The family has issued only one statement, that they do not wish for any officials, any members of political parties to be present at his funeral. In the early hours of the morning, it begins to rain. People tent the candles with their hands, trying to keep them from going out. Some sputter and die anyway. Some people melt away, too. But many stay, standing mute and wet, their mere presence the strongest rejection of the Proletarian Revolution—of the Communiqués, and gambezzati-ing, and the ranting, and the bullets—that they can think of. Angela looks at their faces and feels his thumb on her forehead.
Near dawn, it begins to rain harder, and a ripple runs through the crowd. The funeral has been moved forward. He will be buried today in Torrita Tiberina, where the family has a country house. Angela has no idea where this is, but she knows she is going to get there. She takes one last look at the closed shutters of the top floor apartment. They are shiny in the first gray light. Today the sky will not be the color of a baby’s veins, or of a bird’s breast, or of shells. Rain pours off of the balconies, tangling the long strands of ivy, and tips into the street, and flows like a river to Rome.
She finds an open bar, buys herself a coffee and a roll, and sits at a table by the window looking at nothing. When the kiosk next door opens, she gets a map and a bus plan. Torrita Tiberina is not so easy to get to. It takes her almost three hours. When she arrives she finds she is not alone. His family has said they do not want any outpourings, any national demonstrations of grief. Even so bunches of people stand outside the church. They watch as the pale wood coffin is carried inside, and follow at a distance like wary sheep as it makes its way to the cemetery. Later Angela will read that crowds gathered at crossroads and threw hydrangeas into the path of the funeral cortege. That when it stopped at a light, a truck driver climbed down from his cab and hurried across three lanes of traffic to press his lips to the side of the hearse.
After the prayers have been said and the coffin has been placed in the vault, there is nothing left to do. Angela doesn’t even have any flowers to leave. She watches as the family files away—Anna, Agnese, Giovanni, Maria. The names that fluttered in that tiny awful room, their wings beating the stagnant air.
A half hour later when she gets to the bus stop and sees that the last bus going in the direction she needs to go has already gone, she isn’t even surprised. It’s somehow inevitable that she’ll have to walk. Eventually, she supposes, she’ll come to the next town south and perhaps there will be a bus from there and perhaps there won’t be. She no longer understands whether or not she cares. Bowing her head against the rain, she pulls her sodden bag across her chest, digs her hands into the pockets of her jacket, and begins to make her way back to the city.
* * *
Monica Ghirri stopped at a bar after the funeral. She had thought Giovanni would say she was crazy, last night when she insisted on going and standing outside of the building on Via Forte Trionfale, but he didn’t. Ever since that terrible March morning he has been quieter, and more understanding. She knows that he has always loved her, just as she has always loved him, even if the spark between them died some time ago. Two children, jobs, bills, schools, in-laws, will do that for a couple. But since the kidnapping, since that morning she stood on the pavement and watched five men die and another vanish, something new has flowed between them. An unspoken anguish. A sadness that dwells somewhere beyond the realm or remedy of words. It’s like an underground river they find themselves in, side by side up to their knees steadying each other, and that Monica suspects may, in fact, be nothing more than the underpinning of life. So, when she said she needed to go to Via Forte, and then this morning announced that she was taking the car and driving to Torrita, her husband didn’t argue or ask why. He just said he’d take care of the children.
She closes her eyes and remembers that the first thing she thought was Fireworks.
Then she realized fireworks didn’t go off on Thursday mornings in March in the middle of Rome, and didn’t come from men jumping out of Fiats. Or from Alitalia stewards, who a moment before had been lounging in the sun beside the bus stop and were now pulling guns out of their bags. And firing through car windows again and again and again.
She opens her eyes, but she can still see it. Sometimes she’s afraid she’ll never stop seeing it—the driver sprawling into the road, his hands flying up, as the car’s back door is yanked open and a man wearing a black suit and clutching papers in his hands is dragged out. He stumbles, his foot catching. Then, as they pull him forward, his head jerks up, and his eyes meet hers.
Monica dreams of those eyes. They are still and dark as night, and in her dreams he looks at her and silence ticks like a clock and she realizes that his suit was not black, but dark blue, and that his hair is a crinkly iron gray touched with silver. And that his lips are moving. That, as they drag him away, he is speaking. To her.
Then she wakes. She bolts upright, her hands wound in the sheets, lips cottony and tongue swollen and tears running down her face because he was trying to tell her something. But between the breaking glass and the bullets and the screaming, she couldn’t hear him.
Doors slammed and tires screeched and then, suddenly, there was nothing. Except the damn honking of that horn that went on, and on, a street away. Monica felt something and looked down. Her shoes, which were new and suede and she had paid too much for, were covered in blood. Blood spattered up her legs, and clung in thick drops to her stockings. It dripped from an arm dangling out of a car, and leaked from the man who had fallen into the street and lay in front of her, his knees bent and arms outstretched and head tilted at a strange angle in the blood that pooled around him. It ran in rivulets through a field of broken glass, and flowed like a river to Rome.
She knocks back the brandy that came with her coffee, and wonders what she’s going to do. Not in the next ten minutes, or half hour, or hour after that—that’s simple. She’ll get in the car and drive home. Make dinner. Tuck in her kids, maybe read them a story. Brush her teeth, have sex with her husband. No, what she means is what is she going to do in the next day, and week, and day after that. Because since the moment she saw Aldo Moro dragged from his car, since the second he looked up at her, and their eyes met, and his lips moved, since then she has felt his heart beat inside her.
Sometimes she was sure she heard his voice. Felt his hunger, or anguish, or exhaustion. She marked the days on a calendar. Every one. All fifty-five of them. She read every word that was printed, all the letters in the newspapers.
I am a prisoner.
I kiss you for the last time.
Give a kiss to the children.
We are almost at zero hour.
And now he’s dead. And there is nothing but a dull, reverberating emptiness.
Monica stands and takes her bag off the table. She brushes spilled sugar from the strap. Her shoes are wet through and ruined. Just rain this time, thank God. She pushes the door open and hears the voices in the small fuggy bar cut off as it snaps closed. Her umbrella wasn’t much use at the cemetery, the shoulders of her coat and her blouse are soaked. There doesn’t seem much point in hurrying as she makes her way to the car.
The heater fogs up the windshield. Waiting for it to clear, Monica turns on the radio. Then she can’t stand it and turns it off again. She isn’t sure what they are having for dinner. Perhaps she ought to stop and get something. She can’t remember what’s in the refrigerator. The wipers snap back and forth. If anything, it’s raining harder now. She turns the defroster up to a roar and watches as the little puddle of clear glass spreads slowly upward. When she can see, she pulls out and winds her way through the narrow streets. She’s gone a few miles when she sees the girl.
Hunched, hands in pockets, plodding along the side of the road, she’s so wet that her dark hair is plastered to her skull. She doesn’t even look up when Monica pulls out to pass her. All the same, Monica recognizes her. She saw her last night at Via Forte, and again today outside the church. A fellow pilgrim.
> Monica pulls into the side of the road, stops, and watches as the blurred figure gets larger and larger in the rearview mirror. The girl doesn’t run, or even look up, or seem to care that the car is there. Finally Monica has to roll the window down and call out to her, or else she’d walk right by.
“Ciao! Ciao, hello!” she calls. “I was at the funeral. Can I give you a ride?”
The voice startles Angela. She slips on the muddy verge and puts her hand on the car to steady herself. The Mercedes is warm. Steaming, as if it’s alive.
“I’m sorry?”
The window is half open, rain spattering in, and the woman is talking to her, maybe asking directions. She’s small and doll-like and blond, with curly hair not unlike Angela’s own.
“A ride,” The woman says. “I’m going back to Rome. I saw you last night. And at the funeral. Can I give you a ride?”
Angela is about to shake her head, to say no, she’s fine, even if she isn’t, or if she doesn’t know what she is, when she hears something in the woman’s voice. The offer is less a question than a plea. Angela frowns. Her brain doesn’t seem to be working correctly. Don’t let them take your heart, Angela.
She hears his voice all the time now.
“I’m very wet.”
She looks beyond the woman to the car’s leather seats, to its fancy interior, with wood on the dashboard. She has never ridden in a car like this, and surely, soaked as she is, she’ll ruin it. The woman shakes her head, she actually lets out a little laugh that seems almost relieved.
“Well, it’s raining,” she says. “It would be strange if you weren’t.” Then she leans over and opens the passenger door. “Come on, get in.”
So Angela does. The seat cradles her like a hand. She places her muddy, squidgy shoes carefully on the navy blue carpet and puts her soaking bag beside them, which seems like the best place for it. When she closes the door, the car surges forward without a sound.
At first Angela doesn’t dare lean back against the padded headrest, then, little by little, as the heat courses through her, she can’t help herself. Rain streams down the windows. The clack and slap of the wipers push time away. Angela closes her eyes and feels like she’s melting. She is almost asleep when the woman says, “I saw it.”
Angela looks at her.
“I saw it,” the woman says again. She glances at Angela, then back to the road where a truck is putting on its brake lights, slowing for a puddle that has spread like a lake across the tarmac.
“When they took him. I was there. On the pavement, beside the bus stop. I’d just taken my kids to school.” She shakes her head and laughs, then reaches up and wipes her cheek with one of her tiny hands, and Angela realizes she’s crying.
“I was just standing there, you know, waiting to cross the street—we live right across—and I saw the cars, the accident. When they stopped and made his car run into them. And I remember, I just thought, ‘Oh how stupid. Bad drivers are so careless.’ Then there was shooting.”
They’ve slowed to a crawl, are nosing their way through the gray sheets of rain, following the red wolf eyes of the truck.
“I’d never heard a gun go off before,” the woman says a second later. “I thought it was fireworks. Isn’t that stupid? Isn’t that the stupidest thing you’ve ever heard? Fireworks at nine in the morning. But now I hear them all the time. Every bang. Even if it’s just a door slamming, I think it’s a gun. And I see it, those men dying. I see it every day. Isn’t that crazy?” She glances at Angela again. “That’s crazy isn’t it?” she says. “That’s what crazy people do. Play movies in their heads like that. Over and over and over.” Damp curls bounce and cling to her cheek. “They didn’t even have time to get out of the cars. Those men. Only one. He fell, and lay there in the road. His blood—”
Tears are streaming down her face now. They hit the high collar of the silk blouse that pokes above the neck of her coat. Ahead of them the truck has cleared the lakelike puddle. As they drive through, Angela feels the Mercedes’s tires slip, then take. A fin of spray rises up.
“They just reached in and took him,” the woman says. “As though they had the right. Just to take him like that. Pull him off the face of the earth because they wanted to. And you know the strangest thing? He didn’t even fight. Or try to get away. He didn’t do anything. Except look at me.”
They have come into a town. There is a sign Angela can’t read, partly because it’s graffittied and partly because of the rain. Grimy buildings, their windows black and slick, slide by.
“He looked at me,” the woman says. “And since then, nothing’s been right. Nothing. Because he said something to me. And I keep thinking, I’m certain, that he was asking, begging me, to stop it. To save him. But I couldn’t.” She takes a breath and her voice drops. “I couldn’t,” she says. “I was standing right there, but I couldn’t do anything. Nothing. Nothing at all. And now they’ve killed him. I’m sorry.”
She reaches out and touches Angela’s thigh, her jeans that are so wet they’re a second skin.
“I’m sorry,” she says again, looking back at the road. “It’s just, you were there. You know? Like me. Last night. And at the funeral. It’s good to talk to someone who—” She shakes her head. “I’m forty years old. I have a husband and two children, and I can’t stop. I dream about it, every night.” She puts both hands on the wheel and frowns as her voice breaks again. “I couldn’t hear him. I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t do anything at all to stop it.”
“No one could have stopped it.”
Angela’s voice sounds strange and far away. Hollow, as if it’s coming from a tunnel somewhere deep inside her. “No one could have stopped it,” she says again. “No one could have saved him.”
“What kind of people?” The woman shakes her head. “What kind of people do that?”
Her voice dribbles off, replaced by ragged breathing, as though she’s been held underwater.
“I’m sorry,” she says again. “I’m sorry.” Then she pushes her hand through her hair and makes an effort to smile. “Where would you like to go?”
They have reached the outskirts of Rome. Torrita Tiberina is only thirty-five miles north of the city, nothing in a car. What took hours this morning, changing buses and waiting for new ones, has flashed by in barely thirty minutes. Angela looks at her and almost laughs. Then she realizes she can’t say “nowhere,” and feels a faint nudge of panic.
“Anywhere,” she says. “Anywhere is fine.” The woman looks as if this is the wrong answer.
“I can get a bus,” Angela adds. “Now that I’m back in the city.”
“But I can drive you. Really. It’s not a problem.”
“No.” Angela shakes her head. “I’d like to be alone for a while,” she adds. “You know, before I go home.”
The woman nods, but even as she says it, Angela knows it isn’t possible. That she no longer has a home. She wonders if she ever did. Or if the last few months have just been borrowed, weren’t really ever part of her life at all. Is that what Antonio planned, somehow, from the very beginning? From that day in the orchard? That it would always be like this? She reaches into her jacket and feels through the soaked cotton of her shirt, her fingers finding the hard nub of the ring that hangs around her neck, no date engraved inside the band. She wonders when he bought it. Or if it was borrowed, too, like the red Renault.
They have come into the city and are winding through the modern expensive suburbs with their balconies and concrete walls and trees. Looking out the window, Angela half expects the phone booth to flash by. To see a woman wearing a green scarf, life swelling inside her as she hurries down the pavement, clutching a box of words.
“I’m sorry?”
The woman has said something to her, but she has no idea what it was.
“I live just here. Up the street. Look—” They have stopped at a light. “If you’d like to come in.” The woman looks at her, her blue eyes searching Angela’s face. “If you’d like get
dry, have a meal. Or if I can help you. I could—”
Angela looks out and sees a sign that says Via Stresa. Another says Via Fani. Across the street a triangular neon light spelling BAR, TAVOLA CALDA sparkles in the rain.
“This is fine.” She picks up her sodden bag. “Here is fine. Anywhere.” Angela looks across at the shelter. “I can get a bus.”
The woman nods reluctantly.
“Well, OK,” she says. “If you’re sure.”
Angela opens the Mercedes’s door.
“Thank you.” She gets out, feeling her shoes squish with rain. Then before she closes the door, she leans back into the car. “The men?” Angela asks. She can feel traffic behind them, sense the light about to change. “The men who took him that day. Did you see them?”
The woman nods. The look in her eyes suggests she has seen them every day and probably most nights since. And that she will go on seeing them. Possibly forever.
“They were dressed as Alitalia stewards,” she says. “You know, in the uniform. One had a mustache and glasses. The other was taller. Quite a lot taller. Dark hair.”
“Was it curly?”
The light has changed. A scooter shoots by. A car hoots.
“I’m sorry,” the woman says, leaning toward the open door. “I didn’t hear—”
“I asked—” Angela smiles. “It doesn’t matter,” she says, and closes the car door.
The woman is staring at her through the window. She is saying something. Then another car honks, and another, and finally she is forced to move off. Angela watches the Mercedes turn into Via Fani, and then turn again, and slide into the mouth of the garage below the building on the corner.
She stands there for some time, on the far side of the stream of traffic, looking at the last things he saw before he was pulled out of the world and dropped into the People’s Prison. The buildings are tall and dull. There are some magnolia trees in bloom. Oleander leaves drip beside the bus stop. A few ragged fingers of late forsythia reach through a fence. She seems to remember reading somewhere, in a magazine or the newspaper, that on the morning of March 16, the sun was shining. She might be making that up, but she hopes it’s true.
The Lost Daughter Page 38
