Free A Tranquil Star by Primo Levi Page A

sand almost up to their hubs. In vain they tried to push each other back, with their forks entwined like battling stags; then the green stripe disentangled itself, backed up rapidly, and, making a tight turn, butted the side of red with its rear. Red yielded but then quickly went into reverse and managed to lodge its fork under the belly of green. The fork rose, and green swayed and then fell on one side, indecently exposing its differential and muffler. The audience laughed and applauded.
    The fourth gladiator had to go against a banged-up Peugeot. The crowd immediately began to shout “Rigged!” The driver even had the audacity to switch on his turn signal before swerving.
    The fifth entry was a real spectacle. The gladiator was gutsy and was obviously aiming not just at the windshield but at the head of the driver, and he missed by a hair. He dodged three charges, with precision and lazy grace, not even raising the hammer; at the fourth, he bounced up in front of the car like a spring, came down on the hood, and with two brutal hammer blows shattered the windshield. Nicola heard a brief, strangled cry that stood out from the roar of the crowd: it was Stefania, who was pressed tight against him. The driver seemed to be blinded: instead of braking, he accelerated and hit the wooden barrier sideways; the car rebounded and came to rest on its side, trapping one of the gladiator’s feet in the sand. He was mad with rage, and continued, through the empty frame of the windshield, to pound the head of the driver, who was trying to get out of the car by the door facing up. Finally he emerged, his face bleeding; he tore the hammer away from the gladiator, and began wringing his neck. The crowd yelled a word that Nicola couldn’t understand, but his neighbor calmly explained to him that they were asking the director of the competition to spare his life, which in fact was what happened. A tow truck from the automobile club entered the arena, and in a flash the car was turned rightside up and towed away. The driver and the gladiator shook hands amid the applause, and then walked toward the locker rooms waving, but after a few steps the gladiator staggered and fell. It wasn’t clear if he was dead or had only fainted. They loaded him, too, onto the tow truck.
    As the great Lorusso entered the arena, Nicola realized that Stefania had turned very pale. He felt a vague rancor toward her, and he would have liked to stay longer, if only to make her pay—he couldn’t care less about Lorusso. On principle he would have preferred Stefania to ask him if they could leave, but he knew her, and knew that she would never stoop to that, so he told her that he had had enough, and they left. Stefania didn’t feel well, she felt like throwing up, but when he questioned her she said curtly that it was the sausage she had eaten at dinner. She refused to have a glass of bitters at the bar, refused to spend the evening with him, rebuffed every topic of conversation that he suggested: she really must be ill. Nicola took her home, and realized that he, too, had little appetite, and didn’t even feel like playing the usual game of pool with Renato. He drank two cognacs and went to bed.

The Fugitive

    To compose a poem that is worth reading and remembering is a gift of destiny: it happens to only a few people, without regard for rules or intentions, and to them it happens only a few times in their lives. Perhaps this is a good thing; if the phenomenon were more frequent, we would be drowning in poetic messages, our own and those of others, to the detriment of us all. To Pasquale, too, it had happened only a few times, and the awareness of having a poem in his mind, ready to be caught in flight and fixed on a page like a butterfly, had always been accompanied by a curious sensation, by an aura like that which precedes epileptic fits: each time, he had heard a faint whistle in his ears, and a ticklish shiver ran through him