Glass Souls

by Maurizio de Giovanni

  Bianca nodded sadly.

  “You don’t understand what I’m doing here. And I understand that. Maybe I don’t understand myself, really.”

  She got up and put her hat on her head. She was clamping her lips together, as if trying to keep them from quavering.

  “Still, please believe me when I tell you that I’m not one of these little ladies who go around denying reality just because it’s different than the way they’d like it to be.”

  She turned and walked toward the door. When she had her hand on the doorknob, she turned and leveled her fierce eyes at Ricciardi’s. He couldn’t help but notice how pretty she was.

  “You see, Commissario, it might not count for much, I’m sorry to say. But I know for certain that my husband is innocent. Still, no one will listen to me. Have a good day.”

  And with that, she turned and left.

  Maione and Ricciardi exchanged a baffled glance, speechless for several seconds. Then the commissario briefly nodded his head in the direction of the door and the brigadier took off like a bloodhound. Less than a minute later, he came back in with the contessa.

  Ricciardi stood up.

  “Signora, you said that you’re certain your husband committed no crime. Would you be so kind, if you please, as to tell us the source of this certainty?”

  Bianca lifted her veil and looked calmly at Ricciardi.

  “I never said that my husband hadn’t committed crimes. He’s a gambler, he’s failed to pay both debts and taxes, and he has surely robbed and defrauded friends and relatives, to say nothing of me. He is a man with a number of bad habits and he seems incapable of shaking them. But he didn’t murder Ludovico Piro that night.”

  Ricciardi leaned forward, placing both hands palm-down on the desktop.

  “And how do you know that, if I may ask?”

  “Simple. He was home. He was home, fast asleep, for a change.”

  Ricciardi shook his head.

  “Contessa, forgive me, but I continue not to understand. Why didn’t you just say so at the time?”

  The feverish conversation had put a bit of color in Bianca’s cheeks, and now she looked much younger.

  “But I did say so. At first, very calmly, then sobbing, shouting, angrily, stubbornly, firmly, and even sweetly. But it was all no good, no one was willing to listen. Until, finally, here I am.”

  Maione shifted his considerable weight from one police-issue boot to the other.

  “I think I remember something of the sort, the newspapers wrote about it. Commissa’, we were already working on the case about the professor, at the polyclinic, and when you’re in the middle of an investigation, you don’t want to know about anything else, but the whole city was talking about it. You were the only one, Conte’, who insisted it wasn’t your husband, isn’t that right?”

  The woman nodded. She seemed exhausted.

  “Yes. I was the only one. And I was also the only one who could do so, since I alone knew where my husband had been that night.”

  Ricciardi broke in, flatly.

  “Not you alone. According to what you say, your husband also knew that. And yet . . . ”

  “And yet he confessed,” put in Bianca, beating him to it. “And he filled out that confession with numerous details. But the medical examiner said very clearly that Piro died during the night, and that night my husband was at home, dead drunk, in his bed. Still, yes, he confessed, and he hasn’t retracted his statement yet, after more than three months behind bars.”

  “Why would he ever do such a thing, Contessa? Why would a man who, according to what you tell me, burns his candle at both ends, indulging freely in bad habits and pleasures, invent a story that might condemn him to spend the rest of his life in prison?”

  They stood there, staring each other in the eye, the violet in the green without blinking, expressions cold and hard, resembling one another slightly without realizing it.

  “I don’t know,” the woman murmured at last in an almost unintelligible voice. “I just don’t know, dammit. I ask myself all the time, every hour, every minute, but I have no answer. Everyone thinks I’ve lost my mind. My family, my friends, and even his lawyer all think I’m crazy and do their best to talk me out of repeating this story, and instead to throw myself on the mercy of the court in the trial that’s about to begin, which they expect will be short, with a predetermined verdict.”

  Ricciardi ran a hand over his forehead.

  “Let’s see if I’ve got this straight: the investigation is closed, there’s a man who’ll be facing trial soon, who’s been in jail for some time, who has confessed and confirmed his confession, providing details and particulars on how the murder took place. Everyone is in agreement, including his lawyer, but you alone insist that things went differently. And in all these months, you’ve repeated your version of events to anyone who would listen, but no one believed you. Is that right?”

  Bianca lifted her face, proudly.

  “Yes, that’s right. And one thing you’ve forgotten to say, Commissario, is that it’s the truth. The truth, pure and simple.”

  “Can I ask why you chose to come to me?”

  “Because when we first met you struck me as a person who digs deeper than mere surface appearances. Who has no prejudices and who doesn’t fall back on the most convenient solutions. And also because I have no one else to turn to.”

  They remained silent for what seemed like an interminable amount of time. Bianca was clutching hard at the handle of her tattered handbag. Maione looked at his feet. Ricciardi listened to Rosa’s voice as she told him, as a boy, to answer all requests for help he received in life. At least respond.

  At last, he nodded.

  “I’ll ask around a little. But I’m not promising anything, let that be clear. Not a thing.”

  VII

  Ever since she had returned home from the summer colony on Ischia at the end of August, Enrica Colombo had feared the arrival of only one moment: the preparations for bottling the tomatoes.

  Because up till that moment, she had been fairly confident of her ability to sidestep the interrogation to which she was sure to be subjected by her mother and her sister Susanna, their efforts backed by that cursed flock of gossips, the neighbor women.

  In time, she had become very skilled at pretending to be otherwise occupied and to dodging the interest of others, using as an excuse the countless petty activities of the day. Moreover, school would soon start up again and she needed to look after the summer projects that had been assigned to her younger siblings: inasmuch as she had a teaching certificate that responsibility fell to her, and it allowed her to sidestep the topic when it veered into dangerous territory, by pretending to have to break off the conversation because Luigino or Francesca had this composition to finish or that geometry problem to solve. It was all useful in her efforts to avoid the beady-eyed scrutiny of the women in her family, who were ravenously eager for news about Enrica’s mysterious German suitor, a figure who was beginning to take on an absurdly mythological dimension.

  She might even have been able to keep Manfred’s existence a secret from almost everyone, had it not been for the methodical stream of letters that began to arrive, starting three days after her return home, every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, at a precise rate of dispiriting regularity. Enrica found the perfect operation of the postal service to be quite irritating, and in her mind she silently cursed poor Signor Egidio, the middle-aged, flat-footed postman who delivered mail throughout the quarter.

  Impossible, therefore, to keep her mother from intercepting them: the woman had a gift, a sixth sense that allowed her to predict in advance the little man’s arrival, and to be waiting magically next to the wooden postboxes in the building’s atrium, to take them in her own hands. Please, please, Signor Egidio, don’t bother to put on your reading spectacles, I’ll just rifle through your bag myself.
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  Nor had she felt up to the idea of writing Manfred and asking him to redirect his correspondence elsewhere, such as to her father’s haberdashery, for example. It struck her as somehow excessively conniving, and it would give him an impression of her and her family that she found distasteful. Moreover, it was unnecessary for the moment, because her mother, with some considerable effort, seemed capable of resisting the temptation to open those ochre-yellow envelopes, with the address filled out in a strange, Gothic-style handwriting, and with the exotic return address neatly compiled on the back flap.

  The ceremony that accompanied her mother’s delivery was quite annoying. Maria Colombo would walk from one end of the apartment to the other, from the front door all the way to the room where Enrica sat waiting, like a ship sailing majestically across the bay, foghorns blasting, to the wharf where it would finally tie up, waving the envelope like a pennant fluttering in the breeze. Along the way, she collected a small following consisting of the housekeeper, her younger daughter with the toddler grandson in her arms, and the younger boys, until she finally fetched up in her room, extending the envelope to Enrica as if she were bestowing some honorary title. Then she would stand there, arms crossed and with an irksome little smile on her face, in the hope that Enrica might open and read it, ideally aloud, in the presence of the entire motley crew. Of course, Enrica had no intention of doing any such thing; she would tuck the letter away in the pocket of her dressing gown and calmly resume whatever she had been doing, humming a song and making a great show of her absolute lack of urgency to learn the news that had just arrived from the town of Prien, in Bavaria, as was clearly written on the back flap.

  When her audience finally resigned itself and went back to its proper pursuits, Enrica would withdraw to her bedroom and begin reading. Manfred wrote better Italian than he spoke, unhindered by the harsh pronunciation and the overemphatic consonants; his lengthy stays on the island of Ischia and a heartfelt fondness for a culture so abounding in art and beauty had led him to read and study extensively, and he seemed happy to be able to carry on a correspondence in that language. With an affectionate tone, in his frequent but not over-long missives he told her about the profound changes in his everyday life.

  The National Socialist Party had won the federal elections. For Manfred, an activist from the earliest days, this outcome had opened an array of important opportunities. He aspired to a position in the rebuilt armed forces, the Reichswehr, or else in the diplomatic corps where Hitler would soon start making changes. He was attracted by the clear ideas and the desire to redeem the country’s national pride that emerged from the heartfelt and frequent speeches that the party leader often delivered in public, and which he himself often attended, as an army major. When he wasn’t writing about that, he’d tell her about life in the lakeshore town where he lived, a place full of flowers, often battered by sudden downpours: solitary bicycle outings, calisthenics, lunches with his elderly parents. And he’d also express his desire to see her again, of course, to reestablish the magic of their early meetings.

  Whenever those very regular lines took her back to her memories of certain moments, Enrica would feel a struggle in her heart that was starting to become very familiar to her. A mixture of unease, guilt, excitement, pleasure, and a subtle sorrow: like an elaborate, complex cake whose individual ingredients you can try to guess, but which still has a strange and mysterious flavor, so different from the sum of its parts.

  What did Enrica really want? She couldn’t lie to herself. She had liked being embraced by those strong and solid hands, savoring the taste of those lips in the moonlight, in the seething perfume of that summer filled with sea breezes and dreams. But if she thought about her life, if she imagined herself turning to look at her man while she walked with him on the street, or worrying about someone as she turned to look out a window and awaited his return, it wasn’t Manfred that came to mind.

  It was as if she were trapped in an ongoing struggle inside her own body. Her heart pounded every time she left her home, at the thought she might be confronted by those green eyes. And she had heard about the death of Rosa, a woman she had become very fond of and who had been her only bridge, her only link to the world of a strange and solitary man she had fallen deeply in love with. But by now she was certain of it: That man didn’t want her. If he had wanted her, he would have reached out to her, and she would have made sure he had no trouble finding her. And so, it was now up to her to answer herself, reply to the crucial question: what did she want from life?

  A family. Children. A home of her own. Someone to take care of, someone to take care of her. Nothing transcendental, nothing any different, really, from what, she had to imagine, were the desires of any young woman. Manfred with the confident smile and the strong hands, Manfred so full of certainties, Manfred who had painted her portrait while she was taking the children to the beach, Manfred who was a widower and was thirty-eight years old and who therefore knew what it was a woman wants.

  Manfred who would take her far away.

  There was only one person at home who didn’t question her about what her “German fiancé,” as her brothers mockingly liked to call him, wrote her. A person who, in fact, put on a show of the utmost indifference to the matter in general, and who never asked her trick questions to try to get her to tip her hand. And yet, that person knew more about her than everyone else in her family put together.

  Giulio Colombo, Enrica’s father, would have had every right to delve into the matter of his daughter’s inner turmoil. He knew about Ricciardi, and—through the lengthy letters that, all summer long, she had been sending him directly at the haberdashery that he ran—he had been able to keep track of the developments in her relationship with Manfred. Moreover, he knew the place in the young woman’s heart that both one man and the other enjoyed. But precisely because of this knowledge, Giulio lacked the courage to ask her just what she meant to do, for the very simple reason that he had no idea what would be best for her.

  I have a soul of glass, thought Enrica. Fragile and transparent, ready to be filled with something lovely and colorful, and ready to shatter into a thousand pieces. She felt as if anyone at all could easily see what was happening inside of her, and she felt ashamed, as if she’d committed many wrongs. That was the real reason she said nothing about Manfred to her mother or her sister: for fear that they might be capable of seeing clearly, though the transparent surface of her eyes, that she liked him, certainly, and a great deal, but that she wasn’t in love with him. And she never would be, as long as she loved another man, who did not want her in return.

  But the last letter changed everything. The last letter carried important news, momentous enough to put her on the horns of a dilemma.

  With a certain sense of drama and with fatal timeliness, it had been delivered to her on that fateful day. The day that they were going to start bottling the tomato sauce.

  That was the kind of undertaking that involved entire nuclear families: in the case of the Colombos, it also dragged in the two Signorinas Lapenna, a pair of old maids well along in years who lived next door; the Barbatos; a childless Jewish couple; and the Greco family, a young widowed mother with three small children that everyone did their best to help out.

  The beer, wine, and soda pop bottles were collected and stored all year long, then painstakingly washed and dried, a task assigned to the younger girls and the little boys. The men were entrusted with the responsibility of finding, selecting, and buying the tomatoes from trusted peasants and farmers who could be relied upon for high quality. The transport of the crates of tomatoes was a job performed by laborers recruited in piazzas and on the street, and their arrival was greeted with jubilation by the children and gimlet-eyed wariness by the housekeepers, lest a certain amount of the product might “lose its way” in the process. They oversaw the “discard,” as the task of choosing the usable tomatoes was known, with the elimination of the ones that were too soft
or riddled with bruises, after which the select, chosen fruit was slow-cooked in a double boiler, and the stalks removed and carved out. This rather complicated part of the operation fell to the experienced hands of the mothers and the eldest daughters. Only after that was complete could they move on to the slow boil, the crushing, and the fine food mill, culminating in the decisive phase of canning proper.

  Throughout the entire process of canning and bottling, which was going to provide for the occupants of that floor of the apartment building for the rest of the year—raw material for the production of superfine ragús and marvelous eggplant Parmesans—the women remained alone for hours with nothing to do but chatter, with no escape from the work at hand save for momentary restroom breaks.

  Enrica felt like a defendant on trial, and what’s more, one who was guilty and facing a teetering stack of damning evidence. She knew that she was bound to be subjected to a withering hail of questions, and she had always been completely incapable of lying. This time, she would have no chance of dodging the questioning the way she usually did, by remaining silent and merely smiling, only to escape until the next occasion.

  For that matter, Manfred’s latest letter had been quite different in tone from the others that preceded it. His usual account of events in Germany had been replaced by an unmistakable enthusiasm for what he clearly considered a major piece of news.

  Standing in front of the mirror in her bedroom, while the court of women armed with wet rags and cork stoppers had already gathered in the apartment’s vast kitchen and were waiting for her so they could begin the inquisition, she asked herself once again what it was she really wanted. She wondered whether she truly desired to leave that window closed, never again to feel those feverish, suffering eyes upon her, peering deep into her soul of glass.

  She compressed her lips, tightly. She was determined not to cry. Manfred was coming, to the city she lived in, and he might be staying long enough to force her to deal with a potential future that she felt completely unprepared to take on. He asked her, in his letter, to arrange to invite him to dinner so that he could meet her family. He promised her promenades in the bright sunshine, arm in arm, and assured her that she would be at his side at receptions and dinners to which, as a member of the diplomatic corps of a great and allied nation—now even more closely allied than before—he was bound to be invited.