The checked Moon

by Quelli di ZEd

air-conditioner. The police were taking a glaring mistake, for the first time not due to incompetence of any department or individual agent.

  Alida felt the first drops of sweat accumulate between her breasts. It was not heat that had created them, but the thought that soon Manuel Bracconieri would turn into a wolf in a prison cell, in front of the eyes of everyone. A very serious event for their species, who had been guarding the secret of the moon for millennia.

  Tell him Alida, I beg you, tell him... they think I am a murderer, you must help me out of here! So she thought that Manuel would have begged her if she went to visit him, his face pressed against the plastic partition of the visiting room.

  If she talked, no one would believe her.

  She could only do one thing. Avoid more deaths.

  How, Alida? How are you going to?

  "Madam, are you listening to me?" the inspector asked, choking his cigarette in the ashtray. "If something else occurs to you, this is my number. Call me at any time of day." He pulled out a business card and pushed it along the smooth surface of the desk.

  Alida took it without looking and dropped it in the bag resting on her knees.

  Before she left the room, it seemed to her that the walls had become even more yellow.

  June 16 – 23:50

  The subway doors shut with a bang and the train started.

  Alida looked around. There was no seat left in the carriage. She grabbed the vertical support at the centre of the carriage and waited for her stop, examining an advertisement for hearing aids. On the poster, an old man listened, smiling, to what a freckled boy had to whisper in his ear.

  At the Coliseum two boys with an asphyxiated Labrador on a lead got in. Poor beast, Alida thought. Then all happened too fast for her to move out of the way. The dog, pulling the arm of its owner, approached her leg, sniffed it and bathed it with a sudden splash of urine. Alida stepped back, treading on the foot of a man who was reading the newspaper. She turned to apologize, but the man had already turned his back.

  No one had noticed anything.

  Not even the owner of the dog.

  The only one watching Alida was the Labrador, with a look of satisfaction on its muzzle, as if to say didn’t see it coming, uh?

  The smell of urine became more pungent and Alida wondered if she was the only one to smell it so strongly. Probably she was, since the passengers were still not even glancing in her direction.

  The train slowed down crossing near a construction site and Alida felt a tingling in her belly, that soon turned into an unbearable itch.

  She had to pee!

  The smell of the Labrador pee had stimulated her bladder and now holding it was impossible. Her hands moved by themselves and quickly unbuttoned her jeans and pulled them down along with the panties. She squatted on the rubber floor and did it there, at the base of the pole to which other passengers were holding.

  While the stream of hot urine flooded the floor, spraying her buttocks, the only look level with hers was that of the Labrador. It stared at her, its tongue lolling at every jolt of the train. Its eyes had changed. They were no longer fun and playful, but sad, incredibly human and familiar.

  Alida awoke with a start at 03:21, with her bladder in pain. The first night alone in the big bed.

  She went to the bathroom and peed for so long that she almost fell asleep again, then she went to the kitchen, annoyingly disturbed by the dream that had no intention of wearing off.

  The look of the dog. Lost, hurt.

  She had always believed that dreams were a kind of evacuation, like the nocturnal pee she had got rid of. She opened the fridge, took the carton of milk and drank half a glass, leaning out from the window.

  Shortly after, she remembered the mug shot the inspector had shown her.

  Manuel Bracconieri. The murderer of her husband.

  That's who those scared eyes belonged to.

  June 17 – 14:01

  The rough and impersonal facade of the prison of Rebibbia reminded her of the orphanage where she had grown up.

  As a child, she believed that that place was a former prison, where children were locked never to be let out again. Or maybe a prison proper, disguised as an orphanage, because even there, even though no one had ever gotten in trouble with justice, windows had thick iron bars, the same that would have accompanied her for the rest of her life.

  Her room looked over the large courtyard where, in daytime, she played hopscotch or with those big rubber bands bound to the ankles, but she would have given anything for a room whose view was obstructed by a hundred-stories skyscraper or a mountain touching the clouds.

  At least she would not have suffered the torments of the moon.

  The checked moon.

  She had begun to call it that as a child, because of the bars behind which it appeared to her.

  Those pieces of iron seemed to her the most useless thing she had ever seen. They should have protected her, instead they made her feel like the most fragile being on Earth.

  She only liked one thing of that grid. It was the only thing in the world that could harm the moon. The bars made her suffer, yes, because they maimed her. Since she hated the splendour of that perfectly round disc, she was pleased that there was something that could ruin its image, branding it as a slice of grilled cheese. The moon burnt her skin, but most of the time it was Alida who challenged it, laughing in its face, shouting that it was ridiculous with that kind of checkerboard on, as if a brave child had climbed up there and scribbled on it to play tic-tac-toe.

  Entering the prison, she thought that it hadn’t been difficult to obtain the permission to visit Manuel Bracconieri.

  She had fished out from her bag the business card of the inspector and called him, saying she wanted to see the prisoner.

  "I think the wife of the victim should be granted that," she had said. "And I want to look the man who made a widow of me in the eyes."

  The inspector had surrendered easily and set an appointment for her the following day, right after lunch.

  Down the corridor the guard on duty had told her to follow, Alida approached another policeman who escorted her into an antechamber, where the inspector was waiting. The only difference from the day of the interview was the packet of cigarettes sticking out from the pocket of his shirt. Marlboro red. Soft. They must have been out of 100's.

  "Remember what I told you on the phone," Brembati said. "We are exceptionally proceeding against the norm, so you are subject to more restrictive rules than those of a normal visit."

  Alida did not flinch.

  "A guard will be there for the whole duration of the visit, which will not exceed fifteen minutes. You are not allowed to bring anything inside except this." He gestured to the policeman to hand him a bug that Alida studied, frowning.

  "You want to record us?"

  "You’re not the only one who wants to hear what this man has to say."

  "Problems with the investigation?"

  Brembati smiled bitterly. "I don’t remember a single case for which we hadn’t. There might be developments, an accomplice. But it is still early to speculate."

  An accomplice on all fours?

  Or have you wondered how a man taking out his dog to pee turns into a murderer all of a sudden?

  Alida grabbed the bug between index and thumb, as if it were an insect for real.

  "I can do it alone," she said to the policeman who had approached to help her disguise the device under her clothes.

  "That's why you agreed to let me see the prisoner," she said while hiding the bug.

  "We are doing you a favour, do one to us. Fifteen minutes" the inspector reminded her, turning his back.

  The policeman opened the door and led Alida in a room with large windows, from which the sunlight reflected on the surface of the tables, arranged in five rows of six.

  "Please sit down, I will be behind you," the policeman said.

  Handcuffed to two handles attached to the table was a man of stocky build, shave
d hair, dark eyes that seemed to chase a truth impossible to grasp.

  Alida sat down opposite him, hearing behind her the noise of the policeman taking place on a chair.

  Manuel and Alida looked at one another for several seconds without saying a word, although the available time had already started to flow.

  Manuel was the first to speak: "It wasn’t me," he said in the tone of a sentenced person to whom pardon has just been denied.

  If there were more prisoners in the prison than the times those walls had heard that sentence, thought Alida, it was impossible for the system to work properly.

  "I didn’t kill your husband," Manuel repeated, and Alida wondered if it had been the inspector to inform him of her relationship with the victim. "And they're right not to believe me..." he added softly, as if not wishing to be heard.

  "Why you say they’re right not to believe you?" Alida first words sounded fake to her own ears. She wondered whether Manuel had had the same impression.

  "Because I don’t believe those who say they saw the devil."

  Alida felt a chill run down her arms and found a better position on the chair to dispel it.

  "The police don’t believe you because there is no evidence of what you saw."

  "So much the better, really. The fact remains that what they have seen is not what happened. Only I know what happened, because I was there, and I was the only witness."

  "What happened?"

  "You mean that you don’t know?"

  "Why should I know?"

  "He was your husband. I don’t believe that you don’t know what he really was."

  "You're crazy. Why can’t you convince them that you are innocent?"

  "Ten