The Crossroads Read Online Free Page B

had.
    Lately he had noticed that he often remembered things that had never happened. Or he got things he had seen on TV jumbled up with his own memories.
    Certainly something in the world must have changed if it no longer snowed as it used to.
    On TV they had explained that the world was warming up like a meatball inside the oven and that it was all the fault of man and his gases.
    Quattro Formaggi, lying in bed, had told himself that if he hurriedup he could go round to Rino and Cristiano’s and when Cristiano came out to go to school he could pelt him with snowballs.
    But as if the weather had been listening and decided to put a spanner in the works, the snowflakes had become increasingly heavier and more liquid till they had turned to rain, and the hills had first become pockmarked and then shrunk to patches of icy mush, revealing the mass of old junk heaped up in the little yard. Beds, furniture, tyres, rusty rubbish bins, the skeleton of an orange Ape 125 pickup, and the carcase of a sofa.
    Quattro Formaggi gulped down his cup of milk, his pointed Adam’s apple rising and falling. He yawned, and stood up to his full height of one metre eighty-seven centimetres.
    He was so tall and thin he looked like a basketball player who had been put on starvation rations. Gangly arms and legs, enormous hands and feet. There was a callused weal on the palm of his right hand and a hard brown scar on his right calf. His bony neck supported a head as small and round as that of a silvery gibbon. A greyish beard stained his sunken cheeks and his chin. His hair, unlike his beard, was black and shiny and hung in a fringe over his low forehead, in the style of an Amazonian Indian.
    He put the cup in the sink, quivering with tremors and spasms as if he had hundreds of electrodes clamped to his body.
    He continued to stare at the yard, cocking his head on one side and twisting his mouth, then he thumped himself twice on the thigh and slapped his forehead.
    The children in the park, when they saw him go by, would stare at him in amazement and then run to their nannies and tug at their clothes, asking: ‘Why does that man walk in that funny way?’
    And usually they would get the reply (if the nanny was a polite person) that it was rude to point and that the poor fellow was an unfortunate who suffered from some mental illness.
    But then the same children, talking to the older ones at school, would learn that that strange man, who was always in the public gardens and who would steal your toys if you didn’t watch out, was called Electric Man, like some enemy of Spiderman or Superman.
    That would indeed have been a more appropriate nickname for Quattro Formaggi. At the age of thirty Corrado Rumitz had had a nasty experience which had nearly cost him his life.
    It had all begun with an air rifle which he had exchanged for a long fishing rod. It was a good bargain: the air rifle’s gaskets were worn out and it made a farting noise when you fired it. It barely even tickled the coypu in the river. The rod, by contrast, was practically new and extremely long, so if you cast it properly you could reach the middle of the river.
    Feeling very pleased with himself, Quattro Formaggi had set off, rod in one hand and bucket in the other, to fish in the river. He had been told that there was one special point, just below the lock, where the fish gathered, carried down on the current.
    After having a look around, Quattro Formaggi had climbed over the fence and stationed himself just above the lock, which that day was closed.
    He had never been the brightest of people. When he was in the orphanage he had caught a particularly acute form of meningitis and consequently he ‘thought slowly’, as he put it.
    That day he may have thought slowly but he had thought well. He had made a few casts and could feel that the fish were touching the bait. There must be hundreds of them, massed by the lock gates. But they were very crafty. They would