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Overview
The winner of the prestigious Strega Prize, As God Commands is a dizzying and compulsively readable novel set in a moribund town in industrial Italy, where a father and son contend with a hostile world and their own inner demons. The economically depressed village of Varrano, where Cristiano Zena lives with his hard-drinking, out-of-work father, Rino, is a world away from the picturesque towns of travel-brochure Italy. When Rino and his rough-edged cronies Danilo and Quattro Formaggi come up with a plan to reverse all their fortunes, Cristiano wonders if maybe their lives are poised for deliverance after all. But the plan goes horribly awry. On a night of apocalyptic weather, each character will act in a way that will have irreversible consequences for themselves and others, and Cristiano will find his life changed forever, and not in the way he had hoped. Gritty and relentless, As God Commands moves at breakneck speed, blending brutal violence, dark humor, and surprising tenderness. With clear-eyed affection, Niccolò Ammaniti introduces a cast of unforgettable characters trapped at the crossroads of hope and despair.
“It is impossible not to be gripped.” —Financial Times
“Punk-rock desperadoes and a daft father-son tragicomedy team run riot through the mess and splendor of today’s Italy . . . Propulsive from the first page . . . Not at all pretty, but darkly, ferociously beautiful—a triumph for Europe’s hottest novelist.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780802197856 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Grove/Atlantic, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 11/20/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 417 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
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Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
1
"Wake up! Wake up, for fuck's sake!"
Cristiano Zena gasped, and clutched at the mattress as if the ground had opened up under his feet.
A hand clamped around his throat. "Wake up! You know you should always sleep lightly. It's when you're sleeping that they fuck you over!"
"It's not my fault. The alarm clock didn't ..." the boy murmured. He twisted free of that vice-like grip and lifted his head off the pillow.
But it's night time, he thought.
Outside the window everything was pitch-black, except where the streetlamp shed a yellow cone of light, into which snowflakes as big as balls of cotton wool were falling.
"It's snowing," he said to his father, who was standing in the middle of the room.
A shaft of light crept in from the hall, picking out Rino Zena's shaven head, his beaky nose, his moustache and goatee beard, his neck and one muscular shoulder. Instead of eyes he had two black holes. His chest was bare. Below, his army trousers and paint-splashed boots.
How can he stand this cold? thought Cristiano, stretching out his fingers toward the bedside lamp.
"Don't turn it on," said Rino. "It's annoying."
Cristiano curled up under the warm tangle of blankets and sheets. His heart was still pounding. "Why did you wake me?"
Then he noticed that his father was holding the pistol. When he was drunk he often got it out and wandered around the house pointing it at the television, the furniture, the lights.
"How can you sleep?" Rino turned toward his son.
His voice was hoarse and dry, as if he had swallowed a handful of chalk.
Cristiano shrugged. "I just do ..."
"Congratulations." His father took a beer can out of his pants pocket, opened it, drained it in one swig and wiped his beard with his arm, then crushed it and threw it on the floor. "Can't you hear him, that bastard?"
There wasn't a sound. Not even the cars that flashed past the house day and night so close that if you closed your eyes they seemed to be going right through the room.
It's the snow. Snow deadens noise.
His father went over to the window and rested his head against the pane, wet with condensation. Now the light from the hall caught his deltoids and the cobra tattoo on his shoulder. "You sleep too deeply. In wartime you'd be the first to get it."
Cristiano concentrated and heard in the distance the hoarse bark of Castardin's dog.
It was a sound so familiar his ears no longer registered it. Like the buzz of the neon light in the hall and the leaky toilet.
"The dog?"
"About time ... I was starting to worry." His father turned back toward him. "He hasn't stopped barking for a second. Not even in the snow."
Cristiano remembered what he had been dreaming about when his father had woken him up.
Downstairs in the sitting room, next to the television, there was a large phosphorescent fish tank containing a squishy green jellyfish that spoke a strange language, all Cs, Zs and Rs. And the amazing thing was that he could understand every word.
What time is it? he wondered, with a yawn.
The luminous dial of the clock radio on the floor showed three twenty-three.
His father lit a cigarette and snorted: "I'm fucking fed up."
"It's half stupid, that dog," said Christiano. "With all the beatings it's taken ..."
Now that his heart had stopped pounding, Cristiano felt sleep pressing down on his eyelids. His mouth was dry and full of the taste of garlic from the takeout chicken. A drink of water mighthave washed that foul taste away, but it was too cold to go down to the kitchen.
He felt like resuming the dream about the jellyfish from where he had left off. He rubbed his eyes.
Why don't you go to bed? The question was on the tip of his tongue, but he checked it. From the way his father was pacing around the room there wasn't much chance of him calming down.
Three stars.
Cristiano ranked his father's rages on a five-star scale.
No, three to four. Already in the "approach with caution" area, where the only strategy was to agree with everything he said and keep out of his way as much as possible.
His father turned around and kicked a white plastic chair, which hurtled across the room and fetched up against the pile of boxes where Cristiano kept his clothes. No, he had been wrong. This was five stars. Red alert. Here the only thing to do was to shut up and blend in with your surroundings.
His father had been in a filthy mood for the past week. A few days earlier he had lost his temper with the bathroom door because it wouldn't open. The lock was broken. For a couple of minutes he had fiddled with a screwdriver. He had knelt there, swearing and heaping curses on Fratini, the locksmith who had sold it to him, the Chinese manufacturers who had made it out of tin, and the politicians who allowed such crap to be imported, as if they all were standing there in front of him. But it was no good, the door just wouldn't budge.
One punch. Another one, harder. Another. The door had leaped on its hinges, but hadn't come open. Rino had gone to his bedroom, got the gun and fired at the lock. But it still hadn't yielded. The only result had been a deafening bang, which had left Cristiano dazed for half an hour.
There had been one good thing about this: it had taught Cristiano that, contrary to what the movies would have us believe, you can't open a door by shooting at its lock.
In the end his father had started kicking the door. He had smashed it in, shouting and tearing out strips of wood with his bare hands. When he had got inside the bathroom he had punched the mirror, and shards of glass had gone everywhere and he had cut his hand and had sat for a long time dripping with blood on the edge of the bath, smoking a cigarette.
"What the fuck do I care if it's half stupid?" replied Rino, after thinking it over for a while. "I'm fucking fed up with it. I've got to go to work tomorrow."
He came toward his son and sat down on the edge of his bed. "Do you know something that really shits me? Stepping out of the shower in the morning, soaking wet, and putting my feet on the freezing cold tiles, and at the risk of breaking my neck." He smirked, loaded the pistol and held it out to him by the barrel: "I was thinking that what we need is a nice new dogskin mat."
2
At three thirty-five in the morning Cristiano Zena left the house wearing green rubber boots, his checked pajama pants and his father's windproof jacket. In one hand he held the pistol, in the other a flashlight.
Cristiano was a slim boy, tall for his thirteen years, with slender wrists and ankles, long bony hands and a size ten and one half foot. On his head grew a tousled mop of fair hair, which couldn't conceal his protruding ears, and which continued down onto his cheeks in the form of two bushy sideburns. He had two big blue eyes separated by a small snub nose, and a mouth too wide for his thin face.
The snow was falling more thickly. The air was still. And the temperature several degrees below freezing.
Cristiano crammed a black woolly hat on his head, puffed out a cloud of vapor and shone the flashlight around the yard.
A layer of snow covered the gravel, the rusty old rocking chair, the garbage cans, a pile of bricks and the van. The highway, which ran right past the front of the house, was a long, immaculate strip of white. The dog continued to bark in the distance.
He shut the front door and tucked his pajamas more tightly into his rubber boots.
"Go on. It's a piece of cake. All you have to do is shoot him in the head — make sure you hit the head, or he'll start whining and you'll have to shoot him again — then come home. You'll be back in bed in ten minutes. Go, soldier." The little speech his father had delivered as he yanked him out of bed still echoed in his brain.
He looked up. The dark shape of his father stood behind the window, waving at him to get a move on. He stuck the pistol into his underpants. The cold steel shrivelled his scrotum.
He waved to his father and stumbled unsteadily around to the back of the house, as his heart began to beat faster.
3
Rino Zena watched from the window as his son went out into the snow.
He had finished all the beer and grappa. And that's bad enough in itself, but if, on top of that, you have a piercing whistle boring into your eardrums, it becomes a real problem.
The whistle had begun when Rino had fired at the bathroom door, and although a week had passed since then, it wasn't decreasing.
Maybe I've burst an eardrum. I should see a doctor, he said to himself, as he lit a cigarette.
But Rino Zena had sworn that the only way he would ever enter an ambulance was feet first.
He wasn't going to get caught in the trap.
The bastards start by telling you that you need some tests done, that way you enter the tunnel and you're a goner. If the illness doesn't do you in, the medical bills will.
Rino Zena had spent the evening slumped on a folding chair in front of the television, drunk out of his mind. With two slits instead of eyes, his jaw sagging and a beer can in his hand, he had tried to follow some crappy show that kept blurring over in front of him.
As far as he could make out it was about two husbands who had agreed to swap wives for a week, God only knew why ...
They had no respect for anything these days on the fucking TV. Just to be original they had chosen a piss-poor family from Cosenza and a filthy rich one from Rome.
The poor husband was a repairman. The rich one, who anyone could see was a complete asshole, worked in advertising. And of course the repairman's wife was as ugly as sin and the other woman was a curvy blonde with long shapely legs who taught people how to breathe in a gym.
In the end, however, the story had caught Rino's attention and he had finished a whole bottle of grappa watching it.
At the advertising agent's home the hag from Cosenza made herself unpopular by going around with a bottle of Windex, and you couldn't sit down without her scolding you for spoiling the cushions. But before the first day was out they were ordering her about like a chambermaid and she was as happy as a clam.
Rino was more interested in the situation in Cosenza. The repair man treated the sex-bomb as if she was Lady Diana. Rino had been hoping that, in a surge of lust, he would grab the blonde — who for all her airs and graces was clearly begging for it — and fuck her.
"Come around here, you slag! I'll show you the way we do it in the Zena household!" he had bellowed, hurling a beer can at the TV.
He knew it was all a sham, that those shows were about as genuine as the African handbags the niggers sold outside the shopping malls.
Then he had dozed off. He had woken up again some time later feeling as if he had a dead toad in his mouth and with a vice crushing his temples.
He had wandered around the house searching for something alcoholic to alleviate the pain.
Eventually, at the back of one of the kitchen units, he had found a dust-covered bottle of Poire William. God knows how long it had been there. The grappa was finished, but the pear still seemed pretty well steeped in alcohol. He had smashed the bottle on the sink and, bending over the table, sucked the pear. It had been then that he had noticed the dog. It barked on and on. After a while he had figured out that it was the mongrel in Castardin's furniture factory. It would lie in its kennel all day as quiet as a mouse, then when night fell it would start barking and never let up till dawn.
Old Castardin probably didn't even know about it. At closing time he would come out, drive to the club in his great hearse of a BMW and fritter his money away on poker. In the village he was known as a great gambler, one of the old-fashioned kind who showed dignity in defeat.
In other words, he gritted his teeth and kept his mouth shut.
So he showed all his great dignity in losing the money he stole with his trashy furniture, and his bloody dog barked all night.
And if anyone had pointed this out to him, he would have replied, with his old-fashioned dignity, that there was nothing but factories in the area. Who could possibly object to a dog that was only doing its duty? Rino was sure it had never crossed that old-fashioned man's mind that only half a mile away there was a house in which a young boy slept.
A boy who had to go to school.
Okay then, Rino Zena had said to himself, taking the pistol out of the drawer, tomorrow you'll have a chance to show the world just how dignified you can be, when you find your dog stone-dead.
4
Cristiano decided to approach the furniture factory via the fields. Even though the highway was covered with snow, there was still a chance that someone would come along it.
The light from the lamppost didn't reach the backyard, and the darkness was total. He shone his flashlight on the twisted hood of a Renault 5, a cement mixer, the tattered remains of an inflatable swimming pool, a plastic chair, the skeleton of a dead apple tree and a six foot high fence.
Cristiano had left the house in a hurry, without having a pee. He considered doing it there, but decided not to, it was too cold and he wanted to get this thing over with.
He put the chair against the wire netting of the fence, stood on the chair, put the flashlight between his teeth, gripped the mesh with his fingers and pulled himself up. He swung one leg over to the other side, but the seat of his pants got caught on a piece of wire. He tried to break free, but couldn't, and in the end he threw the flashlight down on the ground and jumped. He heard a ripping sound and felt a pain in his leg.
He found himself lying on his back among the wet weeds, with snow melting on his face. He got to his feet and slipped his hand through the tear that ran halfway down his pajamas. A long scratch, not deep enough to bleed, scored the inside of his thigh. The pistol was still in his underpants.
He picked up the flashlight and began to work his way around the fences of the factories, the mud sucking down his feet and brambles blocking his path.
He was on the edge of a plowed field, which in the daytime stretched as far as the horizon. In the distance, if there was no fog — but there always was fog in winter — you could see the gray foliage of the woods that lined the banks of the river.
If it hadn't been for the barking of the dog and his own heavy breathing the silence would have been complete.
Far away, across the river, he could see the lights of the factories hanging in the air and the yellowish glow of the power station.
His fingers, squeezed in the vice of cold, were beginning to feel numb, and the chill was rising up through his feet and biting his calves.
What a fool.
In his haste to go out, furious with his father, he hadn't put on his socks. The snowflakes were falling on his neck and his jacket was beginning to get wet along the shoulders.
The black silhouettes of the industrial buildings followed one after the other. He passed a bathroom furniture outlet. Toilets. Tiles. Basins. Neatly stacked all around the building. Then a salesroom that sold tractors and farming machinery and the rear end of a nightclub, which had had to shut down because it had gone bankrupt.
It's no good, I'm going to wet my pants.
He switched off the flashlight, put the pistol in his jacket pocket, lowered his trousers and pulled out his pecker.
Fear and the cold had shrunk it. It looked like a little salami. The spurt of urine melted the snow and a cloud of acrid steam rose from the ground.
As he was shaking it, he noticed that the dog's bark was louder.
The next building was Castardin's furniture factory.
It seemed as if the brute ran on batteries: it didn't even pause for breath. Every now and then, though, it stopped barking and howled like a fucking coyote.
He switched on the flashlight and started walking again, more quickly. He was taking too long. Old baldy would already be fuming. He could just see him pacing around the house like a lion.
5
Cristiano Zena was wrong. At that moment his father was in the bathroom. Standing in front of the toilet, one hand against the wall, he was looking at his reflection in the black water at the bottom of the bowl.
His face was swelling up. Where had his cheekbones gone? His gaunt jaw? He looked like a Chinaman. He was thirty-seven years old and he looked fifty. He had put on several pounds in the last few months. He hadn't dared to get on a scale, but he knew it. His stomach had swollen up too. He kept lifting weights and doing push-ups and struggling with sit-ups on the bench, but that bulge below his pectorals just wouldn't go down.
He couldn't decide whether to piss or to throw up.
His stomach contained a dozen beers, half a liter of grappa and a Poire William.
He hated being sick. But if he got it all out of his system he would certainly feel better.
Meanwhile the dog kept barking.
What the fuck is Cristiano doing? What if he doesn't shoot it?
One part of his brain was telling him yes, the boy did have the balls to shoot a dog. But another part wasn't so sure: Cristiano was too childish, he only did things out of fear of his father. And if your only motivation is fear, not anger, you'll never be able to pull a trigger.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "As God Commands"
by .
Copyright © 2006 Niccolò Ammaniti.
Excerpted by permission of Grove Atlantic, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
PROLOGUE,
BEFORE,
Friday,
Saturday,
Sunday,
THE NIGHT,
AFTER,
Monday,
Tuesday,
Wednesday,