“You need any help?”
“I can get dressed all by myself.”
“But getting undressed, now . . . Really, though, you just beg the stupidest wisecracks, don’t you?”
Liguori was enchanted at the sight of Blanca eating: from time to time she seemed to forget entirely that she was in the company of another person, and she showed that she was entirely alone with age-old movements of teeth and saliva. Then she’d regain her composure and be fully present again, sitting at the table, talking and laughing, only to wander off again into a flavor, into an indecipherable thought.
Blanca sniffed at her Amarone risotto with her nose a little too close to be seemly and felt a flush of shame. She shook her head and shoved away her sense of embarrassment, set down her fork, and picked up the solitary grape that sat in the middle of the dish: first she ate it with her fingers, squeezing it slightly to coax out a few drops of juice, then she lifted it to her mouth, holding it braced between her incisors before biting into it. Slowly.
“Can’t you taste how good the bitterness is when it’s paired with this slender sweetness?”
“You’re turning mystical on me, Occhiuzzi.”
“Who, me? Never been more flesh and blood in my life.”
The man allowed himself to be dragged into a form of survival he’d never experienced before. Blanca clutched onto an excessive vitality, with her fingernails scratching the edge of the cliff, straining to experience the new, as if it were possible. Liguori abandoned his customary detachment and followed her.
He followed her courageously later, too, while they were making love.
37.
You won’t stay?”
“See you tomorrow.”
Blanca had gone back to her room and opened the door of the fridge crammed underneath the television set. It had taken her some time to locate it. The tiny bottles, all identical, gave her no information about what they contained. She’d opened one at random and set it down on the marble windowsill, where she’d taken a seat. The first sip told her that she’d selected a mixture of peach juice and rum. She didn’t like it, but she drank it all the same. She wanted to drive away the strong taste of the two bodies twisted together, the ferocious striving for goodness and fear.
She started murmuring words, she needed to hear the sound of her own voice, she needed to tidy up her own mess.
The high heels I can never chance to wear be damned! I’ve been walking on stilts, blindfolded. What an idiot. And like a reckless fool running a risk she can’t dare run, I even prayed: let the flash I can never control appear this time, let me see his face, and his hands, and his body, the color of his hair, the shape of his hips. Even if it isn’t real, even if the light is imaginary. What good did it do, it was just wasted effort, I had to make do with the eyes in my fingertips. And I don’t even know whether you realized. Or whether that was exactly why you wanted me. The exotic woman who lives in the world of blind shadows, instead, left afterward, didn’t she, Liguori? She didn’t stay there, adoring you, thanking you for the honor you’d just bestowed. What can I say, outsiders sometimes react with unexpected signals. Maybe you’re sitting there thinking about it now, or else you just fluffed up your pillow and went to sleep. Satiated. But I’m not complaining, it’s my fault that I don’t know how to explain the sentiment that ranges from the cry here we are: me, my terrible fears, the laborious exercise of my responses to the decision to turn my back, keeping for myself a flat if you don’t understand that’s certainly not my damned problem. It’s my fault up to a certain point, though: how could I tell you, Liguori, that I haven’t been with a man for ten years? Ten years, that’s almost how long you’d spend in prison on multiple charges of manslaughter. I wonder if you understood. You’re so nice. You never left me alone for a moment, your body and your voice never stopped repeating to me you see, we’re the two of us, we’re in the same darkness together. After all, pitch darkness is what I insisted on, that much at least. You cheated: light came through a couple of loose slats in the wooden roller blind. I knew it immediately. How did you know? you asked me. Because you’d been a little too adept at reaching the bed without running into anything. But I didn’t tell you. In fact, after you went back and closed the blinds properly, the way I wanted, the sound of your footsteps was hesitant, uncertain. The harmony of footsteps isn’t something you learn in a minute’s time. Just as it isn’t easy for me to show you the body that I can’t even see for myself. There, now we’re even. I told you. And you got aroused in the presence of the mystery of my head. I wanted you, I couldn’t wait any longer. In that moment it became clear to me that the story of some ordinary date, some hookup, wasn’t something I could tell myself, so I set out with determination to take you back with me to Exoticland. I could feign pleasure, I thought to myself. A displayed trembling and then I can go back to my room and go to sleep. I couldn’t pull it off, your hands came in search of me, finding me in my seasons of solitude, and then your mouth took care of the rest. The scents dazzled me, it’s not easy being overwhelmed by life and death, embraced and then trying to keep your distance. Not after the decision to remain cloistered, not after all the slips and falls avoided, not after planning the wall that was supposed to save me. But save me from what, after all? From this, damn it, from this. From all this noise of the river, beautiful and mortal, that I even went in search of myself.
Liguori wasn’t sleeping. He’d tried to discover weariness inside him, but it was nowhere to be found. His naked body suddenly annoyed him, he put his clothes back on.
Maybe you’ll come back.
He pulled up the roller blind, which jammed at the top just to annoy him. He threw open the shutters. A black silhouette made up of the profiles of trees and plants served as a backdrop to the fickle glittering of the water. A streetlamp contained in its apron of light a church dome and a tower. The night was clear, it let itself be seen. The laughter of someone out in the street somewhere echoed from who knows where. The noise of the river was loud: a weir, a rapids, a cataract, the collapse of a dam. Blanca had foreseen it—he hadn’t believed her.
He wanted to go out. It annoyed him to have to wait—he wasn’t used to it. He switched on his phone, replied to a few messages, tried to concentrate. He had no desire to lose even the smallest pieces of this acceptable mood that he’d rebuilt for himself, but his thoughts kept going back to a past so recent that it was still present.
Nothing surprises me: I’ve said goodbye so many times, with excuses of all kinds. You, at least, just left and that was it. And you did the right thing, because waking up together can be awkward, the day dawns and things change. Before you know it the sound of the river is indistinguishable from the flushing toilet. If you come back, I’ll tell you that a world of the flesh like this is something I’ve never known. Maybe the last few times with Marinella, when it was already all over. But no, even then it really wasn’t the same. Listen closely, though, if you make me tired of the passing days again, I’ll kill you and prop you up in a soccer net with a blade of grass in your mouth. A murder more, a murder less, what difference does it make? I have an exact image of your body inside my eyes, and yet I don’t even know what you’re like. I haven’t seen you and yet I know you. At a certain point you decided to carry me along with you, and I’m as baffled as can be as to just where your mystery begins. Bites after a fast—you make love the way you eat. Part of me almost always just sits and watches, that I know: it might not be elegant, in terms of pleasure, I’m saying, but that’s the way it is. That part of me laughs, too, because if you’re wide awake and present you can hardly help but recognize the obscene, the unseemliness of a scream, legs excessively spread-eagled, the throes of the struggle. I can’t imagine how you managed always to keep one step ahead of me, to never lose your balance even as you were losing it. How you manage to stay beautiful in the darkness. And then you were gone, but I don’t think it was planned out, intentional, canny. Maybe it
’s as simple as you not wanting to sleep with a stranger, you don’t want to, and that’s that. We’re not that young anymore, the way we were when we could still believe in closeness. Maybe. The fact remains that here I sat like a fool, and I’m still waiting for you and wondering whether this squandering of energy after the energy we spent so well is nothing more than a curiosity about the quirk that inhabits your head and your eyes.
Liguori closed the shutters and stretched out on the bed.
Instead, you decided to leave. What a good little girl you are.
38.
Blanca and Liguori saw each other again at breakfast—the woman expected a certain distance and she found what she’d expected. She wasn’t able to swallow, the few forced bites she took pushed her nausea toward her mouth.
“Did you sleep well, Signora? Your face looks nicely rested.”
“Slept very well, thank you. I see that you too have a relaxed expression this morning.”
“Yes, your eyes serve you well.” Liguori spoke with the smile of any ordinary distant spectator. “Tell the truth: you like pain, you like wandering around blindfolded inside the lives of others, mocking the meanness of spirit of those who fail to grasp a single aspect of your mystery. It amuses you, the malaise of distance is no contraindication. Quite the contrary.”
“Now then, Detective, today we meet with Adami. We have an appointment to see him at eleven.”
“Fine. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go take a walk over near where Julia Marin lived. The extracurricular details continue to interest me. See you later. If you have any difficulties getting to the police station, give me a call.”
“I won’t have any difficulties.”
Liguori moved off. The light settled into his weary eyes and annoyed him. He likewise noticed the beauty of piazzas and streets, finding that beauty to be homogeneous.
“Where we come from, the wonderful is always undercut by the horror nearby, the sincerity of chaos. Here, everything seems to be mature, uniformly applied; it reassures your expectations, promising more. Different forms of allure. If you want to go for subtleties, the only problem I see is this pavement, like the marble flooring in a lobby, a sort of television plaster. It must be a recent innovation.”
The places where Julia Marin had lived possessed an equal share of constant beauty.
He asked around about her. Only a few were willing to talk to him, but when Liguori added that Julia Marin was the victim found in the stadium, they did their best to remember. The information he gathered yielded no interesting tidbits.
Blanca asked the housecleaner when her shift ended. Her schedule suited Blanca’s need and so she asked the woman to walk her to the police station.
“Your accent isn’t from around here, have you lived here long?”
“Just three years. I’m Calabrian, my son is studying at the university here.”
“How do you like living here?”
“There’s good things and bad things, like anywhere, like always.”
The woman had no interest in talking, and when they reached the police station she refused money and left.
Captain Adami said he was quite skeptical about the likelihood of a serial killer. He didn’t see the one constant that he’d seen in murders committed by serial killers: a lack of connection between the victims. Jerry and Julia in fact had actually been lovers. Liguori and Blanca studied the evidence, interviewed the captain, and told him about the events in Naples. Adami asked lots of questions about the murder of the night watchman. The detective told him that in Martusciello’s opinion, it had been the work of professionals interested in leaving as few clues as possible. The captain told them that he considered organized crime to be a national catastrophe, that he wanted nothing to do with those who thought fine, too bad for them, let them kill each other off. This captain listened to good music.
Every so often Liguori got distracted and glanced over at Blanca.
Every so often, Blanca lacked focus because of that scent of the flesh. Adami explained that the night of Julia Marin’s murder, the two guards at the Bentegodi had been drugged, the forensics team had found traces of the narcotic in a bottle of second-rate spumante, so bad, he added, that in order to forget it they would have fallen asleep even without the sleeping pills.
They worked all day. When evening came, the captain invited them to dine in the same restaurant where they’d eaten the night before.
The proprietor suggested Blanca sample the Amarone risotto.
“I had a chance to enjoy it yesterday.” She turned toward Liguori. “I would rather procure a new memory.”
Adami was pleasant company, and during the meal they avoided all conversation about investigations and suspects. It was only when they were saying goodnight that the captain mentioned the appointment the following day with the medical examiner.
Blanca and Liguori climbed the stairs to their floor in silence. The man stopped outside the door of the woman’s room:
“You owe me a few apologies. You can make them in your room, that way you don’t have to leave afterward.” They spoke in the dark. They exchanged secrets and laughter and phrases without any intelligent line of defense.
Then Blanca climbed back up onto her high heels and teetered once again on the brink of the precipice.
39.
I didn’t do a good job of getting rid of you, I haven’t completed my task. I’m no good even at slaughtering your memory.
I would like to hook it up by the heels, a village hog. I wish I could hear it squeal.
I wish I could overturn the bowl set to capture the liquids that spilt from the dying animal.
I’d like to fall asleep right in front of the severed jugular.
Instead the memories survive and here they are, stomping on every part of me, curse them.
“Does your neck hurt?” I asked you after the two men had left and we were alone in the dense darkness that you had desired. As usual.
“Cuts are always a serious matter, but what could you know about it, since you spend all your time in a closed cabinet,” you told me. “Blades, even if they don’t plunge deep into the flesh, remain. Under the throat. Like a long goodbye.” I couldn’t see a thing, but I could smell the stench of your fear.
There in the dark you grabbed me.
“Now get down there and do what you have to do.”
“At your orders, sir.”
Of course I liked it. I liked it. And it destroyed me.
And it made me become another person. Terrible. Indecent. A liar. Of course, I’m not such an idiot that I don’t know I’m others as well as myself, just like everyone is, probably. Even before you, I mean. The other me’s were hanging on hooks in the walnut-wood armoire: lovely little outfits, nicely ironed, sweet smelling. Every so often I’d take down one that had caught my fancy. The threat began when I chose, when you started choosing the same one every time, always the same one, always the same one.
I lost all the rest while you took everything. And you talked. You demanded. And you sliced open.
And I loved with a crystalline rage your stench of fear.
At the end you said to me:
“What a good little boy you are.”
“I’m your property, sir.” You opened the window to the light and went on not seeing me.
40.
You’ve started to go out on weekends again, Martusciello. That’s good.”
“Well? If there’s one thing that rattles my nervous system it’s this good and bad you know so much about.”
Santina was cleaning up in the kitchen, the captain was answering her from the dining room, channel surfing with the volume turned down low. The woman lowered her own volume and went on talking, sure that her husband would get up from the sofa and move into the hallway to hear better, unseen.
“You have this thing about bodily
illnesses being evidence of your virility leaving you. You can’t accept the idea that it might be an imperfection in just a part of you, no, sir: you feel as if you’re a machine, a high performance car, and even the smallest cog or gear has to be made of gold, absolutely impervious to wear and tear. Otherwise the engine is going to stop working. Otherwise the litany of the passing years is going to start up: so few are left, so many have gone by, I just can’t do it anymore, and so on and so forth. And what the hell! You’ve always been healthy, what’s the big deal, it’s just a minor operation for . . . and after all the problem was solved in a week. You let your weariness drag on for two months. Far too long. So I’m just happy to see you back at work, going out, doing what you need to do. Coming and going is your daily bread, you seemed like a kid without toys. That’s what.”
Santina took her sweet time understanding. If something happened that didn’t entirely convince her, first she sank into a state of immobility, then she reluctantly took step after step toward the point of pain. In the end, she understood. And once she understood, she turned hard, in part because of all the wasted time. Perhaps a massive intelligence takes days to get started. Then the woman gave birth to her answer, a wrinkled tortoise. She licked up the placenta and never gave it another thought.
At that point, she became brisk and dismissive, eager to regain time. Martusciello didn’t answer, to deny his wife the satisfaction of knowing he was interested in her words.
The sound of the telephone came as a benediction.
“Captain, this is Funicella Corta.”
“Where are you?”
“I am where I am and don’t bother writing down the number, it won’t do you any good anyway. In five minutes I’m going to throw away the SIM card I just bought. I’m in a world of trouble, but that’s not why I’m calling you, Captain. I don’t have anything to do with the betting sheets of the illegal gambling rings and the people they’re arresting. I’m going to take myself out of circulation for a while, far from everybody else, and by the time I get back it’s all going to be cleared up.”
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