The main reason was Rosa. In the past few days he’d noticed that the background noise of the woman’s complaints about the lack of routine in his life, the unpleasant soundtrack of his evening hours, had faded to the point of vanishing entirely. His tata had something on her mind, and she seemed irritated, almost preoccupied.
At first, it had been nothing more than a feeling, but with time it had become a certainty. He wanted to ask her how she was, if she was having any trouble with her health; he wanted to ask her, even though he knew it would inevitably lead to a long tirade about him being alone, the importance of starting a family, that usual line of conversation: in other words, Rosa’s favorite hobbyhorse.
He reflected, as he made his way through the mass of people that crowded Via Toledo, on the fact that he actually already had a family. And that family consisted of one person: that very same old woman, strange, energetic, and simple, fragile and incredibly strong at the same time, who had been with him since the day he was born. Always present, always vigilant in her rearguard position, more of a parent than his father who died when he was young, more than his mother who was always sick, more than anyone else had ever been. His family, which was much dearer to him than he’d be willing to admit, much more than he was capable of showing.
Along the street, the crowd of the living was punctuated here and there by the dead. A young man who’d fallen from a scaffold, his neck broken, who called out for his mother; a man who had been beaten to death, and who inveighed against a certain Michele through his shattered jaw; a woman run over by a car in the middle of the road, who recited like a prayer the list of items she was going to buy, while blood from her leg, shorn clean off, pumped out into the empty air.
Here I am, thought Ricciardi. Just another face in the crowd. Neither fat nor skinny, neither tall nor short; small active hands plunged deep into the pockets of an overcoat, a rebellious lock of hair dangling over the forehead. Just another face in the crowd.
The only real difference, he reflected bitterly, is the crowd itself. My crowd is made up of the living and the dead, indifference and sorrow, cries and silences. I’m the sole citizen of a city made up of people who are dead but think they’re alive, or of people who breathe but think they’re dead.
When he got home he opened the door and realized that someone, in the drawing room, was crying.
The Villa Nazionale was teeming with people, in spite of the cold.
It was full of people because the Villa Nazionale was yet another one of the battlefields of December twenty-third, where opposing armies of vendors and purchasers of all manner of merchandise squared off and clashed. Every square inch of open ground was occupied by stands and stalls, behind which the merchants huddled, fighting off the cold and the damp that came in off the water, bundling themselves in every item of clothing imaginable, all the way up to their eyes.
The playful experience intrinsic to the Villa Nazionale also influenced the selection of merchandise on display: balloons, wooden and tin toys, candies and sweets; but also conversation pieces, ceramic items, chinoiseries, and cooking utensils. The result was the usual particolored cacophony of wares-hawking and feverish haggling, under an increasingly dark sky that promised only bad weather in the offing.
It took Maione a little while to identify the people he was looking for, a family like so many others, a young couple with two small children. He adjusted his pace to match the gait of the Candela family, three hundred feet or so ahead of him, shielded by a curtain of strollers preparing for Christmas with one last walk among the trees, down by the sea.
They couldn’t afford a perambulator; the little girl held her mother by the hand, and the little boy rode on his father’s shoulders, with the man holding both the boy’s tiny feet. Maione noticed that, unlike most of the children there, Biagio’s weren’t constantly pestering their parents for a piece of candy or a toy. They’d been brought up to resist temptation, or else they were simply happy to go for a walk in the park and didn’t feel the need for anything more.
After a while the little family stopped in a clearing and sat on the lawn, not far from the bandshell where a chilled, haphazard little orchestra sat playing operatic arias without vocal accompaniment. Out of her bag the mother pulled a little bundle containing some pieces of bread, which she gave to her husband and daughter, then sat breaking something into small bits and feeding them to the toddler. Maione lurked behind a tree, about seventy-five feet away.
What am I doing here? he asked himself. What do I want from these people? Why do I keep watching them, memorizing their gestures and expressions? It’s not as if by spying on their lives I’ll be able to figure out what I want to do. Or what I ought to do. It’ll just make things worse, when the time comes. Knowing how the man smiles at his son and daughter, having seen him roll around on the grass with his daughter the way he’s doing now, or watching him carve with his left hand, with the tip of his tongue protruding between his teeth like a little boy, or seeing him risk his life to protect money that doesn’t belong to him from a robber—none of that’s going to help me. Not one bit.
All around him, the Villa Nazionale was teeming with excitement, expectations for the future, enthusiasm and optimism. The expressions on people’s faces were cheerful; poverty and desperation seemed far away, when in fact they were right here, just below the surface of the holiday that was fast approaching and would be over all too quickly.
Maione was confused and frightened. For the first time in his life, right and wrong kept changing places before his eyes, losing their proper outlines and transforming into floating, elusive concepts, like the balloon that had just escaped the hands of its young owner and was now flying off into the gray sky.
He could feel a chill, and he realized that it was coming from within. He wished there were someone close to him who could help him. He passed his hand over his eyes, disconsolate.
“You could talk to me about it. There was a time when you used to, and you could do it again.”
He turned around with his heart in his mouth. Just a few inches away from his own, he saw the blue eyes of his wife.
XLIX
Ricciardi rushed into the drawing room and found Rosa sitting in her armchair in tears, with something in her hand,. As soon as she saw him, the woman tried to get to her feet, wiping her face with the hem of her apron, but she soon gave up that effort.
“What’s happened?” asked Ricciardi anxiously. “Are you hurt? Did you fall?”
Rosa didn’t even try to control herself. Between sobs, she choked out:
“Useless, I’m useless . . . a useless old woman . . . You should just commit me to an institution, one of those places where they keep old people like me . . . I can’t stand it, being unable to take care of things myself . . .”
Ricciardi looked around the room, trying to guess the reason for all this drama. In all the time he’d known her, which is to say as long as he’d been alive, he’d only seen Rosa in tears once: when his mother had died. He’d accompanied her to the funerals of several of her brothers and sisters, and they’d experienced sad moments together, like when they’d left once and for all the home in Fortino where he’d grown up, but he’d never seen her cry again.
But now here she was, dissolving in unstoppable sobs in her armchair in the drawing room.
“Rosa, please, stop crying. I don’t know what to do. You’re starting to worry me! What are you saying, you’re not useless, I need you. Please, stop talking nonsense.”
As he said it, he realized that every word was true, and that what he’d been thinking the whole way home had been this, and nothing else: the elderly tata was all the family he had, and without her he’d have been infinitely more lonely than he felt now.
“No, I’m becoming a burden to you. Before long I won’t even be able to dress myself, let alone cook, iron, and take care of the apartment. I’m an old invalid woman, and all I do is cau
se trouble . . .”
Ricciardi kneeled on the floor next to the armchair. He reached out hesitantly with one hand and placed it on the woman’s head, as she covered her face in despair, and he gently stroked her gray hair, gathered into a bun.
“Now stop it. You’re not useless—if anything, I’m crazy for making you work so hard at your age. You know what we’ll do tomorrow? We’ll hire a housekeeper, that way she can do all the hard work and you can direct her. What do you say?”
Rosa jerked her head up, staring Ricciardi in the face with a warlike glare.
“Have you lost your senses? An outsider in our home, robbing us blind? It would be more work supervising her than it would be to take care of things myself. Ah, but I almost forgot, you don’t care a fig about your own money, and if it weren’t for me the peasants back home would have taken the clothes off your back by now.”
At last, the Rosa he knew.
“Whatever you say, Rosa. Maybe we could send for someone from back home, what about that? Then you’d be comfortable with her around, maybe one of your nieces, the daughter of one of your brothers or sisters. Just to lend a hand.”
Rosa waved one hand irritatedly, as if she were shooing away a mosquito.
“We’ll see about that later; it’s out of the question for now.”
Ricciardi nodded, continuing to stroke her hair all the while. It seemed to have a calming effect on her, and he would have done anything to make her stop crying.
“Well, in any case, will you tell me what the dickens started all this? What happened to make you cry like that, as if your heart was broken?”
Rosa heaved a deep sigh and lifted her clenched fist until it was right in front of Ricciardi’s face. She opened it slowly, and he glimpsed shards of something that seemed vaguely familiar.
“Well? What is it?”
Rosa put on a despairing expression.
“You don’t even recognize it . . . It’s the Baby Jesus that once belonged to your mother, the baroness. And I dropped it, because I can’t even hold things in my hands anymore!”
The tears started streaming down her face again, and Ricciardi felt a stab of pity in his heart.
“Please, don’t start crying again! It’s nothing, just an old piece of porcelain, you’ll see, we can fix it. All we need is some glue, no? You had me thinking it was something really serious, and instead it’s just a trifle.”
“No, it’s not a trifle. I’m really upset, it’s an antique, and it was so important to your mother that I put up the manger scene every year!”
Ricciardi felt like smiling, but he didn’t want to seem dismissive about something that was clearly important to his old tata.
“All right, we’ll buy another one. They told me that a real manger scene is like that, you always have to add pieces, one or two every year.”
Rosa said nothing, staring at her hand. Suddenly she held it up and said:
“Look. Just look at this.”
Ricciardi noticed the tremor, with a new stab of concern, this one sharper than the first. For a short time he said nothing. Then he took Rosa’s hand and kissed it tenderly.
“Easy there, don’t worry about it, calm down. You’ll see, it’ll turn out to be nothing. And I want you to write a letter back home first thing to send for one of your nieces. I don’t want you to be alone anymore, you understand? We can afford it, and that’s what I want.”
The woman looked down. Then she murmured under her breath:
“If you had a family of your own, the way nature intended, there wouldn’t be any need for a niece.”
Rosa was Rosa; nothing could change her, not even a trembling hand. And that was a good thing.
“Still, it’ll be faster to bring your niece up here, trust me. I’m a little slow when it comes to this kind of thing. Now get up, come on; I’m hungry and I have to get back to work.”
Antonio Lomunno sat looking at his hands. He thought about how inadequate they were given his new situation.
He’d lulled himself into the belief that he’d spend his life working at a desk, enjoying a steady climb up the rungs of a brilliant career, toward an increasingly prosperous future for himself and his family; but then everything was gone in an instant, and now he wished he knew how to do something that was humble but useful.
When he was a boy he loved carving wood, but he’d never pursued that passion because, his father told him, it distracted him from his studies. He used to carve little armies, and he’d make them fight one another for hours, on rainy Sunday afternoons when he couldn’t go out and play in the courtyard. Now that old talent was good for only one thing, carving a manger scene for his children.
He looked at it: an absurd luxury for a shack that lacked everything. His children never complained, not even when that damned cheap wine was blurring his heart and he started shouting at them about some ridiculous trifle. They’d stare back at him, but they wouldn’t cry or run away.
He was all they had, and they were all he had, too.
He’d clung to the thought of his children during those long, terrible months in prison; and the love he felt for them had saved him from madness, after the warden informed him of what his wife had done.
His children, no question: and his thirst for revenge.
Two conflicting emotions, equally powerful, equally intense. During the nights he spent staring sleeplessly at the ceiling of his cell, watchful as rough hands reached out for him, as cockroaches scuttled across the floor, those two passions worked together to keep him alive.
But the minute he was released, those two emotions became enemies: if he wanted to provide for his children, if he wished to preserve a shred of hope for them, he’d have to renounce his thirst for revenge.
As he was getting ready to go out for the day of temporary work he’d managed to secure, he thought about the blood that had been shed; and his own blood, which flowed in the veins of those two children who’d become old too soon, who watched as he dressed.
Again, he looked at his hands, and he decided that loading and unloading fish at the market was certainly a job he could do. It wasn’t that hard, after all. And anything was respectable that was good for his kids.
He reached his hand out toward the manger scene and picked up Saint Joseph. The original figurine, the one he had owned in the beautiful home he’d lived in in his previous life, had been lost; he’d carved this one out of wood, coloring it with a little paint. You were a father, too, he murmured. A father who had only one thought, to work for his son’s good, without a lot of talk, without a lot of philosophizing.
He put the figurine back, amid the others, and smiled sadly. Among the many houses in the manger scene, there was room for little shacks like the one he lived in.
He stood up, gave his children a kiss, and went to the market.
L
Maione gaped, opening and then shutting his mouth twice, like a fresh-caught mullet wriggling on the deck of a fishing boat. He was experiencing a sense of bewilderment, as if Lucia had suddenly materialized before him in response to a mystical invocation. As if she’d been transported to the Villa Nazionale on his own thought waves.
He stared at her, her hat fastened to her head with a ribbon, her overcoat with the fur collar, the one he’d bought for her so many years ago and that she kept in perfect condition, her cheeks red from the chilly air, her blue eyes turned in the same direction he’d been gazing until just a few seconds ago.
“Luci’, what are you doing here?”
His wife didn’t answer; she just looked at him with her lips pressed firmly together and a determined expression on her face. Then she said:
“You’re not working. Don’t even try to tell me that you’re here on a case, that you’re tailing some criminal the day before Christmas Eve. Those people aren’t fugitives; they’re just a normal family, out for a little fresh air in t
he Villa Nazionale. Don’t you dare try to lie to me, Rafe’.”
Maione knew his wife. Joking around at home, back when Luca was still alive, they used to say that she was the real policeman in the family. All the same, he tried lying to her anyway.
“What’s that supposed to mean? If you only knew how many people seem normal, harmless, but then it turns out they’ve done things that you can’t even imagine. Believe me, people aren’t always what they seem.”
Lucia, without taking her eyes off Biagio’s family, replied:
“Nonsense. A minute ago you put your hands on your face; you only do that when you’re confused, when you don’t know what to do next. And you never have doubts or uncertainties about your work. There’s some other problem here, and I want to know what it is.”
Maione didn’t know what to say. The woman went on.
“I’ve been following you for two days now. Ever since you came home that night three days ago, your mood has changed. You’ve seemed sad, distracted, pensive. You try your best to seem normal, but I know you: you can’t pull the wool over my eyes. When an investigation gets under your skin you bring it home with you, but there’s always been a limit. This time it’s different, and I want to know what it’s about.”
Her tone of voice brooked no objections.
“Come here, Luci’. Let’s sit down on that bench and I’ll tell you all about it.”
A few shafts of sunlight slanted down, making their way fitfully through the thick black clouds, hitting the sea here and there. The bench was cold, but the fact that there was no wind made it tolerable. The strollers were thinning out as lunchtime drew near, but the orchestra played on heroically, keeping the Christmas spirit flying, like the banner of a regiment fighting in the trenches.
By My Hand Page 26