There were people standing outside as well. I ducked under the umbrellas, pushing and shoving to make my way past them. The bishop had started talking again, the loudspeakers blared his voice: “Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord . . .”
A hand grabbed me by the shoulder. I tried to shrug it off, but it tightened its hold. I turned around. Cosimo stared at me, distraught.
“What did you all do to him? What did you do to that poor boy?”
His blotchy red face was very close to mine. His white hair was sopping wet, the shoulder pads of his jacket sodden with rain, like sponges.
“I had nothing to do with it.”
He was still clutching my shoulder. A lady nearby watched us but did not intervene.
“There is only hell for people like you!”
I managed to struggle free, or maybe he loosened his grip. When I made it out of the crowd, I too was drenched. My umbrella had been left in the church, but I didn’t dream of going back for it. The rain had turned the pavement into a water chute. I fell once, twisting an ankle. Someone approached to help me, but I was already on my feet and running more precariously than before.
Driving back to the masseria, I tried to shut out the thoughts swarming through my head from the funeral: Floriana’s animal cry, Don Valerio’s words and those of Cosimo, the wreath of damp flowers lying on the coffin. The windshield wipers swept the glass at top speed, but that wasn’t fast enough, it was pouring so hard, too hard, you couldn’t even make out the road.
* * *
—
I REMEMBER very little of the weeks that followed. There was more rain, pounding at first, then intermittent, until there were only puddles left scattered in the yard, and finally those too dried up. Then came the inconsolable croaking of the frogs, all night long: I thought of the first summer with Bern.
April. A scrawl appeared on a wall along Speziale’s main street: NICOLA LIVES. A few days later, LIVES had been covered over with an offensive word in red letters, and a circle of the same color had been drawn around the letter A, forming the symbol of the anarchists.
May. I lived as though suspended. A sirocco wind blew for weeks and already there was talk of the drought that would devastate the countryside in the months to come. That uncharacteristic spring, oppressive and dry, only intensified the feeling of stasis.
The police search had dug up traces from the past. I found a Bible that had belonged to Bern and the others. I spent a lot of time leafing through it. Comments in the margins, in tiny letters in three different handwritings, noted the meanings of the most difficult words:
stranger (a man from another country)
diadem (a kind of necklace for the head)
fetid (very smelly)
grotto (cave)
trickle (drip)
caducous (destined to live a short time)
halter (rope for horses)
pervert (someone who has illicit and evil thoughts)
scourge (catastrophe, grave disaster, often sent by God because of a sin committed)
drifter (someone who no longer has a place to stay and wanders around the world like an exile, dejected and solitary)
“Drifter.” I repeated that word in a whisper. I constantly wondered where Bern was. Only his return could restore the normal flow of time and the seasons.
To keep me company there were the bugging devices. Truthfully, I hadn’t found any, I hadn’t even looked for them, but I knew they were there, that the police had planted them around the house. I also knew that the phone was being tapped, and that from time to time plainclothes agents drove up as far as the iron bar across the track, remained parked there awhile, and finally left. It made sense. All of that commotion on their part made sense. My husband was wanted for killing one of their own; an international arrest warrant had been issued against him.
Nevertheless, what the bugs recorded was irrelevant. Not just because Bern would not show up there and wouldn’t even phone, but above all because the devices couldn’t capture anything of what the masseria really was, of what it had been. They were listening for clues encoded in my conversations, interpreting sounds, but they couldn’t pick up the countless happy moments, the years of our living there together, Bern and me, the mornings in bed and the long, leisurely meals, when we let ourselves be mesmerized by the rustling foliage of the pepper tree outside the window. They didn’t capture the exhilaration of the years the six of us had lived there amid a glorious chaos, nor the intensity of our feelings for one another, at least at the beginning. And they did not capture the hope that had infused the masseria, since Cesare’s time there. The only thing the hidden microphones could detect was an acoustic rendering of my loneliness. The rattling of dishes and cutlery. The gushing of the taps. The clacking of the computer keyboard and, in between times, the long hours of silence.
* * *
—
THE FIRST to appear on television was Giuliana’s father. He said what I already knew, namely, that he had not been in touch with his daughter for ten years. But Danco and Giuliana were not all that interesting for the public. The fascination lay entirely in the blood bond between the cousins who were once inseparable and later became so hateful that one could kill the other. Bernardo and Nicola. Nicola and Bernardo. Simply mentioning their names as a pair was all it took for everyone in Italy to know whom you were talking about. Alternatively, all you had to do was bring up Speziale. A cloud of gossip rose around the masseria. Now that the incubator of that scandal had been disclosed, reporters and cameramen even ventured as far as the house. After turning them away at the door, I watched them moving about the property, looking for the best angle to photograph the dwelling. They wanted to take my picture as well, and a couple of them succeeded.
There were phone calls and emails sent to the masseria website, mostly from television stations, though sometimes they were purely obscene insults. My parents again tried to persuade me to return to Turin, just to find some peace while waiting for things to settle down.
At the newsstand in Speziale the covers of the weeklies featuring Bern and Nicola continued to be on view outside, displayed with perverse pride. I stopped walking past there, then I stopped going to town altogether. I did the shopping in supermarkets miles away, run by immigrants, and always during hours when they were deserted.
Just when the media found themselves running out of new developments, just when the focus on Bern and Nicola was finally tapering off, Floriana appeared in a television broadcast. It was aired early on a Wednesday evening and was watched by more than a million viewers.
Since there was no television at the masseria, I drove to San Vito dei Normanni that evening, where no one knew me. The one-way streets were clogged with cars. I passed a bar and through the window I saw a monitor hanging on the wall. I parked. There were only men inside, with the exception of the bartender, a corpulent woman with a clinging yellow tank top and a tattoo on her arm. They studied me silently as I passed between the tables.
I sat down in a spot closest to the screen, turning my back to everyone. I ordered coffee and didn’t notice when it was put on the table because Floriana had already appeared in the video. Behind her, a kitchen stove I had never seen before.
She nodded in response to the interviewer’s welcome, and the interviewer then opened by saying, “Perhaps many viewers may not remember Floriana, but I do. For the women of my generation, little more than twenty-year-olds at the end of the seventies, she is a symbol. Floriana Ligorio was among the first women to oppose the detestable practice of exploitation of farm laborers in the region she comes from, Puglia.”
Floriana nodded without answering, because that wasn’t a question. The host went on, addressing the public directly now: “There is a photograph that became famous at the time. Here it is, the girl whom the policeman is holding by the arm is Floriana.”
For a few seconds t
he image filled the screen. Soon afterward it appeared smaller, lying on the table between the two women. Floriana looked at it without touching it, as if she doubted it was really her.
“Do we sometimes have to struggle to get what’s right, Floriana? Struggle even against a policeman?”
“He was gripping my arm, all I tried to do was free myself.”
“In an interview at that time you called the policeman in the photograph a ‘dirtbag.’”
“Our battle was a just one.”
“What would you think if your son, Nicola, in a similar picture taken today, were the policeman gripping the girl’s arm?”
Floriana’s head snapped up. “He wouldn’t have done that.”
“Can you describe your relationship with your son?”
“On Sundays he came to see us. For lunch. If he wasn’t on duty.”
“And you never had any arguments? After all, it seems clear that your ideas differed. You were a symbol of dissidence, and Nicola became a police agent.”
“A mother is able to accept her child’s choices.”
The bartender in the yellow tank top approached the table and asked me if there was something wrong with the coffee. I said everything was fine.
“You didn’t drink it,” she said, grabbing the cup.
On the screen, the interviewer had noticed Floriana’s agitation, an agitation that she herself had provoked, and was now reassuring her that everyone, she herself included, was on her side, and shared the pain of her loss, a cruel loss.
“But here we are, and this is a unique opportunity to shed some light on every aspect of this affair. We have to face it bravely, Floriana. There are many testimonies from demonstrators who were at the scene of the murder. They witnessed Nicola and his colleague’s arrival. They tell of an aggressive, defiant attitude. Some claim to have been verbally attacked, and others say that Nicola continued fingering the belt holding the gun in an incendiary way.”
At that point Floriana lost control: “It’s my son who was killed. My son, Nicola, was murdered by a group of terrorists. He’s the one who’s dead! That’s what we should be talking about!”
“Is that what you consider them? Terrorists?”
“What else would you call them?”
The interviewer nodded, then gave a summary of what had happened. She reminded viewers that the principal suspects in the death of Nicola Belpanno were Danco Viglione and Bernardo Corianò, the victim’s cousin. Their photographs were shown. She asked Floriana if there was anything in Bern’s past, some episode perhaps, that would give any hint of the violent young man he would become.
“He had his odd ways, like all children. He grew up without parents.”
“Do you mean that Bernardo is an orphan?”
“Cesare’s sister, Marina . . .”
“Cesare is your husband, right?”
“Yes.”
“So we’re talking about your sister-in-law. We’re just trying to make it clearer for those who are watching us, Floriana. Continue, please.”
“Marina was very young when she became pregnant, she was only fifteen.”
“Fifteen?”
“She came to us because she didn’t know where else to go. If she had told them at home . . . My in-laws were very strict people. Nicola had just been born and we had bought this little house in the countryside and fixed it up. There wasn’t even a well. We had to go to the village fountain every day and fill our containers with water.”
“Were you hippies?”
“No. I mean, we didn’t see ourselves that way. Hippies don’t believe in God.”
“Whereas you and your husband are very devoted.”
“Yes.”
“Your husband even founded a sect.”
“He wouldn’t want it to be called that.”
“Let’s go back to Marina, your sister-in-law. She came to you to ask for help because she was pregnant. And so young. Southern Italy, in those days . . . It must not have been easy.”
“She wanted to find a solution.”
“What kind of solution?”
“She was only fifteen, she was scared.”
“Do you mean she wanted to have an abortion?”
“Cesare was very concerned about her. He’s the big brother, he’s ten years older, and in their family . . . he’s always been like a father to Marina. But he too was very young. We were all very young and we had no money. One evening, Cesare went off somewhere. He stayed out all night and when he came back he said that we would take care of Marina’s child no matter what.”
“What had he done that night when he stayed out?”
“He had prayed.”
“Did your husband often do that? Stay out all night praying?”
“Sometimes he did.”
“So we can say that Bernardo was born as a result of your husband’s praying.”
“Yes.”
“And can we say that with his praying your husband saved the child who thirty years later would kill his own son?”
Floriana fingered the transparent frame of her glasses, as if to make sure they were still there. A few seconds of silence followed. The interviewer shuffled her sheets of paper.
“All right. We’ll continue with this, Floriana. We’ll pick up exactly where we left off.”
There was a commercial break. When the program resumed, it was not a continuation of the interview with Floriana. Instead, images of Speziale’s town center were shown: the street that cut the town in two, the bar-café, the grocery store, and the small church where many years ago I had attended my grandmother’s funeral mass.
A car was driving along country roads that I knew all too well, with dry stone walls on either side of them. Taking the longest possible route, it arrived at the barred entrance to the masseria. The reporter had no qualms about ducking under the iron bar and walking along the dirt track, on my property, followed by the cameraman. He went as far as the house, where the doors and windows were closed.
The interviewer said: “Your husband preferred to see to Nicola and Bernardo’s schooling himself. Why?”
“Cesare is an educated man.”
“There are many educated people who, nevertheless, decide to send their children to school.”
“We had our convictions. We still have them.”
“Meaning you would do it all the same way again?”
“Yes. Or maybe not everything. Not all of it.”
“In view of what has happened, don’t you think that the isolation may have contributed to altering Bernardo’s personality?”
“Bern. We always called him Bern. No one calls him Bernardo.”
“Bern, of course, excuse me.”
“Cesare gave all of them an excellent education. Better than that of other children their age.”
“Is it true he forced them to memorize passages from the Bible?”
“No, that’s not so.”
“When we spoke the first time you told me that . . .”
“I said that Bern memorized parts of the Bible. He was the one who wanted to. Cesare never forced him to. For him, they only had to know a few short passages, only what was essential.”
“Essential for what?”
“For them to understand.”
“For them to understand what, Floriana?”
The camera panned for a moment to the interviewer, who was now frowning.
“Floriana, I think it’s important that you clarify this point. What did the boys have to know at all costs?”
“The principles of faith. The principles of . . . behavior.”
“And were there punishments for anyone who refused to learn what Cesare considered essential?”
Floriana shook her head slightly, as if shivering.
“During our first conversation you told
me that there were severe consequences for those who did not obey him.”
Floriana was silent. The interviewer lowered her voice even further.
“Did his son, Nicola, and Bernardo ever receive corporal punishment from Cesare?”
Floriana turned her head purposefully, as if looking for someone. Then there was an abrupt cut. In the next frame she had a half-full glass of water beside her. Her upper lip was a little moist. The interviewer was more severe than before.
“After Nicola’s death you decided to leave your husband. Do you think that he is partially responsible for what happened?”
Floriana took a sip of water. She stared at the glass with a lifeless expression. Then she nodded.
“Why did you decide to share your story today?”
“Because I want people to know the truth.”
“Does the truth set us free, Floriana?”
Floriana hesitated, as if the question had triggered a startling memory. Her eyes widened a little more, just for a moment. With conviction she said: “Yes, I think so.”
“What would you say to Bernardo if you knew he was watching us right now?”
“I would tell him to stand up to his responsibilities. As he was taught to do.”
“And what would you say to Nicola if you could, Floriana? What would you say to your son?”
“I . . .”
“Would you bring Mrs. Belpanno some tissues? Don’t worry. Take all the time you need. Have some more water. Do you feel up to continuing? We were talking about Nicola. When I came to see you, you told me that Cesare has his own very personal idea of the Catholic religion. He is convinced that souls are reincarnated. So, if you were to close your eyes and . . . Close your eyes, Floriana. Try to imagine: into what creature would your son have been transformed?”
The picture on the screen suddenly changed, as Floriana’s mouth opened. A music show appeared on the monitor.
I went to the counter, but the bartender paid no attention to me; she was busy listening to another story from the guy with the paint-spattered face. When I interrupted them, they both turned to look at me.
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