Ricciardi stared pensively at the paperweight made from a fragment of mortar shell sitting on his desk.
“Listen, do you happen to have the name of Signora Serra’s lover? I think he’s an actor, right? A stage actor.”
“Yes, exactly, that’s what the Serras’ doorman told me. I don’t know the name, but I can find out. Everyone knows about it.”
Ricciardi nodded.
“Fine, and be quick about it. If you ask me, we’re going to the theater tonight.”
Filomena was selecting pea pods from the vegetable man’s pushcart in the Pignasecca marketplace. It was no simple matter: if they were too hard, they could be unripe and not add enough flavor to the soup, while the soft ones might be shriveled and lacking in nutrition.
She was rediscovering the pleasure of cooking dinner; Gaetano ate like a wolf, ravenously consuming whatever she set before him. Rituccia, who had come to stay at their house, never touched her food. But these days, Filomena thought with an inward smile, someone else came around at dinnertime; someone who clearly showed his pleasure at receiving a woman’s attentions.
And she still felt like a woman; in fact, she felt like a woman for the first time since her husband died. She thought of him as a sort of gift, given in exchange for the slash on her face; the loss of the beauty that had been her cross to bear, in exchange for the warm eyes of a man who looked inside her instead of stopping at the surface. In a way she’d never experienced. Smiling, Filomena wondered what kind of fruit Raffaele liked best.
Lucia hadn’t gotten out of bed. She hadn’t even opened the shutters. She’d just lain there, stretched out on her back, staring at the ceiling.
The children didn’t know what to think; they walked back and forth and looked in from the doorway with worried faces, to make sure that she wasn’t ill. After a while, the littlest girl asked: “Mamma, are you all right?” She told her yes with a tense smile. But was she all right? That she couldn’t say.
She missed Luca, of course. But she missed her husband, too, she missed him so much that she felt intense pain, a physical pain, in her chest, a pain that left her breathless. And she missed her other children, watching them from the other side of the glass wall she’d built around herself over the years, unable to touch them. She even missed herself: Lucia, the woman who laughed, sang, and made love, looking life right in the eye. She felt as though she were already dead, as if she were a ghost observing the world from the beyond.
She would have liked to sleep and dream of Luca, hear him laughing, in that completely unique way of his, telling her: “Mamma, c’mon, get up and take your life into your own hands, like you’ve always done. You’re still the prettiest girl in the neighborhood, you’re still my best girl; are you trying to put me to shame?” Instead, her sleep was fitful, sorrowful, and dreamless, and she woke up wearier than she was when she went to sleep.
From the balcony she could hear street noises, the songs of the washerwomen, vendors hawking their wares. Through the closed shutters she could feel the light gusting push of new spring air, heavy with the perfumes of the farmlands of Vomero. Springtime, she thought. Another springtime.
Lucia got up from the bed and threw the shutters open wide. The light hurt her eyes. She looked down, four stories high. Solid, ancient stone; the marks of a century of horses’ hooves.
She saw the daughter of Assuntina, wife of Carmine the carter, go by hand-in-hand with a dark-skinned lad wearing a brown cap. Madonna, she thought. It seems like just yesterday that that girl was born, and her mamma was selling sulphur mineral water on the street with the child hanging from her neck; and now there she is strolling with a boy, and tomorrow she’ll be married, and before you know it she’ll have children of her own.
And Lucia Maione decided that she was alive after all. She turned around and went back inside, because her blood, and the blood of her blood, was still flowing.
And with that another minor, unnoticed miracle of the springtime of nineteen thirty-one was complete.
LVII
The pizza from the pushcart that passed through Piazza Municipio made him think of Iodice and his dream. Ricciardi’s solitary lunch generally featured this solution as an alternative to his sfogliatella pastry and espresso, and he gobbled it down, thinking about other things. Work, Garzo, his current case. Enrica.
But this time, as he watched the agile hands of the itinerant pizza chef, the commissario tried to imagine the suicide’s thoughts and words, when, not yet a prisoner to his dream, he wandered carefree and happy through the streets of the city. The doctor was right: there is a precise moment in which a person decides his own death. That moment can always be avoided. Fate doesn’t preordain; it has no will of its own. There’s no such thing as fate.
The piping hot mouthful slithered down into his belly, silencing its savage clamoring for more. Pizza was good, all right. Poor Iodice, his poor children, his poor wife. And his poor mother, who, judging by the proverb she’d uttered as she’d left his office—a proverb that had opened new avenues of investigation—really believed in fate.
He strolled along Via Toledo for a ways. The street’s two very different faces were on view: the large, venerable old palazzi with their high windows and broad balconies, the austere entrances guarded by liveried doormen. Illustrious names and heraldic crests; centuries of history having passed by in the shadows of those walls, year after year. Palazzo Della Porta, Palazzo Zevallos Stigliano, Palazzo Cavalcanti, Palazzo Capece Galeota: severe, majestic edifices, constituting the city’s formal drawing room. Behind them swarmed the anthill of the Spanish Quarter, nameless vicoli bubbling over with passions and crime: the dark narrow lanes that the Fascist regime wanted to erase through reclamation projects, as if a new piazza and a façade here and there could change people’s souls.
Children were getting out of school, a few factory workers and laborers and the city’s credentialed professionals were heading home. Nearly all the shops were closed; lunchtime was about to come to an end. The air was steeped in springtime.
Ricciardi caught a gamy whiff of love. Calise worked with money and emotions, the roots underlying every crime. But this time he could feel it: love was the killer.
As he walked, he skirted the construction sites, empty at this hour. The heavy white blocks used in the new constructions, the rickety, precarious wooden scaffoldings. Standing vigil, by now little more than fading shadows, were two dead men, killed in accidents a few months earlier. Distractedly, Ricciardi noticed a new one: Rachele, my Rachele, I’m coming to join you, they pushed me to join you. Sighing, he did his best not to dwell on those words, knowing he’d hear them again many times. Who was Rachele? A wife? A sister? And that poor soul in need of her company? Had he fallen or had he jumped? Who could say? And what did it matter now?
A short distance farther on, he saw a couple coming toward him, the man hobbling along on a pair of crutches, his left leg bandaged from knee to foot. He suddenly recognized Ridolfi, the unhappy widower of the woman who had set herself on fire and loyal client of Calise. He was talking excitedly with an insignificant woman who looked to be about his same age, her head lowered beneath a small hat trimmed with a veil.
Before the man’s eyes met his, Ricciardi had a chance to overhear: “I looked there too, I tell you. Who knows where she put them, damn her. May she burn in hell the way she burned to death.”
His voice was throbbing with rage. When he saw Ricciardi, his face transformed itself into the usual mask of grief demanding compassion; with a comical, awkward gesture, he lurched to a precarious halt, balancing on a single crutch, and removed his hat.
The commissario, offering no response to this greeting other than an expressionless gaze, thought to himself that a crutch was as good a murder weapon as any; and if you could stroll along Via Toledo with a sprained ankle, then you could also get to an apartment in the Sanità.
Still, despicable hypocrite though he was, even Professor Ridolfi needed a motive to commit a murder.
/> He turned around and retraced his steps; time was short and there was still a great deal of work to be done.
Maione was waiting for the commissario just outside of his office door.
“Commissario, buona sera. Have you eaten? The usual pizza, eh? Lucky you, you must have a cast-iron stomach. If I eat a fried pizza, I have to go straight to the hospital to see Doctor Modo. So I have that name. This city is just incredible; a person does something good, like, I don’t know, catching a dangerous criminal, and nobody ever finds out about it; but sleep with a married woman and pretty soon the newspaper boys are shouting it out on the street. Anyway, the man’s name is Attilio Romor, and they say he’s a good-looking young man. He has a part in a play by that famous guy, what’s his name . . . well, you know who I mean, right around here, at the Teatro dei Fiorentini. The show starts at eight. It’ll be easy for us to get there, so you tell me. And just in the nick of time: I hear that tomorrow is the last show before the troupe heads for Rome.”
Ricciardi thought it over.
“The last show. Tomorrow. Here’s what we’ll do: let’s meet at the theater at eight o’clock. Now let’s go home and get some rest; it’s going to be a late night.”
But Maione didn’t go home. He had another place to visit, and he was in a hurry: he needed to clear something up, once and for all.
In his strong, simple heart, there was no room for messiness. He had spent his whole life dealing with direct and unequivocal feelings and emotions; he was incapable of coping with doubt.
The sun had just set when he arrived at Vico del Fico. Filomena was surprised to see him, but she didn’t hold back a happy smile. She hastily pulled the shawl up over her face to hide her scar; she’d removed the bandages.
“Raffaele, what a surprise. I didn’t think you’d be here so early. I wanted to make you something to eat.”
Maione waved his hand, as if telling her not to bother.
“No, Filome’, don’t go to any trouble on my account. If you don’t mind, I was hoping to have a little talk with you. Can we go inside?”
A shadow of worry flitted over the woman’s beautiful face; Maione’s expression was different from the one she was accustomed to. He looked grim, determined, as if he were struggling with some mute sorrow or being tormented by a thought.
In that ground floor room, steeped in darkness as always, sat Rituccia, intently shelling peas at the table. Maione observed her serene, distant expression. A little old lady who had just turned twelve.
Filomena told her that they wanted to talk privately. The girl nodded a silent good-bye and left the room.
“She’s a good girl, but unfortunate. She’s suffered so, first losing her mamma, and now her father. Gaetano and I have decided to keep her here with us, at least until her mother’s relatives turn up. So far, we haven’t seen anyone. Shall I make you an ersatz coffee? It’ll just take me a couple of minutes.”
Maione sat down, setting his cap down on the table in front of him.
“No, Filome’, don’t worry about it. Sit down here for a second. I need to talk to you.”
The woman took a seat, drying her hands on her apron. In her deep dark eyes there glittered a light of concern and apprehension. As she sat down, she removed the shawl from her head. Maione smiled at her.
“This place, this home, and you, have done something important for me in these last few days. Knowing that you’re here, knowing the road to come here, have given me back the desire to get to the end of the day. You’ve become a good, dear friend to me. You smile at me, and I’m proud to make you smile. But Filome’, I’m a policeman. It’s not just a matter of the uniform; that’s just a shell, a box. I’m a policeman deep down. I can’t live with the thought that something’s been left unresolved; and also with the thought that you might be in danger. Whoever committed this . . . crime,” and here he waved vaguely in the direction of her face, “could come back with even worse intentions.”
Filomena gently shook her head, smiling.
“You see, Raffaele, you’re something new for me, in my life. You see me for who I am. I uncovered my face, with the wound showing, and you never so much as glanced at it. No one looks at me the way they used to. Not even my son. But you look me in the eye without looking away. We’re friends, you said; so why can’t we just pretend we met under different circumstances, not these?”
Now it was Maione’s turn to shake his head.
“No, Filomena. Between friends, people who have come to care about each other, people who talk and are happy to see each other, things cannot be left unsaid. I have to know, Filome’. With this shadow between us, there can be no friendship.”
Tears welled up in Filomena’s eyes. She glimpsed a determination in Maione’s face that she’d never seen in him before.
Outside in the vicolo, the children were playing with a bundle of rags that was serving as a makeshift soccer ball. A woman called her son for dinner. Over the fire, the pot was coming to a boil.
The woman lifted her hand to the scar on her face and traced its contour, with a gesture that was becoming habitual.
“All right, Raffaele. I don’t want to lose your friendship, and I want to be able to talk to my friend. But this thing doesn’t leave this house, the place where it happened. Do I have your word on that?”
Maione nodded. Filomena hadn’t once shifted her gaze away from his eyes.
“It was my son.”
LVIII
Tata Rosa was surprised to see him home so early. Out in the street, the last rays of sunlight were still illuminating the highest stories of the apartment buildings. She had imperiously demanded to check his temperature, laying her calloused hand across his forehead.
Ricciardi wasted no time arguing; he knew from his own sad experience that Tata Rosa was unstoppable. He explained that he felt just fine but had come home early to rest since he’d be out late that night for work. He thus managed to sidestep the usual jeremiad on woolen undershirts and the perils of weather during the changing of the seasons, but not an egg frittata with macaroni left over from last night’s dinner.
Once he had finished his snack, already bracing himself for the first burning stabs of stomach pain, he went to his window. In the Colombo apartment—he now knew the last name of the family across the way—preparations were underway for dinner. He saw Enrica go by. He was relieved to see that she looked healthy, but at the same time, he was disheartened by her expression, which was sad, preoccupied.
If only he could, he would tell her how important it was to him to be able to watch her movements, day after day, to imagine the words he couldn’t hear, her serene, left-handed motions. If he could, he would have erased their awkward meeting at police headquarters. It never occurred to him that Enrica’s state of mind might be roughly analogous to his own.
In that reflected life, he’d learned how to live, he who was a prisoner of his own curse.
He remembered that about a year ago, on the floor above the one where Enrica’s family lived, something terrible had happened: a young bride, abandoned by her husband, had hanged herself. Lost love, shame, humiliation: it was hard to imagine the hell to which she’d been condemned. The same home that had seen her arrive overjoyed, carried over the threshold in the arms of one man, saw her leave in the arms of four, asleep now and forever. Since then, the shutters had been shut tight.
In the two months until the ghost vanished, Ricciardi watched the same double vignette every night: on the floor below, the peaceful, smiling warmth of a large family celebrating the life of an ordinary day; on the floor above, in the black empty eye socket of an unlighted window, the swaying corpse of the dead bride. The two faces of love: the two extremes of the same emotion.
And while his sweet Enrica went on with her left-handed embroidering, her head tilted over her right shoulder, in the cone of soft light from the table lamp, the dead woman—her neck unnaturally elongated from the rope, her eyes bugging out, her swollen tongue lolling out her open mouth—curse
d the unfaithful bastard who had killed her without laying a finger on her.
His arms crossed, hidden from her sight by the fading light of sunset, the commissario mused that a man who bore the perennially bleeding wound of the deaths of others had no right to dream of a life like other people’s; like the life he could see out his window. The man who watches may not be able to live, but he can still try to set things right.
’O Padreterno nun è mercante ca pava ’o sabbato, Iodice’s mother and Carmela Calise had both said. God Almighty’s not a shopkeeper who pays His debts on Saturday. But sooner or later, He pays them.
Reluctantly, he pulled himself away from the window and grabbed his jacket.
The muffled noises from the vicolo filtered in through the dim light of the basso. The words that Filomena had just uttered had landed between them like a live bomb, but the woman’s calm, straightforward tone of voice had made it clear to Maione that this was a statement of fact, not an accusation.
“But why? Your son, Gaetano . . . why would he do such a thing?”
Filomena smiled, and in that moment she resembled a Madonna painted by Raphael. Her gentle voice was that of a woman who was finally at peace.
“I grew up on a farm in Vomero. We were a big family, poor but happy, even if we didn’t really know it. Life on a farm is hard work, at every hour of the day and night. If you don’t work, you don’t eat, and if you don’t eat, you die. Everything’s simple. But nothing’s ever easy.
“Once, when I was a little girl, maybe seven, maybe eight, our hens started going missing. We’d find feathers, blood. We never heard a sound. Could be a fox, maybe a weasel, my father said.
“He set out a trap, one of those wire traps that snap tight to capture the animal. The next morning we found a small paw dangling from the wire. Just the paw: coal black. You could see the gnaw marks of sharp teeth and there was blood all over the ground. That fox had chewed it off, little by little, without crying out. We slept right next to the henhouse, and we hadn’t heard a thing.
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