A Different Darkness and Other Abominations by Luigi Musolino

Author:Luigi Musolino
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Valancourt Books
Published: 2022-08-12T00:00:00+00:00

Like Dogs

I take the bus to Turin.

Once a month. Or twice.

I go there for the lights. The archways. The voices. To get away from the country, the darkness, the farm, the manure basin, the strange bushes that sprout from the ground, the sounds that echo in the belly of the earth . . . And from the bad memories. Although the memories are always there. I could go all the way to the North Pole, but they would still be there.

I also go there for the homeless. And to get hold of books.

I sit under the shelter in my worn-out overalls, waiting for the bus that goes from Orlasco to the city. Sometimes there are kids with stylish haircuts and backpacks on their shoulders waiting too.

‘What is he wearing? And look how fat he is!’

‘Does he ever wash those filthy overalls?’

‘Look at those glasses, they’re like Coke bottles!’

And so on. I don’t pay any attention. With everything I’ve been through . . . well, their insults are caresses. I just shrug and wait for the bus to come. Sometimes I think about Dog and smile.

Dog was my only friend.

He still is.

United by despair. Brothers in loneliness.

And when two wretched souls meet, reality can take some twists and turns.

Terrible, surprising, unimaginable.

This story will take some twists and turns too. It won’t be a linear narrative. It will be a mule track full of curves, hairpin bends, and wrong turns. Isn’t life the same way?

I hope you’ll come along for the ride.

My name is Danilo Marosso.

An only child.

Class of 1986.

When I was born Dad was forty, Mom thirty-eight. Not exactly spring chickens.

And I grew up on the family farm on the outskirts of Orlasco, a little village of one thousand souls located six kilometers from Pinerolo, twenty-eight from Turin, at the foot of the Alps.

I still live here.

A corner of Piedmont untouched by modern life. Every­thing is just like it was thirty years ago: the gravel road leading to the farm, the skeletal poplars standing guard over piles of steaming manure, the darkness that swallows up the irrigation ditches on moonless nights, the horizon broken up by the ruined remnants of old houses along the railroad tracks.

It’s comforting and at the same time awful how some things don’t change, always staying the same. In some places time doesn’t pass, just like in some people’s minds. The two things are related, I think, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. It’s just how it is, and that’s all there is to it.

My parents ‘worked the land’, as they say in these parts. Farmers and ranchers. They had acres and acres of land (mostly for growing corn and poplar trees) and ninety hogs, crammed into a sty whose stench spread throughout our house and for a radius of miles, sometimes all the way to the center of town. That might be why we weren’t looked on too fondly in Orlasco. Besides the fact that my father was a violent drunk and my

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