The Night of the Moths

by Riccardo Bruni

  Gloria takes the umbrella.

  “Where are you going?” Chiara asks.

  “You said the car parked over there is Enrico’s.”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “I’m going to go say hello to him and tell your parents that you and I had a little chat. It’s right that you speak with them now, and whatever happens next should concern them and not me.”

  “I . . .”

  “You have to calm down. The worst decisions are those made in the heat of the moment. Stay here, try to work through your feelings. Right now you’re too shaken. Everything will seem clear and simple once things settle down. Wait for me here.”

  Gloria opens the umbrella and steps out. She didn’t hear Chiara mutter “settle my ass” as soon as the door closed.

  Gloria approaches her daughter’s house down the street. The light in the living room is on. She has no intention of ringing the bell. She wants to see what’s going on. She peers through the window and can make out Enrico. He’s sitting next to Betti. She’s talking. He’s staring at an empty glass. Gloria moves close to the door and presses her ear against it.

  Betti goes on, telling him everything that happened. That idiot. Gloria stands there listening. Her daughter keeps talking, all you hear is her voice. She pictures Enrico sitting beside her, listening. She got there too late. If she had arrived before him, she could have convinced Betti to tell a different story. Why tell him everything now? He’s not a member of the family. He might have been. And if he had been, this whole mess would never have happened. Because Enrico is different from Maurizio. Enrico is someone who is unable to lie. And now that could be a huge problem.

  “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.”

  Betti must have lost her mind. The stress must have gotten to her. Putting their fate in the hands of an outsider. Imagine. After all they’d done up to now. And that insignificant, useless, pathetic asshole Maurizio lies there without saying a word. Would it really have been so difficult to make up a story to tell him? They were talking about a phone. A phone.

  Dear God, does it make sense to confess everything over a phone? Couldn’t they come up with some excuse, a fabrication, something to explain the phone? Do I always have to take care of everything? Can’t they resolve anything without me? Must I always be the one to pick up the pieces? Is it conceivable that all the men we’ve had in our lives have always been a problem? Fortunately, the children are girls. And I must be present, from now on, to make sure they keep their guard up. To make sure they both know that all men are deceitful assholes like their father. And that those who aren’t, and they are few indeed, are likely to become a worse problem. Because the only thing that really matters is family. There are no principles that count more than that. Defending the family should be one’s main obligation. Because everything is founded on the family. And it’s women who must sustain it, because men, after having done their reproductive duty, only serve to create problems. And then they just get old, they piss their pants, and their women have to clean up after them. There are insects that kill the male after mating. Nature knows what needs to be done. God took care of Alfredo, a nice heart attack and off he went. Of course, I gave him a hand. I realized he was in difficulty, that he had slumped to the floor, and I went to the movies. There was a good film playing too. And when I came back, he had relieved us of his presence. Now, sooner or later, we’ll have to see to Maurizio.

  Gloria walks quickly back to the Alfa and opens the door. Chiara is still there. Good.

  “Well?” her granddaughter asks.

  “So go home. I explained it all and everything is fine.”

  “You let Mom know you told me?”

  “Of course.”

  “And?”

  “She got very angry with me, as she usually does. But Enrico is with her, and he was always able to make her feel better.”

  “You told him everything too?”

  “Of course not. I spoke with Betti in the kitchen. Certain things mustn’t leave the family, remember that.”

  “What about you? Are you going back to your house?”

  “Yes, I’m going now. Will you come and see me again?”

  “I don’t know. I have to think about it.”

  “Good, an excellent response. As I told you, never make hasty decisions.”

  Chiara opens the door.

  “Wait a minute,” Gloria says. “Maybe when it’s not raining so hard.”

  A few minutes go by in silence, until Gloria sees the door of the house open.

  “Okay, Chiara, maybe you’d better go. You wouldn’t want to stay here all night. Take the umbrella, pull your hood up, and try to make a run for it.”

  “You could drive me up to the door . . .”

  “I’m not going that way. I’m turning around here. I told your mother I changed cars, that I have one that doesn’t go as fast now. Let’s not let her see that it’s not true.”

  Chiara takes the umbrella, opens the door, and gets out.

  It’s raining cats and dogs. She closes the Alfa’s door behind her. What a god-awful night. There are so many things she has to tell her mother. Best to start with Gibo. Because now, suddenly, she feels like telling her about that too. She wants to sit on the bed with a nice hot cup of Nesquik and tell her everything. And tomorrow Margherita. That’s why her sister wasn’t answering. Now she can though. Now they can talk about everything. No more secrets, no more silence, no more skeletons in the closet. Even so, I’m still a little pissed at her, Chiara thinks. In fact, I’m still a little pissed at all of them.

  Here comes Enrico. Opening the gate. He’s leaving.

  Chiara wants to say hello to him. Maybe one of these days they can meet up again and have lunch together. She walks faster to catch up with him. He hasn’t seen her. His car is parked across the street, and he steps down from the sidewalk to cross over. He doesn’t seem to be in a hurry. He doesn’t seem to care about the rain.

  The roar of the Alfa comes out of nowhere. Her grandmother didn’t turn around, she didn’t go back the way she said. She’s heading this way, toward her parents’ house, toward Enrico. The wall of water raised by the car as it speeds by hits Chiara squarely and washes over her. When she opens her eyes again, Enrico is no longer in the street.

  All she sees is the Alfa, a missile hurtling down the street and then suddenly gliding, like an ice skater.

  The oil slick.

  Gloria had been going so fast she hadn’t seen the sign. In technical terms—the same terms the police will use in the course of their investigation, the same terms they’ll use when they reach the scene of what will be recorded as a tragic accident resulting from bad weather and poor maintenance on the part of the refinery—one would say that “the car lost traction due to an oil spill.” Gloria’s Alfa kicks up jets of water, out of control. It starts spinning around like a centrifugal clothes dryer and then flips over, once, twice, three times. Finally, it crashes into a tree and all its lights come on at the same time. Red ones, yellow ones, blinkers and headlights. And it remains there, motionless, lighting up the whole street like a bizarre Christmas tree.

  Four

  The junkie is better. He only has a few fractures. Enzo called, he tried to talk to Ekaterina, but she wasn’t there. However, they told him that Bastiani is recovering from the accident.

  Enzo is wearing the regulation dark-blue waterproof poncho, the brim of his cap sticking out from under the hood. He’s explained everything to the police. It’s clear that they will also have to talk to Sarti. Enzo has to speak to him too. That genius was in a big hurry, he told Enzo to let him know right away how his friend was, but he didn’t leave a number. So now how is he supposed to get in touch with him?

  A shitty night in any case, Lieutenant McClane. And all that rain that dripped into his pants before he remembered that he had the poncho isn’t helping any either. But there’s the patrol ro
und to complete, the cards to slip under the doors. It’s a dirty job, but someone . . . Bullshit. He could use some nice hot milk with brandy, Stravecchio, of course. That’s for sure!

  He gets in the car. Picks up the company phone.

  “Central, do you read me?”

  “Porretta, what is it?”

  “We’re done with the investigation here. I’m going to complete the rounds.”

  “Bravo.”

  “Anything new happening?”

  “Italy is losing by one goal.”

  “Police news, I meant.”

  “Porretta . . .”

  “Copy.”

  “Can you see okay?”

  “Affirmative, Central, despite the heavy precipitation, the visual—”

  “Then see that you go to h—”

  End of conversation. He didn’t catch the last part; the storm must have disrupted communications. We’re isolated, Lieutenant. We’re on our own to face the night. All right then. We can do it! Die-hards, that’s us. He settles in, takes a towel from the duffel bag on the back seat, and dries off as best he can. There’s still a piece of the Supremo and a few home fries left. A nice little bite was just what he needed. As he sinks his teeth into the sausage, christening the poncho with the first smear of mayonnaise accompanied by an inevitable “what the fuck,” he starts the agency car and resumes his rounds.

  He’ll start with the street where the real-estate guy lives, the one who knows Sarti and asked for two security checks for him. Maybe that’s where the out-of-towner went.

  With this rain, you can’t see a thing. He should revise his last exchange with Central, about being able to see well, but his sixth sense tells him that he’d better leave it alone. He drives slowly, almost at a crawl. And every time he has to get out to leave a card, an icy shower awaits. Tonight he’ll be gobbling aspirin like Tic Tacs.

  He turns into Germano’s street, drives up to where it’s blocked at the refinery plant, and pulls over to the curb to get out and drop off the cards.

  But isn’t that the guy’s car? Sarti, the one who drove off in such a hurry? Intuition is not something they hand out along with the uniform, Lieutenant. Intuition is something you either have or don’t have. And if you don’t have it, you’d better leave it to others to do this work.

  He gets out. Yeah, that’s the car. No doubt about it. A nice toy. The very one he took off in to do some important thing the junkie told him to do.

  Enzo gets back in the agency car and polishes off the Supremo accompanied by the spicy home fries, crispy earlier and now limp and soggy. He slips the third episode of Die Hard, the one with the bombs, into the DVD player. I’ll give him fifteen minutes, that Sarti, then I’ll move on.

  It only takes ten.

  There he is, that’s him. He’s coming out of the house where Germano lives, the agency guy who so firmly insisted that he monitor the house on Via delle Ortiche, because they were concerned there might be a thief casing the joint and instead it was that junkie. A lot of strange things are going on here tonight. Sarti seems like he’s in a trance. He’s walking in the rain, absolutely drenched, but he doesn’t seem to care. Subject identified, in any case: now he has to make contact with him.

  Enzo gets out of the car.

  He approaches, about to say something.

  It takes an instant.

  Suddenly two headlights spring out of the darkness.

  You know what marks the difference between people like us and people like them, Lieutenant? It’s solely a matter of reflexes. That’s it. None of that crap about the spirit of sacrifice or goodness of heart, that’s just for bedtime stories. No, it’s all about reflexes, and reflexes leave you no choice; they’re triggered before you can ask any questions. You’re like an animal, a panther that leaps in response to instinct. It’s a heightened perception, as only some insects and certain ninja warriors have. A fucking war machine, that’s what. Reflexes, either you have them or you don’t. And if you don’t have them, you’d better leave this work to others. Am I right, Lieutenant?

  And with that he rushes forward.

  Five

  Sandro is lying on a gurney. He spent all night parked in a hospital corridor, because the ER was full. He’s still there, lying under a blanket with a pattern of smiling teddy bears.

  He’s thinking.

  As he explained to the policeman just a few minutes ago, he had forgotten to put the car in reverse and the vehicle had practically run over him because the hand brake doesn’t hold. What had he gone there to do? He was high. Someone with all that heroin in his body does things that don’t make much sense, right? But he sure wasn’t driving. He doesn’t see how you can call it a road accident. He’s certainly no lawyer, but suspending his license seems unwarranted. He was on foot. He was walking after all. In fact, if he were the cop he would do a few . . . What do you call them? A few tests to verify that the damn hand brake works, because these American cars . . . you know how they are, maybe with a German car, it wouldn’t have happened.

  But apart from the version he gave to avoid telling the whole story about the telephone and Enrico, there is something else that he hasn’t yet told them. There’s that face that he could swear he saw inside the car. At first he couldn’t place it. Then he recognized the blue cap, the clown hair sticking out at the sides. That pasty face and those vacant eyes. And he thinks he read it on his lips, in that split second artificially drawn-out by the drug: “Sandro, will you throw me the ball?” But he decided to deal with this aspect of the story on his own.

  “You tried to kill me, you dirty son of a bitch. You finally decided to try it. But you know what? I think that at this point it’s time we got some things clear. The reality that maybe you still don’t get, you little shit, is that I would do it again. The only thing that drove me out of my mind was having let someone else take the blame. You can keep busting my balls every time I shoot up, you can pop up on the TV or even out of the toilet, but always be sure of one thing: that I would do it again. If only I could go back and save her, but I can’t. So that’s that. I’ll expect you at the next hallucination. But I wanted to tell you that. I’m not afraid. No guilty feelings. To hell with you.”

  “Excuse me, what did you say?” The blonde girl with the Eastern European accent who was in the ambulance walks past him.

  “I was thinking aloud.”

  “You were fortunate, you know?”

  “Not that fortunate, let me tell you.”

  The girl smiles.

  “Do you need anything?”

  “I don’t think so. On second thought, could I possibly get an ACE juice?”

  Six

  “Naturally the Evil Sisters had something to say about the olives, because, of course, they didn’t like them. First they arrived early, and then they carped about everything, but ‘not to criticize, Giulia dear, just saying.’ It’s my fault for wasting my time planning these evenings for them when they would be better off at a pizzeria. Yes, damn it, that’s what I said. A pizzeria. Just think, when they served the shells with curried rice, Jessica was sure that curry was a plant. I mean really, doesn’t she know that it’s a blend of spices? Enrico? You know that at a certain point . . .”

  Enrico is driving. He’s been away a couple of days. After everything that happened he felt the need to go somewhere. When he returned, he stopped by the agency, signed the documents with Carmen, and is now on his way back to Rome. Before leaving town, he received a text from Betti.

  We’re burying Mom tomorrow. I don’t think you’ll come. As for all the rest, I know you’ve already decided. I would have liked to thank you. But it’s all right this way. Love, B.

  He did not reply.

  That nutty guy had saved his life the other night, the guy who’d buzzed him on the intercom to tell him that Sandro was lying on the ground in front of his gate. Jumping out of nowhere in an instant, he’d rushed him and knocked him out of Steely Gloria’s path. She had tried to kill him, and if the security guard
hadn’t been there, she very well would have succeeded. When they got up, Enrico still couldn’t believe what had happened. He stood there staring at the Alfa while the security guard recited a whole speech about a sixth sense that only some insects and certain ninja warriors have.

  The police arrived and went to Maurizio and Betti’s house. While they were still inside, the living room curtain parted, and he saw Chiara. She’d looked at him, raised her hand, and waved. Enrico did the same. For a moment, he’d thought of saying something, to her or to Betti. But he had no idea what to say. He got in the car, drove past the house, slowed, but did not stop. He continued on at a crawl until he came to the end of the street. He turned down another street, and drove until he reached the Aurelia, still moving very slowly. One direction led to Rome. He went the other way.

  And kept on going. He turned on the stereo, found something decent, and turned up the volume. He didn’t know the car had such a great stereo. And he went on driving. Nothing but earsplitting music and the road to keep him company. For kilometers and kilometers. He stopped at an Autogrill, bought all the U2 CDs he could find, and set out again. He drove some more, until the night came to an end. And still he kept on driving. He drove on, as the sky grew lighter and the sun rose. Then farther still, crossing the border into France. Nice, Cannes, Marseille, Provence, Languedoc. He continued on, reading the names on the road signs, surprised at how close those places he’d never been were. He went on driving, losing all sense of time, through Aquitaine, as far as Biarritz. And there he finally stopped.

  He reached for the hand brake, then, not finding it, he remembered the button. He got out and looked for a bar. He found one, ordered a coffee, and stood gazing at the ocean for what felt like an eternity.

  It’s windy. No whaling ships, but he saw surfers in wetsuits challenging the huge waves of the Atlantic.

  Alice was right. It didn’t take all that long to get there. And being there, in front of the ocean, at this moment, is actually enough. Reason enough to have come.

  He goes down to the beach. Walks along the shore. Looks at the sea. In his pocket is Alice’s phone. That tiny memory card contains a truth that has been buried for ten years. A secret in which the lives of all of them have remained trapped. It’s time to set them free.