Death's Dark Abyss

by Massimo Carlotto

  “I don’t understand why you’re so worried about animals like Beggiato and Siviero.”

  “The fact that Siviero is dead and Beggiato soon will be doesn’t matter to me at all. I’ve always been in favor of capital punishment for murderers. It’s just that the courts should issue the sentence and the state should execute it. This isn’t the Wild West, Signor Contin, and no one has pinned a sheriff’s star on your chest.”

  “But we victims are asked to decide whether to forgive.”

  Valiani stared at me with contempt. “You’re not a victim anymore. You need treatment. You’re sick.”

  The superintendent left, dragging his feet as always. I was sure I’d never see him again, and I was happy about it. At this point, no one could implicate me in that incident. The journalists had also stopped bothering me with their stupid questions about my letter of support for the suspended sentence. I’d limited myself to responding I wasn’t a judge, and, besides, I’d never forgiven Beggiato.

  The howl had vanished. But I didn’t feel any better. I felt even more desperate. The pain continued to throb like a festering wound. And in the darkness of my mind I now met Oreste and Daniela too. I couldn’t stop thinking of Beggiato either. I was burning with curiosity to know whether he was suffering, but then sometimes I found myself hoping he wasn’t. My life resumed as before. The same routines repeated over and over again in the most absolute solitude.

  RAFFAELLO

  What motherfucking pain! They say it’s my fault ’cause I refused chemo and they’re light on the morphine. The fucking torturers. I knew they’d make me suffer like hell at the clinic. I beg, implore, insult, curse. Nothing doing. I’m a multiple murderer, cruel and ruthless, and even here at the clinic these things matter. Mamma, what pain. They finally told me anyhow: I got cancer of the stomach. And now that I know I don’t do nothing but hold my guts. I’m thin as a rail but at least I still got hair on my head. The only dope going around this joint is expensive and I ain’t got no money to score. Besides, I can’t even get out of bed. Not much time left now. The priest told me the same thing. “Be strong. Ask God to forgive your sins.” “Up your fucking asshole,” I shouted at him. “For more than fifteen years I been asking for forgiveness.” I don’t do nothing but dig up the past. And tell myself what a fucking dumbass I’ve been. My life was completely off track. And I’m fed up with thinking about it. Can’t wait to kick and see what’s on the other side. If there’s a God maybe he’ll take some pity on me. Contin was right about the darkness. Every so often I can’t see a thing and I start shaking with fear. Who knows if that dickhead came to his senses. Let’s hope he took advantage of his second chance. Shit, what a fucked-up life I had. And how fucked-up my death is. In this ward for the terminally ill there ain’t nothing but death. Nobody takes any pity on you. We’re the dregs of the prison system. They don’t even think us worthy of croaking in a normal hospital. The sooner we’re out of the way, the better. I wrote a letter to Giorgia. Kept it in the night table for almost a month. Now the time’s come to send it to her.

  SILVANO

  Raffaello Beggiato died a few months later. I learned about it from the newspapers. I attended his funeral, although from a distance. Apart from his mother, the only people present were Giorgia Valente and Don Silvio. To one side stood the journalists, Presotto at the head of the pack. The next day his article appeared. The title was “The Solitude of the Killer.”

  The trial for the murders of Siviero and Borsatto was not held because of the defendant’s death. The case was definitively closed. A file buried in a cabinet.

  Right up to the end I hoped Beggiato would give me some sort of explanation. Every day I checked the mailbox, but nothing turned up. His death didn’t leave me indifferent. Towards him I had feelings that were conflicting and always confused. Sometimes I felt as if I owed him something. Then I’d run to get the photos of Clara and Enrico out of the drawer, and the hate came back to comfort and reassure me.

  The doubts proved to be a continual torment till I saw Giorgia Valente leaning on the counter of Heels in a Jiffy. She was uglier and fatter than I remembered her. I waited on the other customers, then asked how I could help her.

  “You haven’t come round for a while,” she said. “Don’t you like my ass anymore?”

  “Is this what you’ve come to ask me?”

  “No. I wanted to look you in the face. I wanted to see how someone who should be in jail right now was getting along.”

  “I don’t understand—”

  She raised a hand to interrupt me. “I know everything. Raffaello told me.”

  I sighed, resigned. “You want the money?”

  “No. I really don’t want anything from you. You make me sick. You’ve always made me sick.”

  “Then what do you want?”

  “I bring you a message from Raffaello: don’t waste your second chance.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “You still don’t understand?” she said, irritated. “Poor Raffaello, he died in jail to give it to you,” she grumbled as she walked away.

  Then she spun around and shouted. “Don’t waste it, asshole. We never had it. Never!”

  Everyone turned to look. Giorgia Valente stared at me hatefully. Then she walked away, clacking her heels.

  EPILOGUE

  Today I logged on to the internet again and visited the site of that TV program devoted to missing persons. My file is always among the “urgent” cases, despite the fact that more than a year has passed since I left my apartment one night and never returned. The newspapers pursued my case for a while. Almost everybody was convinced that I’d taken my own life because I’d left everything just as it was—the apartment, shop, car, even the garage where I kept the memories of my previous life. Good old Presotto came up with the hypothesis that I felt guilty for helping Beggiato get out of prison. Fact is, I’m alive and thriving, and I’d been thinking about taking off for a while. The death of the widow Mandruzzato forced me to retrieve the bag with the money and passport from her storage space. It stayed under my bed for a week before I decided to open it. I spread the dollars on the duvet and leafed through the fake passport made out in the name of Pietro Andrea Bertorelli. Only the photograph was missing. In a side pocket I found the embossing stamp that needed to be used to authenticate the photo. I started counting the money. Beggiato could never have spent it all, even if he did his best. It was enough for a lifetime. I returned the bag to its place. Every night, before I slipped under the covers, I checked that it was there. Around that time, my solitary existence was interrupted by the arrival of another letter. A yellow medium-size padded envelope. The sender was someone called Gianna Tormene. It contained two photographs. They both pictured a woman sitting on a park bench, smiling at the camera. It was Clara, but it took me a while to recognize her. For too many years, her face, even in the sweetest dreams, was the one I saw in agony at the hospital. In the accompanying note, the woman explained she was the mother of a schoolmate of Enrico’s. One day they happened to be in the park with the children, and she took the photos for fun. She apologized for not having one of Enrico, but he and her son had started running across the lawns and just then they were far away. She got my address from my lawyer, who was a friend of the family. She decided to send them to me, even though many years had passed. She thought they might give me pleasure.

  I framed them and put one in the bedroom, on the night table, and the other in the living room. But I tried not to look at them. The woman wasn’t my Clara. Gradually everything became unbearable. The apartment, Heels in a Jiffy, the cemetery, the food from the rosticceria, the wine in the carton, the TV quiz shows. I was getting worse all the time. The darkness that engulfed my mind was rent by flashes of light; Siviero’s and his wife’s blood turned redder and redder. Valiani and Beggiato became insistent thoughts, difficult to drive away. Sometimes I’d lose my breath and be seized by a panic attack. Afraid that I was losing control, I even went to a specialist.
I was very careful in describing the symptoms—and in omitting the truth about what was happening inside my head. Besides, my story was more than enough to convince him I was sick. He prescribed a series of drugs, and right away I started to feel better. Much better. My strength came back, even though my whole life continued to be unbearable. Very soon the specialist was too. Useless, annoying chitchat. One day, at lunch time, I went to the photographer in the supermarket. At home that night I glued one of the four photos in the passport and embossed it with the stamp.

  “My name is Pietro Andrea Bertorelli,” I said out loud in front of the mirror. One, two, three, twenty times non-stop.

  I started to go out with the passport in my pocket. I couldn’t be Silvano Contin anymore. One Sunday I happened to see a travel program on TV. Everything else was just a matter of following thoughts and actions in succession. I now live in Fort-de-France on Martinique, and I am Monsieur Pietro Andrea Bertorelli. The darkness still clouds my mind, and the past continues to torment me, but at least I’m a little more calm and aware. I still rely on drugs, but I’m very happy to do so. They allow me to live without hurtling down into the abyss of madness. I must only be careful not to use any alcohol, which could alter the chemical balance that governs my mind. This isn’t such a big sacrifice. The French Antilles are famous for rum, but I prefer fried bananas to liquor. Here I’m no longer the man whose wife and son were murdered, and I can look about me without any fear of being recognized. I gaze at the flowers and the gaudy colors of the girls’ flimsy dresses. From the terrace of my new house I observe the sunset on the sea. The only emotion I feel is curiosity. Today I’m perfectly aware that I killed two people. I could’ve avoided it. But it was my right to choose whether or not to forgive. And I haven’t forgiven anyone. Not even Beggiato. He thought he’d given me another chance at life by avoiding prison. He might’ve also thought he was making a noble gesture and squaring accounts. But only in part has he restored what he took away from me.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Massimo Carlotto was born in Padua, Italy, and now lives in Sardinia. In addition to the many titles in his extremely popular alligator series, he is also the author of The Goodbye Kiss (Europa Editions, 2006) and The Fugitive (Europa Editions, 2007). One of Italy’s most popular authors and a major exponent of the Mediterranean Noir novel, Carlotto has been compared with many of the most important American hardboiled crime writers. His novels have been translated into many languages, enjoying enormous success outside of Italy, and several have been made into highly acclaimed films.