The Night of the Moths

by Riccardo Bruni

  “Evening,” Enzo says. “I was passing by on my security rounds and found him like that.”

  He points to the guy’s body lying in the middle of the street. He looks like a squashed bug, half dead, all scrunched up but still moving. Sarti runs over to him and stoops down.

  “He’s the guy I caught the other night, right here. He was spying on you,” Enzo explains.

  “I know him.”

  “Look, I’ll call Central headquarters,” Enzo says. “I have a phone in the car.”

  He walks over to the agency car. As he’s retrieving the cell phone, he watches the two men in the middle of the street, illuminated by his car’s headlights. It looks like the guy on the ground is talking. Maybe he’s still talking crap. Some junkies should just stay in a rehab center and not go around being a pain in the ass.

  “Central, someone’s been injured,” he says as soon as they answer.

  “Porretta, what are you talking about? Who’s injured?”

  “He answers to the name of Alessandro Bastiani. Or rather, at the moment he isn’t really answering, but anyhow, that’s his name, confirmed by a witness.”

  “What the hell are you saying?”

  “An accident, Central, at least that’s the most likely assumption right now, but we need the paramedics.”

  As he spells out the street name and house number, the guy who came out of the house, Sarti, motions him over. Enzo hikes up his pants, grabbing his belt with the flashlight and everything else, pulls the cap lower on his head, and goes up to the witness.

  “What is it?” he says as soon as he joins him.

  “Listen to me closely.” From Sarti’s first words he can tell that this story is not yet over, not by a long shot. “I have to leave. I have to do something very important. When the police arrive, tell them I’ll be back as soon as possible. Take care of this man and then let me know how he is.”

  “But did the injured guy tell you anything?”

  “I know him. He’s a friend of mine.”

  “Yeah, but did he say what happened? Because he didn’t seem very lucid, he was speaking weirdly.”

  “He told me something important, which is why I have to go now.”

  “I don’t know if you should leave now, you’re kind of a witness . . .”

  “I didn’t see anything. What I have to say I can tell them later. The house is open. If you need anything, go on in.”

  So okay, it was a shitty night anyway, he’d already had a feeling. A burning sensation, Lieutenant McClane. And so he sits on the pavement next to the injured man and crosses his legs.

  “How do you feel?” he asks him, enunciating the words clearly, so maybe the junkie will understand.

  “I could use another one,” Bastiani says. His voice is barely a whisper, but he sounds more coherent.

  “You need something?”

  “It’s coming. I just have to wait.”

  “What’s coming?”

  “The wave.”

  “The wave?”

  “Yeah, now I can even sleep.”

  “If you hit your head, generally speaking you should try to stay awake.”

  “Here it comes.”

  Enzo looks around: What wave is this guy talking about?

  “You see a wave? You think you’re at the beach?”

  “It’s just a little slower.”

  The guy is out of his head. Who knows what he’s talking about. He must have hit the pavement hard when he fell. Better to play along with him. Enzo tightens his lips in an understanding expression and nods.

  “No problem, we’ll stay here on the beach and catch some sun, nice and quiet, no wave will get us, you’ll see.”

  The crackhead is delirious, and the most absurd thing is that the other guy, Sarti, took off like a rocket because of something that this one here told him. A bunch of lunatics. The one small hope of redeeming the situation is if Ekaterina is on duty at the Misericordia. If so, maybe she’ll come and see that he’s saving someone. And these mayonnaise smears on his uniform might look like bloodstains, like the ones that are always found on McClane. Ekaterina has such a beautiful name, because she comes from someplace in Russia. Everyone butchers it into Cate, Cati, Caterina. But you can tell it pleases her when he calls her by her real name, because she always smiles at him in return.

  The cokehead, however, mustn’t fall asleep.

  “Stay awake, come on. Try to tell me your name.”

  “Me . . . ?”

  “Yes, you, of course . . . Can you tell me your name?”

  “I am the taipan snake.”

  Enrico recognizes the profile of the farmhouse as he approaches, driving along the last stretch of the provincial road to Carrubo. A nocturnal, spectral vision. Jacques Spitz’s aging present from The Eye of Purgatory. It is both the same as he remembered and unrecognizable in its deterioration. Peeling shutters on the windows, overgrown grass, climbing ivy that has swallowed up much of the building. The unfinished expansion that looks like a ruin. It looks like something that was, and instead it is something that has never been.

  The only sound is that of the car door slamming behind him as he walks to the door. He has his old phone in his pocket. Those messages. He knows now who sent them. He knows now that an answer awaits him in there.

  He follows Sandro’s instructions. The few words he’d managed to tell him as he struggled through the nightmares that plagued him, that were taking him farther and farther away.

  The door is unlocked. Enrico goes in. Inside it is dark and silent.

  There is a staircase leading upstairs. Before going up, though, he must first go to the kitchen. He must do everything as Sandro explained it to him.

  He opens the fridge, takes out a carton of milk, and fills a glass. The cookie tin is beside the sink. They are dry biscuits, each shaped like a different animal. There are kittens, teddy bears, and elephants. He takes a handful, making sure that there is at least one of each kind, and puts them on a plate.

  He leaves the kitchen and goes up the stairs. No need to look for a light switch: the shutters are open and the night is luminous.

  Step by step, a sound begins to penetrate the silence. At first it’s far away, remote. Little more than a distant crackle. Then it materializes. A voice, then some cheerful music, one of those South American tunes that people dance to, moving as a group.

  He reaches the top of the stairs and starts down the corridor. From under the last door, at the end of the hall, comes a faint bluish glow.

  He knocks. No answer. It’s only an attempt, it won’t be easy and he won’t necessarily succeed. But he has to try.

  He opens the door.

  Luciana Bastiani, Giancarlo’s wife, the mother of Sandro and Alice, is sitting in a big armchair beside the bed. She’s wearing a flowered robe and a pair of padded slippers. Her white hair falls almost to the floor. Next to the door, on a chest of drawers, a big TV set is turned on to that program with the famous people who dance.

  “Good evening, Luciana,” Enrico says. “Sandro had a problem. I’ve brought your dinner.”

  No reply.

  Enrico enters and approaches her. The woman’s gaze is fixed on the TV. Not a move. Even back then she suffered from nerves and alcohol problems, now not much of her seems to be left, apart from the little that a desperate drug addict has been able to keep alive.

  “I’ll put your milk and cookies on the nightstand.”

  He carefully arranges the glass and saucer among the pill bottles, used tissues, and a big hairbrush. He tries to find enough space without moving anything.

  When he turns around, she’s staring at him.

  The impact of those eyes, of that gaze on him, is unexpected. Enrico wanted a reaction, and now that he has managed to prompt one, he is almost frightened.

  “Luciana, I’m Enrico. Remember?”

  She goes on staring at him, not saying a word.

  “Sandro had a problem, but don’t worry, later they’ll let us know how he
is.”

  Nothing.

  “An accident, in front of my house.”

  Those eyes planted on him are making him uncomfortable.

  “He’d come to tell me something. It’s not easy to talk about it now. But see, as a result of a series of circumstances, I found some messages on my phone. Here, wait. I have it in my pocket. Right here. There, you see, this was my old phone, the one I had at the time I was going out with your daughter. With Alice. I had left it at my house, on Via delle Ortiche, turned on. It was plugged in and must have remained on for several days before they took it away with the rest of my stuff, so they could rent the house. See, the fact is that during those days, after the funeral, a number of messages arrived. And two of them came from Alice’s number. Here, you see, these two.”

  But she doesn’t look at the phone, she just keeps staring at him.

  “Here, there’s this one. I’ll read it to you: ‘I thought you wanted to know, and instead you chose to forget.’ I . . . I assure you that it isn’t so.”

  Those eyes on him.

  “Sandro told me something,” he continues, trying to get through to her. “I went to look for him today. Because after seeing these messages, I was convinced that he had Alice’s phone. I was sure he had kept it with him. So I went looking for him and he told me that Alice had left her phone at home that night, because she made a mistake and went out with another phone, the one you all used for the restaurant.”

  Luciana continues to stare at him, expressionless.

  “I never wanted to forget. And if I had known that there were things I didn’t know, I would have done anything to find out what they were.”

  The distance contracts. Time falls back and, superimposing itself, is erased. Enrico had never felt so close to that night. Emotion hits him. He feels his stomach tighten, his breathing becomes shallow, his eyes sting and well up. Tears.

  “Sandro told me that you had it, that telephone. That you kept your daughter’s phone with you. Sandro told me that you watched over it constantly so he let you keep it.”

  Enrico is crying. He’s searching for something in those eyes that are boring into him. But it’s as if they were letting him drown, indifferent. Trying to get a firm grip on himself, he goes to the window and looks out. The air in the room is heavy. It smells of sweat and medicine. What had he thought he would find?

  “You must wonder why I didn’t say anything.”

  The voice comes from behind him. Enrico turns. Luciana’s expression has changed. There’s life there now.

  “About what?”

  Luciana looks at him and seems to see him for the first time.

  “Enrico . . .” she says.

  “What didn’t you say anything about?” he urges her.

  “The reporters wrote a lot of things about her. I didn’t want them to write that too,” she says, reaching out to the bedside table to take the glass of milk. Enrico helps her, bringing it to her. “She wasn’t like the way they described her. You know that. You’re a good boy, you knew her well.” She takes a sip of milk and hands the glass to Enrico, who puts it back. She wipes her lips on the sleeve of her robe. “Enrico . . . I waited so long for you.”

  “I’m sorry. I was . . . I . . .”

  “I know, we all were.”

  “Was it you, Luciana, who sent me those messages?”

  “I thought you would answer.”

  “I assure you I would have, but when you saw that I didn’t answer, couldn’t you have found me some other way?”

  Luciana looks at him, smiling. She raises a hand and strokes his forehead.

  “Alice loved you very much . . .”

  “Why did you send me those messages?”

  Luciana opens the nightstand drawer. Slowly she takes something out. A phone.

  Alice’s.

  “Take it. She wanted to tell you everything.”

  The charger port is identical to his, now all he has to do is turn it on.

  “Will Sandro be back soon?” Luciana asks him.

  “He had an accident, but as I told you, I’ll take care of things. As soon as there is any news, I’ll make sure you know.”

  “Sandro takes care of me every night.”

  Enrico tries to find something to add, but he can’t come up with anything. Luciana spares him the embarrassment by turning back to the TV. The star of a soap opera is making a fool of himself trying to dance a tango.

  “I’ll come back to tell you about Sandro,” he says.

  But Luciana doesn’t respond. She has returned to her world.

  Enrico leaves the room and goes downstairs. Opens the door and hurries to the car. He gets in. He lifts up the armrest and finds a charger for the cigarette lighter. He inserts the jack. The phone turns on. There’s no PIN, because Alice was always forgetting things like that and deactivated it.

  The messages are saved in the phone memory.

  They are still there.

  Enrico starts to read.

  Ten

  The Alfa may have a few years on it, but some things improve with age. And Frank’s voice gliding on velvet in “Fly Me to the Moon” is proof of that.

  Steely Gloria had already decided to go even before reading her granddaughter’s message. Because she knew they needed her.

  Those two still haven’t learned how to get themselves out of trouble, him in particular, a loser, a pathetic waste. He’s been the worst misfortune that could have happened to her daughter and her grandchildren. A little boy who can’t manage to keep his dick in his shorts sooner or later becomes a problem. And Maurizio Germano has always been a problem. Except that, unlike so many other problems that in some way can be resolved or forgotten, he is still a living disaster. With that suntan meant for a guy of twenty and the attitude of an ambitious go-getter, when all he’s built is a real-estate agency with only one employee, whom he must surely have fucked behind the desk, because little boys like that are so dismally predictable. So many times she’s watched him, unnoticed. So many times she’s sat in the car, parked on the street, to see Chiara grow up and become the young woman she is now.

  She has always looked out for them.

  By the time it starts to rain, Gloria is already at the exit of the Aurelia. She hopes that Chiara isn’t getting drenched. She still doesn’t know exactly what happened, but it’s obvious that those two have failed to manage even one single daughter. And that one would do well to leave too. Follow her sister and go someplace where she can be free of the pathetic burden her parents have become. They messed her up but good, that girl. And as usual it will be up to Steely Gloria to fix everything. Fortunately, some things age well.

  Why isn’t Margherita answering? Chiara left her another message, this time on Facebook. But the only notifications on her cell phone are the three calls from her mother, which she hasn’t answered. She doesn’t feel like talking to her and admitting that she was right about Gibo; she doesn’t want to talk to her after seeing her father in that situation; and she especially doesn’t want to explain why she contacted her grandmother. She doesn’t know if she hates her mother or feels sorry for her, and until she figures it out, she won’t answer the phone. She wrote Margherita and told her she wanted to escape from there. But she didn’t tell her about that slut from the beauty salon. She only told her that something strange is going on at home, that they’re all very worried about something that seems to have to do with the death of that girl, Alice. That it’s just what you’d expect from people who are off their rockers. She didn’t tell her about her grandmother. But what the fuck, Marghe, you could have answered. So she writes about her now, how Gloria is the only one there for her. She types the last message a little angrily.

  I’m waiting for grandma. Maybe with her I can talk a little.

  As soon as she sends it, a thunder clap silences everyone and the light in the station bar flickers, as if it were going to go out at any moment. The sound of the pelting rain is stronger now. And the guys speaking an incomprehensible E
astern European language start laughing after being struck dumb by the violence of the storm. They’re probably saying how lucky they are to be in here drinking that crappy grappa and good thing there’s that game to watch; though here, it seems, nobody gives a damn about it. Chiara doesn’t even notice when one of them comes over to her.

  “Ciao, how come you’re all alone?” he asks her. He smiles. He has white teeth and dark eyes. His haircut looks like crap and is combed with a part on one side, as if he were going to Communion. “Want a glass to warm up a bit?” he asks, setting one down on the table.

  Chiara smiles and takes the glass. She looks at the others, who raise theirs in a toast. She drinks it all in one gulp. Her throat burns, but the feeling it leaves isn’t bad. That stuff really can warm you up.

  “Thanks, just what I needed.”

  “If you need another, we’re over there.”

  The guy goes back to the table with his friends, who laugh, slap him on the back, and say something dirty that, as only males can do, makes even such a nice gesture seem vulgar. Chiara picks up the glass and goes over to their table. The guy nudges the one sitting next to him, who immediately jumps up to make room for her and goes to look for another chair.

  “I could use another,” Chiara says, holding out the glass.

  And a second bottle appears on the table.

  Maurizio enters the house. He’s soaking wet. He’s still dabbing his forehead with the cloth used to wipe the car windows. He drops the keys in the plate. Betti is in the living room, sitting at the table with the cordless and cell phones in front of her.

  “What are you doing?” Maurizio asks her.

  “Chiara isn’t answering.”

  “Isn’t she with Gloria?”

  “That’s the point.”

  “She’ll bring her home.”

  “I don’t want you to speak to her.”

  “Why not?”

  Betti explodes and slams her hands on the table.

  “Fuck! How can you ask that?”

  She looks up and only now realizes that Maurizio is dabbing at his forehead. “What happened to you?”