Savage Kiss

by Roberto Saviano

  “You can all do a great deal,” the man from Doctors Without Borders was saying, and Greta blushed because for a second she thought she might have been thinking aloud.

  War didn’t frighten her, because that was another thing she’d basically received as her birthright, and going to seek out a war on the far side of the planet would at least allow her to help a lot of people.

  “I’ nun so’ nisciuno, i’ saccio sulo cucinà,” she said to herself in dialect. I’m no one, and all I know how to do is cook, and this time the words really did come out.

  “We’re looking for people, and each of them offers what he or she can do,” the man said, speaking to Greta. They all turned to peer at her, and she bowed her head in embarrassment. “You’d be useful. How could you not! You know, a calling is something that’s inside a person, not outside. If a person wants to, they can become whatever they desire. And everything emerges when there are no exams, no credentials. When you have to do something because your survival depends on it. When you have to do something for someone else because their survival depends on it.”

  “But I have three children.”

  “All of us have children … But we don’t feel as if we’re taking anything away from them. Quite the opposite. When you live, giving life, then you simply add to the equation, you don’t take away from it. I spent three and a half months in Aleppo, and I’ve told you a few of my stories: not the most terrible ones, otherwise you wouldn’t have gotten any sleep tonight.”

  Lots of smiles spread through the room, but Greta had another question: “So what would I do? Make pasta with ragù?”

  “Does that strike you as unimportant?”

  The smiles were transformed into laughter, and then into a round of applause that marked the end of the meeting and the beginning of refreshments. Greta pulled out her phone and realized that she had thirty messages in the WhatsApp group for the school where her younger children went. That was definitely too many to ignore.

  Greta, they’re looking for you …

  Greta, what’s happened?

  Greta, has something happened to Eduardo?

  Greta, has something happened to Susy?

  Are Michelino, Susy, and Eduardo all okay?

  She interrupted that steady flow of questions with a simple “What’s happening?” whereupon one of the mothers in the chat replied:

  A lady, out front of the school, asked all of us about you.

  She said it was urgent.

  But who was she?

  Did she leave any kind of message?

  Yes, she said she’d be there tomorrow.

  She’d wait for you.

  Tomorrow, thought Greta, was a long time to wait. But she said it to herself just as a passing thought, because her mother had taught her that a trivial piece of news shows up in a hurry, pushed along by the people who pass it forward like a baton in a relay race. It’s the bad, dark, horrible pieces of news that struggle to reach you, that make you wait.

  She went to school to pick up Susy and Michelino, who were in third grade. Eduardo was in seventh grade, and he wouldn’t be let out for another couple of hours. She started hammering them with the usual questions—How was your day? Everything all right? Everything okay? She just wanted to hear them answer, give the usual responses—Everything’s fine! Everything’s normal! Nothing happened at all!—to make sure that the banality of daily life could stave off the bad omen that was plaguing her.

  “Greta! Greta! Gre’!”

  A woman her age came running toward her, clutching her purse to her breast with both arms.

  “Do you remember me? I’m Emma,” she said, without even glancing at the little ones.

  “Oh, right,” said Greta. “Today I have to take the kids to eat.” Certainly she remembered her, even if they’d never actually exchanged a word. Her youngest son was one of the kids that buzzed around Eduardo. What was his name? Oh, right, Pisciazziello …

  “No, this is urgent,” said the other woman. She continued clutching the purse, as if she was ready to take off on another sprint.

  “All right,” Greta said with a sigh, and pulled out her cell phone. “Give me your number. I’ll call you.”

  “No, no, no. I need to talk to you, for real, and right away. I have to come to your house.” She was talking so fast that Greta could barely understand her.

  “Then tell me now, right here, ja’.”

  “No, no, there are too many people around.”

  “All right.” And she gestured for the woman to follow her. She took off toward home at a brisk pace, with her two children struggling to catch up. Susy yanked on her mother’s sleeve and asked, “Who is this lady here?”

  “A friend of Mamma’s,” Greta replied in a tone that would clearly brook no further questions. First she needed to stare down the sense of foreboding that kept twisting her guts.

  * * *

  The basso was a window of order in the chaos of walls that surrounded it. The tags of a graffiti writer ended right up against the mahogany door that Greta polished every weekend and then started up again just past the casement of the window. She opened the door and pushed past her children, then she stood in the doorway and waited for Emma to come through it. Michelino and Susy sat down at a table already set, which marked the boundary between the kitchen and the rest of the house, while she, after triple-locking the door and closing the shutters on the only window, turned on the stove to heat the pasta with tomato sauce and meatballs. Emma found the television set, turned it on, and flipped through the channels until she found a cartoon show. After which she turned up the volume until the cartoon character Masha’s voice drowned out the sound of the cars going by in the street, and then she stepped close to Greta.

  “There’s no good way to say this,” she told her, raising the volume of her voice just enough to make herself heard.

  “Spit it out, come on!” Greta replied, stirring the tomatoes in the pot with her wooden spoon the whole while.

  “Eduardo has screwed up for real this time.”

  “What did he do?” Greta asked. The wooden spoon spun around, faster and faster, a few red splatters had already stained the ceramic tiles.

  “He killed a guy,” said Emma. The roar of a bear on TV prompted a burst of laughter that for a moment drowned out those words.

  “No, that can’t be,” said Greta, keeping her eyes on the pan.

  “No, it’s true, it’s the absolute truth.”

  “But what, when? What are you even talking about? Get out of here, right this second.” In two quick steps, Greta stood nose to nose with the other woman. The children didn’t seem to notice a thing, their eyes fastened on the TV; now there was a panda as well.

  “He killed that guy. He killed Roipnol,” Emma went on, “the guy they sent to take charge of Forcella. It was him.”

  “That makes no sense! I haven’t heard anything about this, I don’t know anything about these names!” Greta shoved Emma toward the door, and she was sorry she’d locked it when she came in.

  “You know perfectly well that he’s a member of a paranza, stop pretending.” Even if Greta had raised her voice, Emma continued to whisper.

  “You just want to shift the blame because your son didn’t do what he was supposed to.”

  “Ah, so you see that you know all about it?” she scolded her, without losing her cool. Since the day they had tortured her eldest son, she had only one objective, to keep such a horrible thing from happening again, to somebody else. She pushed her foot against the door, against Greta, who took a step back. “You see that you know all about these things?” Another step. “You know about them, just like everybody else does: you know inside, you just don’t know outside.”

  “Of course I know them: I hear them out on the street every day.”

  “It was Eduardo.”

  “Impossible, he’s just a kid.”

  “Yes, I’m telling you that he’s the one who did it. My son Rinuccio was on the stairs, he saw it all: Edua
rdo went in and Eduardo did it. Because my son went in and out of Roipnol’s house all the time. They treated him like a grandson.”

  They grabbed each other by the hair, like a couple of girls fighting, but in silence, to keep from attracting the attention of the young twins. They held each other at bay, reciprocally, and then the stalemate was broken by three knocks on the door. The women released their grip on each other all at once, and Greta lunged to answer it, worried that outside someone might have overheard their bickering. She was ready and eager to reassure anyone who might present themselves that her children would learn the lesson, that that deafening volume was intolerable, so sorry, a thousand apologies.

  Instead, what she said was “Rinuccio.” Pisciazziello must have followed her all the way to the basso. And I’m a fool, she thought to herself. She grabbed him by the collar and yanked him through the door. Then she collapsed on the floor, bursting into tears, knees pulled up to her body: “You’re just saying it…” she sobbed, “you’re just saying it because your son didn’t know how to guard the place right. You’re just saying it because they pried your son’s teeth out of his mouth.”

  “So I can see that you know these things,” Emma said again, but this time there was no hint of accusation in her voice, only the understanding of one mother in the presence of another. She got down on her knees, as if she wanted to console her. She’d been through it, too.

  “I know them, because people talk about them,” said Greta, sniffing. “But then how do I know if they’re even true? I don’t understand anything anymore, I don’t know anything. Who knows anything anymore?”

  “I’m telling you, it’s all true. And we need to say these things to each other. If we can’t say them, then who is ever going to tell us? We need to save our children, rescue them. We can’t let them wind up like your husband. And my husband, to keep him from winding up dead in an alley, shot full of holes, I talked him into taking work on the ships. They had him working as a lookout, too. At night, he couldn’t sleep worth a damn because he knew the cops might come to take him in at any moment, or shoot him. Only with him out on the high seas do I feel safe.”

  “Mammà?” Susy and Michelino were staring at her with frightened eyes.

  Greta slowly got to her feet and reached out to pat the little ones on the cheek. “Everything’s fine, Mamma lost her temper for a minute, but now she’s fine. Now the signora here is going to help me, you go outside and play, ja’, that way I can sit down nice and peaceful in my chair.”

  Only after she saw them playing happily did Greta shut the door, look down at Pisciazziello, and ask: “But did you really see him? Did you see Eduardo firing the gun with your own eyes?” But the kid just kept looking down at a point along the line of ceramic floor tiles. “Look me in the face!” she shouted.

  Emma didn’t like this interrogation one bit, but she knew it was the price to pay for winning Greta’s trust.

  Pisciazziello nodded.

  “Talk!”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Yes, what? Yes, you saw it?”

  “I saw him come out with the pistol.”

  “Ah, so you saw him come out with the pistol, but you didn’t see him fire it!”

  “No, but he went in, and then he fired.”

  “We need to resolve this,” Emma broke in. Then she took Greta by the hand and sat her down. Greta was pale. She brought her a glass of water, then went on: “You know why they didn’t kill me? Because if they had, then Micione would have looked like a fool. My oldest boy doesn’t even know this. Rinuccio came to see me and told me because he’s afraid. Because they’re trying to find out who it was: they’re trying to find out who killed Roipnol. So my eldest son gets to go on living. To say over and over again that it wasn’t him, that it wasn’t his paranza, that it wasn’t the Longhairs. That’s his fate. As long as it’s needed, I need to make it clear that it wasn’t something internal in his structure, but that it was something done by enemies. To get through this, we have to stay united.”

  By now, Greta wasn’t even listening anymore: she’d just shut down. She didn’t care that Emma knew everything, every detail, things that weren’t in the police reports, things that weren’t in the newspaper articles. Emma had sifted the information through the dense network, the tightly woven mesh of her own experience, and had already separated the real stories from the invented ones, the hypotheses from the legends. What she had just told her was the truth.

  Biscottino had murdered Roipnol.

  “Greta, there’s just one thing we need to do. We both need to understand that the destiny of being a mother here is to be a soldier’s mother. Have them, raise them, and then send them to die. It’s just that there’s no medal for this war, just shame and contempt.”

  War again, thought Greta, always war. Then she said: “I don’t give a fuck about what people think.”

  “No, I’m not talking about shame and contempt that people might feel, I’m talking about my own, lo scuorno mio, the fact that I live off the money that my son earns from the paranza, that’s my real shame. ’O vero scuorno. I curse every day since I gave birth to my children, for having brought them into a world like this.”

  For the first time since he’d come in, Pisciazziello looked up from the floor and turned his eyes to his mother’s face, as she went on: “If I could,” she continued, “I’d take them and put them back inside me. But that’s not something I can do. How can you even have children in this state of war? Greta, you and I, here and now, we need to settle this thing. Take the kids to your mother. Talk to your son, we need to ask for help from the police.”

  “But what police, what on earth are you saying?” Greta shrilled as she got to her feet. Her eyesight fogged over for a second, her legs started shaking, she tried to shove the other woman toward the door. That word—police—drove her once again to deny the unmistakable evidence of the facts. Which is to say, the fact that she and her son needed help.

  “A social worker comes to see me,” said Emma, “we talk, she helps me. She’s a good person. She even works for the church.”

  Greta’s arms lost all strength, she let them rest on Emma’s, almost as if she were clinging to her. “All right, let’s do as you say, I’ll talk to Eduardo, I’ll talk to this social worker.”

  “It’s the right decision, Greta,” said Emma. She took Greta’s hands in hers and squeezed them for a second. Then, without another word, she left with her son.

  * * *

  Greta did as she’d been told. After lunch, she took the twins to her mother, told her that that afternoon she’d be going to pick Eduardo up at school, because they’d changed her afternoon shift at the cafeteria. Outside the school, she paced around like all the other mothers waiting for their kids, ignoring their greetings, her head filled with nothing but thoughts of that son of hers who’d betrayed her. And if he’d betrayed her once, he could do it again, couldn’t he? Maybe at that moment he’d holed up in a school restroom and he was already plotting something else on his cell phone with the other members of the paranza. Another murder? Greta wondered.

  Biscottino was one of the first to emerge and he immediately saw his mother. He walked over to her, but instead of hugging him, she smacked his backpack, accompanying the blow with a “Let’s go!”

  “What is it, Ma?”

  “Let’s go,” she said again, and they traveled the distance back home in silence. Every once in a while he tried to catch his mother’s eye, but Greta was looking straight ahead of her, and whenever she could tell that her son wasn’t keeping pace, she gave him another hard smack on his backpack.

  Biscottino hurried into the basso and threw his backpack to the floor at the foot of the little sofa.

  “Where are Susy and Michelino?”

  His mother said nothing.

  “Where are they?” she echoed him, wandering around the basso, as if in that cramped three-hundred-square-foot apartment it was possible to find a hiding place for two eight-year-old children
.

  “I took them to stay with Grandma.”

  “What for?”

  Greta switched on the television set and turned up the volume. In the basso, the crystalline voices of wizards and sorceresses echoed as they engaged in a chase scene on flying broomsticks. Biscottino paid those sounds no mind; he decided that his mother was furious at him for one of those usual things—disrupting class, bad grades—but still, that twist in their everyday routine smacked of something not right, excessive for anything to do with a trivial matter of school discipline. Plus, she hadn’t even offered him a snack. That was strange, no doubt about it.

  “What is it, Ma? Why did you take Susy and Michele to stay with Nonno and Nonna? Is something wrong? Are they okay?” And he remembered the time, in second grade, when he’d caught the mumps and had to stay alone in his bedroom for ten days, without anyone else to keep him company.

  Greta just looked at him. Motionless.

  “So why don’t you answer me, why do you look at me as if you’d lost your tongue?”

  “I’m looking at you because I’m trying to figure out if I still know you. I want to look good and hard, these eyes, this nose…”

  Biscottino burst out laughing. “Why don’t you know me anymore, Mammà! You made me yourself, I came out of your tummy! Ja’, turn off the television set.”