We present an extract from The Gorgeous Inertia of the Earth, the new novel by Adrian Duncan, the acclaimed author of Love Notes from a German Building Site, A Sabbatical in Leipzig, Midfield Dynamo and The Geometer Lobachevsky.
During winter season in a secluded Alpine city, John Molloy, an Irish restorative sculptor, meets Bernadette, an enigmatic Italian sociologist. As John falls in love, a distressing moment from his youth rises into view, the disastrous fallout of which has reverberated unchecked through his life...
After a coffee, Bernadette and I hire bicycles and cycle out and around Ferrara's perimeter wall, looking at the many large flower-filled gaps in the boundary, and as we go I imagine the bricks that once filled these openings are now the makings of some citizen’s shed or a small extension elsewhere in the town – a kitchen, perhaps, with a stove in the corner upon which bubbles a pot of water.
The day oscillates from warm to cold to warm, until everything then settles in the late afternoon, when we turn our bicycles for the centre of the town and make off towards the stadium.
*
While traversing the narrow and busy streets converging on the bowl-shaped stadium in the distance, Bernadette turns to me and asks, as we drift for a moment closer to each other, if it was because of my leg injury that I went on to study stone restoration.
I hesitate as the crowds around us gather, and I can feel her looking at me.
And because this connection between broken bone and stone had not occurred to me before, I just shake my head, and say, 'Don’t think so, Bernadette.’
*
Seething in the southern stand, the hordes of Lazio fans are stripped to their waists and are waving giant blue flags in the evening sun. They chant with a punchy, if almost comical, aggression.
The Ferrara crowd are so good-humoured though, and the volley of singing returned from the large and packed tribune to our left is like a playlist of crooned Italian love songs, all about how much this crowd admire their club, their players and their manager, a small overweight man called Simplici.
Bernadette leans towards me and touches my forearm while she points out a sky-blue-and-white banner unfolding near the top of the home stand. Across it are the words FERRARA NEL CUORE. It must be Franco, and in among the giant fluttering flags his banner is minute, but I can imagine him up there beneath it, singing his heart out. He told us earlier – in the morning, while we were finishing our breakfast – about the material he’d used for his banner. As he searched for the word, he drifted towards the dining-room window and took the hem of the curtain in his fingers and uttered the word reticolato – netted. And as the morning sunshine broke across him, he explained that, with this material, those behind him would be able to see the game even while he opened out his banner and proclaimed his admiration.
Bernadette gazes on at the swaying fans singing in the distance. Then she turns to me, now smiling widely, and she kisses me on the cheek.
She looks at me a while, her large blue eyes moving over and back, gauging my response. Then a roar erupts from far across the pitch.
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Listen: The Gorgeous Inertia of the Earth - Adrian Duncan talks to RTÉ Arena
Sometimes, she holds her fist up to her chest and then, when she emphasises something to me, her thumb, forefinger and middle finger spring apart, as if a tiny explosion has propelled her fingertips away in three spirals, until they are halted and the fingers and hand then slump into a gesture that becomes irrelevant to what she has moved on to saying.
*
I remember, weeks after I snapped my shin, I was told by one of my young teammates that the sound, when the bone broke, was that of detonated stone.
*
The piazza shudders.
And what at first felt like a ripple then grows into a roar as flare-wielding hordes pour into the square. From high up on the municipal building behind us comes a high-pitched call as two giant banners unfurl, one with a knight on horseback brandishing a jousting stick and the other showing a dragon with a large red tongue. The people around us jostle and clamour. Bernadette, now speaking loudly to an elderly man a table over, begins to laugh. She tells me this banner depicts Saint George.
On it goes above, this giant painting of Saint George being slid across and back by supporters leaning over the parapet towards the other six, who have unfurled their huge painting of the slayed dragon. It is as if these dozen or so puppet masters have stormed the government buildings of Ferrara to bring news to the piazza below of the great victory claimed in the colosseum outside the city walls.
More red and orange flares pop, smoke billows and, behind these throbbing flares, figures appear, winding through the throngs with drums and trumpets and giant blue-and-white flags, and disappearing into where the shadows grow into darkness and where the whistles trill, the ultras sing and jump in rampant circles, hands in the air, fists pumping, shouts expanding, shivering, receding.
Then, I look over to Bernadette. And she is looking at me.
She puts her hands up to her ears and crosses her eyes, then she nods her head that we should leave. But we are surrounded, so Bernadette stands on a chair and surveys the piazza, looking for a route to escape. She cups her fingers over her brow for a second, as if she is the courageous sea captain of a ship in some peril, facing a hostile incoming armada and deciding how best to organise her ship hands. There is the sound of a distant canon ripping a metal ball into the air, the quiet measuring its distance, before it crashes into the waves half a knot in front of the prow of Bernadette’s surging frigate. Netting and sails billow as men clamber up masts, smoke plumes into the air and thousands of lungs of breath back on the mainland are held, and still, she stands, her eyes surveying the approaching bastards, until her shipwright, a toothless and tired man, steps forth to join her at the prow, informing her of the water her ship is taking on, to which she merely nods, accepting that this frigate is now almost useless and doomed to its last voyage, and to this she lets the shipwright on his way and takes her hand from above her brow.
She steps down from the chair and, as another blue-and-white Ferrara flag folds and unfolds expansively in the smoke behind her, she approaches me and whispers into my ear a simple: ‘Follow!’
The Gorgeous Inertia of the Earth is published by Tuskar Rock Press
