some celebrity reality TV show. Finally he reached the presenters’ table. The Indian writer was seated in the middle. He looked like a turtle who had his shell slipped off and a white tunic and black-rimmed glasses put in its place. He had a peaceful face and two small, wide-set, watery eyes. A carpet of black hair combed back with hair oil helped him to not look like an Egyptian mummy. When he saw Fabrizio, the Indian bent his head forward slightly and welcomed him, pressing the palms of his hands one against the other. But Ciba's attention was immediately drawn to the female creature sitting next to Sawhney. About thirty years old. Mixed heritage. Half Indian and half Caucasian. She looked like a model, but those glasses perched on her petite nose gave her the air of a primary school teacher. A Chinese chopstick held her long hair together in a dishevelled manner. Loose locks, the colour of tar, fell around her delicate neck. A narrow yet voluptuous mouth, lazily open, stood out like a ripe plum above her pointed chin. She was wearing a white linen blouse, open just enough to show off her cleavage, which was neither too small nor too large.

      A C cup, Fabrizio calculated.

      Her bronze-coloured arms came to end in fine wrists covered in heavy copper bracelets. Her fingers were tipped with nails painted black. While Fabrizio took his seat, he peeked under the table to see if she was just as well-set down below. Elegant legs appeared from underneath a dark skirt. Her thin feet were wrapped in Greek-style sandals, and even her toenails were covered in the same black polish as her hands. Who was this goddess come down from Olympus?

      Tremagli, seated on his left, looked up from his sheets of paper, a stern expression on his face. ‘Well, Mr Ciba has decided to honour us with his presence . . .’ He made a point of staring noticeably at his watch. ‘I believe, if you agree of course, that we may begin.’

      ‘I agree.’

      For Fabrizio Ciba, the highly esteemed Professor Tremagli, without beating around the bush, was a huge pain in the arse. He had never attacked him with one of his poisonous reviews, but he had never praised him either. Quite simply, for Professor Tremagli, Ciba's work did not exist. Whenever he talked about the current, regrettable, state of Italian Literature, he began to go into raptures over a series of little writers only he knew, and for whom the sale of one thousand five hundred copies would trigger a family party. Never a mention, never a comment about Fabrizio. Finally, one day, on Corriere della Sera, when asked directly ‘Professor, how can you explain the Ciba phenomenon?’, he had answered: ‘If we must talk of a phenomenon, it's a passing phenomenon, one of those storms greatly feared by meteorologists but which pass by without causing any damage.’ And then he'd clarified: ‘However, I haven't read his books thoroughly.’

      Fabrizio had foamed at the mouth like a rabid dog and thrown himself onto his computer to write a fiery reply to be published on the first page of La Repubblica. But when his ire had died down he had deleted the file.

      The first rule for each true writer is: never, ever, not even on one's deathbed, not even under torture, reply to insults. Everyone expects you to fall into the trap and reply. No, you have to be as intangible as a noble gas and as distant as Alpha Centauri.

      But he had felt like waiting for the old fogey on his front doorstep and ripping that fucking walking stick out of his hands and beating it down on his skull like it was an African drum. It would have been so enjoyable, and it would have strengthened his reputation as an accursed writer, one of those who answered literary insults with his fists, like real men, and not like fuckwit intellectuals using bitter comments in page three of the Culture section. Only thing was, that fogey was seventy years old and he would have ended four paws up in the middle of Via Somalia.

      Tremagli, in a hypnotist's tone of voice, began a lesson on Indian Literature, starting with the first texts in Sanskrit dating back to 2000 BC found in the rock cave tombs of Jaipur. Fabrizio calculated that it would take him at least an hour before he made it to 2000 AD. The first ones to be anaesthetised would be the old biddies, then the officials, then everyone else, including Fabrizio and the Indian writer.

      Ciba leant an elbow on the table and his forehead on his palm, in an attempt to do three manoeuvres at once:

      The first manoeuvre took a few seconds. The whole of the Martinelli senior staff was sitting in the second row: Federico Gianni, the managing director, Achille Pennacchini, the general manager, Giacomo Modica, the sales manager, and a rally of editors including Leo Malagò. Then the whole gynaeceum of the press office. If even Gianni had unnailed his arse from Genova, then that showed the Indian's book meant a lot to them. Who knows, maybe they hoped to sell a few copies.

      In the first row he recognised the Councilman responsible for Culture, a television director, a couple of actors, a thread of journalists and some other faces he'd seen a thousand times but couldn't remember where or when.

      There were little cardboard markers with the names of the participants on the table. The goddess's name was Alice Tyler. She was murmuring the translation of Tremagli's speech in the ear of Sarwar Sawhney. The old man, with his eyes closed, was nodding as regularly as a pendulum. Fabrizio opened the Indian's novel and realised that the translation was by Alice Tyler. So she wasn't just the translator for the evening. He began to seriously think that he had found his perfect woman. As beautiful as Naomi Campbell and as intelligent as Margherita Hack.

      Fabrizio Ciba had been reflecting for some time on the idea of building a stable relationship with a woman. Perhaps this could help him to concentrate on his new novel, which had paused at chapter two for the past three years.

      Alice Tyler . . . Alice Tyler . . . Where had he heard that