Anna. Niccolo Ammaniti

fell down on his side, panting, his long tongue curled under his nose, his eyes narrowed.

      As he tried to get up, she looked around for a stone or a stick to hit him with, but saw nothing but burnt paper, plastic bags and crushed cans.

      *

      ‘Why don’t you leave me alone?’ she shouted, getting to her feet. ‘What have I done to you?’

      The dog stared at her, baring his teeth and growling.

      She stumbled away in a daze, vaguely aware of oleanders, a dark sky and the blackened roofless shell of a farmhouse. After a while she stopped and looked back.

      He was following her.

      She came to a blue estate car. Its front was crushed, the rear window had lost its glass and the driver’s door was open. She slipped inside and tried to close the door, but it wouldn’t move. She pulled with both hands. The door creaked shut, but bounced back off the rusty lock. She pulled again, but it still wouldn’t close, so she wrapped the safety belt around the handle to hold it. Laying her head against the steering wheel, she sat there with her eyes closed, breathing in the smell of bird droppings.

      On the passenger’s seat beside her was a skeleton covered in white guano. The shrivelled remains of a Moncler quilted jacket had fused with the covering of the seat. Feathers and yellow ribs showed through splits in the fabric. The skull hung down on the chest, held up by withered tendons. A pair of high-heeled suede boots covered the feet.

      Anna slipped through onto the back seat, climbed into the boot and crawled up to the rear window, hardly daring to look out. There was no sign of the dog.

      She curled up beside two suitcases that had been stripped of their contents, crossing her arms over her chest, with her hands under her sweaty armpits. The adrenaline rush had passed and she could barely keep her eyes open. She tried to jam the suitcases into the window frame. One was too small, but she managed to wedge the other one into the gap by pushing it with her feet.

      She ran her fingers over her lips. Her eyes fell on a dirty page torn out of a notebook. The first line read, in capital letters: HELP ME, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD!

      Written by the woman on the front seat, no doubt.

      The note said her name was Giovanna Improta and she was dying. She had two children, Ettore and Francesca. They lived on the top floor of Via Re Federico 36, in Palermo. They were only four and five years old and they’d starve to death if they didn’t get help. There were 500 euros in the hall cupboard.

      Anna tossed the piece of paper aside, leaned her head against the side window and closed her eyes.

      *

      She woke up abruptly, surrounded by darkness and silence. It was a few seconds before she could remember where she was. She badly needed a pee, but didn’t dare leave the car. She’d be defenceless – and blind: there was no moon.

      Better to do it in the boot and move over onto the back seat. She unbuttoned her shorts. As she pulled them down, a sudden noise took her breath away. The sound of dogs sniffing. She put her hand over her mouth, trying not to breathe, shake, or even move her tongue.

      Dogs’ claws scratched on the bodywork, and the car lurched.

      Her bladder relaxed and warm liquid slid between her thighs, soaking the carpet under her buttocks.

      She started silently praying for help, to no one in particular.

      The dogs were fighting among themselves, circling the car, their claws clicking on the asphalt.

      She imagined thousands of them surrounding the car, a carpet of fur stretching as far as the sea and the mountains, enveloping the whole planet.

      She clamped her hands over her ears. Think about gelato. Like big, sweet, multicoloured hailstones. You used to choose the flavours you wanted and they’d scoop them out into a cone for you. She remembered one visit to the ice-cream stall in the private beach area, ‘The Mermaids’. Peering through the glass top of the refrigerator, she’d decided on ‘chocolate and lemon’.

      Her mother had grimaced. ‘Ugh!’

      ‘What’s the matter?’

      ‘Those flavours don’t go together.’

      ‘Can I have them anyway?’

      ‘Oh, all right, then. You’d better eat them, though!’

      So she’d gone to the beach with her gelato and sat by the water’s edge, while the seagulls strutted along, one behind the other.

      Until the fire came, it had still been possible to find other sweet things. Mars bars, flapjacks, Bountys, boxes of chocolates. Usually dry, mouldy or nibbled by mice, though sometimes, if you were lucky, you’d find them in good condition. But it wasn’t the same as ice cream. Cold things had disappeared with the Grown-ups.

      She took her hands away from her ears. The dogs had gone.

      *

      It was that phase of dawn when night and day have equal weight and things seem larger than they really are. A milk-white band lay across the horizon. The wind rustled between ears of wheat spared by the fire.

      Anna climbed out of the car and stretched. Her ankle was numb, but less painful after the rest.

      The road unreeled in front of her like a strip of liquorice. The asphalt around the car was spattered with pawprints. Fifty metres away, something lay on the white line between the lanes.

      At first it looked like her rucksack, then a tyre, then a heap of rags. Then the rags rose up and turned into a dog.

      *

      THE DOG WITH THREE NAMES

      He’d been born in a scrapyard on the outskirts of Trapani, under an old Alfa Romeo. His mother, a Maremma sheepdog called Lisa, had suckled him and his five siblings for a couple of months. In the desperate fight for her nipples, the frailest one hadn’t survived. The others, as soon as they were weaned, had been sold for a few euros, and only he, the greediest and most intelligent, had been allowed to stay.

      Daniele Oddo, the scrap-dealer, was a parsimonious man. And since the 13th October was his wife’s birthday, he had an idea: why not give her the puppy, with a nice red ribbon round its neck?

      Signora Rosita, who had been expecting the latest Ariston tumble dryer, wasn’t too enthusiastic about this bundle of white fluff. He was a holy terror, who crapped and peed on the carpets and gnawed the feet of the sideboard in the sitting room.

      Without making a great effort, she found him a name: Dopey.

      But there was someone else in the house who was even more put out by the new arrival. Colonel, an old, bad-tempered, snappy wire-haired dachshund, whose natural habitats were the bed, onto which he would climb thanks to a stairway made specially for him, and a Louis Vuitton handbag, where he’d sit and snarl at any other four-legged creature.

      Colonel may have had his virtues, but they didn’t include mercy. He’d bite the puppy whenever it strayed from the corner to which he had banished it.

      Signora Rosita decided to shut Dopey out on the kitchen balcony. But he was a determined little guy; he whimpered and scratched at the door, and the neighbours started complaining. His precarious status as a household pet ended the day he succeeded in slipping inside and, pursued by his mistress, skidded on the polished parquet floor and got tangled up in the wire of a lamp, which crashed down on top of the row of china pandas arrayed on the cocktail cabinet.

      Dopey was sent straight back to the scrapyard and, still with his milk teeth and a zest for playing, had a chain put round his neck. Lisa, his mother, on the other side of the yard, beyond two walls of junk, would bark at any car that came in through the gate.

      The puppy’s diet changed from canned venison nuggets to Chinese cuisine. Spring rolls, bamboo chicken and sweet and sour pork, the leftovers from the China Garden, a foul-smelling restaurant on the other side of the