THE DARK MAN

By Roberto Pace

The appearance of Dark Man cannot be an event without consequence. Once come into this world, he will entice you with candy, seep into your skin, and savour your blissful ignorance of his purpose. Roberto Pace delights us with this story of a wild pursuit, set in an imaginary Central Europe that has descended into madness at the apparition of a remarkable anti-hero, Dark Man. {Guernica Editions}

• Language: English
• Publisher: Guernica
• Release date: Jan 1, 2005
• ISBN: 9781550717716

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ROBERTO PACE

THE DARK MAN

 PICAS SERIES 54

TRANSLATED BY PASQUALE VERDICCHIO

GUERNICA

Toronto – Buffalo – Lancaster (U.K.)

2005  

1

THE ABUSE

Schultze had made himself scarce for years. The world out there hadn’t even noticed. He had gone in and out of life like a sticky fly and it was quite something that someone had not squashed him. Schultze had always been quite efficient in squirming away at the last moment, thereby avoiding being overcome by the thick web of intrigues that he himself would weave before his time had come. It was a frightening sight, as he dragged around with that lugubrious and unsettling air, wrapped in that heavy black overcoat, gloomy and dark, like a bad omen.

Curiosity animated him. That insatiable instinct for involving himself in the lives of others, for criscrossing anonymous lives that flow undisturbed behind the endless doorways that move ever day in front of our eyes.

With clear determination he was particularly interested in the names printed behind the Plexiglas of doorbells: unknown surnames that interest no one, aside from those who regularly ring them up, and only because they know that behind the name there is someone who actually exists.

There existed inside of him a ferocious need to understand other people’s physical warmth. He wanted to know the desire and scent that the body exudes at certain moments when life is intensely disturbed, interrupted from its normal flow, grabbed by others for some end external to it, stripped bare and naked.

During that moment Schultze penetrated life, he drank it, ate it, absorbed its entire scent. Because of this he again felt an indecorous, insatiable, senile, maybe invidious, want of another’s life.

Dark and heavy shadow, slightly cut by some electric flash signed the umpteenth manifestation of Schultze as he re-emerged from the usual street corner in order to ring the doorbell of the seamstress Meyer. She was the widowed mother of two wonderful twins in their sixteenth year of life.

Meyer here, the seamstress is on deliveries! Augustin Meyer, the male child of the couple, answered in a shrill voice.

The honour and burden of regulating his mother’s client traffic had fallen upon him. This was also done in order to prevent some malintentioned character from hearing the chirping voice of Anne Lise Meyer, the female twin, and be tempted to rush upstairs in order to take advantage of the virgin’s innocence.

Schultze smirked in satisfaction. Every time he uncovered a not-so-well hidden obstacle to his desire of unveiling someone’s secrets, his imagination caught fire. The perverse image of the man who hands out candy in the park inspired in him full-blown cycles of other obscenities and similar transgressions.

With a calming and studied voice he lied, as usual, priggish and slightly bothered:

It’s about the suit for the ceremony . . . of the rehearsal, I mean. We had agreed on four o’ clock! I’ll wait, if by any chance . . . open up please, don’t waste my time!

Augustin was used to the various inconveniences that his seamstress mother’s multiple appointments could provoke. This was especially true in the spring, when in a matter of a few weeks everyone seemed to be celebrating weddings and christenings. Mother must have made two appointments for the same time without marking them down, Augustin thought. And yet the diffidence to which he had been educated suggested that he verify the fact, so that he would not have to regret it later.

He checked the black appointment book and found nothing. Finally, he asked, without any luck, for his sister’s help. She, for her part, couldn’t wait for some stranger to stick his nose in their business or in hers in particular.

In the end he resolved to say: Come up, third floor, apartment seven. But you’ll have to wait on the landing. We cannot open to strangers.

Schultze was already happy to have overcome the first obstacle, the main gate, and so he sweetly sighed into the microphone: That’s not a problem, dear boy. I’ll wait, if I have to!

Fast and fleeting, like an otter in dark waters, he flew floor to floor, without ever touching the banister, without turning on the lights, until he discerned just behind a door spy, the clear eye of Augustin scrutinizing him. When he knew he was being watched from the peephole he gave an affected smile.

He counted on the deforming effect that the lens of a peephole usually produces. He knew from experience that the lens improved his appearance, made it less threatening. On the contrary, it made it seem quite reassuring. This was not the product of any one particular deformation, but rather the result of serious training in front of mirrors where Schultze had spent long hours of practice. Over the course of the years he had contorted his face, neither handsome nor ugly, in a sort of gymnastics aimed at creating a good first impression. This was crucial in his line of work.

When he knew that he was being spied through a peephole he basked in a self-congratulatory air, slightly puffing up his cheeks and upper lip. He widened his eyes a little and slackened his jaw.

He looks like a toad. But he looks like a nice person, Augustin said to his sister, who quickly dashed to have a look.

He looks like an undertaker to me. A poor fool with patches on his pants . . . only old people and the wretched ever come to see mother any more!

Cut it out! Shut that awful mouth!

You be quiet. You’re the usual ass-licker. What’s wrong with saying the truth? Handsome young men with money in their pockets would never set foot in this disgusting building!

The brutality of Anne Lise’s last words choked whatever decent answer Augustin could have given. So he fell quiet and turned to have another look. And what he saw was, once more, reassuring.

Schultze was calmly seated on the last step, his head resting on the back of the smallish fists for support. His eyes were turned to the sky like someone resigned to having to wait a good long time, bored plenty but faithful that his patience would be repaid.

But Schultze was thinking. He was thinking about how he could overcome the last obstacle between himself and physical contact with those two children, and what he would do once they were at his disposal. He could already taste the surprise of the attack and the sweetness of clutching the two docile victims set out just for him. This was Schultze’s vice. Not always an easy one to perpetrate.

Between those who watched from the peephole – Augustin and Anne Lise were not doing much else – and he who was being observed, there arose an immediate and silly complicity. It was a sort of infantile peek-a-boo game, made more and more boring by the passing minutes and by the rules that set themselves into action. This strange game, dilated into very long moments, became more and more fascinating for Schultze. He waited for a sign, a fatal move, a hole in the net of resistance that would allow a tightening of his clandestine existence on the physical and solid world of Augustin and Anne Lise Meyer.

Unknowingly, the youngsters had given Schultze the key to open the door. After all, as with all games, their repeated looking back and forth, hiding and pretending nothing was happening had turned into a charade that required more and more effort on the part of each participant. Each step forward satisfied a growing curiosity.

Schultze was a master in such ventures.

Certain of the outcome, he stood up suddenly, and babbling in protest, it seemed as if he was about to go back down the stairs. He thus moved out of the field of vision of the peephole and the twins.

The disappointment at the end of the game and the disappearance of another client pushed Augustin to open the door just enough to call Schultze back.

From the fissure allowed by the door-chain, the boy loudly called:

Sir! Please, sir, be patient! Mother will be right back.

Schultze, who had not in fact gone down the stairs, smirked in satisfaction from behind a column that hid him from Augustin.

Then he abruptly poked out his large head, illuminated by a smile wide as that of a shabby clown.

Frightened by the looming head, Augustin closed the door. But he thought that he might have imagined it all when Anne Lise, who was peering out the peephole, sweetly said:

There is no one out there. You scared yourself, scaredy-cat!

But in that very brief conversation, in that fraction of a second in which the girl had turned to her brother to communicate the briefest sentence, Schultze had moved like lightning.

Squeezed up against the door, too close to it to be seen through any peephole, Schultze invisibly waited for his next move.

Augustin and Anne Lise, still uncertain as to whether he had truly disappeared or had only momentarily retreated, decided to check in person. They removed the door-chain that had, up until then and opened the door to the curiosity that ate at them. They were about to consign themselves over to the world and the dangers that inhabit it.

In the excitement the door opened suddenly. Schultze dashed into the opening, easily penetrating their weak defense.

But he did not overstep the entryway. He stopped only a step beyond the doormat, keeping an unstable and oscillating balance.

Then, turning his large, mellifluous and round head toward them, he whispered May I? The request sounded as false as the courtesy he struggled to express. The two children, overcome by the stranger’s lightning speed, could only concede."

Please, come in . . . After you . . .

Schultze furtively entered the Meyer household, with ocular and studied circumspection, as if wanting to sample the first taste of initial contact with the reason of his desire. And wanting to savour it a little before acting. Because the first involucre of something foreign, unjustified, casual and improbable, was opening up to him at that very moment.

He widened his nostrils and began to understand.

He smelled the strong scent of Augustin’s hair, probably unwashed for at least three days. He smelled Anne Lise’s freshly washed and recently changed underwear. He also smelled the slightly rank smell of a celery and bean soup that had been eaten the day before, but of which there were most likely some leftovers in the fridge.

He noticed the photograph of a man. A liar, Schultze thought, one of those who goes off to die without keeping his promises. Someone so useless that not even a photograph placed in a prominent place can help to remember him.

He scorned him and moved on, all the while registering in his analytic mind the constant and devastating impact that the man’s presence had provoked in the infancy and still uncertain adolescence of the twins.

In that brief instant, he photographed every intimate detail of the poor but decorous furnishings of the Meyer household; the entry had been transformed into a sort of trial room with mirrors, pins, mannequins and all the rest. It was also obvious that the little door at the end of the room, what had originally been designated as a pantry, had been transformed, out of necessity, into a change room.

The intense odour of cut fabric was everywhere, mixed with vague traces of sewing machine lubricant. An organized disorder reigned over everything. This made it possible to instantly change the sewing shop into an emergency dining area.

The sewing machine, instrument of survival and anxiety for the little family, dominated the table. The machine produced both money and damnation for Mrs. Meyer’s eyes who, along with her sight, was fast losing her health and life.

Mrs. Meyer’s was a life desirous of gifts and joy. After one single conjugal day she had found herself pregnant and alone. Since then she had had no time to look about, not even to make an attempt to remarry. She had pressed down upon the sewing machine pedal without pause, praying to God to give her strength.

Schultze sensed all this in a flash: the chain of intuitions and deductions had developed without delay.

He sat himself down in one of the empty chairs; he placed his black bag down on the ground, crossed his legs, and then turned to the two youngsters who watched and waited:

Don’t just stand there like a couple of dummies. Speak! Don’t you have anything to say? Cat got your tongue?

Anne Lise didn’t wait to be asked twice.

Are you here for a funeral or a wedding, sir? 

Given the opportunity I would take the former. 

Do you mean that you’ve suffered a death in the family?

Or you are about to? Augustin added. 

Schultze felt a sinister force rise up from his legs. It was an antsy feeling. He stiffened, and the reason for his presence there became suddenly clear.

The cause was pain, and Schultze was the effect. 

The seamstress Meyer would not return that night. She would stop, once and for all, pedaling the machine and straining her eyes over the lining of clothing that others had cut.

Seamstress Meyer finally had a dress all of her own to make. As a way of forgetting the grandfather jacket re-adapted for the nephews, and those of nephews retailored for the sons, until the fabric could no longer hold the extensions, the cutting and ironing toward different ends from its original. This time the seamstress Meyer had undertaken the high road of the original work, and she would not look back.

But the twins did not know this, and could not see what Schultze perceived behind them.

The seamstress Meyer had met, for religious reasons, Brother Erasmus Poitier, prior of the convent in Anversa and today father general of his Order.

Brother Erasmus had immediately understood, or rather, after a full and analytically conducted confession, the talent, the inspiration and artisanlike ability that were hidden away in the frustrated soul of Mrs. Meyer.

And so he asked her to mend something of his as a test. He invited her to follow him to the rectory, where she would find needles, scissors and thread. The seamstress climbed the stairs with bowed head and troubled soul, uncertain as to what she might find there.

She entered the prior’s private cell anxiously, and waited in sadness by the narrow little corner between the dresser and door. Erasmus opened the cabinet of the only piece of furniture in the room and, after searching it with a certain obsession, triumphally pulled from it an old frock, burned by the sun and worn out by time and ferocious laundering.

His first frock, that of his ordination.

Do you think you could mend this? asked the brother hopefully.

Traudel Meyer drew close to that piece of cloth with the same mute respect and the same disconsolate compassion that others reserve for the victims of disaster.

She took the habit in her hands as if she were holding the body of an abandoned infant invoking his absent mother for help. She stretched it out on the bed with infinite care and ran her hands over it, caressing it.

Then, showing the same competence and firmness of a caring doctor when faced by the irreparable work of a disease on a living body, she finally said:

There isn’t much hope, Brother Erasmus. It might have to be discarded. I will do what I can, with the help of God and a little thread. But I have to see it on you, if you don’t mind . . .

And in saying this, she withdrew from the room and made her way toward the door with all the modesty that the occasion required.

In fact, the first frock had been designed according to a much more contained volume than what had subsequently developed over his body. Erasmus, with age and celibacy, had permitted