Livia, lazily, evaluated the man: courteous, very gallant, good-looking and well aware of it, educated and intelligent. But lacking in any one quality that stood out over all the others. No special allure, in other words. No spark.
Duty, however, came first, so she listened to him with a display of interest as he described his work day: the archaeological digs he was working on, the diplomatic milieu, the political and social situation back in Germany.
Then, suddenly, while sipping her tea, she asked him: “What about your leisure time, Manfred? What do you do in your free time, in this strange and beautiful city? Where do you like to stroll?”
The German waved his hand vaguely in the air.
“Oh, here and there. I like the sea, the architecture of the buildings. And I love to stop and eat those wonderful pizzas they fry up in the streets. People are very kind and friendly to men in uniform, unlike what you might imagine in the aftermath of the war.”
Livia set down her cup.
“You know, the same thing happens to me. I like to chat with agreeable strangers. I also enjoy going down to the port to look at the ships. I take advantage of a special permit that a friend of mine secured for me; it even allows me into areas that are otherwise off limits. I personally find it quite thrilling, I have to admit.”
At those words, Manfred seemed to start, lunging forward in his chair.
“Really, Livia? I like ships very much myself. I could accompany you, sometime. Would you allow me?”
The woman laughed, coquettishly.
“Certain privileges ought to be earned, don’t you know that? It’s not enough just to ask, even if you are an attractive German officer.”
The major placed his hand on his chest in a theatrical manner.
“Livia, I promise that I’ll do everything I can to win your favor. And that will be a delightful ordeal, since it will mean spending time with you.”
“We’ll see about that. We’ll have to see whether, after a full day of work, the archeological digs, and the fried pizzas, there will be enough time to court a poor widow. By the way, what do you have to say about your heart? I hope you’re not going to try to tell me that a man like you has no current female interests?”
Manfred shifted uncomfortably in his chair: “No, no . . . I’m a free man.”
Livia feigned a grimace of disappointment.
“Ah. Too bad. I find men who are otherwise spoken for so much more intriguing. They’re less trouble and a lot more fun. Single men all too often display a worrisome tendency to become excessively serious.”
The German seemed to be reassured.
“Well, then, I suppose I ought to make myself clearer, I’m a free man at the moment. But I have . . . certain plans for the near future that will soon usher me into your favorite category of men.”
Livia put on a picture-perfect expression of astonishment.
“Then you’re saying you’re about to be engaged! Congratulations, Major. This only increases my curiosity about you. By all means, carry out your intentions: I’ll feel so much more comfortable spending time with you.”
Manfred stared at her in happy surprise.
“No doubt about it, you certainly are an extraordinary woman, Livia. Splendid and extraordinary. All right then, it’s decided: I’ll become an engaged man who’s clearly inclined to enjoy all the best life has to offer me, and you can take me to all the off-limits areas that occur to you. Down at the port and . . . anywhere else. Are we agreed?”
Livia replied with a mischievous smile and drank another gulp of tea. In the most secret chamber of her heart, two green eyes began to glow.
XXXV
As if by some favorable combination of events, the minute Ricciardi and Sannino walked out the front door of the Hotel Vesuvio, it stopped raining. Or better, the rain was simply transformed into a fine mist that hovered in midair, breathable and turning everything a faint shade of gray. It continued to leave clothing and hair damp, but it no longer gave you the sensation of a stream of drops blowing into your face.
The two men started walking slowly in the direction of Mergellina, leaving behind them the gentle slope that led uphill to the center city. They crossed the broad avenue and continued walking with the water on their left: the sea, a lazy, blithe companion, as storm-tossed and dark as the sky.
Maione hadn’t told his officers to follow them, but Ricciardi was certain that the brigadier was somewhere right behind them, big and strapping and yet invisible, thanks to a strange enchantment that made it possible for him to move unobserved through the city.
The commissario wondered why he had decided to grant Sannino’s wish. It wasn’t because he was laboring under any illusions of obtaining information from him that wouldn’t have emerged in a more conventional interrogation. What had convinced him was the strain of despair that he had detected in the man’s dark, vivid eyes. Despair and loneliness. Despair, loneliness, and love. The same sentiments that, every single day, he perceived all around him and carried within him.
Along the street, rendered solitary by the impending darkness and the bad weather, swept by gusting winds and glistening with rain, he perceived a small chorus of the dead. It always happened, down by the sea. These were the lingering images of fishermen swept into shore by the undertow, and those of autumn suicides who peered out at the horizon from the shore in search of lost loves. One young man called to his mother, another was cursing a cruel god; a body rendered leaden and swollen from its long soaking in the seawater was psalmodizing an incoherent prayer; a woman in black had blood oozing from her slashed wrists, as she uttered the name of her husband.
Hell, Ricciardi told himself. If hell exists, what could it possibly hold for me that would be any worse? How much more grief and sorrow am I going to have to feel wash over me before I can be at peace? He shot a sidelong glance at the man walking along next to him. You think you’ve experienced despair, he thought. You ought to lean in and glimpse, for just a single second, the panorama of my soul.
Like him, the boxer wore neither hat, nor overcoat; the tails of his jacket were tossing in the wind, but he seemed to feel no discomfort. His eyes were darting from the sea to the buildings and to the trees in the Villa Nazionale, which ran in rows to their right. Every so often, the roar of an automobile lacerated the air.
At last, Sannino began to speak.
This request must have struck you as an odd one, Commissa’. A stroll at a time like this. But if I’m about to lose my freedom, there’s one place I need to go first. Otherwise I might find myself thinking I never was free at all. And then, there was something I wanted to talk to you about. No, maybe I didn’t want to explain it to you, but to God. Or to myself. Or to Cettina. Or to who knows who.
I wanted to explain the story of the nameless serenade.
I may have sailed away from here, Commissa’, but I really never left. To sail away is one thing, to leave is another, two separate and different ideas completely. It took me a year to understand that, in that place where I thought I’d find certain things but where instead I found others; maybe because I didn’t know how to search for the things that I thought I’d find, or else because they weren’t there at all.
One day, when I was standing in the ring delivering punches instead of taking them, the way I was supposed to, like a sort of punching bag with legs, like a tool for training boxers, it dawned on me that this might be a way of shortening my time there, of getting my life back early: feinting and punching. Because a man only gets one life, Commissa’, not two; and if my life was here, then how could it be there, too? So I feinted and punched, and I haven’t stopped since.
Are you looking at the sea, Commissa’? It’s not the same as what they have over there, on the other side. At first, all seas look the same, especially today when it’s autumn, it’s cold out and it’s drizzly, when it’s gray and you can’t see the island, the mountain, and the strip of land that stretches out in front of us. You can’t see them, but I know that they’re the
re, and you know it, too: everyone knows it. The sea that they have on the other side, though, is just a piece of make-believe. Behind you are the buildings, tall and full of people, and the streets, broad and full of people, and in front of you is a pointless expanse, full of people, without a soul, without a speck of mystery. This is the sea, Commissa’. What they have there is just water.
That’s what the years on the other side were like. Years of silence, smiles, and meaningless words. Years of feinting and hitting. Years of never having left, even though I’d sailed away. Years spent in the belief that I was just in an intermission in my life, a period of suspension during which I had no real existence. I was like those pieces of meat, those sides of beef that people keep in their iceboxes, so they can eat them on holidays. And the Lord only knows how many sides of beef I’ve unloaded, Commissa’. You can’t begin to imagine.
And you can’t imagine how strong it makes you feel to know that you’re not living, and that the day will come when you’ll board that ship again and return home. When you’re overwhelmed with exhaustion and you think to yourself: Okay, now I’m going to drop to the ground and just never get back up again, that’s when the thought of returning home gives you a breather, and so you hoist the last weight onto your shoulders. That’s what I would do, then I’d go off to sleep in certain rooms full of strangers, with a stench that took your breath away, dormitories for dreamless nights, where you’d wake up at dawn more exhausted than when you lay down.
I only had a single thought in my mind, Commissa’. A single face, a single person. One voice, one smile, one flesh, one mouth that obsessed me and gave me peace at the same time; hell and heaven, sorrow and joy. One of those thoughts that lurks behind all the others in every instant, so at a certain point you almost think you can’t hear it anymore, but instead it’s still there, always there, the whole time. Just one thought.
That’s what Cettina is for me, Commissa’. The breath of life. If you take away the thought of Cettina, then you might as well ask the brigadier to give you his pistol and shoot me in the head. We could just say that I was trying to escape, and then everybody’s happy: your bosses, her, her brother, her cousin, and even me. Just perform this act of kindness, if you’re going to take away the thought of Cettina. Because without that thought, I can no longer live. Not even for a minute.
I sailed away, that’s true. But I never really left. I stayed here, at her side. I saw her face and I heard her voice as she changed the way she dressed, the way she thought, as she grew from a girl to a woman and even became a mother, even though, actually, she never did have children. I knew it, that she was going to get married, she’d told me so. My Cettina is honest. Of course, I hoped she wouldn’t; but what can you say, that’s the way women are, they’re practical. But I thought when I finally got back, she’d understand that I’d never really left at all. That I’d just sailed away.
I always imagined that the first part of me that she’d get back would be my voice. When we were kids, she would always enjoy it if I sang her a song. The song she loved best was the nameless serenade; it would fill her eyes with tears, every time she listened to it.
There, you see that rock by the water, Commissa’? The one down there. We would always hurry down here, on those evenings when the fine weather was so sweet that it would hurt your heart, and the moon drew a white boulevard over the dark water and the stars and the city lights were one and the same thing, both near and far. If you have someone you care for, then try bringing her here sometime, at night, in the season when the weather is fine. Don’t worry about it, you have my permission.
On those evenings, amidst the kisses and caresses and the agony of the flesh as it called to us, between her desire and mine, with the suddenly grown-up voice of the woman that she would become, she would say to me: “Vince’, will you sing me the nameless serenade?” And I—with no musical accompaniment but the sound of the barely moving sea, in a low voice lest I be heard from the street or the boats with their night-fishing lights—I would sing it to her.
You know that song, don’t you, Commissa’? He goes to stand under her window while she sleeps with her husband, even though he is the only real husband she will ever have, and he stands in the street with a broken heart. Don’t worry, he tells her, don’t worry, because I’ll never utter your name. But you recognize this voice, it’s my voice, the same voice I had when we spoke to each other using the formal terms of address. And this voice will tell you the story of the torment of loving from afar, all the love of an ancient torment.
I went and sang it to her, under her window. I sang her all the suffering of every instant that I’d lived far away from her, when I sailed away without leaving, and all the love of the present, the suffering that I’ve been dragging along behind me every minute since then, in this broken heart of mine. Just that, Commissa’. Tutto ’o turmiento ’e ’nu luntano ammore, tutto ll’ammore ’e ’nu turmiento antico. All the torment of loving from afar, all the love of an ancient torment.
Cettina isn’t mine, Commissa’. Cettina is me. Cettina is every beat of my heart, every breath I take. Every hope and every memory. Maybe I’ll never see her again, maybe she really will think that it was me, but I can’t tear her out of me, uproot her from inside me.
In all the years after I sailed away without leaving, the other me ate, breathed, even had women. Penny is just one of them. She’s a fine girl, I’m sorry for her, but I’ve always told her that there’s room in my heart for one woman and one woman only. Maybe she hoped to capture it, one day, my heart, but if your heart grows up around a person, then that place is taken.
That man, Irace, maybe he was a good person too, who can say. And it’s not his fault, or Cettina’s, that after all these years she never thought she’d see me again. It’s not Jack’s fault, who’s following me to try to get me back into the ring, or even poor Solomon Rose’s, who stopped breathing before my eyes, nor his mother’s, who wept over him for a whole month until he finally died. It’s not America’s fault, it’s not the sea’s fault. It’s no one’s fault, Commissa’.
I remember that I went out. I remember the rain, I remember Cettina’s building, and I remember that I stopped at the same place where I had sung the nameless serenade. Then I fell asleep, I think, I’d had a lot to drink, and I woke up when I saw that he was going out. Or maybe I dreamed that. I dreamed that I was knocking on the door and that Cettina came to answer, because she had recognized my knock, the way I used to knock before I sailed away. I dreamed that she was kissing me and weeping in love and torment, and that I was weeping, too. And I dreamed that I was returning home along the streets that I know so well, because I might have sailed away, Commissa’, but I never left.
I might have dreamed that part. I was drunk, and when I’m like that it seems as if the past and the present blend together and become a single thing, so I can’t tell you whether Cettina’s kiss really happened, or whether instead I followed her husband and killed him with my bare hands. I can’t say, I don’t know.
And that’s why I wanted to come to the seaside rock. To find out whether I had just imagined it, that evening of stars and silence, with the warm wind coming off the sea and Cettina holding my hand and asking me to sing the nameless serenade. Maybe that too was nothing but a dream, to help me breathe when I was on the other side, when, in order to survive, a dream was what I needed.
But the rock does exist, Commissa’, you see it yourself, don’t you? It exists. And if so, then all the rest exists too, and I’m not crazy.
Please forgive me if I’ve wasted your time like this. We can go now.
And thank you.
XXXVI
Once they had completed the legal procedures required for Sannino’s arrest, Maione and Ricciardi found themselves alone in the office.
The brigadier had a slightly baffled look on his face.
“Did you see the way the reporters came running the minute they heard that we’d arrested him? They’re all still milling around
outside; I told Amitrano that if one of them gets any closer than twenty-five feet from the front door or interferes with the regular flow of foot traffic, he is to shoot on sight. Let’s just hope that idiot understood I was kidding.”
Ricciardi was standing by the window; he was looking down, watching men, women, and ghosts, indifferent to the rain that had started falling again.
“They’re vultures. They’ll pick the flesh off the carcass and then fly off in search of another. In any case, they won’t get any information from us.”
Maione stopped to think for a moment, then asked: “Commissa’, unless it’s a secret, can I ask you what Sannino told you when you were down by the sea? From a distance, I could see that he was talking, and gesticulating too. And what was there, at that spot where you stopped? It looked as if he was about to jump into the water, from the way he was leaning over.”
The commissario turned around.
“A rock, Raffaele. Just a rock by the water, no different from all the others. But one that has a special meaning for him, because that’s where he used to go with Irace’s widow, when the two of them were just kids.”
“What impression did you get from him? Do you think he did it?”
Ricciardi threw both arms wide, helplessly.
“I have no idea. And the thing is, he doesn’t even know himself. He can’t remember. He’s a man of great passions, but he keeps all his emotions sealed up inside. He deeply loved, and still loves, that woman, but over the years what he feels for her has turned into something different, something more than just a feeling, however profound. The impression that I got from him is that he’s not a vindictive person, but that he’s not capable of fully controlling his reactions. Yes, it might have been him. Perhaps with the help of Biasin, who seems to be very devoted to him.”
Maione sighed.
“Then we’re back to square one. So, what do we do now, Commissa’?”
[Ricciardi 09] - Nameless Serenade Page 26
