“Can I ask you a few questions?” he asked, cautiously.
“Certainly,” Papa replied on my behalf.
The cameraman lifted his equipment to his shoulder, and as if by magic, a small cluster of rubberneckers assembled.
“We now know for certain that your fiancée, Giovanna Barovier, was murdered,” he said, in a booming voice. For a moment he looked around, enjoying the effect his statement produced. “Is it true that the investigators questioned you at length?”
I looked sidewise at my father’s face. He hadn’t reacted a bit, and looked as confident as always.
I tried to imitate his poker face. “I’m sad to say that it’s true: Giovanna was murdered. It is also true that I was questioned on two separate occasions, and I am doing my best to help the investigators in any way I can.”
“Do you suspect anyone in particular?” the reporter drilled in.
“No. No one.”
“Do you think that the murder has anything to do with Alvise Barovier’s troubles with the law?”
“I doubt it. That’s an old piece of history, from fifteen years back.”
“Doesn’t it strike you as odd that your fiancée would be taking a bath at that time of the night? And how did the murderer get into the house? There are no signs of breaking and entering on doors or windows. I checked for myself.”
Within a few hours, the whole town would be wondering the same thing, and then everyone would learn about the seminal fluid. Francesco Visentin—a cuckold even before he could become a husband. I wanted to turn on my heel and walk away, but everyone was staring at me.
“I see that you know more about this matter than I do,” I complimented the journalist. “To tell the truth, I can’t answer your questions. I hope the investigators provide some answers soon.”
Beggiolin wasn’t satisfied. I could see it from the grimace of disappointment framed by his fashionable little goatee. “Giovanna let the murderer into her house; how many people could have expected access to her home in the middle of the night?”
He had painted me into a corner. Luckily my father intervened. He stood in front of the television camera, staring into the lens. “Our family is suffering immense pain right now. We ask that you respect our grief and our loss. Now it’s up to the investigators, who have our complete trust, to identify and arrest Giovanna’s killer.”
Theatrically, he shook Beggiolin’s hand, thanking him for the service he had rendered to the community, then he took me by the arm and we walked off, followed by the buzz of excited comments.
“I told you it was a bad idea to come to the piazza café for an espresso.”
“No. This is something we needed to do,” Papa whispered. “You have to get used to journalists and to gossip. Just never forget who you are, and everything will turn out fine.”
I shook off his arm and stepped away. “No, I don’t know who I am anymore,” I blurted. “In just one week I was supposed to marry Giovanna, but now she’s dead, and the man who killed her was her lover. You tell me who I am.”
“Lower your voice,” he warned. “You’re a Visentin, you’ll always be a Visentin. What matters now is getting you out of this mess with as little damage as possible.”
“What about Giovanna? Don’t you care about finding her killer?”
“More than anything else on earth,” he answered in a firm voice. “But we must take care to avoid being overwhelmed by the situation. Giovanna was cheating on you, her family’s unsavory past will come back to the surface. Everyone will be talking about us, and we have to go on living in this town.”
I wrapped my arms around him. “I can’t take it, Papa.”
“Buck up. I’m here, and I’ll never abandon you.”
I walked with him to the front door of his law office, then I went back home. I was rummaging in my pocket for the keys when I heard the unmistakable sound of a bicycle rattling along under the porticoes. In our town, bicycles are one of the most common means of transportation, and you learn from the earliest age to recognize all the variations on the sounds they make. I turned around. It was Carla. She was heading straight toward me. The bicycle was brand-new, and made in China. It was a copy of an old Italian Bianchi: a girl’s bike, black with gold trim and old-fashioned rod brakes. The front wheel grazed the tips of my shoes.
“Who killed Giovanna?” she demanded in a broken voice.
Her cheeks were red from the cold, her eyes swollen with weeping. She was clearly upset, on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
“Come inside.”
“No. I want to know who killed her.”
“I don’t know.”
“Was it you?”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Maybe she confessed that she had a lover and you couldn’t take it.”
So that’s who the mysterious witness was who had told the police all about Giovanna’s lover. I should have guessed. Carla and Giovanna were lifelong friends.
“Come inside, please. I need to know everything.”
“I don’t trust you,” she hissed.
I spread my arms in desolation. “Do you think I want to hurt you in some way? Don’t you understand that she was killed by her lover? Do you know who he was? What did Giovanna tell you about him?”
She opened her purse and pulled out a rumpled pack of cigarettes. She took one out and clamped it between her lips. Giovanna had been a smoker too.
I hadn’t smoked since I was at university and I couldn’t stand it when Giovanna smoked in the house or, worse, in the car. But I never said anything. I didn’t want to come off as the typical preachy ex-smoker, but most of all, I liked the smell and taste of the tobacco in her mouth when I kissed her. I would let my tongue wander over hers and then over her teeth and palate. I wondered if her lover liked that taste too. I felt a shiver run down my back. How many aspects of Giovanna had I shared with her killer?
Carla lit the cigarette and sucked hungrily at the smoke. “She told me about her lover the other morning. We were at the seamstress’s shop, trying her wedding dress for the final fitting. She was a wreck; she told me that she had decided to confess everything to you.”
“That’s all? She didn’t tell you anything else?”
Carla stared at me for a long time. She was uncertain whether or not to trust me. She dropped her cigarette butt on the ground and crushed it out with the heel of her shoe.
“She told me that she had become the slut of the man who had ruined her life. Those were her exact words.”
I stood there, petrified. I mulled those words over in my mind, in search of a possible meaning. But I couldn’t figure one out. They were only terrifying. Giovanna must have been in a state of complete despair to describe herself with such contempt.
“You don’t know anything else?”
Carla mounted her bicycle. “What about you? How much do you know?”
I watched as she pedaled away beneath the portico and then vanished around a curve.
On the evening news show, Beggiolin outdid himself. He managed to create an aura of mystery around the murder that would lure the television audience into watching Antenna N/E news until the case was fully resolved. Even though he didn’t say so explicitly, it was clear that the investigators were trying to establish my guilt or innocence.
I was unable to eat. I drained a couple of glasses of cognac and I knocked back a couple of sleeping pills on top of them. They were Giovanna’s sleeping pills. She frequently suffered from insomnia. I had always blamed her problems getting to sleep on the stress of her job and the tension of preparing for the wedding. But in reality, the reason that Giovanna couldn’t fall asleep was that she had become the slut of the man who had ruined her life. That phrase was stuck in my mind, driven in like a nail by a hammer, and when it came to the surface it caused a dull pain that left me panting and breathless.
Back at home I made another cup of coffee and began reading. The dailies had nothing more than what Beggiolin had already said on the news. But they had done interview after interview with ordinary people, from an elementary school teacher to a supermarket cashier. In the absence of any solid, fresh news, they had seized on her father’s past, asking the man in the street what he thought about how that old story had affected poor Giovanna Barovier. There were also a number of articles about me, but I wasted no time reading them. I put on my overcoat and left the house. The time had come to face Prunella’s pain and grief.
Prunella still lived in the villa that Alvise had built at the end of the sixties, one of the nicest homes in town, though with the passage of time it was slowly collapsing into ruin.
The front gate was open. The expansive garden was still in good condition. Prunella herself did the gardening. A woman whom I had never seen before opened the door when I knocked. She greeted me courteously and led me into the living room. There were a number of people seated on the old sofas, upholstered in leather that was worn but still shiny and presentable. They were all holding hands and praying. Prunella greeted me with a nod and continued praying with unabated fervor. A man who looked to be about forty invited me to join the group but I shook my head no. I left the living room and waited in an adjoining room. Prunella came in a few minutes later.
“They’re my friends from our prayer group,” she explained. “They’ve come to comfort me.”
She spread her arms in a gesture that struck me as excessive and theatrical. “Come to my arms, I beg you,” she said in a doleful voice, as if she were still praying. “We have lost our Giovanna,” she whispered, hugging me tight. “Now we must pray for her soul.”
I broke away from her embrace and looked at her directly. “Giovanna was murdered.”
“I know. Inspector Mele was here.”
“He suspects me of being the killer.”
Prunella caressed my cheek. “You’re innocent. I know that.”
“Giovanna had a lover.”
“I know that too. Carla told me.”
“But you don’t know who it was?”
“No.”
“Giovanna never told you anything about this?”
“She would come here for meals, she would go into her room and shut the door, to rest. She seemed happy to me.”
But she wasn’t. She had become the slut of the man who had ruined her life. I was tempted to ask Prunella if that phrase had any meaning for her, but I lacked the courage. That woman had been overwhelmed by a tsunami of grief and pain. She was resisting through pure faith.
“We’re going to rehearse the hymns for the funeral now,” she announced. “Do you want to join us?”
As I left the house I ran into Venerino Stoppa, known as Rino the Embalmer. He invariably carried a black plastic valise with an assortment of coffin catalogues.
“Tomorrow morning, the prosecutor’s office is releasing the corpse for the funeral,” he announced confidently.
I didn’t waste my breath asking him how he knew. Rino always knew things before anyone else. He was a true professional.
Soon I would see Giovanna again. For the last time. A quick visit to the morgue before the coffin was sealed forever. As I got into my car I wondered if I really wanted to see her again.
I had just started the engine when my cell phone rang. I felt a stab at my stomach. Giovanna had selected the ring tone a couple of days before she was murdered. She loved to change my ring tones, and there were times when I lost track so that, among the dozens of cell phones that crowded the court building, I often failed to recognize my own. It was Davide Trevisan.
“First of all, my condolences,” he began in dialect.
“Thanks.”
“I would have preferred to tell you in person, but I had to call you, because here in the piazza café there’s an unpleasant situation that concerns you.”
“I don’t understand.”
“That idiot Filippo has gulped down three Negronis in a row and now he’s making a speech. He says that you killed Giovanna and he’s going to make you pay for it.”
“I’ll be right there,” I snarled, and snapped the phone shut.
What I should have done was call my father and Inspector Mele. They would have made sure that Filippo shut up and stayed out of sight. But I couldn’t take it anymore, and I wanted to pick a fight with someone, anyone. And that psychotic was perfect for it.
I was at the café in three minutes flat. When I walked in the door everyone turned to stare. Half the town was there enjoying the show. Filippo was the only one who failed to notice my presence. He had his back to me. He was arguing with Bepi, the bartender, who was refusing to serve him a fourth Negroni and urging him to go home.
Filippo lost control. “This is a public place of refreshment, and you have a legal obligation to serve me, do you understand?”
“You’re drunk, get the hell out of my bar,” the barman shot back, shooting a worried glance in my direction.
Filippo pulled a handful of banknotes out of the pocket of his heavy jacket and threw them in Bepi’s direction. “I’ll buy this stinking bar from you. How much do you want?”
“Bepi’s right, you need to go home,” I said loudly.
Filippo whipped around and gave me a vicious smile. “Have you come to enjoy your last wine spritzer before going to prison?”
It took three, maybe four steps to cross the bar. I was close enough that if I had reached out my hand, I could have touched him. And that was what I was tempted to do. “Shut your mouth,” I ordered him.
Speaking to the other customers, he pointed at me. “He killed Giovanna because she had decided to come back to me.”
“Giovanna felt nothing but pity for you. Look at yourself, can’t you see what a sad mess you’ve become?”
Filippo emitted a bloodcurdling scream. It issued from his throat as if I had run him through, and he lunged at me. It was what I wanted, and I was ready for him. I hit him with a left to the jaw and then with a right to the belly. Filippo took the punches better than I expected and hit me in the forehead with an empty glass.
The fight came to a quick end. Strong arms pulled the two of us apart. I couldn’t break free, and I quickly found myself outside the café.
“Calm down,” said Davide Trevisan as he handed me a handkerchief. The base of the glass had cut my forehead. “I have to say, you’re a real half-ass,” he mocked me good-naturedly. “You can’t even beat up a cripple.”
“Fuck you, Davide.”
“Come on, you don’t need to take it out on me.”
“You’re right, I’m sorry.”
“It’s nothing. This is a bad time for you,” he said, then he lowered his voice. “And anyway, even if it was you, you’re still a friend to me.”
I looked at him as if he’d lost his mind. “What are you saying?”
“You can count on me. When they questioned me, I said nothing about the slut who was rubbing your crotch. You know, it takes practically nothing for those guys to get the wrong idea.”
I was speechless. I turned and left. Davide was a small-town bar animal. Nothing but dirty jokes and filthy gossip. Now I knew what they thought about me. I almost ran into Beggiolin, who had come running, followed by his cameraman. When he saw me, he had an immediate reaction of fury.
I flashed him a satisfied smile. “You’re too late. The party’s already over.”
* * *
To the women of the town, Antonio Visentin “was still a good-looking man,” a
nd according to the men “they don’t make them like Antonio Visentin anymore.”
This universal opinion was evident every time he crossed the main piazza, which he did four times a day to reach his law office in the center of town.
The men would bow their heads ever so slightly in a sign of intimate respect, or else they would greet him with stage gestures, hoping to ingratiate themselves with those who counted in town.
The women would cast him coquettish glances, or wait anxiously to be recognized and greeted. Which he unfailingly did. Counselor Visentin never missed a trick.
Things went differently that day. As he walked around the piazza under the porticoes, he failed to notice Judge Bellaviti and he avoided the curious glance of the widow Biondi.
Visentin looked at the ground as he walked, lost in dark thoughts. He didn’t even notice the uproar outside the Bar Centrale. If he had only looked up, he would have seen his son burst out of the café, arms pinned to his side by Trevisan and other customers.
He had an appointment with the head of the Medical Examiner’s Office.
“It’s a confidential matter,” he had told him over the phone.
Guido Marizza, the head of the Medical Examiner’s Office, was an old friend. They had gone to elementary school together, then to middle school and high school.
They’d drifted out of contact during their years at university, because each had followed in his father’s footsteps, as had been the case in each family for at least three generations. The sole exception was Marizza’s grandfather on his mother’s side. He, to the dismay of family and community, had chosen to become a professional soccer player, and wound up playing in the minor minors, the Italian serie C. This one unfortunate case aside, no other family member had ever left the beaten track.
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