Poisonville

by Massimo Carlotto

  The chilly salt air was like a second bucketful of water.

  He must have been a pretty awful sight, considering the look that the chauffeur gave him as he resumed unmooring the boat.

  His wobbly gait was not the result of the boat’s pitch and roll. The swampy sea was motionless. He breathed deeply, gulping down fog and salt.

  It was the air he had breathed since he was a child, an unhealthy air for anyone who hadn’t been born in the Northeast. A swelling surge of water, perhaps the wake of a passing oil tanker in the distance, made the yacht pitch and yaw. He lost his balance and he felt the chauffeur grab his arm to steady him. He shook that unwanted hand away, and seized the railing of the gangway with all the determination that the boat’s unbridled motion allowed him.

  He set foot on solid ground with some satisfaction. For a moment, as he was crossing the gangway, he was afraid of pitching headfirst into the water. But he was Antonio Visentin, and the Visentins never fall.

  He turned around to look at the yacht. The Romanian chauffeur was at the wheel, having pulled the gangway inboard. The boat was slowly heading out to the open sea.

  Selvaggia didn’t come on deck to bid him farewell. She was probably still sitting on the leather sofa. He thought he glimpsed the flickering flame of her Dupont lighter; she was probably lighting one of those cigars she loved so much. He had taught her to appreciate those Cuban cigars.

  The engine revved and the yacht suddenly sped up; the bow rose in the water, and a yellowish wake spread out behind it. He stood gazing after the boat as it vanished into the nighttime mists. He wondered if he’d ever see Selvaggia again. One thing he knew for certain was that he’d never go see her in Timisoara. He wasn’t going to abandon the Northeast, the way everyone else was about to do.

  As the darkness tightened around him, he climbed into the Jaguar and phoned Francesco.

  * * *

  I had returned to town a while ago, and I was hunting for my father. Before turning him in to the police I wanted to talk to him. I had only one question for him: why? Why had he taken Giovanna to bed? Why did she consider him the man who had ruined her life? Why had he killed her? I was an emotional wreck, but the fury that filled my brain kept me from collapsing. That would happen later, when it was all over. I had gone to my father’s villa, then to his law office, and even to the Villa Selvaggia. He wasn’t anywhere. He must be hiding somewhere, or else he had fled with his accomplice. I was ready to follow him to Romania, but I was determined to make him answer my questions. I heard the muffled ring of the cell phone in my overcoat pocket. It was him.

  “I have to talk to you,” he said in a gummy voice.

  “Don’t think you can keep me from telling the police,” I shouted. “You may be my father, but you’re going to stand trial in a criminal court.”

  “I’ll wait for you at the old iron bridge over the river.”

  It was an old bridge built by the Allies at the end of the war, to replace the one that the Germans had destroyed during their withdrawal. Papa and I used to fish from it. I wondered why he would choose that dark, cold, deserted place at that time of night.

  In the distance, I saw the headlights of the Jaguar, the dome light burning brightly, the door wide open. I jabbed my foot down angrily on the accelerator and flicked on my brights.

  Papa had one hand resting on the railing. His elegant tailored overcoat was unbuttoned, his tie was askew, outside the jacket. He was squinting against the bright beam of the headlights. He looked like a bewildered old man. The rage I had managed to tamp down until then became uncontrollable. I picked up rocks from the road and started hurling them at him. One hit him on the chest, another on the shoulder, a third on the forehead. He tried not to flinch as the rocks flew at him, then by instinct he raised one hand to protect his face.

  I stopped about three steps away from him and picked up a particularly large rock.

  “Why?!” I shouted. “Why?”

  “She gave me no choice,” he replied in a wavering voice. “She was going to tell you everything.”

  I lunged at him and knocked him to the ground. “Everything? What was she going to tell me?”

  “She had figured out that Selvaggia and I had been responsible for Alvise’s ruin,” he replied, trying to get to his feet. “She started challenging me, in a subtle, twisted game. Before I knew it, we wound up in bed.”

  “Were you in love with her?”

  “No. It was just a game. Giovanna loved only you.”

  “How could you?” I shouted.

  I hoisted the rock high, ready to smash it down into his face. To kill him. Papa raised his hands to stop me.

  “No! There’s no need,” he stammered, and then climbed up onto the parapet of the bridge.

  “Don’t be a coward,” I shouted, trying to grab him.

  He looked back for an instant, and then allowed himself to drop into the river. I heard a splash. Then silence.

  I was trembling from the cold when I knocked at Carla’s door. Carla let me in without a word. Teeth chattering, I told her everything that had happened, that my father had killed himself and that I was satisfied with that. Now I knew the truth, and no one else needed to know. The game was over.

  Caressing my cheek, Carla said only: “Unless you tell the truth, you’ll wind up like him.”

  That was when I burst into uncontrolled sobs, and with a voice that was nothing like my own, I burst out: “Now what about me? How will I ever be able to have a son? How can I . . . ever forget?”

  Carla embraced me, with an infinite gentleness. I realized that she was weeping too, in silence.

  “Come on,” she said, “I’ll come with you.”

  I went to the barracks and asked for Mele. The inspector took one look and realized that something very serious had happened.

  “Call Zan,” I said. “I have a statement to make.”

  The prosecutor took an hour to arrive. While we waited, I sat in silence, staring at the facing wall. Mele waited with me, standing beside me. Zan was annoyed at having been awakened in the middle of the night.

  “I am all ears,” he said, as he took a seat in the inspector’s office chair.

  “My father Antonio Visentin killed himself a little more than an hour ago. He jumped off the old iron bridge. Before committing suicide, he confessed that he had killed my fiancée, Giovanna Barovier, in a small suburban house and that he transported Giovanna’s dead body to her own house in complicity with the Contessa Selvaggia Calchi Renier and her Romanian chauffeur.”

  Zan stared at me in horror.

  “Please take down my official statement, if you would,” I said.

  “You’re not in your right mind,” Zan grumbled. “Maybe you should take some time to reflect . . .”

  “Zan!” Inspector Mele exclaimed indignantly.

  The prosecutor cleared his throat in embarrassment, then decided to take my testimony.

  In reality, I didn’t have much too add, but I wanted to make sure that every word was taken down with meticulous precision. I left the barracks a few hours later.

  Carla was outside waiting for me. She flicked her cigarette away onto the wet asphalt and linked arms with me.

  As we walked off into the dark, I felt a strange surge of strength. Strong enough to face the new situation. Strong enough to face the town.

  * * *

  “Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be.”

  The rosary had just begun, and Don Piero’s stentorian voice echoed through the half-empty church.

  “World without end. Amen.”

  The prayer group that had assembled for Antonio Visentin’s wake responded in a whisper that echoed like a gust of wind down the empty church aisles. No one, not even Francesco, wanted to pray for his damned soul.

&nb
sp; Prunella was kneeling in the front row, dressed in black with a veil over her eyes. She had joined in the chorus mechanically, though the incipit of the rosary was especially well suited to her state of mind.

  Glory be to the Father, and to the Sonj.

  Alvise was dead. Giovanna was dead. Antonio was dead.

  “In the first dolorous mystery we contemplate Jesus praying in the garden of Gethsemane,” the elderly parish priest was reciting.

  The first sorrowful mystery.

  Mystery and sacrifice. This was the essence of violent and unjust deaths. Death is always unjust. The death of a daughter goes against nature. Prunella was alive, and she felt a profound sense of guilt. Her sin lay at the origin of that tragedy, of all that suffering. Years before, while her husband was in prison, she had gone to bed with Antonio Visentin, the family friend, the lawyer whose duty it had been to clear her husband’s name. She had given her body to Visentin in order to take revenge for her husband’s thousands of betrayals. And she had done it when Alvise most needed her, when he needed his wife, the woman whom he had led to the altar, who had embraced the sacrament of faithfulness and devotion. In sickness and in health, in good times and in bad. In poverty. That was why she could never forgive him. She had married the wealthiest man in town, and had abandoned him when he reduced her to poverty. Alvise had been her first and her last. Until Antonio, who had been her second and her last. With Alvise, it had lasted sixteen years. With Antonio, a few months. He had soon tired of her, of her overwhelming crises of guilt. Probably, he had taken her to bed with a finely calibrated goal, to alienate from Alvise the one person who might have fought on his behalf.

  Alvise loved life, especially a life of luxury. He loved women, gambling, and reckless nights out with his friends. But he was no criminal. He would never have been capable of doing what they had charged him with, what they had convicted him of.

  And yet she had chosen to believe the lies of scum like Giacomo Zuglio, the chilly logic of Antonio Visentin, and the hasty judgment of the town. She had chosen to believe the dispassionate but faulty decision of a judge. Her one shortcoming had been far more serious than Alvise’s many shortcomings. Because, even though Alvise had betrayed her repeatedly, he would never have abandoned her. And that was precisely what she had done to him. She had repudiated him, and in so doing, she thought that she had rescued her own, skin-deep virtue.

  “In the second sorrowful mystery we contemplate the scourging of our lord Jesus Christ in the house of Pontius Pilate,” Don Piero was reciting. His voice reached her from a distance, muffled by the buzzing of her thoughts.

  Antonio had been her Pontius Pilate. He had done nothing to protect Alvise, his childhood friend, from the cruelties of flagellation. But what happened in the years that followed was even worse. And there was no justification imaginable. Even though she had turned her back on Alvise, the town had still turned its back on her.

  And as she slipped into disgrace, she besmirched herself with her second sin. She had allowed herself to be devoured by envy. Envy of Antonio, and especially of Selvaggia. Selvaggia—that hateful, vulgar, arrogant, domineering, faithless woman who had commanded the town for years—the town’s unquestioned queen. That untouchable woman, who could however touch anyone and anything that she pleased.

  Prunella had become convinced that after Antonio left her, he had become Selvaggia’s lover. And that had made her blind with fury.

  “In the third sorrowful mystery, we contemplate the coronation of our lord with thorns.”

  When Giovanna, after all her grieving and suffering over her father, had finally started to rebuild her life, Prunella, instead of rejoicing in that process like any good mother, had fallen victim to a demented and all-enveloping jealousy. She couldn’t stand the idea of Giovanna marrying either a Calchi Renier or a Visentin.

  She had infused her daughter with the seed of suspicion. Over the course of the years, Prunella had managed to discover certain aspects of the truth. Don Piero had confided to her that Alvise was young Lucio’s father. And a few years later, in the course of her work with the homeless and mentally ill, she had come to know El Mato, the town fool who wandered around dressed in an old parka shouting: “Now I understand! Now I’ve figured it out!” One summer day she went to visit him in the lean-to where he lived in the country, to take him some second-hand clothing. She had seen him washing himself in a basin, and had seen the skin of his upper body, devastated by old burns. Patiently, she had coaxed the story from him of how he had gotten those burns. It was he who had set the fire at the furniture factory. He had been paid by an emissary from the Contessa, but he had never used the money. He still kept the cash in an old briefcase hidden under his bed. Prunella had watched as he rubbed those old fifty-thousand-lire banknotes between his fingers. When he sloshed the gasoline over the floor in the paint and varnish store room, he was falling-down drunk, and the flames had enveloped him in a flash. The Contessa’s emissary had taken him out of the country for medical treatment. Then he’d come home, but he was never the same. Prunella felt sure that the only reason they hadn’t killed him was that they no longer thought of him as a threat.

  “In the fourth sorrowful mystery, we contemplate the climb of Jesus up to Calvary’s mount, bearing the exceedingly heavy Cross.”

  She hadn’t been honest with Giovanna. No, she certainly hadn’t. She’d been deceitful, insinuating and manipulative—as only the envious know how to be. She had pushed her to dig into the mystery, providing her with those few but fundamental truths, bit by bit. Giovanna’s mental and emotional equilibrium was so fragile, the wounds of her abandonment had not yet healed. But Prunella had plunged the knife of false hope straight into her heart. And then, foolish woman that she was, she had covered her eyes, turned her head away, pretended not to know in what direction she had pushed her despairing daughter. In the name of a truth that would never come out into the open, she had driven her daughter into the darkness of hell.

  And now here she was, reciting the fifth sorrowful mystery, in which we contemplate the crucifixion and death of Jesus on the Cross. In order to plumb the depths of the mystery of a wretched wife and a deceitful mother. Of a woman who professed a sacred love in the pews of a church, so that she could conceal from herself her own inability to provide an unconditional love. Condemned to secrecy by her hypocrisy and pride. Cursed unto the ages of ages. Amen.

  * * *

  The reporter from Romania Libera, the most respected Romanian daily, waited for his photographer to finish his shoot of the Contessa Selvaggia Calchi Renier. He was in her office, in the new headquarters of the Torrefranchi Group in Timisoara. The reporter was overwhelmed by the elegance of the furnishings. The photographer began breaking down his lights, and the Contessa gestured to the reporter.

  “I’m at your disposal,” she said, with a smile.

  The man smiled back and sat down across the desk from her.

  “Why has an important group like Torrefranchi chosen to transfer its operations to Romania?” he asked.

  “Because Romania is a country rich in natural and human resources, capable of offering numerous opportunities to a group as dynamic as ours.”

  “Here in Timisoara there are more than 1,200 Italian companies out of the 13,000 present in the country. One Italian newspaper called this a province of the Northeast. Do you agree with this statement?”

  “It strikes me as inaccurate, inasmuch as we are only guests here,” she replied diplomatically. “But the presence of northeastern Italian companies is unquestionably sizable. Most of the companies and most of the ten thousand Italians who live in Timisoara do come from that part of Italy.”

  “In an earlier interview you said that you were not satisfied with new Romanian labor regulations—”

  “And I am still not satisfied. The regulations impose too many restrictions on the rights of companies to fire employees and negotiate salaries.
If we hope to be competitive, we need to have an increasingly flexible labor market.”

  “Italy is Romania’s largest trading partner, but it is only in sixth place in terms of investments—”

  “The Torrefranchi Group has always adopted a different policy in this important sector. We have developed our industrial sites with special attention to the question of infrastructure, building new roads and repairing existing roads. And we take care of our own waste disposal. We are also making plans for a school and a nursery school for our employees.”

  “Free of charge?”

  Selvaggia smiled. “Our prices are always very competitive.”

  “Many Italian industrialists complain about corruption among the authorities in Romania—”

  “Corruption is a blight, harmful to Romania, and in particular to the customs sector. All we ask is reliable rules that will allow us to work without unreasonable risk.”

  “Now, a personal question: you have stated that you are the victim of a miscarriage of Italian justice—”

  “A political conspiracy,” the Contessa explained. “Like many of the investigations targeting entrepreneurs. But I am sure it will all be solved amicably. It’s only a question of time.”

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  Massimo Carlotto was born in Padua, Italy. He is the author of The Goodbye Kiss (nominated for the Edgar Award in 2007), Death’s Dark Abyss, and The Fugitive, an autobiographical account of his time on the run after being falsely accused of murder. He is one of Italy’s most popular authors and a major exponent of the Mediterranean noir novel.

  Marco Videtta is a well-known screenwriter and the author of several successful Italian television series. Poisonville is his first novel.