Ricciardi nodded. He was perfectly aware.
“Then, after about a year, I met Tettè. He was the smallest one there, and with his stutter he couldn’t even speak. But he had a smile, Commissario, a smile that loosened a knot in my chest that I didn’t even know was there. I remember it . . . forgive me . . . ”
Carmen stopped talking and burst into tears. Ricciardi waited for her sobbing to subside.
“We understood each other instantly, all it took was a glance. He never spoke to anyone; his difficulty with speech made most adults lose their patience, even Eleonora, and the other boys just made fun of him. I’m not a particularly patient person, and I never have been; but I was patient with him. We’d sit together for hours, he’d draw and I’d speak sweetly to him, and toward the end he almost never stuttered with me anymore. He was able to talk to me about his world, his life. We’d tell each other stories. It was as if our two lonelinesses had finally met, after waiting for each other for all those years.”
Ricciardi listened in silence. Then he said:
“Did you see him often, Signora? I mean to say, aside from the lessons you gave him twice a week.”
Carmen sighed. She smiled through hers tears as she spoke.
“I used to go pick him up at least once a week; he loved my car, he was so excited whenever he got a chance to ride in it. I’d bought him a suit of clothes that they kept for him at the parish, and they’d have him wear them whenever he came out alone with me. I’d take him out to eat, but he’d get full right away, because his stomach was so small. I’d drive him around, without my chauffeur. He loved the way the wind would come in through the window and toss his hair, and in the summer we’d put the roof down and laugh, oh how we laughed. Those were the happiest moments, for him and me. He was the son I’d never had, Commissario. God had given him to me, after all.”
XXXV
Seven days earlier, Friday, October 23
It’s cold in the big room, freezing cold. It’s still early, but Tettè has been awake for a while now, curled up under the burlap sacks that he has for covers.
The rain patters against the shutters, still closed, and the dampness in the air ought to depress him; instead Tettè smiles happily. It’s the most wonderful day of the week. The day his angel comes.
Tettè daydreams and waits. When Nanni opens the door and yells out the morning wake-up call, he leaps out of bed and starts folding his makeshift covers, pulling his shirt and britches from under the pallet. He shivers as he puts them on. They’re icy cold against his bare skin.
After the sexton has made sure that even the most stubborn ones are out from under the covers, he approaches Tettè and gestures for him to come with him into the other room. Tettè follows him, joyfully. The other boys watch them go, and the twins exchange a knowing glance.
In the other room, it’s even colder, because no one sleeps in here; it’s a little room that the sexton always keeps locked. There’s a table with two chairs and a small, rusty metal cabinet, also locked. The sexton pulls the key out of his pocket and opens it. Tettè can’t wipe the smile off his face, and Nanni shoots him an ugly look.
The man pulls a pair of short pants and a little sailor’s blouse out of the wardrobe, a cap and a pair of black leather shoes. The clothes are spotless and neatly ironed. Nanni sets them down on a table like a series of relics and then sits down to watch Tettè change.
Tettè doesn’t like the way the sexton looks at him; he has one of those gazes in which you can’t read a thing. His eyes are always red; Tettè knows, as do all the other boys, that the man gets drunk every night in a tavern down by the harbor. They’ve seen him snoring openmouthed in the gutter on summer nights many times.
You’re getting to be a big boy, says Nanni as he watches him. Such a big boy. Tettè gets dressed as quick as he can, putting the clean clothing on hastily, and in his haste he loses his balance and almost rips the short pants. The man lunges forward and slaps him hard.
Stupid cacaglio, he says to him: those pants are worth a lot more than you are. You have no idea what Don Antonio would do to you if you tore them. Tettè’s ear is ringing from the slap the man gave him, but he chokes back his tears. All he wants to do is get dressed and leave the room.
Nanni goes on talking: remember that I know your secret, cacaglio. The secret that only you and I know. Just remember that I can always tell that secret, and if I do you’ll lose everything, you fool of a cacaglio. Which means you also won’t get to wear your new clothes and drive in the car with the signora anymore.
Tettè wants to answer him: he longs to say, no, I don’t want the secret, you can have it! All I want is to be with my angel, nothing more. Why can’t you leave me alone?
That’s what he wants to say; but the serpent immediately comes up from his belly and coils around his throat, choking off his breath. And, as always, it keeps him from speaking.
The man laughs, and he opens his mouth wide, showing his rotten teeth. A foul stench of wine wafts over Tettè. Tettè shuts his eyes and thinks: it doesn’t matter. In a couple of minutes, I’ll be out of this room. In a couple of minutes, I’ll be out on the street, holding Don Antonio’s hand, in my new clothes, waiting for the car to come and pick me up.
I’ll be with my angel.
XXXVI
Carmen had stopped near a doorway, the entrance to one of the most opulent apartment buildings on Via Toledo, just before the Largo della Carità.
“The son I never had. I don’t know why I formed such a strong bond with the boy. I could have picked a younger child, a . . . healthier child, a child without defects. I could have picked a little girl, one I could teach good manners to and dress up like a doll. Lots of women do it, you know, Commissario. I have plenty of girlfriends who have a favorite, a child on whom they lavish their maternal instincts, as a kind of release. But I wasn’t looking for a toy, and in fact, Tettè wasn’t one.”
Ricciardi remembered the exchange of white envelopes and asked:
“I noticed that Don Antonio approached you, at the hospital and also at the end of the funeral service. He told me that he was worried you might stop coming to see the other boys, now that Tettè is dead. Is that true?”
Carmen smiled bitterly. Her blind grief was slowly giving way to dull melancholy, a process with which Ricciardi was all too familiar. The melancholy would take a long, long time to ebb away; and it might never go away entirely.
“Money. All Don Antonio cares about is money, do you think I don’t know that? I know it very well; but I don’t care. I have much more money than I need. And as you said yourself, at least he’s doing something for these children. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to go back to the parish. I’m not sure I could stand to see that place at the desk without . . . ”
She burst into tears again. A few passersby turned to stare: her black dress was indicative of a recent loss, and so people exchanged looks of commiseration. Carmen recovered and went on.
“I’ll never love a child again, Commissario. I know it. I would caress his head, and he’d press it against my hand, so that he wouldn’t miss a second of it. I’ll never be able to caress another child as long as I live.”
Ricciardi felt a great surge of pity for the woman, deprived first by nature and later by cruel fate of the one feeling she dreamed of experiencing.
“Signora, you shouldn’t talk about it now, with this loss so fresh in your mind. You should wait; on this point I have to agree with Don Antonio. There are so few people who do anything for these lost children. You can’t give it up.”
Carmen wasn’t listening. She was reliving her memories.
“I had bought him a sailor’s suit. When I went to get him for our outings I asked Don Antonio to dress him in it. He was a sight to behold, and so happy. I understood from the fact that the clothes never showed any signs of wear that they only let him wear them to go out with me. How ca
n it have happened, Commissario? Could he really have been so hungry that he ate rat bait? Wouldn’t he have said something to me? I’d have given him anything he wanted.”
Ricciardi shook his head.
“I don’t know, Signora. I’m trying to figure it out myself. Earlier, I was talking with Dr. Modo who performed the . . . the necessary examinations of the child’s corpse. He found many marks, bruises, and contusions. Nothing dating to the time of death, though, or immediately before it.”
Carmen opened her eyes wide.
“I didn’t have the courage to see him dead, Commissario. Eleonora told me . . . she was scandalized. She said that it was horrible, to torment the poor body of a dead child like that. I . . . I don’t know what to say about it, to tell the truth. I can’t even believe that I’ll never see him again. But tell me, what kind of marks? What were they, these injuries that he had?”
“No, Signora, not full-fledged injuries. Let’s just say, marks of abuse. For instance, someone had taken him by the throat and choked him, a couple of days before his death.”
The woman raised her gloved hand to her mouth, as if to stifle a scream.
“Really? By the neck . . . then someone wanted to kill him? That means his death could have been . . . oh my God!”
Ricciardi held up a hand, as if to put a halt to that chain of thought.
“No, no, Signora. That’s not how it is. I repeat, his death was absolutely accidental. There are no signs of involuntary ingestion. Tettè meant to eat them; he just didn’t know they were poisoned rat bait. But what I’d like to know from you is whether he told you about any kind of mistreatment recently. Any fights, or violent quarrels. In other words, if there could have been someone who had it in for him.”
Carmen tried to remember.
“I know that life at the parish wasn’t easy, certainly. He didn’t like to talk about it; perhaps he was afraid that I’d lodge some complaint with Don Antonio and that there would be retaliations against him. The other boys made fun of his stammer, they took it out on him because he was the smallest, the most defenseless. One time there was a bruise on his face, but he refused to tell me what had happened; he said he tripped and fell but I didn’t believe him. So I told the parish priest and he promised to look into it, but I never heard back from him.”
Ricciardi took advantage of the opportunity:
“Did he ever tell you about the other people in his life and the things he did? For example, about his apprenticeship; about the sexton, about Don Antonio himself; whether he ever went anywhere in particular, or frequented some establishment or other, I don’t know, with that junk seller, Cosimo Capone, or anyone else?”
Carmen ran a trembling hand over her eyes and tried to remember.
“I don’t know, really. Right now, I’d say no . . . It hurt me to think of him left to his own devices, and he knew that, so after a while he stopped telling me things. That man, the junk seller to whom he was apprenticed, for example: one day I happened to see them out together. I saw Tettè first; I felt so sorry for him, he was so tattered, with that little dog of his. But he was smiling; he didn’t strike me as unhappy. The man was odd, dressed in a ragged old tailcoat and a dented hat. I think he was reciting a poem, and the people around him were laughing. Well, I left to keep Tettè from seeing me. I knew how much he cared about being clean and nicely dressed when we saw each other. Still, he didn’t strike me as a bad man, and again, Tettè was smiling.”
Ricciardi insisted on the point:
“And aside from his rounds with the junk seller, did he go anywhere else? For instance, do you know if he went anywhere at night?”
Carmen furrowed her brow and tried to remember.
“No, Commissario. That’s the oddest thing of all: the thought of Tettè going out at night strikes me as absurd. He didn’t like the dark; he was afraid of it. I can’t imagine him out on the streets on one of these rainy nights, with thunder and lightning. And in any case, not anywhere strange, places he didn’t usually go. My God, Commissario, I can’t stand to think about it: that he’s dead, and that perhaps his death could have been prevented.”
Ricciardi decided that it was time to put an end to that conversation. The woman seemed to be on the brink of a nervous breakdown.
“Signora, let’s stop talking about it, for now. You’re exhausted, you need to get some rest. If anything should occur to you, you’ll find Brigadier Maione at police headquarters. I’m going to be out for a few days, but he’ll know how to get hold of me.”
Carmen nodded, still pensive, and walked toward the entrance of the building. Then she turned around and came back.
“There is one thing I want to tell you, Commissario. Perhaps you’re thinking that if I loved him as much as I say I did, I should have adopted Tettè and brought him to live with me.”
“Signora, I . . . ”
The woman interrupted him, raising her gloved hand.
“I know that you have to be thinking it. I think it myself. And I meant to do it, as God is my witness. But you should know that my husband is ill, very ill. His sickness has rendered him a complete invalid, and to bring a child home, in these conditions, would have meant doing him harm.”
Ricciardi became uncomfortable as she confided these details.
“Signora, I beg of you: I have no right to have an opinion, or to judge. I only want to understand whether there is anything, in the deplorable death of this child, that can possibly explain it. And that’s all.”
Carmen nodded.
“But I’ll be damned for all time, Commissario. I’ll be damned by the thought that if he’d been with me, that night, and not abandoned to his fate, right now Tettè would probably be alive. And I’d still have had a chance at happiness.”
She turned and walked away, carrying with her an immense burden of grief. Ricciardi felt pity for her, because he knew that what she’d said was true.
XXXVII
Seven days earlier, Friday, October 23
Tettè lets go of Don Antonio’s hand and climbs into the car. He closes his eyes halfway: the smell of the leather upholstery, the hot motor oil, the gasoline. The roar of the speeding car, the light breeze from the window.
Ciao, amore mio, says his angel. He smiles at her, head over heels in love. He adores every instant that he spends with her, wherever they are, wherever they go. He feels a pang of regret for having left the dog behind, but he knows he understands because he explained it to him: it’s just a matter of minutes, he whispered into the dog’s ear as he petted him, an hour or two at most.
She strokes his hair, he holds the cap in his hand. Where do you want to go? she asks him. Would you like a yummy pastry? Yes, he replies. Yes, of course.
He thinks to himself that the other boys never have moments like this one. They dream of moments like this one. One of the first times he went out, they asked him to tell them about it: come on, you fool of a cacaglio, tell us where you went with Signora Carmen. And he wished he could have told them, but the serpent rose up out of his stomach and he just couldn’t do it; so they beat him up, the twins holding him down and Saverio kicking him in the belly, Amedeo laughing. But Cristiano left the room, so he didn’t have to watch.
Tettè likes Cristiano. He thinks that they could even be friends, if only Tettè were able to talk. Cristiano’s the only one who protects Tettè sometimes, the only one who intervenes.
Ever since that time, whenever they go out together, he asks the angel to let him take something back with him, a pastry, some cookies, a piece of candy. That way he can give it to them, they’ll eat it, and no one will hit him.
All of them seem to hate him, because his angel loves him. But since each of them gets something in return, they seem to leave him be, let him have this thing, and they don’t beat him to a pulp or say something false, something bad to her.
As the car pulls up in front of the p
astry shop and comes to a stop, Tettè thinks back to what Nanni, the sexton, said to him. He thinks about this bad thing that’s happening, this secret that he never wanted, and the fact that if his angel ever found out, according to what Nanni told him, she’d never want to see him again.
Tettè could lose everything. He’d even lose the dog, and he’s crazy about that dog, the dog is the only friend he has. But he’d never give up the time he spends with his angel. Never.
Now they’re in the pastry shop, the proprietor bows to them, he entrusts them to the care of a waiter who leads them to a nice little table. The angel asks hims what he wants, and he points to a cream-filled pastry.
He eats, but he doesn’t finish because he can’t eat it all. His angel laughs, she says but how can it be that you’re so hungry, you’re so skinny, and yet you eat like a baby bird. He laughs: like a baby bird! He begs his angel to have them wrap up the half pastry that’s left over so he can take it back to the other boys. She is moved, and full of tenderness she says you’re so good to think of other children less fortunate than you. Tettè thinks: that’s right, and plus that way no one will beat me like a drum at the Festival of Piedigrotta.
He thinks that maybe he can even save a little piece for the dog, but he’ll have to find a new place to hide it, now that they know about the loose brick in the wall.
His angel asks him all the usual questions. How are you? How are they treating you at the parish? Is anyone hurting you? What about the junk seller?
What can Tettè say? Should he risk ruining these moments, so longed for, so dreamt of? Should he speak of the hatred, the mockery, the pranks? Isn’t it better, Tettè thinks, to keep the two lives separate, to enjoy these moments of pure heaven?
No. He shakes his head and smiles. Everything’s all right, my angel.
Everything’s all right, as long as you’re with me.
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