Day of the Dead

by Maurizio de Giovanni

  He raised his hand to wave, but stopped mid-gesture when he saw the look of absolute horror on Ricciardi’s face. It was over in an instant: the car shot off, leaving a trail of mud and exhaust. Maione felt his heart race furiously in his chest, and he responded to the impulse of the moment. He squeezed Lucia’s arm, murmured that he’d join her afterward at Luca’s grave, and set off at a dead run toward the taxi stand.

  There you are, thought Ricciardi. At last, there you are.

  For the first time since he’d become aware of the Deed, the name he gave his peculiar ability to perceive the grief of the dead who were killed, he had sought it out instead of fleeing from it.

  He’d tried to explain the absence of Tettè from all the places he might reasonably have expected or hoped to find him; he’d walked the same streets the boy frequented, the same dark vicoli and alleys. And now, just when he’d given up the hunt, just when he’d decided to set his soul at rest and stop worrying, here he was, in all the atrocity of a slow, painful death.

  The boy was contorted in excruciating convulsions, which forced him to straighten and then fold over at the waist continuously; his eyelids were pulled back and his eyes were showing the white of the corneas; he was grinding his teeth from the tremendous suffering caused by the poison. Yet at the same time, a sweet, loving phrase kept issuing from his lips: thank you for the cookies. I love you, Mamma, you know that: you’re my angel.

  As was often the case, the greatest horror of all lay in the contrast between the contortions of the body at its moment of extreme suffering and the dead boy’s last delicate, loving thought. Ricciardi couldn’t seem to tear his eyes away from Tettè’s ghost, and from the terrible implications of seeing him there of all places, and of the phrase that he continued to repeat.

  He turned to look at the woman.

  He turned to look at the killer.

  LVIII

  It had once again started to rain. A peal of thunder had shaken the air and a violent gust of rain slammed down onto the pavement.

  Carmen was a nervous, jerky driver, and she paid no attention to the slippery surface of the road. She seemed lost in other thoughts, which drew her far away.

  Ricciardi wondered what could possibly have driven her to such an act. Why had she done it? Suddenly he felt a terrible weariness come over him, and after the brief cease-fire that the fever had accorded him, it was back, and worse than ever. The commissario’s soul was filled with the dead boy’s suffering and sorrow, his last dying hope, all the love he’d felt for the woman who’d killed him.

  Without thinking about the words he was saying, he murmured softly:

  “Thank you for the cookies. I love you, Mamma, you know that: you’re my angel.”

  He couldn’t even be sure if he’d really said it, or if he’d just imagined he had. But Carmen jerked in her seat as if she’d been bitten by a snake. She turned to look in terror into the back seat, and then gazed, aghast, at the commissario. The car swerved dangerously, knocking a handcart standing by the side of the road into a ditch, but then miraculously returned to the road. The woman didn’t even think of slowing down. In fact, she jammed her foot down hard on the accelerator.

  And, through tears and shrieks of sorrow, she began to tell her story.

  So you knew all along, then. You knew. I realized it immediately, when I first saw you at the funeral: somehow you’d figured it out, that he hadn’t just died by accident. And now you’re here with me, to hear me confess it, and to take me down to hell.

  Because I know, I know who you are: you’re the devil. With those unblinking eyes of yours, that pale face, with death all around you. I know, I know who you are.

  But I’m not going with you to hell, and you know why? Because I’m already familiar with hell. I’ve lived there and I live there still, in hell. Do you know, devil, what it’s like to live with a lunatic? Do you know that, before locking him up, ashamed that word might get out, we used to pretend that he was normal? He’d stub out cigarettes on my arms; he’d wake me up at night and beat me bloody; he waited for me around every corner, in the dark, and lunged at me, fists clenched. He used to say that I was his enemy, a monster. But the real monster was him.

  I lived like that for five years. How bad can you make hell for me, devil, how much worse than what I’d already lived through? But I put up with it. I put up with it all.

  Because, you see, devil, I was born poor. I put up with privations because my father gambled away every penny we had, because my mother didn’t know how to do anything but cry. And now that I finally had everything I’d ever dreamed of—wealth, comfort, status—I wasn’t going to let anyone take that away from me.

  That’s right. The little boy was my son.

  Born of an illicit affair, the child of a love without a future, two people writhing together in the dark. We made love while the lunatic was screaming and pounding at the door of his cell. We made love while everyone else thought we were hunting for the cure, as if there could be a cure for that monster’s madness.

  I really did think I was infertile. I’d tried, with all the treatments available, back when the monster still seemed to be a normal man. Nothing. But with him, with the doctor, I got pregnant right away. He took fright, he was as penniless as I was, all his money was in his wife’s name. A lovely pair of paupers we were, rich only with other people’s money.

  We came up with a spa cure for the lunatic, far away, in Tuscany; Matteo prescribed it for him. Did you know that, devil, that his name was Matteo? So now, do you understand why my child bore that name?

  I gave birth all alone, assisted by the chambermaid in a hotel. Like an animal. Like a stray bitch.

  After that, what else could I do? I went back to my life, to my gilded cage. I placed the child with a family in the country, people I secretly sent money, but who didn’t even know my name. Then the woman died of typhus, and the man began to drink. I couldn’t leave him there anymore.

  I searched for and found Don Antonio, that slimy, money-hungry priest. I paid the child, every month, plenty of money; but at least I could see him, I could practically raise him myself. I made the best of it, teaching school to those other bastard children, as long as I could be near him: near my son.

  I couldn’t keep him with me, you understand that, devil? It would have been easy for the monster’s family to put two and two together: that wastrel of a brother, that coward who wants to get his hands on my money, now that the monster is finally dying, now that I finally have a chance to live my own life, a decent life.

  And now he’s found the letters.

  I thought I’d destroyed them; I didn’t remember that I still had them somewhere. He came to see me, he threatened me. I gave him a little something, but that was as much as I was willing to give him. So he followed me, and he found Tettè.

  I knew everything, you understand, devil? He never stuttered with me. It was only with me, with his mamma, that he could talk. And the things he didn’t tell me, I understood on my own. I knew all about those little bastards, the way they tormented him, what they put him through. I knew about the priest, the sexton, and the dark broom closet they used for punishments. I knew about the dog.

  He’d told me about the poisoned tidbits in the food warehouse, how afraid he was that his dog might eat them. And toward the end he’d told me about the visits from my debauched brother-in-law, Edoardo.

  The fear of losing everything obsessed me. If anyone found out that he was my son, a little orphan left to rot in a parish church, wallowing in filth and hunger, I’d have lost everything. They’d have tossed me out on the streets—perhaps they’d have thrown me in jail. What could I do? The child told me about the relentless demands, the questions that the damned man with the limp kept asking. It was only a matter of time; everything was coming to an end.

  I had waited. I had been waiting for the lunatic to die and finally make me the mistr
ess of all my wealth. Then I’d take the boy home to live with me, I’d give him everything I’d never had as a child; but now I’d been found out, and now I could no longer afford to wait.

  For days and days, I was in a state of utter despair. I couldn’t make up my mind. I had to choose between remaining rich and lonely or becoming poor and desperate, with a mentally deficient child to raise, and no skills, no way to make it on my own.

  I just couldn’t make up my mind. So I decided to leave it to fate. I baked him four cookies, two of them poisoned, and two safe. I made up a wrapper of cookies and took them to him. He loved it when I made him things with my own hands. I thought to myself: if he doesn’t pick the poisoned cookies, that’ll mean we’re destined to go forward together, to fight side by side, even if we’re left with nothing but each other.

  We’ll fight the man with the limp, we’ll fight the lunatic, we’ll take on the whole world.

  But he grabbed the poisoned cookies without hesitation. I watched him eat them eagerly, smiling at me, right here, in the backseat of this car. And he said those words. The words that no one knows but you—because you’re the devil—and me. And I’m his mother.

  That’s all he said.

  Then he died.

  LIX

  Ricciardi listened to Carmen’s story as if in a nightmare. His head was pounding painfully; the fever was devouring him.

  And as if that weren’t enough, the incessant hammering sound of Tettè’s voice rang in his mind, piercing his soul, without passing through his ears. Thank you for the cookies. I love you, Mamma, you know that: you’re my angel.

  He’d seen so many things in his time: sons murdering mothers, brothers slaughtering each other, wives killing their husbands as they slept. But a mother who’d abandoned her own child to his fate and then poisoned him, letting him die an atrocious death, writhing in nightmarish pain—that was beyond his wildest imaginings.

  Even without looking back, as the car hurtled at reckless speed up a steep dirt road leading to Posillipo, the wheels sliding in the mud, he still could sense the contractions of Tettè’s body, the convulsions induced by the strychnine. And at the same time, he could sense his words of love. I love you, Mamma, you know that: you’re my angel.

  It dawned on him that the woman was referring to him as the devil. He almost laughed at the irony of the thing, until he realized that she might well be right. His otherworldly perceptions, the Deed: it was possible they came directly from the chief demon, might be a sign of his own damnation. Absurdly, he thought of Don Pierino, and his simple faith made up of a blend of truth and lies. Here you are, then, Padre: one angel and one devil, sitting side by side in the same car hurtling through the rain at breakneck speed. But you tell me which is which.

  As the woman wept and muttered her delirious rantings, Ricciardi understood that their fate was sealed: Carmen was no longer looking at the road ahead of them, and she seemed to be jerking the steering wheel at random as she pressed the accelerator to the floorboards. Sluggishly, as if through a headful of drifting vapors, the commissario found himself thinking that at least they were now out of the populated districts. There was no one in sight, the road running straight uphill high above the coast was deserted; if nothing else, at least there were no other innocent lives involved.

  Behind him, his voice gentle and unhampered, Tettè was once again thanking his angel.

  The last thought, Ricciardi reflected. My last thought, so that if someone like me were to happen past, he’d hear it. My last thought, a legacy, a memory. A dead man’s last thought, his farewell to a life he never really lived. That’s my sin.

  The car hurtled into a tight curve. The rain poured down furiously; visibility would have been limited even if Carmen’s eyes hadn’t been blurred with tears, her eyelids half shut. She said: child, my sweet child; forgive me, forgive your mother.

  Around the curve, in the middle of the road, motionless, sat a dog on its haunches, still as a statue. Its eyes were leveled straight at the car that came swerving, tires spinning uselessly in the rain-slick mud, around the curve like a snarling beast. The dog didn’t move. Carmen shouted Tettè’s name and yanked the wheel hard in the direction of the railing, toward the sea far below, toward the sheer cliff.

  As the car was hurtling toward the void, next to the woman who was sobbing out the name of the son she’d murdered, with the ghost of the little boy calling his mother his angel from behind him, Ricciardi squeezed his eyes tight shut and thought of Enrica, with every fiber of his being, trying to ensure that his thoughts would be there if someone could hear them, so someone could convey them to her: love, oh my love; what a pity, what a shame.

  LX

  Rain accompanied the silence of the evening of the Day of the Dead, falling heavy in the courtyard of the Pellegrini hospital.

  The air, which was normally full of the cries of the vendors at the neighboring market, was now still, as if expectant. Maione shivered under the entrance awning. He wanted to know, but he was afraid.

  For the hundredth time, he pulled out his pocket watch, looked at it, and put it away: it had been almost six hours. Commissario Ricciardi had been fighting for his life for six hours now, in Dr. Modo’s operating room.

  It’s all my fault, he thought. I knew that he’d go on investigating, that he wouldn’t stop; that he’d already made up his mind not to stop. I knew it, but I left him alone. If I’d been there with him, none of this would have happened: he wouldn’t have gotten into that woman’s car; he wouldn’t have been with her on that absurd, desperate chase to Posillipo; he wouldn’t have been in the car when it flew into the empty air.

  For what seemed like the hundredth time, he saw himself in the taxi, pulling up too late; he saw the car wheels still spinning in the furious downpour, the overturned vehicle teetering on the brink, held back from that nightmarish final plunge only by a few stubborn shrubs; he saw himself extracting Ricciardi’s body from the wreckage with the help of the taxi driver and a passing coachman; he saw the dead woman, her body half ejected through the shattered windshield of her automobile, blood and brains oozing out of her broken skull under the driving rain. He ran a hand over his face. The rush to the hospital, the doctor’s surprised and grief-stricken expression. And that had just been the beginning of this nightmare, this endless wait.

  He’d sent a local boy to summon his eldest boy, who’d already returned home from the cemetery without news of his father, and through him he’d gotten word to Lucia and police headquarters. Then he’d ordered a patrolman to go get Rosa and bring her to the hospital.

  He went back into the waiting room where the woman sat. She’d been accompanied to the hospital by a young woman whom Maione remembered as a neighbor of the commissario’s, someone they’d questioned once in another case. Colombo, Enrica Colombo. That’s how she’d introduced herself.

  She was waxen, overwrought; she was supporting Rosa, who looked as if she’d been carved in marble. Sitting still, glassy-eyed, her lips whispering a prayer, her rosary in her hands.

  Baroness, I know that you can hear me. You remember, you always heard me, even when I was sure you were sleeping; even with your eyes closed, you smiled and you’d tell me things in response to the things I was thinking. I never knew how you did it.

  If you can hear me, Baroness, then you know where I am and what I’m doing here. We’re in the hospital, because they say that your son, the signorino, is dying. I don’t know if he’s really dying. Those aren’t things I’d know how to judge for myself. I’m ignorant and I don’t even know how to read, I only know my numbers. And I don’t know if you’re mad at me, Baroness, because you entrusted your son to me, and I haven’t been able to keep him safe. But I will tell you that he’s my life, and that if he dies, I’ll surely die too.

  At the start, you gave me this responsibility, and I gladly took it. He wasn’t an easy child, and he isn’t easy now. He’s hardh
eaded, stubborn, and you’ve always got to do things the way he says; he’s thirty-one years old and he’s all alone, leaving aside the fact that I’m an old woman and I’m going to die one day soon and he’ll be left all alone like he is now. Even now that he’s come to know this poor girl who’s sitting here beside me, and who’s insisted on coming with me through all that rain to the hospital, who rushed out into the street when she saw the patrolmen who came to get me, and even now he won’t make his mind up to come out and tell us that he’s fine and that he’ll live to be a hundred.

  Baroness, you’re in the other world, the world of truth, and you can speak with the living and the dead, so try to find him wherever he is and tell him to come back to us, that he can’t die now, that it’s not true that he’s alone; there are people who love him, and they couldn’t go on living without him.

  Tell him, Baroness. Tell him that he doesn’t dare play this miserable trick on me, a poor old woman. That in all the years of making me lose my temper, I’ve never once raised my hand to him. Tell him for me that if he dares to do this to me, I’ll fix him so he’ll remember it for all eternity, whether it’s in this world or the next.

  Tell him, Baroness; tell him to come back to me.

  Enrica was sitting by herself, in the shadows. The hospital waiting room was cold and the rain was hammering against the plate glass of the front entrance, determined to come in and cover with a film of water all the emotions and all the suffering that sat waiting there.

  When she saw the two patrolmen approaching Ricciardi’s apartment building, she’d given a name and a color to the anguish that had been persecuting her since the night before. Something had happened. She knew it. She saw Rosa leave, bundled into an overcoat, with a scarf on her head; even from a distance and through the rain, she could tell from her pallor that she was distraught and terrified.