“They ordered two bottles of Veuve Clicquot. Nobody ordered champagne at the Relais, the price was off the charts. I worked all evening feeling slightly uneasy. I had the impression that Nicola never took his eyes off me. But maybe it was the other way around, maybe I was the one who couldn’t forget his presence. I watched him from a distance and tried to reconcile the cheerful man sitting at the table with the one who’d been raging out of control at the wedding, and again with Nicola the boy.
“The room emptied and they were the only ones left. It was very late. I’d left them two bottles of grappa and they seemed intent on finishing them. Nacci motioned me to join him. ‘Your friends want to play cards. Did you tell them about it?’ Evidently Nicola remembered what I had told him during our time at the Scalo. Nacci glanced at them for a moment.
“‘I don’t know what you were thinking. They’re cops, for God’s sake! Anyway, it’s fine with me. Have them move into the card room.’
“‘I should go home,’ I said.
“He stepped closer. ‘Listen to me closely. You got us into this situation. Now your friends want to play cards, after all the champagne they drank. And we won’t disappoint them, will we?’
“So I ended up being the dealer for Nicola and his buddies. Blackjack, until five in the morning. They lost at least two hundred euros each, but when they left they were euphoric. I walked them to the car. A ground fog had risen from the fields. Nicola grabbed my head and pressed a chaste kiss on my lips. He also said something affectionate to me, downright soppy. He was really quite drunk at that point.
“After that night they started coming every Saturday. They had dinner and then played cards. Nacci started treating them like guests of honor, and often lingered with them. He paid me for the extra hours with a percentage of what the bank won, as he used to.
“Corinne did not look favorably upon those nights. She knew about the cards, but I didn’t tell her about Nicola. It was as if the most unacceptable part wasn’t the gambling or the drinking, or even staying up so late and then sleeping for most of the following day, the only day of the week that I could have spent entirely with her and the child; no, the most unacceptable part was that those evenings centered on one of my brothers.
“After a few weeks she couldn’t take it anymore and decided to confront me. It was Sunday afternoon and I was still in bed. Corinne came into the room but kept her distance.
“‘Why do you need to do it?’ she said.
“‘It’s extra money. It comes in handy.’
“‘We don’t need more money. We have more than we spend.’
“‘No. You have more than we spend. My account always shows the same amount.’
“I was inexcusably icy when I said it. I did it on purpose. She stood in the middle of the room, while I lay in bed as if it wasn’t even worth the effort to pull myself together. The light pressed against the drawn curtains, spilling out at the edges. I think Corinne started crying, in the dimness I couldn’t be sure; in any case I remained lying down, until she left.”
* * *
—
TOMMASO WIGGLED a foot under the blanket, causing Medea to twitch, though she did not wake up. He smiled faintly at her.
“They knew how to party. Nicola and his pals. One night I caught two of them in the bathroom taking turns snorting a line of coke. They nodded their heads for me to join them but my response was to go look for Nacci. I told him what I had just seen. I think part of me still wanted to get rid of them.
“‘So now you’re being a moralist?’ Nacci replied. ‘Let them have a good time. Or do you want to report the police to the police?’ He went off chuckling at his joke. His reaction had the effect of a perverse blessing on me. From that night on I let myself go. I would often play poker, with my own money, I drank if there was alcohol, and I joined the pilgrimages to Nacci’s private bathroom. It was in that bathroom that Nicola told me. Not because he was sorry, or to provoke me. There was something fiercely sincere between us at that point, as if all outstanding accounts had been canceled and our brotherhood, always obstructed by Bern, had found the chance to express itself.
“‘Remember the solar panels? It was me and Fabrizio. It took us almost two hours.’
“‘Why?’
“‘You hadn’t called me, not even once. In all that time, not once. I’d see you. I saw what you were doing, when you were all together in the evening under the pergola. That place belonged to me too.’
“A few days before Christmas they rented the Relais, all of it, a party in grand style. I helped Nicola with the preparations; by now I was becoming an expert in planning other people’s parties. We decided on a fish-based menu, we found a deejay, and one morning I accompanied Nicola to a wholesale store outside Gallipoli, where we bought up a supply of alcohol and a quantity of party gizmos: glow sticks that became fluorescent when broken, headbands with teddy-bear ears, silver and gold masks with elastic bands, and firecrackers. We showed up at the cashier’s desk wearing the masks, like a couple of kids. I was happy.
“On the way back, Nicola told me about the girl he was seeing. Stella. He elaborated on certain very private details, maybe to impress me. He said they had this agreement between them: one month apiece, each of them had absolute power over the other. When Nicola was in charge, he could order Stella to do anything at any time, and vice versa. Obviously almost all the demands had to do with sex. Often they involved other couples, or unattached men and women, for a fee. He was neither arrogant nor funny as he talked about it. In his mind, it was something very serious.
“‘Do you like those games?’ I asked him at one point.
“Nicola narrowed his eyes to stare more intensely at the road that wound through the vineyards. He said, ‘If I don’t do that, I don’t feel anything. Nothing at all.’ He spoke those words with great sadness. Then he added, ‘Isn’t it like that for you too?’
“But I avoided the question. ‘Have you introduced her to Cesare and Floriana?’
“He burst out laughing. ‘Have I introduced her to them? Hell no. No way!’
“‘And do you still think about her a lot?’
“I still couldn’t get over the fact Nicola and I had ventured into such intimate territory. But for years I’d misjudged him. When I asked him if he still thought about her a lot, I was referring to Violalibera. Instead Nicola replied: ‘She’s married to him now. What can I do?’”
* * *
—
I STOOD UP ABRUPTLY. “Do you mind if I open the window for a moment? It’s stuffy in here.”
“Whatever you like,” Tommaso said.
The cold air hit me in the face; it smelled vaguely of the sea, although you couldn’t see it from there, only other buildings, all dark. I breathed in that fresh air for a few seconds, then closed the window and went to sit down again. Tommaso waited patiently, somewhat lost in thought.
“Do you feel okay?”
“Yeah.”
“I can stop if you want.”
“No, go on.”
“You should drink some wine too.”
“Go on, I said.”
“There were about eighty people at the party, all policemen with their girlfriends. After dinner, when the deejay turned up the volume, they all got up to dance. Nacci stood in the doorway counting the buckets of Veuve Clicquot that went by him.
“Nicola and his little group climbed up on a table and danced on that improvised stage. Stella was there too. Seeing her there, you wouldn’t have said she was capable of what Nicola had described to me.
“I took advantage of the coke supplies available in the bathroom and downed countless glasses left half full, before putting them in the dishwasher. I remember thinking: Corinne’s father should see me now; I wouldn’t be able to touch the tip of my nose with my eyes closed, but I can still carry a tray with thirty glasses. I found myself standing on th
e table, a whole new perspective on that dining room that I had walked through thousands of times.
“Nicola was dancing behind me. I ended up crushed between him and Stella. Then other people climbed up. I was moved by the packed contact with all those bodies.
“After that I have a kind of memory gap of a few hours. I remember going into a long, narrow apartment, like a corridor, where there was a wall painted black that you could write on with colored chalk, and I wrote something on it that the others found funny. Outside it was already lightish. There were five of us, the next morning, at least.
“I woke up on the carpet and went down to the street. It seemed a Sunday morning like so many others, bright and warm for December. I realized I was a few blocks from home. I went into a bar and in the bathroom I tried to pull myself together; my vision was slightly clouded.
“When Corinne saw me, she couldn’t speak for a few minutes. She kept pacing nonstop through the rooms.
“‘It’s eleven o’clock,’ she said finally, as if she had counted the hours that had gone by, one by one.
“‘The party ended late. I slept at the Relais not to wake you up.’
“‘Not to wake me up? Really? I called the Relais at eight. They told me you’d left a long time ago.’
“I went over to her. I touched her arms, but she stiffened as if I’d scared her to death.
“She said, ‘I have to go out. And you have to change Ada. You have to watch her.’
“Then she took her things and left, still in a kind of trance.
“I was in a state of confusion. And tired. My hands were shaking. I was well aware of the effects of a hangover, and if it were just that . . . But there was all the cocaine as well, I had no idea how much even. And those memory flashbacks of the night before. I sat down on the couch and probably collapsed immediately. What woke me was Ada crying in her little room. By then she was really shrieking, I don’t know how long it had been going on. I lifted her out of the crib and held her in my arms. I was starving, I hadn’t eaten anything since before the party, but when I tried to put her down on the floor, she instantly started screaming again, so I picked her back up. I put a pot of water on to boil, looked in the refrigerator for some leftover sauce, found the pasta. I held Ada with my left arm, I’d done it hundreds of times. Maybe she made an abrupt move. She lurched backward. I’d left the cabinet door open.
“There was so much blood, I couldn’t even see the wound. The emergency room doctors said she’d been deprived of oxygen for several seconds, not because of the blow, but because she’d screamed so hard. She’d suffocated from fright. Corinne had already arrived and her parents had come, and some other people—I didn’t even know why they were there. Someone brought me tea from the vending machine, which tasted of lemon concentrate; I took a sip, then left it to cool. I kept wondering why Corinne wasn’t pouring out her anger at me. The doctor spoke with her, then left without adding anything about being confident, about being hopeful. Cesare came to mind and I felt a wrenching nostalgia. At a time like that he would have said the words that were needed.
“Toward evening the swelling of Ada’s head had gone down. Corinne went home to get some rest. The nurses asked me to step out of the room for a moment. Corinne’s father was in the hallway. He put a hand on my shoulder. He spoke kindly, a true diplomat, I thought. He gave a brief recap of the events, as if I could have forgotten them. He said that he had never seen his daughter as unhappy as she’d been recently, not even during the worst years when she was a girl. He never called her by name, he always said ‘my daughter.’ It was time for me to undergo treatment, my problem had become a serious concern. My problem. ‘Right now you’re sorry, you’re certain you want to set things right and that the recent scare will give you the strength to do it. But that’s not so. You could go back to her and promise her that from now on it will be different, but you and I know that’s not true.’
“Then he explained the solution that he had arranged in the last few hours, or that more likely had been ready for some time and had only been waiting for the right opportunity. He explained about the apartment that had become vacant, this apartment where we are now. Not to let it slip away, he had already paid a few months’ rent, and he wouldn’t ask me to repay him. I could consider it assistance to start over again. Naturally, I would continue to see Ada, everything would be decided very civilly before a judge. I might have to put up with his wife being present with us, at least at the beginning, as long as it took for me to get back on track. However, if they had wanted to prevent me, it would have been all too easy, given how things had gone, right? But you don’t punish a man for an accident. You don’t expunge a father just because he has weaknesses. Who doesn’t have any?
“In exchange for clemency, all he asked was that I do him the favor of not reporting any of that conversation to Corinne, that I take full responsibility for the plan. She would suffer a little at first, but ultimately she would appreciate it. Because women can recognize when men have the courage to act on their decisions, he said. If he were me, he would wait a couple of weeks, allow enough time to recover from the scare. If he were me, he would let New Year’s go by, but no longer, because later it would be more complicated for everyone. If he were me . . . So I let him be me.”
* * *
—
TOMMASO PAUSED AGAIN. He seemed to be pondering something, and finally he asked me to bring him a cigarette.
“Won’t it make you feel worse?”
“No. It won’t make me feel worse.”
I went to the other room, found the packet, and returned to the bedroom. I lit Tommaso’s cigarette, then mine. We used his glass as an ashtray.
“It was what I wanted, deep down. To get out of there. To be rid of Corinne and her expectations. My debt had been repaid for some time. Yet the first few weeks were the worst. When I wasn’t at the Relais, I was at the bar across from the harbor. I’d meet Ada there, together with Corinne’s mother.
“‘Why don’t we go to your house?’ the woman urged me after a few times. ‘It’s important that the child see where you live now. So she won’t think her father doesn’t have a home.’
“‘Her father doesn’t have a home,’ I replied, and she did not insist.
“Those meetings were torture. Ada may have been the only one who wasn’t aware of it. She wandered among the tables in the bar, and the customers smiled at her. Corinne’s mother always brought toys, toys that I myself had bought before I left. But she didn’t know it. Who knows what Corinne had told her. She explained how to play with them, but I preferred to watch. As soon as they left, I would order a drink. It went on like that for a couple of months, though, looking back, it seems like a very long time. Sitting in that bar, watching the virtual cards scroll by on the slot-machine screens. Then Bern showed up. Out of nowhere, like always, there he was in the bar. The place on earth least suited to him. He scrutinized the surroundings for some time before coming over.
“‘Let’s get out of here,’ he said.
“‘Why?’
“‘Let’s just go. Where’s your house? I have my bag in the car, but I have to take the car back to Danco before evening.’
“And so he kept the promise he’d made to me all those years ago at the masseria, the night we’d stood in front of the window and he’d promised to take care of me.
“The next day we started stripping off the stained wallpaper. We took the most battered furniture to the dump and bought new pieces at a warehouse. Bern talked a lot, practically nonstop. In recent days he’d been living with Danco in a kind of encampment. ‘The Presidio,’ he called it. Since the Xylella pandemic had begun, Danco and some others had mobilized to prevent infected olive trees from being cut down. They had formed some sort of militant group and slept in camp tents around a farmer’s cabin. It was the farmer who’d convinced them that cutting down the trees was useless, that there were undoubted
ly some profits to be made behind the operation. He was treating the infected olive trees with copper sulfate and lime. Bern was animated as he told me all this. The voice was his, but it was Danco talking. And meanwhile, he tore off strips of wallpaper and painted the bare walls a ridiculous pink, which that little girl would like.” He stopped. “Why are you looking at me like that now?”
* * *
—
“I’M NOT LOOKING at you in any way.”
Tommaso crushed his cigarette out in the bottom of the glass, then held the makeshift ashtray in his lap.
“Yes, you are. You’re looking at me because I haven’t said anything about Bern and you. I haven’t said anything about what he told me. But he didn’t talk about it much. That’s the truth. Only one evening, while we were eating Chinese food, sitting on the floor, he said: ‘Chasing after an egoistic desire tore us apart.’ Then he blamed your doctor. He had gone to see him a few days earlier. I think he must have made a scene, that he threatened him in some bizarre way. Saying he’d tell everyone what he was up to, talk to the newspapers about it.”
“Did Bern tell you that? That he went to Sanfelice and threatened him?”
“He was a little ashamed of it, I think. Or maybe not. Anyway, he must have been distraught when he did it, so he didn’t elaborate much on the details. All he said was that he’d burst into the clinic right in the middle of a visit, that the secretary had tried to stop him, and that he had let the doctor have it. We were sitting on the floor, all smeared with pink paint, passing the container back and forth, the Chinese noodles all stuck together in it. Then Bern said, ‘Teresa slept with him. With Nicola. I saw his car parked outside the masseria. A few nights ago.’”
Heaven and Earth Page 26