by Marco Vichi
‘I may just do it anyway.’
They chatted awhile of this and other things, taking their time. Diotivede seemed rather argumentative. He couldn’t resign himself to the life of the retiree lounging about all day with nothing to do. Bordelli was thinking that five years would go by quickly, and if he wanted to retire to the hills, he’d better get moving.
‘What are you going to do tonight, Diotivede?’
‘Put wax plugs in my ears,’ said the doctor.
They said goodbye. Bordelli had a leisurely shave and went out. There was a postcard in his letterbox. He turned it over slowly, fearing it might be from Milena. But it wasn’t. It was from Paris. The image was of a vineyard in Montmartre.
Dear Bordelli,
We are born to suffer. All people do here is eat a great deal and drink even more, and you need a pitchfork to keep the women at bay … In short, a crashing bore! Lucky you who get to work all day.
Yours, the Baron
What a shit, he thought, smiling. Either he had posted it the minute he’d got off the train, or the Italian postal system had made tremendous progress. Bordelli put the card back in the letterbox and went out into the street. The sky was brimming with clouds in motion, but the sirocco warmed the air. He got into his car and drove off. He would gladly have lit a cigarette but tried to resist. His melancholy practically stuck to his skin. At Porta Romana he turned on to Via Senese, drove past Galluzzo, and after the Certosa took the road that led to Le Rose. By now the Beetle knew the way and drove itself.
He turned on to Odoardo’s unpaved driveway. His desire to smoke grew by the minute. He parked in the usual spot and got out. The Vespa wasn’t there, but that was all right. He’d almost grown fond of the place. As usual, he circled round to the back of the house. The expanse of olive trees had the colour of certain lakes. Farther on, the black tips of cypresses jutted above the broad boughs of pine forest. He walked away from the farmstead and sat down on the wooden flatbed of an old cart. All that peace made him want to smoke a cigarette, and at last he lit one. He smoked slowly, looking out at the horizon. The sky was full of sinewy clouds, and the warm wind blew in waves through the olive trees, sounding like rough seas … That wind brought to mind a morning many years before … It was April, and he was walking along a secondary road with Gavino Piras.
Bordelli was always happy to go out on patrol with him. They spoke little, sometimes not a single word. There was a strong wind blowing that morning. Bordelli liked the feel of it against his face. The spring was entering his blood and head with force. All at once they heard the sound of motors on the wind. They barely managed to get off the road and jump into a ditch in time. A second later, round the bend appeared a Wehrmacht motor convoy. It was endless. It passed so close to their heads that they could hear people speaking German. In the last lorries the men were singing in chorus a now famous song about worthless Italian traitors. Piras started squirming and sweating rage. He couldn’t stand to hear Germans singing, especially that song, and he removed the magazine from his machine gun to prevent himself from opening fire. When the final lorry disappeared over the horizon, Gavino climbed out of the ditch. His eyes were very dark and full of malice. He walked calmly over to the nearest tree, dropped his machine gun on the ground and attacked the trunk with his fists. It sounded like someone chopping wood; it made the same noise. The final blows were quite fierce and left the bark stained with blood. When he stopped, he was out of breath. He picked up the machine gun and magazines from the ground, then lit a cigarette. His knuckles were bleeding, his face full of bitterness. Bordelli saw all of Italy in that face. A Duce with delusions of grandeur had brought the Nazis into our house: that was what hurt the most, the thing that could not be forgiven.
A few months later Gavino lost an arm. And he was the luckiest one. As they were removing a mine from its hole, the other two went flying through the air. The Germans had invented a new hair-trigger safety catch attached under the mine, a hellish thread that lit the fuse when broken.
Bordelli had last seen Gavino Piras in June 1945, in a train station mobbed with people walking in every direction. A throng of silent figures: wounded soldiers, hollow-eyed women, barefooted children, families of old people with their lives inside their suitcases. And instead of voices, one heard the sound of thousands of footsteps. Piras was taking the train to Civitavecchia, where he would take ship for Olbia. He was wearing a military jacket with an empty sleeve and stared at the railway carriages as if looking out over the plain of Campidano. Bordelli didn’t quite know how to say goodbye to him. They weren’t in the habit of talking much, and in the end he gave him a slap on the back.
‘Good luck, Gavino,’ he’d said. He couldn’t think of anything else. Gavino had headed off to his train, empty sleeve dangling at his side.
The cigarette was finished, and Bordelli already wanted to smoke another. He put one in his mouth but didn’t light it. The midday bells were ringing. A lightning bolt flashed on the horizon, and a few seconds later he heard a muffled sound of thunder. More flashes followed at once, one after another, and a long drum roll of thunder rang out. A storm was approaching. The warm wind was bringing an almost summer-like storm.
He heard a hen clucking after laying an egg. Putting the cigarette back into the packet, he got up and went into the chicken coop. He found the egg atop some straw in the shed. Taking it in his hand, he felt its warmth. He made two holes in the shell with the car keys and sucked hard, swallowing the white first. Just as the yolk was descending, he heard Odoardo’s Vespa pull up in the forecourt. He went back to the loggia with the egg still in his hand, smiling.
‘I stole an egg of yours,’ he said.
Odoardo took off his gloves and goggles. He looked very tired, even drunk. It was as if he remained on his feet thanks only to an invisible hand holding him up by the hair.
‘The hens were my mother’s,’ he said. His breath smelled of vomit.
‘It’s been ages since I drank a just-laid egg,’ said Bordelli. He finished the yolk and left the empty egg in his hand. Odoardo pulled a crumpled cigarette from his pocket and stuck it in his mouth.
‘Just throw it on the ground …’ he said, slurring his words.
‘Got a match?’ The inspector tossed the shell on to the tall grass, then lit a match before the boy’s wasted face.
‘Tell me something, Odoardo. If you were me, what would you do?’
‘I’m not you.’
‘A man has been killed. He was a loan shark, a despicable man, someone who ruined people’s lives, who threatened the weak, blackmailed them, and maybe even killed them sometimes. At some point I find out that the killer is a twenty-yearold kid who works for an architect and raises chickens … If you were me, what would you do?’
‘And what would you do if you were me? I have a headache and would really like to sleep, but I’ve got a police inspector standing in front of me wanting to make small talk and stealing my eggs.’ Bordelli smiled.
‘If I were you, I’d invite the inspector into the house, make some coffee, and tell him everything.’
‘Let’s talk right here,’ said Odoardo, eyes feverish.
‘All right.’
‘As luck would have it, I wanted to tell you a story myself. I heard it last night from a poor half-drunken bastard.’ Odoardo went and sat down in a wicker chair. He shivered and then hunched his back. He gestured for Bordelli to sit down in another chair, whose wicker bottom was partly staved in.
‘Please sit down, Inspector. It’s not a long story, but it’s not very short, either. Are you sure you want to hear it?’
Bordelli lit a cigarette and sat down beside Odoardo. The youth was staring at a braid of garlic hanging from a rafter.
‘See that garlic? My mother braided it herself. She’s gone, but the garlic is still there. I can touch with my own hands something my mother touched … But that’s not what I wanted to say … My story’s about something else …’
‘I’m all ears,�
� said Bordelli. Lightning flashed in the distance, followed by muffled rumbles of thunder. The wind began to pick up, but it still wasn’t raining. Odoardo seemed stuck. He rested his hands on his knees and kept looking at his dirty fingernails.
‘It’s a long story and a short story, I don’t know if you know what I mean.’
‘I’m in no hurry,’ said Bordelli.
‘Between one glass and the next, that drunkard started telling me his mother was beautiful, she was good, she loved him very much, all the usual bullshit people say about their mothers. They lived together, and everything was going nicely, without any problems. But one fine day his mother got run over by a car, a Lancia Flaminia that hit her at the edge of a country road and never even stopped. She didn’t die immediately, but spent a few days in agony. Her son stayed by her side, holding her hand. His mother couldn’t talk. Every so often she would open her eyes, but she didn’t even recognise him. Then she died. And there you have it. End of story. As you see, it doesn’t take long to tell, but the guy told me that it’s actually a long story, a very long story. It lasts a lifetime.’
An acidic burp escaped him involuntarily, and he grimaced. He was pale and trembling slightly.
‘And do you know what the guy’s father was called?’ he asked.
‘Let me guess … Was he called Ciro?’ said Bordelli.
‘Well done, Inspector. But you may not know that there are people going around saying that it’s not true … that that ring is a lie, and he was born in a brothel and his father was one of the many Americans passing through to drain his balls.’
‘The world is full of liars.’
‘And drunks who talk rubbish …’
‘Tell me something, Odoardo. The guy who told you that terrible story, what made him feel worse, the fact that his mother died, or the fact that his mother …’
‘Was a whore?’
‘Yes.’
‘I didn’t think to ask him. What do you think?’
‘I think the kid shouldn’t worry himself too much over the slander of a loan shark.’
‘That what I told him, too,’ said Odoardo, throwing his cigarette butt on the ground.
‘And what did he say?’
‘Nothing. He just said there were some photographs around …’
‘Has he ever seen them?’
‘He can’t. A police inspector keeps them locked in a drawer.’ Odoardo was scowling. He kept sighing repeatedly, as if gasping for air, and biting his nails till they bled. Bordelli looked at his bloodshot eyes and felt terribly sorry for him. The thunderclaps were growing near, and the first drops of rain started to fall.
‘You know what you should have asked this friend of yours, Odoardo?’
‘He’s not my friend …’
‘You should have asked him how a ring can end up in a loan shark’s stomach.’
‘I did ask him.’
‘And what did he say?’
‘He told me the whole story. He’d already given a fair amount of money to the guy, basically everything he had, because he wanted his mother to rest in peace and without debts. Then one day he went to see the loan shark and brought the ring with him, to try to persuade him to let him at least see the photos of his mother … Because he didn’t want to believe that story about the brothel. That ring was important to him. It was a cherished memento, a gift from his father to his mother. He wanted to leave it with the man as collateral while he looked for the rest of the money, but only on the condition that he let him see those photos immediately. The shark took the ring in his hand and looked at it up close and started laughing. He started telling him that it was all bollocks, that this Ciro didn’t exist, that the ring had been made by a poor mother who didn’t want her son to know what she used to be: a whore for the Americans. Then he told him that the only thing he should think about was finding a way to pay the debt down to the last lira, and that only then, and only if he felt kind, he might give him the photos. My “friend” swallowed that bitter pill and said that of course he would pay it all in full, but if he couldn’t see the photos now, he wanted the ring back. The shark shook his head and said he would keep it as a guarantee. My “friend” said no, he wanted to leave with his mother’s ring in his pocket. But the guy wouldn’t listen. And so my friend started protesting. He was determined to get that memento back, even by force, but the moment he reached out with his hand, the shark swallowed the ring and said that if he didn’t get the hell out of there immediately, things might take a bad turn …’
‘And then?’
‘And then they started bullfighting. But only the last part, where the torero sticks the sword into the bull’s back, and the bull collapses in the dirt … You know what I’m talking about? It’s a very sad sight.’
Odoardo sneered with disdain. He was paler than ever. He lit another cigarette and took a deep drag. The rain was coming down harder and harder. Bordelli’s legs felt numb, and so he stood up and started walking about under the loggia. Glancing at the braid of garlic, he wondered distractedly how long it would have lasted in Totò’s kitchen.
‘Feel like a coffee?’ he asked, turning towards the lad.
‘Even two, but it’s too much effort to go and make it.’
‘I’ll make it myself,’ said Bordelli.
Odoardo ran his hands over his face, as if to wipe away his weariness, then stood up from the chair with an effort and leaned against the wall. He searched his pockets a long time for the keys, and at last he found them. On the third try, he got the key in the hole and opened the door. They climbed the stairs in silence. Odoardo pointed the inspector to the kitchen and then went and lay down on the couch, in front of the cold fireplace. Bordelli had a little trouble finding things, but he was in no hurry. He liked the silence. Calmly and slowly, he got the espresso pot ready. He found two little cups and set them on the table. While waiting for the water to boil, he went and looked out the window. It was pouring, the thunder growing still louder and more frequent. He stayed there for a spell, watching the raindrops pound the Beetle, thinking about what was happening in that house. Hearing the coffee bubble up, he went and turned off the flame. He put some sugar into the two cups, poured the coffee over it, and went over to Odoardo. The boy seemed to be sleeping, but then he opened his eyes and sat up. He looked unwell. The inspector set the coffee down on the table and put another cigarette in his mouth.
‘Shall we make a fire?’ he asked.
‘Do whatever you like.’
A lightning bolt struck very close to the house, the thunder shaking the windows. Bordelli went and knelt down in front of the fireplace. He rolled up a few pages of newspaper, put some wood on top, and set fire to it all. He watched the flames envelop the logs, which were very dry and started burning at once. Then he went and sat down in an armchair in front of the boy.
‘And how’s your friend from last night feeling now? Satisfied?’ he asked. Odoardo stared at the steaming little cup.
‘Are you talking about his conscience and stuff like that?’
‘More or less.’
‘The loan shark had led him to understand that his mother’s death had not been an accident, and he laughed in his face.’
‘Why would he have killed her?’
‘The poor woman was exasperated and had threatened to report him to the police.’
‘She should have.’
‘It’s water under the bridge. My friend has other worries … He feels like he has a mouse gnawing at his head.’
‘The photographs?’
‘He only wants to know whether certain things are true, or rubbish.’ Odoardo looked devastated. It must have been rather unpleasant to learn all those things from a delicate soul like Badalamenti. The fire started crackling loudly, the flames beginning to rise. Bordelli finished his coffee and set his cup down on the table.
‘Tell your friend I can tell him what the truth is,’ he said. Odoardo raised his head and looked him in the eye.
‘You can tell me,’
he said, ‘and I’ll pass it on to him.’ Bordelli pretended to think it over for a minute, then leaned back in the armchair.
‘Those famous photos were shot in Birkenau,’ he said.
‘What’s that?’
‘A Nazi concentration camp in Poland.’ Odoardo’s upper body lurched, as if struck with a club. The inspector continued his lie.
‘Your friend’s mother was of Jewish extraction. She didn’t want her son to know of the humiliations she’d suffered in that camp. She was afraid he’d grow up with too much anger inside. The photos show some horrifying scenes.’
‘What do they show?’
‘If your friend ever saw them, he would understand why his mother wanted to keep them from falling into his hands. By some strange inner mechanism, some survivors of the camps feel ashamed, and your friend’s mother was an extreme case of this, to the point of letting herself be blackmailed by an extortionist. The only remaining mystery is how those photographs ended up in the hands of someone like Badalamenti … But you can’t always know everything in life,’ the inspector concluded.
Odoardo seemed paralysed for several minutes. Then he got up and went over to the window to enjoy the storm. He kept his hands planted firmly in his pockets.
‘And what can you tell me about Ciro?’ he asked.
‘Ciro? … Well, he was your friend’s father.’
‘And how do you know that?’
‘I did some research. It’s easy for us policemen.’
‘Is Ciro alive?’
‘He died right after the war.’
‘How did he die?’ Bordelli made up the first lie that came to mind.
‘Typhoid fever,’ he said.
Odoardo remained immobile and said nothing. The only sounds came from the fire and the rain falling hard outside. Every so often there was a pop in the fireplace, and an ember came flying out. The thunder was beginning to die down, but it was still raining buckets. At last Odoardo turned his head towards the fire, and Bordelli saw him smile for the very first time. It was not a happy smile.
‘Thank you, Inspector. For me, at least, that’s enough. I really don’t give a fuck about any of the rest,’ he said. Then he turned to look outside again.
