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 road.
Christian, Signor Oddo’s son, worked in the scrapyard. Or maybe ‘worked’ isn’t exactly the right word for it: he sat in front of a computer watching pornographic videos in a container that had been turned into an office. He was a slim, nervy boy, with bushy hair and a pointed chin which he highlighted by wearing a goatee beard. He also had a second job – selling expired pills outside the local high schools. His dream, however, was to become a rapper. He loved the way rappers dressed, the gestures they made, the women they had and the killer dogs they owned. Though it wasn’t easy to rap with a lisp.
Observing Dopey through sunglasses as big as TV screens, he felt that the puppy, which was growing into a quick, strong dog, had potential.
One evening, sitting in his car outside a shopping mall, he told Samuel, his best friend, that he was going to turn Dopey into ‘a ferocious killing machine’.
‘That name, though, Dopey . . .’ Samuel, who was training to be a fashion designer, didn’t think it suited a killing machine.
‘What should I call him, then?’
‘I don’t know . . . How about Bob?’ ventured his friend.
‘Bob? What kind of a name is that? Manson is more like it.’
‘You mean as in Marilyn?’
‘No, you fool! Charles Manson. The greatest murderer of all time!’
Christian dreamed of some illegal immigrant or gypsy breaking into the scrapyard at night to steal something and being confronted by Manson. ‘Just imagine some poor guy trying to get away by climbing over the fence with his guts hanging out and Manson snapping at his arse,’ he guffawed, slapping Samuel on the back.
To make Manson more aggressive, Christian studied websites about fighting dogs. He bought a Taser and, using it and a broomstick wrapped in foam rubber, started a training course of electric shocks and beatings designed to turn the dog into a killing machine. In the winter he doused him with buckets of icy water to harden him against the weather.
Before a year had passed, Manson was so aggressive the only way of feeding him was to throw him food from a distance and fire a jet of water into his bowl from a hose. They couldn’t even let him off the leash at night for fear of losing a hand.
Like thousands of other dogs, Manson seemed destined to spend his whole life chained up.
The virus changed everything.
The epidemic wiped out the Oddo family in the space of a few months, and the dog was left alone on his chain. He survived by drinking the rainwater that collected in the metal remains of cars and by licking up dry scraps of food from the ground. Now and then someone would pass by in the street, but nobody stopped to feed him and he’d howl in despair, his nose to the sky. His mother answered his calls for a while, then she fell silent, and Manson, exhausted by hunger, lost his voice too. He could smell the stench of the corpses in the common graves of Trapani.
Eventually instinct told him his owners weren’t going to bring him any more food and he was going to die there.
The chain round his neck, about ten metres long, ended at a stake fixed in the ground. He started pulling, using his back legs for leverage and his front legs for support. His collar, now that he’d lost weight, was loose, and in the end he managed to wriggle out of it.
He was weak, covered in sores, riddled with fleas and unsteady on his feet. He passed his mother’s body, gave her a perfunctory sniff and staggered out of the gate.
He knew nothing of the world and didn’t stop to wonder why some human beings had become food while other, smaller ones were still alive, but whenever the live ones crossed his path he ran away.
It didn’t take him long to get back into shape. He fed on street litter, entered houses to devour whatever he found there, and chased off crows feasting on corpses. During his wanderings, he met up with a pack of strays and joined them.
The first time he started eating a dead sheep, the others snarled at him. He learned by experience that there was a hierarchy in the group – that he must keep away from females on heat and wait his turn before eating.
One day, on a piece of waste land behind a warehouse full of tyres, a hare crossed his path.
The hare is a difficult animal to catch; it’s quick and its sudden changes of direction can disorientate the pursuer. It has only one weakness: it soon gets tired. Manson’s body, by contrast, was a mass of hardened muscles. After a long chase he caught it, shook it to break its backbone, and started devouring it.
A shambling hound slightly higher in rank in the pack than him, with pendulous ears and a mushroom-like
