And she shot a tender glance at the window across the way.
VII
Standing by his office window, Ricciardi was doing his best to dry himself off with his handkerchief. He watched the wind and the rain hammer down on the piazza, sweeping the streets clean of everything that wasn’t anchored to the ground. The holm oaks were shaking their naked branches at the sky above, and people sought shelter in doorways and tried to save their umbrellas, useless against the fury of the elements.
As usual, the window reminded him of Enrica doing her needlepoint; a picture of peace and quiet, one in which he took refuge when he felt anxious and upset. Enrica. And the letter he’d written her.
Even though he knew that he hadn’t been overly demonstrative, he was still deeply unsettled. For someone like him, so disinclined to engage in human relationships and displays of affection, it had truly been revolutionary to pick up pen and paper and contact her so directly, especially given the fact that they’d never been properly introduced. He shot a look at the chair in front of his desk, where the young woman had been sitting on that regrettable occasion when they’d first met. What a miserable fool he’d seemed. She must have thought he was an imbecile, an unfortunate idiot.
And what if the letter that I wrote her, he thought, strikes her as an intolerable intrusion into her life? Then I won’t even be able to look at her from the window, to observe her simple, slow, serene gestures. Normal. Normality, that strange condition that was unknown to him. He remembered how he’d watched her secretly for months: there was something about the way she embroidered, the unhurried way she moved through her small world, that made the scene such a pleasure to watch that it had become his main reason for coming home at night, after work. Now he was sorry he’d written to her. But there was no taking it back: there was nothing he could do but wait.
In the rain-lashed piazza, he saw cars going by. In the distance he could see a woman holding a little girl by the hand, the two of them standing motionless in the middle of the street, incongruously dressed in light summer clothes. He remembered the accident, which had taken place a month and a half before, during the last whiplash of summer heat: the little girl had dropped something, a toy, perhaps, and she’d made her mother stop just as a Fiat 525 turned the corner and shot onto the piazza; the driver was looking the other way and ran them both over, stopping only after the rear tires had thumped over their bodies. From that distance Ricciardi could see that the woman’s legs had been taken off neatly at mid-thigh, while the little girl’s head was crushed from the neck up. The woman was still saying: hurry, they’re waiting for us. Who knows who was waiting for them; whoever it was, they’d wait forever. The little girl was saying: the top, I lost it, my top. A wooden toy top. The cause of death was nothing more than a cursed little wooden top.
Even though they’d been bloodied and ravaged by the car’s tires, the woman and girl were the only ones who had stayed dry under the driving rain. Death’s little privileges, Ricciardi mused ironically. But the privilege of hearing their words even from a distance and watching their corpses dissolve slowly, day by day: now, that was something he had all to himself. That’s who I am, Enrica. A man destined to walk surrounded by grief and pain, to be deafened, sickened, and suffocated by it. What can a man like that offer you? What kind of life? What kind of love? What a selfish wretch I was to write you a letter, even a pointless letter like that one.
The little girl and her top made him think back to the corpse that had started his week. The fact that he hadn’t seen the boy’s specter, and what Modo had said about it being certain he had died of natural causes. But, Ricciardi wondered, how natural could the death of such a young boy really be? Didn’t that child have a right to enjoy the thrills, the triumphs, and the sorrows of a full life?
He could still see the back of the boy’s neck, rain-streaked, the head dangling in empty air as the morgue attendants carted him off like the carcass of some stray animal. What was the boy’s name? What games did he like to play, who were his friends? Was there a mother, were there brothers and sisters weeping in despair at his loss, or was he as alone and abandoned in life as he was now, in death?
Now Ricciardi saw another little boy in his mind’s eye, another little boy playing with a wooden spade in a vineyard, twenty-five years earlier; he could hear the steady murmur as the boy described to himself the fantastic world around him, the world of his imagination. And he reflected on the thought that loneliness is a disease that spares not even the wealthy, and that spreads from childhood to adulthood and even old age.
These musings were interrupted by a discreet rap at the door, followed by the entrance of 265 pounds of wet brigadier.
“Nothing yet, Commissa’. We have no reports of a missing boy; it seems no one’s noticed that the child’s gone. Or at least, no one’s thought to call the police about it.”
Maione was cleaning himself off with a small hand towel, examining his mud-caked boots with resignation.
“Nothing, and this filth won’t come off; now who’s going to calm Lucia down? It’s just my luck, right at the end of my shift. Otherwise I’d at least have time to let them dry off a little; instead now I have to go home in this state. I’m sorry, Commissa’, were you thinking? Am I interrupting?”
“Why, are there times when you’re not thinking? No, I was just wondering about that little boy. Whether he had someone who cared about him, or if he was alone in the world.”
“To judge by his clothing, if you ask me, he was alone. There’s not a mother alive that would send her little boy out in this rain in wooden clogs, take it from me: even the poorest mother would at least have wrapped his feet in footcloths. When I was a boy my mother spent half an hour every morning wrapping me and my brothers’ feet in the winter. Those footcloths were better than a pair of boots, let me tell you. And she’d wrap them so tight that our feet fell asleep and we’d have pins and needles all day long, I can still remember it. But they never came undone, you can be sure of that.”
“Our little friend, on the other hand, had no footcloths. And his feet were covered with chilblains, did you notice? I’m very curious to know what killed him; what did Modo say, when will he let us know?”
Maione wasn’t convinced that the autopsy had been the right choice, and he made no secret of the fact.
“He said that he’d call us, maybe tomorrow even. But Commissa’, I have to tell you: this business about having the little boy autopsied, I can’t say I was pleased with it. I don’t like the idea of putting him in the ground cut up into pieces, after the doctor is done rummaging around in his guts looking for something that’s not there. I know that you had only the best intentions, but you know that in this city little children die in the street all the time. It’s nothing new, unfortunately.”
Ricciardi turned his back to the window.
“I know. But you, you’re a father, and I’d hardly expect to hear you say such a thing. The little boy is dead, that’s true. And believe me, I don’t like seeing corpses carved up any more than you do. It’s just that I can’t stand the idea of never even knowing how he died, that’s all. A child that young shouldn’t be tossed out like some old clothes. We need to give him a first and last name, and the doctor needs to give him a cause of death; at least that way we’ll be burying a person, not a thing.”
Maione smiled.
“I understand what you’re trying to say. As someone who’s lost a son, I know what it means never to see your child come home again. And even if we never talk about it, when Lucia and I look at the children that are left, we always think of Luca, and we’ll think about him forever: I know it, and she knows it. And now that the Day of the Dead is almost here, we think about him even more. This rain, this neverending rain, it gets into your bones and makes you feel even sadder . . . And now the office is starting up, too; it’s become a living hell!”
“Why? What’s happened?”
Maione spre
ad his arms wide.
“Oh right, I always forget that you never talk with a soul in here but me. And you’re smart not to, believe me. Well, as you know, Mussolini’s coming to town on November 3, and Garzo’s going out of his mind. He’s been saying that if anything goes wrong, he’ll send us all to work as prison guards at Poggioreale; he’s been arranging and rearranging the furniture in his office, over and over again; he’s been having the stairs mopped several times a day; he sent both the automobiles to the garage for an overhaul, on the off chance that Mussolini wants to go for a drive; he looks at his mustache in the mirror constantly—and he thinks no one notices, but everyone’s laughing behind his back. In short, a disaster!”
Ricciardi shook his head.
“How can people be such idiots? So Mussolini’s coming; so what? Leaving aside the fact that he won’t even end up visiting headquarters, what difference does it make anyway? Won’t people go on dying, won’t the same horrible things keep happening, out in the streets?”
Maione pounded a fist into the flat of his hand.
“That’s exactly the point, Commissa’: no, they won’t. That is to say, that idiot Garzo is telling everyone that things have to function smoothly in this city, that there can’t be any unrest or crime; that this is the ideal Fascist city, where all citizens live in peace and tranquility. In other words, we can’t have any unsolved crimes or investigations under way, at least until Thunder Jaw, the Mascellone, heads back to Rome, and we’ll thank God when he leaves.”
Ricciardi gave him a dirty look.
“If he thinks that we’re going to start covering things up or wasting time that we could be using to solve cases just so he can pretend that all’s well, then he’s really lost his mind. You can even send your friend Ponte to tell him: we’re not going to stop doing our work, Mussolini or no Mussolini.”
Maione burst out laughing.
“Fucking hell—my friend Ponte: I’d drop him down a manhole and let him drown in the sewer, that two-faced rat! True, lately he’s been Garzo’s main victim, and it serves him right; if you could see him running back and forth, he’s even more ridiculous than usual . . . Anyway, I knew you’d say that. I was thinking, though: working as a guard at Poggioreale can’t be much worse than staying here, right?”
VIII
From the autopsy room in the hospital, Dr. Modo could hear the rain beating down on the roof and the windows. The overhead lamps illuminated the marble tables; it was finally evening after a long, difficult day. The wards were filled with every disease imaginable; he asked himself how people survived in the hygienic conditions that prevailed in most of the city.
The rain made matters worse: lungs, throats, and bones all absorbed the dampness like sponges and suffered serious damage. The common folk, accustomed to scraping by and concealing their misery with dignity, only showed up at the hospital when the situation had advanced beyond any remedy and there was nothing left for the physicians to do but try to alleviate their pain.
Modo thought about the torrents of filthy water gushing out of the backed-up city sewers and pouring into the ground-floor bassi, carrying waste and dead animals onto the floors where children played. He shook his head and shuddered; it was a miracle that so many people were still alive, to be sure. Often, after his regular shift was over, when he was so exhausted that his eyes refused to close, he’d wander the city’s alleyways and vicoli, administering medical care to those in need of it. Old women tried to kiss his hands, but he recoiled: he wished there were more he could do. He wished he could give them medicine, but he only managed to pilfer a few doses here and there, when those people needed cartloads of it.
Tonight, for instance, I’d be much more useful out there than in here autopsying a corpse, he thought as he looked down at the little boy spread out naked on the table, bruise-blue in the spectral light, his head resting on a wooden block. But he couldn’t bring himself to tell Ricciardi no, and so instead of comforting the living, he found himself digging around inside a dead body.
He mused about the strange nature of his friendship with the commissario. They certainly weren’t kindred spirits: Modo was outgoing and overly emphatic, while Ricciardi was reserved and rarely laughed; but in some strange way he felt closer to him than anyone else he knew. Perhaps it was because they were both loners: perhaps it was because they both observed the times they lived in with the same disenchantment and melancholy. Or perhaps it was because they felt the same pity for that teeming city and its desperate populace. Each of them chose different battles, though: the doctor opted for the path of explicit dissidence, the commissario for silent action.
He pulled the pocket watch out of his vest fob: ten o’clock. It had probably been about twenty-four hours since the little boy’s death. He checked his surgical tools, clean and arrayed neatly in a metal tray next to the autopsy table. As always they looked ordinary and inoffensive: needle and thread, scissors, knives of various gauges and lengths, a handsaw and a pair of hacksaws, a bone chisel and a hammer. He thought of his father, a skilled carpenter who had worked until he was seventy so that Modo could attend medical school. You see, Papà, we’re not all that different in the end. In the end, I saw, hammer, and chisel, too.
Ricciardi, Ricciardi: damn you, and damn your stubbornness. He remembered something from the Great War, on the Carso front, where he’d been the battalion medical officer. He’d met a lieutenant, a Calabrian named Caruso. He was a slight man of few words, swarthy and dark haired, constantly on the move. The two men had hit it off and they spent long evenings together in the trenches, listening to the distant rumble of artillery, swapping stories about women and the faraway cities they called home.
Caruso had a gift: he knew before anyone else what would happen in battle. He’d say: now watch, they’re going to move over here, they’re going to maneuver in thus-and-such a direction, they’re going to try to outflank our machine gun emplacements. And right on schedule, as if Caruso himself were directing the whole operation, the chiefs of staff and the Krauts would do exactly what he’d predicted. But it didn’t stop him from taking a bullet right between the eyes, one September night: that was one thing he hadn’t seen coming.
Ricciardi reminded him of Caruso: the same sad half-smile, the same tense, active hands, the same gaze lost in contemplation of who knows what distant grief. The same strange ability to interpret reality according to his own subterranean streams, currents invisible to everyone else. There are people who go through life taking the burden of everything onto their own shoulders, even though they lack the necessary strength.
He focused on the little boy. He’d completed the external examination. He’d gone over the clothing: a shirt made of coarse linen, several sizes too big, threadbare and filthy, and a pair of oversized short britches, fastened at the waist with a length of twine on the verge of breaking. No underwear, no cuts, no recent rips or tears. No violence, at least not enacted on the clothing.
Then he’d examined the epidermis, every square inch of skin. As he’d announced after his initial survey, there were no signs of recent wounds. Marks aplenty, no doubt about that: on the neck, belly, and legs. Contusions, bruises, hematomas. Life wasn’t easy for scugnizzi like this one. But there was nothing that could have caused his death, nothing very recent.
War, thought Modo. War and death. There was something absurdly exciting about war, he had to admit: the uniforms, the rifles, the bullets, and the bombs. Sure, there were hunger, filth, and infections: but there was also the knowledge that you were fighting for your country, for your homeland. Ridiculous concepts, he saw that now: a distant border, people who had never stopped speaking other languages no matter what flag was flying over city hall; but when you fight, you think of your own home far away, your traditions, the things that belong to you.
But the war that you fought, he mused, looking down at the body on the table, was one of neither glory nor grandeur. It was a war for surviva
l, a war to live long enough to see the sun come up the next day, or to wake up to the feeling of rain on your skin. A war for bread, a war against the cold, a war for a dry place to sleep. A war that has no borders to defend, no bridges to destroy: the war of life.
He took his scalpel and made a Y-shaped incision, starting from the collarbone and running down to below the sternum, and continuing to the pubic bone with a detour around the navel. Beneath the skin, the layer of fatty tissue was virtually nonexistent, and Modo was not a bit surprised.
He decided first of all to perform a thorough examination of the abdomen, convinced as he was that the child’s death had been caused by a straightforward cardiac arrest, possibly triggered by a congenital malformation combined with the generally poor state of health: the little boy was light as a baby bird. If he discovered the cause of death, he hoped to spare the victim the next step: the opening of the cranium for an examination of the encephalon.
Now, once again, the talk was of war: in the speeches of the head of state, in the newspapers, in idle conversations in the bars and cafés. Nothing explicit, of course; no one ever spoke about war openly. But if you observe carefully, thought the doctor as he applied the retractor, you realize that war is in the air, and how. All this talk about greatness, empire, history, ineluctable destiny. About mastery, dominion, and colonies. If that’s not war, then I’ve never seen one before.
But I have seen war, you know that, child? I’ve seen war. And trust me, that’s not easy either.
Now the Man of Destiny himself is actually coming here, to Naples. He’s coming, and all the people like you will crowd the piazzas and clap and cheer on command. They might even put on their best clothes, as if it were a holiday, as if it were a special occasion. There might be a few petty thieves who’ll take advantage of the excitement to slip their hands into a few pockets, I don’t deny it, but there won’t be many. For the most part, everyone will feel better for it, stronger, less hungry. The destiny of greatness. The empire: sky, sea, and land. And this time, just like before, no one will have the courage to say that the fault lies with this man and the others like him, arms akimbo, hands on hips, eyes flashing and jaws jutting, that it is they who spread hunger and death in the name of nonexistent ideals.
Day of the Dead Page 4