The Terra-Cotta Dog Read Free Page B

don’t try to make me swallow this bullshit that you need to be arrested to get medical help. I’ll explain, if you like. You spent a month and a half at Our Lady of Lourdes Clinic in Palermo, then three months at the Gethsemane Clinic of Trapani, where Dr. Amerigo Guarnera even operated on you. And although things today are a little different from a few years ago, if you want, you can find plenty of hospitals willing to look the other way and say nothing to the police if you stay there. So it’s not because you’re sick that you want to be arrested.”
    â€œWhat if I told you that times are changing and that the wheel is turning fast?”
    â€œThat would be a little more convincing.”
    â€œYou see, when I was a little kid, my father—who was a man of honor when the word ‘honor’ still meant something—my father, rest his soul, used to tell me that the cart that men of honor traveled on needed a lot of grease to make the wheels turn, to make them go fast. When my father’s generation passed on and it was my turn to climb aboard the cart, some of our men said: ‘Why should we keep on buying the grease we need from the politicians, mayors, bankers, and the rest of their kind? Let’s make it ourselves! We’ll make our own grease!’ Great! Bravo! Everyone agreed. Sure, there was still the guy who stole his friend’s horse, the guy who blocked the road for some associate of his, the guy who would start shooting blindly at some other gang’s cart, horse, and horseman . . . But these were all things we could settle among ourselves. The carts multiplied in number, there were more and more roads to travel. Then some genius had a big idea, he asked himself: ‘What’s it mean that we’re still traveling by cart? We’re too slow,’ he explained, ‘we’re getting screwed, left behind, everybody else is traveling by car, you can’t stop progress!’ Great! Bravo! And so everybody ran and traded in their cart for a car and got a driver’s license. Some of them, though, didn’t pass the driving-school test and went out, or were pushed out. Then we didn’t even have the time to get comfortable with our new cars before the younger guys, the ones who’d been riding in cars since they were born and who’d studied law or economics in the States or Germany, told us our cars were too slow. Now you were supposed to hop in a race car, a Ferrari, a Maserati equipped with radiophone and fax, so you could take off like a flash of lightning. These kids are new, brand-new, they talk to cell phones instead of people, they don’t even know you, don’t know who you used to be and if they do, they don’t give a fuck. Half the time they don’t even know each other, they just talk over the computer. To cut it short, these kids don’t ever look anyone in the eye. As soon as they see you in trouble with a slow car, they run you off the road without a second thought and you end up in the ditch with a broken neck.”
    â€œAnd you don’t know how to drive a Ferrari.”
    â€œExactly. That’s why, before I end up dead in a ditch, it’s better for me to step aside.”
    â€œBut you don’t seem to me the type who steps aside of his own choosing.”
    â€œIt’s my own choosing, Inspector, all my own, I assure you. Of course, there are ways to make someone act freely of his own choosing. Once a friend of mine who was educated and read a lot told me a story which I’m gonna repeat to you exactly the way he told it, somethin’ he read in a German book. A man says to his friend: ‘Want to bet my cat will eat hot mustard, the kind that’s so hot it makes a hole in your stomach?’ ‘But cats don’t like mustard,’ says his friend. ‘Well, I can make my cat eat it anyway,’ says the man. ‘Do you make him eat it with your fist or with a stick?’