Involuntary Witness

Involuntary Witness by Gianrico Carofiglio

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Authors: Gianrico Carofiglio
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bed. When I woke up after the usual four hours, Melissa was already far, far away, practically invisible.
    Now, ten days later, she called me on my mobile to invite me to a concert by Acid Steel, who were playing in Bari. Or rather, near Bari. Just like that.
    I had an odd feeling. For a moment I was tempted to ring back and say no, I unfortunately had another engagement. Sorry, it had slipped my mind, perhaps some other time.
    Then I said out loud, “Brother, you’re going really mad. Really mad. You go to this bloody Acid Steel concert and let’s put an end to this nonsense. You’re thirty-eight years old and have a pretty long life-expectancy. D’you think you’re going to spend it all like this? Go to this bloody concert and be thankful.”
    Melissa arrived punctually a few minutes after eight. She was on foot and her attire was an incitement to crime.
    She said that her car wouldn’t start but that she’d come into the centre anyway, and was wondering if we had time to get mine. We did. We got the car and set off in the direction of Taranto.
    The concert was in a small, disused industrial warehouse out in the country between Turi and Rutigliano. I’d never have been able to get there on my own.
    The atmosphere in the place was semi-clandestine. Some of the audience looked clandestine without the semi.
    Luckily, one was not forbidden to smoke.
    One was not forbidden to smoke anything .
    And in fact they were smoking everything and drinking beer. The air was dense with the stench of smoke, beer, beery breath and sweaty armpits. No one was laughing and many seemed absorbed in a dark, mysterious ritual from which I – fortunately – was excluded.

    I began to feel uneasy, and the impulse to make a run for it grew and grew.
    Melissa talked to everyone and knew everyone. Or maybe she was simply doing a repeat performance of Renato’s party. In that case, I thought, I was in the accountant’s shoes. The impulse to cut and run redoubled. Worry. Worry. I felt prying eyes on me. More worry.
    Then, luckily, Acid Steel started to play.
    I have no wish to talk about the two hours of uninterrupted so-called music, partly because my most intense recollection is not the sounds but the smells. The beer, the cigarettes, the joints, the sweat and I don’t know what else seemed more and more to fill the air of that gloomy warehouse. For a moment I even had the absurd notion that from one minute to the next it would explode, hurling that deadly cocktail of stenches off into space. The positive aspect of this eventuality was that Acid Steel – whose visible perspiration led one to suppose that they made a determining contribution to the fetor – would also be hurled into space and no one would hear of them ever again.
    The warehouse did not explode. Melissa drank five or six beers and smoked several cigarettes. I am not sure that they were only cigarettes, because it was pesky dark and the source of the smells – including that of joints – was indefinable. At a certain point I seemed to see her wash down a few pills with her beer.
    I confined myself to smoking my cigarettes and drinking the occasional sip of beer from the bottles Melissa handed me.
    When the concert came to an end I refrained from buying the Acid Steel CD on sale at the exit.
    Melissa greeted a bunch of characters with whom I feared we might have to spend the evening, but then
she took my hand. In the darkness of the churned-up field that served as a car park I felt the blood rush to my face, and elsewhere.
    “Shall we go and have a drink?” she gurgled in a strangely suggestive voice, meanwhile stroking the back of my hand with her thumb.
    “Maybe we could eat something too.” I was thinking of the pints of beer already swilling about inside her and of the other unspecified psychoactive substances circulating in her blood and among the neurones.
    “You bet. I really feel like something sweet. A crêpe with Nutella or with cream and a dark

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