The Bottom of Your Heart

by Maurizio de Giovanni

  “Signori’, are you hungry? I brought a bit of pizza chiena, shall I give you a slice?”

  Ricciardi felt a pang in his heart as he recognized the very words and even the same tone of voice as Rosa. And the same heartfelt care for him, the same determination to stuff him with absurd delicacies. Just think: the pizza chiena. A confection of pork lard, eggs, and pepper. At five thirty in the morning.

  “No, thanks. But what about you? Why don’t you go home and get some rest?”

  Nelide shook her head.

  “’A cera se cunzuma, e ’a processione nú camina,” she said in a mournful voice. The image of candles burning down in silence while the procession remained motionless emerged from the venerable folk wisdom of Cilento and plowed into Ricciardi like a speeding train. She was right. Rosa’s flame was burning lower, and her life wasn’t resuming.

  For the first time since his tata had fallen asleep, Ricciardi emerged from the exclusive domain of his grief and realized that poor Nelide was bearing a heavy cross; she was young, fond of her aunt, and far from home. She had come to keep Rosa company, and now she found herself keeping vigil over her sickbed.

  “Nelide, listen. You’re free to go back to your village. I’m here, as you can see, and there’s Dr. Modo, the other physicians, and all the nurses. You have nothing to worry about.”

  “Signori’, Aunt Rosa called me. She chose me, she learned me everything. I’ll stay. I want to stay. If you don’t kick me out. I’m like Aunt Rosa, comme ’a mamma vene ’a figliola. If you want me.”

  Ricciardi felt a pang in his heart: she’d known. Rosa had known, that she would die soon. And she’d thought about who would stay with him, because he refused to make up his mind to start a family of his own. Stubborn old lunatic: instead of telling him that she wasn’t well, instead of getting medical care, she’d arranged to train the niece that most resembled her.

  Comme ’a mamma vene ’a figliola: like mother, like daughter. Stubborn Rosa, stubborn Nelide. Strong as a pair of oak trees.

  “Yes, Nelide. Stay with me. And stay as long as you like. If you wish.”

  A rapid smile flashed across the girl’s lips, so quickly that Ricciardi wondered if he’d really seen it at all.

  His mind followed his heart toward Enrica. How he wished he could feel her close to him. It was absurd: he had written to her, he’d looked and looked at her, but they’d spoken very little. And only once, one unexpected time, in the street, under a strange drizzly snow one winter night, had he tasted the bittersweet flavor of her lips. And yet he felt a sharp painful pang: he missed her there, by Rosa’s bedside, at dawn, as if that were where she belonged, alongside him.

  How absurd love is, thought Ricciardi. Absurd in its acts, in its behaviors. Absurd in the wails of the ghosts on street corners, absurd in the sighs of those who died for love in the gardens where they’d slashed their wrists, beneath the windows they’d jumped out of, in the locked rooms where they’d drunk poison. And how absurd love was in this absence that weighed on him like a boulder, that crushed his heart as if it were made of tin.

  There you are, he thought to himself. There you are.

  Baroness Marta di Malomonte giggled and went on stitching. Rosa, curious, asked her: “Barone’, why are you laughing?”

  Marta turned toward her: “No, it’s nothing. It’s just Nelide and Luigi Alfredo. They’re so strange: they think and they think. They don’t talk much, but they think so much.”

  Rosa sighed: “It’s because they’re from Cilento, Barone’. You know what we’re like, don’t you? Don’t you know us by now?”

  “Sure, sure, of course I do. But the two of them are so afraid that they make me laugh.”

  The tata was bewildered: “What, they’re afraid and that makes you laugh? And what are they afraid of?”

  “They’re afraid of being left without you, and each of them thinks that the other will suffer more, and each of them wonders if they’ll be strong enough to help. That’s what always happens. It’s just something . . . human, I’d say. But you’ll see, they’ll survive. Because you really have been extraordinary.”

  “Me, Barone’? Me, extraordinary? At what? Nelide is just a girl from the country, and the young master can’t even bring himself to talk with the woman he likes. Even I’m afraid for them.”

  Marta’s expression turned reproving: “Now listen, Nelide has a good head on her shoulders, she’ll do your job perfectly: you couldn’t have left my son in better hands. And he, perhaps, will take from you and no one else the strength to emerge from his shell. Don’t worry. People get used to the most difficult situations easily. But what about you, how do you feel?”

  Rosa looked around. The room was growing brighter and brighter, and a pleasant cool breeze was coming in through the window.

  “That’s better, Barone’. That’s better.”

  Marta held up the newborn’s romper she was working on, in a delicate pink that in the light of the sun reminded Rosa of a Jordan almond.

  “It’s turning out very nicely. Before long, you’ll look lovely in this romper.”

  “Me? But don’t you see how big I am? How am I going to fit into that little romper of yours?”

  “Oh, you’ll see, you’ll fit just fine. And I’ll be so proud of my tata, you’ll be the loveliest tata of them all.”

  “You think you can even make me lovely? Then it really is true, what they say about miracles. But tell me, what about the young master? What will become of him?”

  Marta stopped. She laid her work in her lap and gazed out the window. Stretched out in the bed, Rosa couldn’t share in the view.

  “You know, Rosa, sometimes it seems as if the suffering will go on forever. It takes you, it envelops you, it seems as if it’s never going to end. Like when there’s a thunderstorm, you know what I mean? You feel overwhelmed, plunged into despair. And then you see it, the sun comes out. I didn’t believe it, when . . . when I was with you, with all of you. It seemed to me that there couldn’t be anything but the inferno. That pain, that terrible, constant pain . . . all those corpses talking, talking . . . I thought it would never come to an end. Instead, it does end. It ends.”

  Rosa listened, attentively. She thought she understood some of it, but not all.

  “But the young master understands, doesn’t he? He understands that the inferno will come to an end?”

  Marta turned toward her again: “Maybe he does. And maybe he doesn’t. It depends on so many things, you know that, tata? Not just on him. Now let me finish, there’s not much time before dark.”

  And she started stitching again, smiling as if to some music that only she could hear.

  LVI

  Maione stayed overnight at police headquarters; he couldn’t bear to look Lucia in the eye after his confrontation with Pianese.

  He’d arranged for a phone call to be placed to Signora Ruggiero, the only tenant of the apartment house who had a telephone at home, and got word to his family that he’d have to stay overnight at the office. Not half an hour later Giovanni, his eldest son, arrived at headquarters: he was bringing his father a soup tureen wrapped in a carefully knotted cloth napkin, and inside was an abundant portion of pasta with chunks of tomato and spollichini, the fresh summer green beans that were one of Maione’s favorite things to eat.

  “Papà, here’s what mamma told me to tell you: eat every bite of it, but slowly, otherwise it’ll upset your tummy. And she also said: tomorrow, when you come home, don’t forget to bring the soup tureen with you. And make sure you rinse it out, after you’re done eating, or we’ll never be able to get it clean.”

  He had responded by giving his son an offhand pat on the head, but the boy hadn’t even noticed the pained expression on his father’s face, intent as he was on taking in everything around him with greedy curiosity, the way he did every time he came to visit headquarters.

  Mai
one didn’t manage to eat at all, and there could be no more eloquent testimonial to his state of despondency. His stomach had simply closed up. He didn’t know what to do, how to behave; with Fefè he’d acted on impulse, according to an instinctive drive, but with Lucia, who knew him well, he couldn’t have successfully put on a show of indifference. Should he just leave, then? And where would he go? And was it right for him to resign himself to his loss like that, without fighting? And what about his children, what would become of them?

  He was sitting there, assailed by countless anxieties, when the phone call came in.

  The news caught Ricciardi and Maione off guard.

  As they walked the short distance from police headquarters to the goldsmiths’ borgo, they’d both been beset by the uncomfortable feeling that their minds had been taken off the investigation by the personal situation each was experiencing, and for policemen as conscientious as they were, that was a grave failing. The call that had come in, and whose contents had, in any case, been unclear, only heightened that perception, making the two policemen even gloomier than before, and during their walk over they were practically silent: Maione limited himself to asking how Rosa was, and Ricciardi said only that there was nothing new. Neither man commented on the tragic news that had summoned them, first thing in the morning, to a dead-end vicolo in the oldest part of town down by the harbor.

  There was a crowd of rubberneckers standing outside the workshop. The wooden door stood half open, as if it were uncertain whether it should be thrown wide or remain shamefacedly shut to conceal the horror that lay within. The atmosphere, though, was different from the more customary one of morbid curiosity that the policemen were used to encountering. That sensation carried with it the witnesses’ vague sense of relief that dire misfortune had befallen someone else; this time, there was a diffuse sadness, a sincere melancholy, if not outright grief.

  An elderly woman dressed in black came toward them with a wobbly step, her legs stout and her voice hoarse: “Brigadie’, I’d said that it was odd. Mastro Nicola arrived every morning at eight on the dot, you could set your clock by it. This morning it was seven when he showed up. I told my girlfriend Amalia that it was strange, and when I told her, she said the same thing. She told me: ‘Really? That’s strange.’ And that’s when I . . .”

  Maione halted the flood of words by raising both hands: “Signo’, Signo’, do me a favor, stop talking for a moment. Who exactly are you? And what are you talking about?”

  A second woman had come over, more or less the same age and similarly clad in black, but skinny as a rail and bug-eyed; she started talking as if everyone there were anxiously awaiting what she had to say: “When Enzina here told me, the first thing I thought was: something’s happened. Mastro Nicola was always so punctual, he arrived every morning at 8 and you could set your watch by it, but instead this morning it was seven o’clock, and so I said: Enzi’, why, what a curious thing this is, here’s a man who always comes in at eight o’clock and . . .”

  Maione exchanged a discouraged look with Ricciardi, then he turned to the woman who had piped up last: “Signo’, you must be Donna Amalia, I’d imagine. And you,” he said to the first woman, “will be Signora Enza.”

  The two women looked at each other in surprise: “Jesus above, Brigadie’, how on earth would you know that? Then it must be true that the police have us all under surveillance and know all about us!”

  Maione sighed.

  “Well then, apart from the early arrival, will you tell us what happened next?”

  It appeared however that both women had lost the urge to talk. They elbowed one another in the ribs, each inviting the other to answer, until Enza took for herself the role of spokeswoman: “We sit right there, you see? At the end of the vicolo. It’s hot, and in the bassi it’s impossible to breathe, we’re old, and we’ve been friends forever. And so, while it’s still night out, we sit down in our chairs and talk.”

  The other woman cut in: “Sometimes, if there’s light, we do some knitting, or we stitch.”

  Enza shot her a glare, as if to say: are you going to talk or am I? Then she resumed: “Then we take a look around and see what’s happening in the vicolo, and . . .”

  “. . . but not to stick our noses into other people’s business, let’s be clear. It’s just because we sit down there and . . .”

  Enza raised her voice, making it clear that she wouldn’t put up with any further interruptions: “. . . and then we saw Mastro Nicola arrive. He told us good morning and then he shut himself in.”

  Ricciardi asked: “What do you mean, he shut himself in?”

  “That’s right, he shut himself in. He closed the door and we didn’t hear anything more out of him.”

  Amalia couldn’t resist: “Shut, locked.”

  Maione was perplexed: “In that case, who found . . . in other words, who called us?”

  A young man stepped forward: “I did, Brigadie’. I’m the apprentice.”

  Ricciardi said: “Everyone wait out here. Raffaele, I’m going in.”

  Ricciardi waited for his eyesight to become accustomed to the partial darkness of the workshop. Everything was just as it had been on the occasion of the first and only visit he’d paid on the goldsmith, even the oil lamp on the workbench was still lit.

  He turned his head, and saw what had changed.

  The body of Nicola Coviello, renowned goldsmith and master jeweler, dangled from one of the ceiling rafters by a rope wrapped around his neck. Motionless, his outsized hands dangling at his sides, his legs aligned, his feet a good five inches off the floor.

  The commissario concentrated on the spot toward which the hanged man’s face was turned, a corner of the workshop shrouded in darkness; standing, in the same position as the hanging corpse, his simulacrum was revealed to Ricciardi, his tongue sticking out between his teeth, his spectacles askew, one eye half closed, the other staring wide.

  Ricciardi could make out the mark left by the rope on his neck, a dark deep groove, and there was a line of reddish drool running down from the corner of his mouth. Ricciardi turned his eyes back to the rope hanging off the rafter, and saw that the slipknot had jammed before reaching the end of its run. So Coviello had died of suffocation. Not even the mercy of a broken neck.

  The commissario focused on the image of the corpse in the shadowy corner. The head bent to one side, as unlovely as it had been in life, the short curved body, the long arms and legs. Dead, he looked younger.

  Ricciardi listened.

  And the corpse told him: the bottom of your heart.

  LVII

  Outside, Maione had managed to move almost everyone away. Only the apprentice and the two old women, Amalia and Enza, who had appointed themselves the brigadier’s interlocutors, remained.

  Maione spoke to Ricciardi: “Commissa’, so this is Sergio, here, who found him. He’s the young man who worked with Coviello. He shows up around nine, because the master always wants to be left alone for the first hour. Same thing for the last hour at night, when he closes up. That’s what the boy told me.”

  Ricciardi questioned the young man, a terrified adolescent whose face was pocked with acne.

  “Was there anything unusual about this morning?”

  “The door, Commissa’. The door was shut from inside. I had to go back home, that’s where I keep the other key that Mastro Nicola gave me for any emergency; his mother is sick, and a couple of times he couldn’t leave his house and I had to open the workshop.”

  “And when you went in, what did you see?”

  The boy was trembling, and he kept his gaze turned away from the shop’s open door.

  “I saw . . . I saw him right away, Commissa’. And I left, and called for help.”

  Enza stepped forward, proudly: “We were the only ones in the vicolo, Amalia and me, Commissa’. We saw ’o guaglione, here, the boy, and heard him shouting, an
d we came hurrying. Then . . .”

  Amalia interrupted her, earning herself a sour glare: “. . . then we went to see Signora Grimaldi, because she has a telephone, and we told the young lady at the switchboard: we want to talk to police headquarters!”

  Ricciardi said: “All right. Let’s go in now. No, ladies, not you: just the two of us with the boy. Grazie, if we need you we’ll send for you.”

  The two women’s disappointment was enormous. Defeated, they moved away, but not far: just to the threshold of a basso across the way, on the far side of the vicolo, and there they took up their positions on their chairs so they could be sure not to miss a single move the policemen made.

  Maione murmured: “Nothing to be done. No one has any business of his own to mind, in this city.”

  The young man was reluctant to enter, and once he was inside he kept his eyes on the workbench, the wall, and the chair, making sure not to catch so much as a glimpse of the corpse hanging from the ceiling.

  Maione said: “I had the photographer and the medical examiner summoned before we left headquarters, Commissa’. They should be on their way.”

  The bottom of your heart, Ricciardi sensed on the hair on the back of his neck, on the hairs standing erect on his forearms, and inside his chest. The bottom of your heart.

  He asked the young man: “Did he say anything to you yesterday? Anything strange, I mean.”

  The young man shook his head no, eyes on the ground.

  Ricciardi insisted: “But did you see him do anything unusual? What sort of mood was he in?”

  Sergio shrugged his shoulders. Maione broke in harshly: “Sonny, you’d better answer, and answer fast, or it’s going to go hard for you.”