The Night of the Moths

by Riccardo Bruni

  She tells her about her father. She tells her about that girl. Will he really leave them? Will he leave them all for her? Why couldn’t she find someone else? Wasn’t that guy from Rome enough for her? He’s loaded and could give her anything she wants, but no. She wants Margherita’s father. She knows her kind, that spoiled bitch. She wants it all, especially what belongs to others.

  “You mustn’t talk like that,” Gloria says.

  “Who cares? Who can hear me now?”

  “I hear you, and I don’t like you talking that way. Only foolish girls talk that vulgar. You’re not one of them.”

  “Yeah, but apparently, he prefers one of them to all of us.”

  Gloria would like to tell her that her father is an idiot, nothing but a pathetic loser, as Gloria calls him, and that he has always been a big problem. She’d like to tell her that she’d always hoped her daughter would choose someone else, Enrico for example. A well-mannered young man, from a good family. Someone she’d always gotten on well with but who, for some reason, had never stepped forward that way. For a time she’d thought he was one of those.

  “He won’t do it,” Gloria says.

  “How do you know? He told her he wants to leave. I heard him talking to her on the phone. I read the messages they send each other. He really wants to go away with her. I don’t care if in the end he won’t. He’d like to, that’s what matters. He’s sick of his life with us.”

  “It’s because of that girl.” That’s not true, she knows, it’s because he’s an idiot. But for tonight it will do.

  “That bitch.”

  “What did I tell you?”

  “So tell me another word I can use that has the same meaning. Because you can use all the words you want, but that’s what she is. Some people could use a lesson.”

  “What kind of lesson?”

  “I don’t know, but what she’s doing isn’t right.”

  “She’s not doing it on her own.” Look, Margherita, try to understand that your father is an idiot, and that he’s not even worth it.

  “It’s all her fault. If you know how to do it, men can be wrapped around your little finger.”

  “That’s true.”

  “And she sure knows how. And then she complains if someone goes after her.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Today at the bar, she was there too. I don’t even know how I managed not to smack her, that bitch . . .”

  “Again?”

  “She’s a bitch and that’s all there is to it. Anyway, while I was waiting for you I went to the bathroom, because I couldn’t stand to watch her there with Mom talking to her and inviting her to dinner. Sometimes it seems like Mom really doesn’t want to see certain things and pretends not to notice. It was humiliating, you know? So I went to the bathroom so I wouldn’t lose it. And while I was there, I heard the bitch talking with her brother. Apparently, the Half-Wit . . . You know who I mean? That guy in town who’s not right in the head? Anyway, he follows her. He bothers her, the poor thing. Maybe she rubbed up against him like a cat in heat just to enjoy making him get hard . . .”

  “Margherita!”

  “That’s what girls like her do. Anyway, it seems he must have done something, he must have annoyed her, so she asked her brother to set him straight. That fascist bully, I can just imagine . . . Anyhow, it seems that the Half-Wit was actually about to jump her. And that’s just what she deserves. Girls like her should end up just like that . . . You always play this stuff on the stereo?”

  “‘This stuff’? Honey, that’s Frank and ‘Fly Me to the Moon.’”

  They’re about to pass the Bastiani farmhouse. You can see it from the road. Who knows if Alice is already back, Gloria wonders. Who knows what she did tonight. She has her mother’s crazy genes. Luciana in her day used to have quite a good time too before Giancarlo. Really hard to understand how someone like him, one of the few men with a brain around here, went and got mixed up with her. The result couldn’t have been anything but Alice, in the end.

  They drive by the house and continue along the provincial road to Carrubo.

  “What’s that over there?” Margherita says, peering up ahead.

  “Someone’s there,” says Gloria, a moment before realizing who it is.

  “Grandma, it’s her!”

  The bitch is actually coming out of the woods. She’d been hiding. And, if she were hiding, it means she wasn’t with Enrico. It means she had something to hide. Does she really think she can destroy Gloria’s family? Does she really think she can steal the husband of Gloria’s daughter? And what if Maurizio is there? Maybe the girl would realize that he’s just a sorry asshole.

  “So then, tonight we make a scene,” Gloria says.

  “What do you mean? You want to stop and talk to her?”

  “If we wait for your mother to do it, it’ll never happen.”

  Margherita doesn’t say a word. Gloria’s Alfa draws near the girl, who is now heading back into the woods. Maybe she was waiting for someone else. The bitch.

  Gloria stops the car and gets out. Margherita follows her.

  “Expecting someone?” Gloria asks her.

  “I’m waiting for my brother, why?” The Bastiani girl has always had that haughty attitude that gets on her nerves.

  “You know why, bitch.”

  Margherita turns to her grandmother. Gloria smiles at her.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You want to pretend there’s nothing going on? See, it’s okay for my daughter to pretend not to notice, but not for me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She’s talking about my father, bitch.” Margherita takes a step toward her.

  Alice is dumbfounded, taken by surprise. She can’t seem to find the right words.

  “It’s all straightened out with Maurizio, it’s . . . it’s over,” she stammers.

  Her voice is unsure. It’s clear she’s lying. Women like her always lie. Margherita doesn’t know the whole story. For example, she doesn’t know that Betti has already discovered what was going on between them. But she doesn’t have the strength to defend what’s hers, it always falls to her mother to take care of it.

  “Anyway, what do you want from me? If you have something to say, go tell him. Call me a bitch one more time, and you’ll be in big trouble.”

  “We’ll be in trouble?” Gloria’s eyes are now blazing like torches. “And what trouble would we be in? Tell us.”

  “I’ll report you, for threatening me. Then we’ll all be disgraced. After all, I have nothing to lose anymore.”

  “Oh no, you shouldn’t have said that.” Gloria goes up to her. “You’re not reporting anyone, you’re not saying a damn thing.”

  “Or what, Gloria. Huh? Or what? Let’s hear it. Will you offer me money too? See, Margherita, maybe you don’t know it, but that’s how your grandmother settles things. Do you know she offered your father money to leave?”

  “Stop it!” Gloria is close beside her now. That’s not a story that Margherita should hear. How did that slut know about it?

  “And that’s not all. Make her tell you what she suggested to your mother when she got pregnant with you. Go ahead, Gloria, why don’t you . . .”

  A sharp thump. Somehow that rock had appeared in Gloria’s hand. Alice slumps to the ground. Margherita turns to her.

  “Grandma . . . what . . . what did you do?”

  Gloria keeps staring at Alice. She’s not moving.

  “Oh my God, Grandma . . . what . . .”

  “Stay calm.”

  Gloria bends down. Leans close to the bitch’s face. You made Maurizio tell you that too? You were really about to put your foot in it. Next time you’ll think twice.

  “Grandma, is she alive?”

  Margherita’s voice comes from a distance. Gloria can’t seem to understand what she’s asking at first. The problem is “next time.” There’s unlikely to be one.

  “Is she alive?”

  Now the
voice is closer. The distance has shrunk. Everything is back to normal. Everything except Alice, lifeless, stretched out in front of her. No “next time.” She’s dead. Just as well.

  “No, she’s not alive.”

  “Shit, Grandma . . .” Margherita bursts into tears. “Oh God, what did you do? You killed her. Oh my God . . .”

  “Calm down,” Gloria says, standing up. “We have to keep calm now.” She looks around, picks up the blood-smeared rock. “Let’s go.”

  “Where?”

  “Away from here. You want us to ruin our lives over this little tramp?”

  “But . . .” The girl is distraught, she needs time. She starts to approach the dead body, but she’s terrified.

  “She was expecting her brother, we have to get out of here before he comes. We’ll come up with something. We’ll figure out what to do.”

  “I . . .”

  “Let’s go, come on. I’m certainly not going to get into hot water over this bitch. Understand? At this point everyone has to do their part. Now that we’re free of her, everything will go back to the way it was before. Wasn’t that what you wanted? Wasn’t that what we all wanted? It happened. And now all we can do is leave here and forget about it. And everything will fall back into place.”

  Chiara is sleeping the way only children can. Dead to the world, her head lolling to one side. Margherita, however, is cold. She put Gloria’s trench coat over her shoulders. She keeps looking through the window and crying.

  Gloria stops near a stream. She takes the rock and gets out of the car, but then she hesitates. The stream is just along the road. What if the police were to find the rock? How many whodunnits had she seen that were solved that way? Could fragments of Alice’s skull have been left on the rock? Could DNA traces remain despite the water? She has to dump it a distance away, farther from the road. She gets back in the car and they set off again.

  “Grandma . . .”

  “What is it, sweetheart?”

  “What was she about to say?”

  “Listen to me, Margherita. You won’t believe a word that bitch said, will you? Nothing but lies came out of that mouth. Forget it.”

  “What do we do now?” Margherita asks. She’s crying, trembling. She’s in shock.

  “We take our time, we decide.”

  “What is there to decide?”

  “Whether to tell your parents, for instance.”

  “I want to tell them.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right, that’s settled.”

  It would have been much better to avoid it, but the girl would have told them anyway. Maybe not right away, but sooner or later the truth would have come out. And the risk that it might come out in the wrong way and at the wrong time is too great.

  So, family meeting.

  When they get home, Maurizio and Betti are just about done tidying up after the party.

  As soon as they enter, Margherita runs to her mother. Sobbing, she hugs her. Betti looks at her mother to find out what happened to the girl. Gloria is standing in front of the door with Chiara, still sleeping, in her arms.

  “We need to talk.”

  Two

  “I should have called the police,” Betti says.

  Enrico is sitting next to her, the sound of rain, still, on the living room windows. Maurizio is lying on the couch with a glass of scotch resting on his stomach and a clean cloth on his wound.

  “But it was my mother. And Margherita was with her. Can you understand? So I made a decision. Maurizio told me about the message he had sent to Alice, that she had left that pendant in the bathroom, and my mother came up with the idea, because Margherita had told her that she heard Alice telling Sandro that the Half-Wit was bothering her. I don’t know what we were thinking, maybe it was just to buy time. I never meant for him to end up like that. All it took was that pendant and Giancarlo’s strange, incomprehensible story about the Half-Wit’s confession and the case was closed. And if you’re wondering, I was the one who brought the pendant there. Maurizio waited for me in the car. I slipped into the woods and started walking. But first there was something else I had to do. I turned toward the bend. And I found her. She was lying there. I wanted to move her body closer to the Half-Wit’s house. I had started thinking like a murderer. It seems insane when I think about it now. But I thought that if the body were nearby, it would corroborate the story that it had been him and I would be able to save my family. That’s understandable, isn’t it, Enrico? Do you see that I did everything to save my family? It was my duty. So I picked up Alice’s body and carried it near the Half-Wit’s house. Just a short time earlier we had hugged. When you both arrived at the party, she’d come over to me and hugged me tighter than usual. And at that moment, as I was hauling her through the woods, we were hugging again. I was exhausted, but I was driven by a crazy rush of adrenaline. Almost a feeling of well-being. And you know why I did it? You know why I wanted to do it myself? This is the most absurd part. I didn’t want Maurizio to touch her again. I didn’t want him to have a chance to say good-bye to her. I wouldn’t grant him that moment. But when I got close to the Half-Wit’s house, I saw lights cutting through the woods from the other direction, near the bend. So I left Alice’s body on the ground, picked up a stone, wrapped the necklace with the pendant around it, and threw it toward the Half-Wit’s house, hoping they’d find it there. I was so . . . I know it’s terrible, but I felt so satisfied. I had done it all by myself. I had fixed everything. It seemed like a game. The plot of a TV detective story, like those Columbo episodes, when you follow the killer at the beginning as he erases the evidence and constructs an alibi for his perfect murder. As you can see, we made mistakes all along the line. We thought we were saving our family, and instead we destroyed all that was left of it. We all became accessories to a murder. Unintentionally, my mother says. But, in the end, even I don’t believe it. Afterward Margherita couldn’t take it anymore. We had to send her away, because she was likely to have a fit of hysteria every time she passed those woods. I didn’t know what to do with her. You can understand that at that point we were all so compromised. I waited until she calmed down a little, we talked about a school in England. She liked the idea. For years I expected a call from a teacher: ‘Ma’am, we have to speak to you about your daughter, and a murder.’ But the years passed and nothing happened. I deluded myself that time would fix everything. Instead, it’s as if time had stopped that night. And I relive it every time I close my eyes. I see Alice walking over to greet me. I think about what we did. It’s like carrying a black hole inside me that swallows up everything else. You’re left with nothing. You remain imprisoned by a secret. Your life belongs to it. And you let it consume you, day after day, as it robs a piece of you for every lie that you are forced to tell. What else can a murderer do when he gets away with it? When nobody finds out about him? If after the murder the authorities, unlike Lieutenant Columbo, don’t ask too many questions and accept a different version of what happened, and no one even remotely considers the fact that things may have gone differently? If no one looks for the murderer, if no one figures it out? If no one suspects? And then one day you show up and discover the only evidence that we left behind. We were sure we had disposed of that too. When I left Alice’s body near the Half-Wit’s house, I took her phone, shattered it, and threw it in the trash. That was my mistake, Enrico. It took ten years for it to come out, but, in the end, it did. Apparently, that was the wrong phone. And now I don’t know what else to tell you. So pick up that phone and go home. It’s up to you to decide now. It’s a weight that from this moment on I will no longer have to carry.”

  Three

  “Are you afraid?”

  “A little.”

  Gloria has just finished the story. They’re riding in the same car, but this time Chiara isn’t sitting in the back, in a car seat. She’s sitting right where her sister was that night.

  “You shouldn’t be, of any of us. You’re the
only one who had nothing to do with it.”

  “I shouldn’t be? My entire family is an accessory to the murder that everyone in this lousy town talks about, and I shouldn’t be scared?”

  “Chiara . . .”

  “Never mind ‘Chiara,’ fucking shit, Grandma. Just when were you thinking of telling me?”

  “You shouldn’t . . .”

  “Don’t tell me what I should do. It seems you’re not the best person to do that.”

  “Now calm down.”

  “No, I’m not going to calm down. And I’m scared. Tell me, have you bumped off anyone else in the meantime?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I don’t know, maybe someone who found out about you . . .”

  “Chiara . . .”

  “Jesusfuckingchrist, stop saying ‘Chiara, Chiara,’ fuck that.”

  “I told you it was an accident, no one meant . . .”

  “And that other bitch who went away and has been feeding me a load of crap for ten years.”

  “We did it to protect you.”

  “That’s bullshit.”

  “And stop talking like that. I decided to tell you everything, but if that’s the way you’re going to react, it means I shouldn’t have told you. That your mother was right not to want to tell you.”

  The girl is breathing hard. She’s different from her sister. It’s anger that drives her, not fear. The thought of having to admit her mother was right was a decisive factor. She’s stubborn. Obstinate. She’s the last link in the family and in this entire story. And she could be the strongest. The most solid. Just what’s needed most now.