But each time the shivers racked his body, he would open his eyes and I wasn’t there. And he found himself back in that reality in which he had not heard my call, but instead had found me dead in the woods, had killed the Half-Wit, slaughtering him with a shovel, and then had left my father to clean up the whole mess. More shivers, more jerking awake. Until the doorbell rang.
When he stood up, he felt weak. His legs heavy, achy, and limp. He didn’t think he could even walk straight. Maybe he really did have a fever.
He opened the door and found himself face-to-face with Torrese.
The police took him to the spot where my body had been found. They told him about his father, who was at the station, that they’d had to give him a sedative because he wasn’t feeling so good.
“Not feeling so good.” That’s just what they said.
When he saw the white sheet in the woods, his legs buckled. He slumped to the ground, not far from my body. Sandro remained there, while around him pretty much the whole town began to gather. Only when he saw Enrico coming did he find the strength to get up. He remembered that I was supposed to be with him. He went over to him. He really just wanted to ask him how I had ended up alone. But he still wasn’t able to fully control his body. Just as his legs still wobbled and couldn’t support him, so his voice came and went between sobs and moments when breath seemed to fail him altogether.
He spewed it all out angrily and, as he did, he brought up more rage looking for a way out; he found he felt better when he was able to puke it up. So he leaned against a tree to recover a bit, and as soon as he felt ready, he lunged at Enrico, shouting at him.
The police stopped him and took him aside. They let him get it out of his system. Marshal Torrese stared at Enrico strangely.
That’s what happened that evening. My brother would carry with him the truth about the Half-Wit’s death, as our father had told him to. He never breathed a word to anyone.
When he buried my father, a few years later, he was alone in the cemetery. My mother had already entered an artificial world of psychotropic drugs that kept her from ever leaving the house.
When he left the cemetery, the truth that no one else would ever know felt even heavier inside him. That his father, Giancarlo Bastiani, was not a murderer. That his father, that monstrous night, to spare his son from the horrible act that he had committed, had assumed a guilt that was not his. What not even Sandro could have imagined was that his father was not the only one to have done so. Except that the Half-Wit had not decided, of his own volition, to cover up for a killer.
PART THREE
MR. TOBY
One
The Euronics poster with discounted prices for computers, tablets, mobile phones, and microwave ovens is the most recent one she finds. Then there’s the one with the cream that helps eradicate wrinkles, the one for the yogurt that helps you poop, and the one for the insurance company that shows elderly people happy and smiling on a perpetual vacation somewhere that seems light-years away from here. Chiara finds them every morning, under the shelter where she waits for the bus that takes her to school. Backpack resting on the ground between her legs, jacket zipped up to her chin, hands in her pockets, the hood under which there must be a face but from which only two white cables stick out, carrying the voice of Chris Martin of Coldplay into her head, a song that says something about Jerusalem bells.
Now and then she imagines that someday a different bus than usual will pull up. A white bus with tinted windowpanes, the kind that don’t allow you to see in. It will stop in front of her and the door will open, and inside there’ll be a suite or something, with a Jacuzzi tub and a tray of chocolates and strawberries and a bottle of sparkling Brachetto. The best thing is that there will be no one inside, and she can go traveling to the most beautiful cities in the world inside her whirlpool tub whose water is always hot. One day she will pass through London to pick up Margherita and take her along for a ride. They can take a picture together in the foaming bath bubbles, holding the Brachetto, and post it on Facebook with a very simple four-word message, meant for everyone.
Adios and fuck you.
That bus, however, never comes. And after she lets herself be lulled for a while by the fantasy, it’s always the blue Tiemme bus that pulls up and opens its door to her. Inside it’s always very hot. If she’s by herself, she sits as far from the other passengers as possible, and leans her head against the window, dozing for ten minutes or so. But if Valentina is there, they chat a bit. Sometimes Valentina goes with her brother, though, so she isn’t always on the bus. This morning she is.
“Over here, Kia,” she says, sliding over to the seat next to the window.
“Ciao, Vale.” Chiara sits down and takes out an earbud.
“So, tell me, how was dinner with that guy last night? Did they talk about that girl?”
“They said something, yeah, but mostly a bunch of things that had nothing to do with her.”
“A big bore then.”
“They mentioned her a couple of times, that’s it. They didn’t say a word about her being killed by that maniac.”
“Have you told your grandmother?”
“Think I should I call her?”
“I don’t know, Kia. What do you think?”
“She’d want me to call her.”
“Then maybe she’d ask you to come and see her, and then we can do some more shopping at Castel Romano.”
“I have an idea she would pay a lot to know about last night.”
“You answered your own question.”
“I’ll text her later in class. This morning I really don’t have the head to focus.”
“Kia, this morning you won’t have to.”
“Meaning?”
“Rigoni is giving the class a pop quiz, in history.”
“Shit.”
“She told us yesterday.”
“Yesterday I didn’t get there until second period, Vale. What the fuck? You could have told me.”
“Shit.”
“Shit and more shit.”
“How far along are you?”
“Like I haven’t opened my history book since last month.”
“Not good, Kia.”
“Yeah. Bad.”
“She’ll flunk you.”
“She’s not even going to see me this morning.”
“You know how pissed off she gets if you skip class.”
“Anyway, tomorrow is Sunday. I’ll stay home and catch up.”
“Sure.”
“Can you tell her we talked last night and I had a slight fever?”
“No way, that woman will take aim at me.”
“Come on, Vale, tell her at the end of class.”
“At the end of class if it seems right, but I can’t guarantee anything.”
Chiara looks out the window. Soon the bus will stop on the provincial road. All she has to do is get off and walk about ten minutes to get to a dirt road and from there it’s easy. No cars pass by there, no one will catch her. The dirt road leads to the coast highway. Just cross it and you’re on the beach. A walk up to the Miramare and she can make herself comfortable behind the beach club, which is closed, and maybe she can start her total immersion in history there, that way part of Sunday will be spared.
“I’m disappearing,” she tells Valentina.
“Good luck.”
The bus stops. Chiara goes to the back. Gets off. When the bus pulls away, she is alone on the provincial road. This is the riskiest stretch because cars go by here and someone might spot her. But at this moment there’s no one. And it’s a beautiful sunny morning, without so much as a cloud in the sky. A pleasant warm breeze brushes her face. It’s the most exciting moment of the day, when everything still lies ahead. She pulls her hood over her head. She leaves one ear free so she can hear any cars that might approach. In the other ear Coldplay performs “Death and All His Friends.” She starts walking.
Two
The sun is really warm. It’s a pleasur
e to lie there on her coat, spread out under her like a towel, a few steps from the sea. A couple of cigarette butts stuck in the sand, earbuds with Chris’s voice, the smell of salt air, the backpack cradling her head, and the open history book propped on her chest so as not to feel too guilty.
Along the road everything went smoothly: just a few cars passed by, but Chiara had time to duck behind the guardrail. She came to the dirt road and from there it was a peaceful walk. She crossed the coast road to the beach. She walked a little way, and as soon as she reached the Miramare, she settled behind the bathhouse and opened the history book. In the shade, though, it was a little chilly, so she moved onto the sand, letting all her good intentions melt away in the sun like a cherry Popsicle.
Too bad she can’t write anything on Facebook, because it would be good to make the others a little envious; though being the jealous little shits they are, they would probably expose her in no time. Too bad, she knew exactly what she would write if she could: since she couldn’t say “adios” yet, she would simply say “fuck you.” She did take a selfie on the beach with the predictable Converse All Stars prominently featured, however, and sooner or later she’ll find a way to share it with a small circle of people. With Margherita, maybe. But who knows if she’s already crossed over to the other side and would rat her out.
I get you, big sis. I mean, even if it were somewhat true what they say, that you went a little nuts. Look, it’s not the end of the world. Hey, it shows that you’re normal, because a person would really have to be crazy to want to stay around here. Okay, there’s the sea, and the beach this morning is gorgeous, but you can find the sea and beautiful beaches in a lot of places. Maybe someday I’d like to come back here again, sure. Come back and look at everything from the outside.
She checks the time on her iPhone: soon Valentina will send her a message telling her how things went with the blitz quiz, meaning three abrupt questions for each of them that’s it. All questions that you could answer in a nanosecond if you had a smartphone, which goes to prove that learning the material by heart is totally useless. Maybe it’s hard to determine how many gigabytes of space a person has in his brain, which for sure isn’t the same for everyone, and just like smartphones there must be 16-gigabyte brains and brains with 32 gigabytes and 64 gigabytes and 128 gigabytes and so on, up to a terabyte, but in any case, regardless of how many there are, using them to store information that can instantly be found on Google is definitely not the way to go. Further proof, if it were needed, that high school is nothing but a huge waste of time. Adults, such as her mother, don’t get it because they aren’t “digital natives,” as normal people like her generation are called. Yet they have the authority to ask you three shitty little questions and grade you based on how you answer. Rigoni, for that matter, with her old cell phone and its small buttons that light up, certainly isn’t even capable of sending an e-mail. But then teachers are a particularly pathetic category, and at home Rigoni most likely has one of those old computers, which to boot up . . .
That’s weird. It feels like a cloud has covered the sun. Yet there isn’t a single one in the sky. She opens her eyes. It’s not a cloud that’s covering the sun. It’s a person.
It takes her a few seconds to recognize him, as the dazzling effect diminishes and the profile silhouetted against the light is filled in with details that become features.
“Ciao,” says Enrico, the guy who had dinner with her parents last night.
“Ciao.”
“Alternate plan this morning?”
“Huh?”
“That’s what we used to call it. Alternate plan.”
“You won’t tell my parents, will you?”
“Of course not.”
Chiara is about to stand up, because it seems like a sensible thing to do, and go along with this guy who apparently, for the moment, is not about to get her in trouble. He, however, sits down on the sand, beside her jacket.
“If I had gone to school around here, I doubt that I would ever have been able to graduate.”
“Why?”
“Because I would have ended up here every morning.”
“In Rome it must not have been so bad. I mean, there must have been plenty of opportunities for your ‘alternate plan.’”
“Oh sure, of course. I liked the Domus Aurea, near the Colosseum. It was good because of the metro stops. And nearby there was a kiosk that made focaccias stuffed with mortadella that had the taste of that forbidden holiday.” He looks around. “Around here, though, everything is closed.”
“Around here, everyone knows you and it would be dumb to get caught for a focaccia with mortadella, don’t you think?”
“Sure, but there’s another possibility.”
The Veliero is open in the morning, because the home for the elderly brings its residents there to enjoy the sun and a cappuccino.
Apparently, Enrico has been wandering up and down the beach for some time.
A few minutes later, he comes back with a bag in his hand. They sit on the wooden steps of the Miramare and take out the pizza and two cans of Coke.
“Didn’t they have beer?” Chiara asks.
“No, they only have things they serve the old people.”
“I’ll bet. Do you really think I don’t drink beer?”
“At this hour?”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Okay, I owe you a beer.”
The pizza, though, isn’t bad. The tomato is sweet and the mozzarella is nice and melty, not like the kind that tastes like plastic because it’s been sitting around too long. They eat in silence.
Now that she’s not wearing the earbuds, Chiara can hear the sound of the waves. It’s strange how after a while you don’t even notice it anymore, but if you begin to focus on it, you can’t help hearing it and eventually it becomes almost deafening. She considers sharing this thought, because it seems like the kind of thing that someone like Enrico might appreciate. She’s about to tell him, but he breaks the silence first.
“You must have been bored last night.”
“No, of course not.”
“Don’t be polite. I’d be bored in your place.”
“Maybe, but just a little.”
“You can say it. I promise that even if you were to say something wrong, I wouldn’t tell your parents.”
“Actually, more disappointed than bored.” She realizes too late the implications of what she just said.
“Disappointed? By what?”
“No, nothing, it was just something to say. Actually, bored was more like it.”
“You thought we would talk about Alice, right?”
Chiara would like to respond by changing the subject, but she can’t. It’s not like when they ask you a question at school and you don’t know the answer and try to fudge it by talking about something else. Here she’s finding it difficult to recover.
“There’s nothing wrong with it, Chiara. It’s normal for you to be curious. Everyone here is.” He smiles at her and takes the last bite of his pizza. He wipes the greasy crumbs off his lips with one of the paper napkins he’d put in the bag. He picks up the can of Coke and takes a sip.
“You were little at the time. How old were you?”
“I was six years old. I was with Margherita that night, at my grandmother’s.”
“Steely Gloria.”
“Steely.”
“I don’t think she ever cooked anything more complicated than toast, but she chauffeured us around everywhere. When your mother and I were kids, she took us to a Rolling Stones concert.”
“Too bad my mother didn’t take after her.”
“So, you don’t remember anything about that night? But you must have talked about it with your girlfriends, and you must have exchanged plenty of stories about what happened. So you most likely know everything, I imagine.”
“More or less.”
“Then why were you disappointed? What did you want to hear?” He turns to her, and this time it’s a
s if he were cornering her, back to the wall, with those blue eyes. They are not aggressive eyes, though.
“I don’t know. I just said it without thinking.”
“You did, well, the best things are usually said that way. The problem, instead, is when you think about it too much, and then you don’t say it but it shows on your face.”
“And do they all do that with you?”
“Right.”
“And that’s why you never came back here?”
“Right again.”
“I’m sorry.”
“What for? You didn’t do anything.”
“Yes, I did. I mean, you buy me lunch, and I start talking to you about these things. I’m really sorry.”
“I’ve wanted to come back here for a long time.” He looks out at the sea again, as if loosening his hold. As if he were opening up and letting those words discreetly flow away. “You can’t imagine how many times I left the house, got in the car, and started driving. But I always turned back. It was as if I lacked a plausible reason to come here. As if I didn’t want to allow myself the right to need to come and that’s that. One day I drove around the entire ring road twice before returning home, and I only went back because Giulia called me on the cell phone needing me to pick her up. Giulia is my fiancée. The truth is that if I had come back here sooner, maybe it might have been better.”
“My parents mentioned you occasionally. But usually they avoid talking about what happened that night.”
Enrico turns to her and waits for her to continue.
“Here in town everyone avoids talking about it. That’s why everything here seems to have stopped since that day. People need to talk about what they’re carrying inside them, at least that’s how I see it.”
The Night of the Moths Page 11