“Can you tell me where your husband was living during the past year?”
I lied, just as I had done a few hours earlier, in response to the same question. But whereas in the morning I had done it out of a vague precautionary instinct, I now lied deliberately to protect Bern. Whatever he had done.
“I don’t know.”
From that moment on, the grilling became more pressing. The agent had made an effort to be friendly, but it was clear that we were not on the same side. Was I aware of my husband’s involvement with extremist environmental fringe groups? Did I also have associations with those elements? Were there places my husband habitually frequented, places he spoke of often? People he may have named? Had I ever seen him manufacture weapons? Was he interested in building explosive devices before?
No, no, no, my only answer was no. Seen from a distance, the policeman and I must not have seemed so different from the boys who sat beside Cesare in turn, with him doing the talking and me being silent, staring straight ahead or at my feet, a few monosyllables dragged out of me from time to time.
“Mrs. Corianò, I advise you to cooperate. It’s in your own best interest.”
“I am cooperating.”
“So Bernardo Corianò is not linked to any extremist groups.”
“No.”
“And Danco Viglione? What can you tell me about him?”
“Danco is a pacifist.”
“You talk about him as if you knew him well.”
“We lived together. Here, for two years.”
“I see. You, Corianò, Danco Viglione, and who else?”
“Danco’s girlfriend. And another couple.”
“Giuliana Mancini, Tommaso Foglia, and Corinne Argentieri.”
“If you already knew, why did you ask me?”
But the agent ignored the question.
“You see, I find it very strange that you describe Viglione that way. Calling him a pacifist, when he’s actually a convicted offender.”
I felt it hard to breathe. “A convicted offender?”
“Ah, you didn’t know that?”
The policeman flipped back a few pages through his notebook. He read: “For aggravated assault in 2001. Resisting an officer in 2002, in Rome. He and others stripped naked during an international summit. Odd, isn’t it? Your housemate spent a few nights in custody. You weren’t aware of it, I guess.”
Someone was rummaging around in my bedroom, I saw him pass from one side of the window to the other. All he would find was loss.
“As for Giuliana Mancini,” he went on, “the lady was arrested a couple of times with Viglione, but has also been charged with computer fraud. At the moment she too appears to be untraceable.”
He straightened his shoulders. He set the notebook facedown on his lap, as if he were laying down a weapon.
“I’m curious. What exactly did you all do here together?”
“We harvested the olives. We sold our products at the market.”
We were realizing a utopia. But I didn’t say that.
“You were farmers, in short. And your husband, Corianò, is he a pacifist too?”
“Bern has his convictions.”
“Explain that better. What exactly does he believe in?”
What indeed. He had believed in everything and stopped believing in everything. At that point I no longer knew.
I said, “He has a lot of faith in Danco.”
The policeman looked at me, a flicker of triumph in his eyes. If Bern was a follower of Danco and Danco was a previous offender, then Bern too must be a dangerous individual. Answering him like that had been a mistake, but it was too late now. The agent was silent, maybe waiting for me to reveal something more, to go further, but I didn’t say another word. Under the holly oak the air smelled like resin.
“How did he die?” I asked him finally.
“They bashed his skull. With a spade.”
He used that brutal expression on purpose, I think, to get even with me for being reticent. It worked, because the image planted itself in my eyes: Nicola’s head bashed in by a spade. It would never go away.
“Have you already talked to his father?”
“With Belpanno’s father? Someone is with his parents right now. Why do you ask?”
I looked him in the eye.
“Do you know him?” he asked.
He looked off balance, as if he realized he’d been talking to the wrong person the whole time.
“Nicola and Bern are practically brothers. They grew up together. You people think Bern hurt Nicola, but you’re wrong. His father, Cesare, will confirm it.”
The agent told me not to move. From the holly oak I watched him walk away, then talk on the phone, plugging up his free ear with a finger. He did not come back to ask me any more questions.
After that they left. The same deafening stillness of the morning. I opened the goat’s pen and watched her step out and idly graze the winter grass. She was looking for the harebells hidden among the blades.
I went into the house, imagining that I’d find it topsy-turvy, but it was orderly, a somewhat chilly tidiness that wasn’t me, as if by putting things in place the cops had wanted to reproach me for my neglect. I sat down at the computer. The news appeared as the lead story on the Corriere del Mezzogiorno’s website: “Policeman Fatally Wounded During a Tree-Felling Demonstration. Suspects on the Run.”
You could click on the title story or on one of the in-depth analyses: The location of the conflict—Interactive map of Xylella—A life in government service.
No mention of Nicola and Bern being related. I started reading the main article, but by then I was so shaken that I had to get up, go outside, and pace back and forth for several minutes.
When the phone rang again I ran to answer it. It was strange to hear my mother’s voice. Since Bern was no longer living here, since the obstacle of Bern had been removed, we talked at least twice a week, but that wasn’t the usual day, that wasn’t the scheduled time.
“Oh, dammit, Teresa! Dammit!”
She was crying. I asked her to please stop. A very fragile balance was at stake. Something massive and irreparable was ready to explode in me and I knew it would happen if I kept on hearing her sob.
“They’re talking about it on the radio too,” she said.
“Of course,” I replied, but meanwhile I was thinking that my parents never listened to the radio. Maybe things had changed since I was gone. Maybe now they did.
“Come back here, Teresa. Come home. I’ll go to the agency and get you a ticket.”
“I can’t leave the area. The police advised me to stay nearby.”
Mentioning the police triggered a fit of hysteria. But this time it didn’t produce any reaction in me.
“Isn’t Dad there?”
“He went to bed. I persuaded him to take a Xanax. He was beside himself.”
“Mom, I have to go.”
“No, wait! Your father asked me to make sure to tell you, tell Teresa that we don’t believe it. We don’t believe it, do you hear me? We know him. He wouldn’t hurt anybody.”
* * *
—
BY THE FOLLOWING DAY the wind had swept away the clouds. I was expecting another milky day, lingering rain, a landscape matching my dejection, but instead the sky was crystal clear and the rays of sun slanting through the countryside brought a new warmth. The first day of spring, a week early.
Outside the town’s newsstand was a small post with a scrolling digital display in block letters: TRAGEDY IN A FAMILY OF SPEZIALE. So the news they’d missed about Nicola and Bern being related had emerged.
“Where are they talking about it?” I asked Maurizio, the newsagent.
“Everywhere. But especially here.”
I glanced quickly at the headlines of the Quotidiano di Puglia
and the Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno. Both front pages showed the same photograph of Nicola that I had found online the day before. I hunted for some coins at the bottom of my bag.
“Don’t worry about it,” Maurizio said, folding the newspapers.
“I don’t see why,” I said, handing him a fifty-euro bill. “That’s all I have.”
“You can pay me another time.”
“I said no.”
He took the change from the cash register. Meanwhile, other customers had gathered. I knew them, and they knew me. I noticed their looks, their eyes went from the newspaper headline to my face, then back to the headline. Maurizio very slowly counted out the bills. When he looked up, his expression had changed from before. He said, “When they were kids they used to come to the newsstand and stare at everything, their eyes popping out of their sockets. My father always told us about it.”
In the car I read the article in the Gazzetta in a rush. It didn’t say anything that I didn’t already know, only that the search for the fugitives had been extended to all of Puglia. That word “fugitives” hit me. Pictures of Bern and Danco and Giuliana were provided, and everyone was urged to cooperate.
I noticed that Nicola’s age was wrong, thirty-one instead of thirty-two. He had turned thirty-two the month before, on February 16. I had sent him a happy-birthday message and he had replied thanks with a lot of exclamation points. For years that’s all we’d done, sent meaningless birthday greetings.
I looked for the obituary page. His item was the first. He was remembered by his parents and, in the box below, by his police colleagues. Nothing was said about a funeral. I went to the Quotidiano di Puglia and reread the same information, the same error about Nicola’s age, but here they’d added that the funeral had been postponed because of the autopsy. When I looked up from the page I saw an elderly gentleman, one of the regulars in the piazza, seated on his bicycle, stopped a few steps away from the car. He was staring at me.
When I returned home I found the school bus parked in front of the masseria. The children were gathered around, each with his backpack containing a bag lunch. I had completely forgotten about the visit scheduled for that morning. The teacher, Elvira, and her colleague were waiting for me under the pergola, twisting their hands. I apologized for being late. It sounded ridiculous.
“We weren’t sure if you’d feel up to it,” Elvira said.
“It’s fine.”
“I’m sure everything will be cleared up, Teresa.”
She touched my arm, gently, and that unexpected contact startled me. I turned to the children: “Did you find the goat? Yesterday I left her pen open. Go look for her, go on. She usually wanders off that way.” I waved my hand to send them away and they started running in the direction I’d indicated.
Later I looked on as they carved pumpkins and scooped the orange pulp onto the ground. I distributed carrot seeds, one apiece, then watched them dig holes in the soil with their fingers, deposit the seeds, and cover them back up, full of hope. I promised that I would look after the seedlings, knowing full well that I wouldn’t water the seeds even once, that I would let them die of thirst, every last one of them.
“Now do whatever you like,” I said. “Run, climb, tear the place apart for all I care.”
I went into the house without bothering to say goodbye to the teachers. I closed the door and sank onto the sofa. I was still there, perfectly alert, when the school bus drove off along the dirt track.
* * *
—
CONTRARY TO WHAT was originally theorized, Nicola had not died from the spade striking the back of his head. According to the autopsy, that blow had caused a fairly mild concussion. It had been the impact with a sharp rock that had caused much more severe internal hemorrhaging, an impact that the fall alone was not able to justify. “A further contributing factor must have crushed Belpanno’s head forcefully against the rock,” the press release reported. A further contributing factor. On the temple, on the opposite side, there were bruises compatible with the cleated sole of a massive shoe, a boot, maybe an army-issue rubber boot. Someone had flattened his head against the rock with his foot.
Just when the date of the funeral was announced, Danco’s jeep was found along the coast, parked in a grassy clearing. The area was rarely frequented in the winter, the article online said, whereas in the summer it was always crowded because it was just a few steps from a well-known hangout for young people, the Scalo. Reading that, I felt dizzy. I saw Nicola and myself there many years ago, me unhappy with being alone with him, and him looking for an excuse to keep me there.
The investigators’ opinion was that Bern, Danco, and Giuliana had fled by sea, with the help of an accomplice. It did not appear that any of them was familiar with navigation. Inside the ruined tower, a few hundred yards from the jeep, the carabinieri had found a bag with a few clothes and some food remains. According to the reporter, the escape was an implicit admission of the crime. And the hideout, as he insisted on calling it, showed it was premeditated.
The thought of Cesare haunted me. Should I send him a telegram? Was it already too late? There were lists of appropriate phrases on the internet; I read and reread them, but none seemed even remotely adequate.
“Our thoughts are with you . . .”
“May the eternal memory of . . .”
Finally I dropped the idea altogether.
I was undecided about the funeral as well, up until the last minute. An hour from when it was due to start I was still at the masseria, dressed in my work clothes, wandering around aimlessly in the hope that time would leap forward three hours, or maybe ten years. I had to make a mad dash along the highway, under a persistent, furious rain, straightening my hair with my fingers and trying to rub my eyes free of the expression of loss that had marked my face for days.
Police headquarters had insisted that Nicola be accorded a state funeral: a clear sign of solidarity toward law enforcement. The pews of Ostuni’s cathedral were filled from the first to the last row, even the back of the church and the aisles were jammed with people standing: policemen with their families, carabinieri in ceremonial uniform, ordinary citizens drawn there by indignation.
I kept away from anyone who might recognize me, especially from Cesare and Floriana, who were virtually unreachable in any case, wedged between Nicola’s coffin, covered with flowers, and the wall of people behind them.
I spotted Tommaso standing beside a column. He was trying to go unnoticed. There was just a glance between us, more hostile than emotional, our mutual distrust was still there.
The ceremony took place in utmost silence, as if we were being watched from above. The bishop called a younger priest, Don Valerio, to the pulpit. It was only after I’d heard him speak for a while—after he said, “I visited the house where Nicola lived with his parents a number of times, I blessed that house year after year”—that I remembered a muggy August day when Cesare had told me about his friend the priest in Locorotondo.
And here he was, Don Valerio, his furrowed forehead barely projecting above the lectern, his eyes dark and blazing. He described the masseria as a perfect sliver of the world, in which evil could not intrude. But evil, he said, had even managed to creep into the Garden of Eden in the form of a snake.
The bishop had sat down. He listened to the priest with his eyes closed. Don Valerio continued: “There is something that we cannot accept. Didn’t the Lord promise us eternal life through our children? And now it seems He’s revoked that promise. Cesare and Floriana would have a right to doubt God today, but I know that they will not. Because they have made faith the foundation of their every action. Listen well to what they have to teach us on this day of mourning, when even the heavens have joined in our weeping: every single moment of our stay on this earth makes sense as long as we believe in Jesus and in eternal life. If we stop believing, we might as well sit in a corner and let ourselves die.”
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br /> He paused for a long moment. The bishop had bowed his head. I looked for Tommaso again, but he was gone. Don Valerio bent the microphone toward his mouth, but when he resumed his talk he was more subdued, as if his strength were about to run out: “I’ve been hearing a lot of talk these days. I hear accusations being made. As often happens, people talk without knowing what they’re talking about. We all love gossip, don’t we? And what’s better than a violent death to generate gossip? Well, I saw Nicola with the boy he considered a brother. With Bernardo.”
The name was a shock. The bodies crammed into the cathedral flinched.
“When I knew them, I saw two boys incapable of hurting anyone, let alone hurting each other. Raised with so much love as to make them immune to wickedness. I could be wrong, of course. As I’ve already told you, the snake even corrupted Adam and Eve. But let’s wait for the moment of truth. This is not yet that time. This is the time of mourning and of prayer.”
There was another talk after his, by a colleague of Nicola’s, who unfolded a sheet of paper with trembling hands and read from it, stumbling over every word. He described Nicola so differently from how he was in reality that I lost the thread. For a while, after he returned to his seat, there was only the din of the rain hammering the roof, as the bishop blessed the wooden coffin.
That’s when the scream erupted. An animal scream, which rose from a terrible depth, a scream that the local newscasts would air that night, the following day, and the day after that. Cesare held Floriana by the arms as she tried to lunge forward, not exactly toward the coffin, but toward something that she alone was able to see.
I elbowed my way through the paralyzed mob, not moving toward Floriana, but in the other direction, toward the exit blocked by the crowd.
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