Kill the Father

by Sandrone Dazieri

  The day was cold, and the lights in the shop windows made it clear that Christmas was coming. Colomba walked up the Corso and reached the old city center of Cremona, stopping at three pharmacies along the way, until she finally found what she needed. Then she turned off into a small pedestrian street onto which opened the courtyard of an eighteenth-century palazzo with cobblestones perfectly arrayed in a peacock-tail pattern behind the bronze street door. She rang the doorbell, and a housekeeper ushered her up to the second floor, through a living room with a fireplace, and down a long hallway lined with books.

  Annibale Valle was waiting for her, sunk in an enormous armchair, wrapped in a dressing gown that might be big enough to serve as the mainsail of a brigantine. He was drinking from a snifter of cognac that practically vanished in his hand. “What do you want?” he sighed. The only light burning was a small table lamp beside him, which cast long shadows onto his face.

  He doesn’t look like him, thought Colomba. He doesn’t look a thing like him. How could I have missed it?

  “Aren’t you happy that Dante and I have been let off the hook?”

  He took a sip. “I called him this morning to give him my best wishes. I invited him to lunch, too . . . I don’t think he likes my house. Not that I like it either, but it was such a good investment. He’ll inherit it.”

  Colomba turned a chair and sat down in front of him, straddling it. “We’re going back to Rome tomorrow.”

  “Good,” said Valle.

  “But you asked what I want. Well, before we leave, there is something I need you to do for me.” Colomba pulled the DNA kit out that she’d bought in the pharmacy of her pocket. She tore open the sealed envelope and pulled out the test tube; she extracted the long stick with a sterile cotton swab on the end. “Put this in your mouth, please.”

  Valle half-closed his eyes. “No.”

  “It doesn’t hurt. I’m just going to collect some of your saliva.”

  “No. And you can’t force me to.”

  “I could take it by force.”

  “Are you willing to beat up an elderly invalid?”

  “I’d be willing to beat you up.”

  Valle sighed. “How did you figure it out?”

  So it’s true, thought Colomba, losing the last crumb of hope that she might be wrong. “I found the family photo album that you’d hidden at Wanda’s house. The one you claimed you burned.”

  A sad smile wrinkled his face. “I could never bring myself to destroy it. They were the last memories I had of him.”

  “Of Dante.”

  “Yes.” He took another drink. “I had resigned myself to the fact that I’d lost him. In prison . . . I didn’t even care anymore that no one believed me. Then my lawyer came to tell me that he’d been found. That he’d run from his kidnapper, who had kept him in a silo. That my son couldn’t wait to see me. And I believed in the miracle.”

  So did I, thought Colomba. We all did.

  “They gave me a nice suit to wear, and they took care of all the bureaucratic red tape to get me out in a hurry,” Valle continued. “Word had already spread through the prison. For the first time the other convicts looked at me with something other than contempt. I was no longer . . . the child molester, the killer of kids. Someone actually gave me cigarettes, someone else gave me chocolate . . . I felt . . .” He shook his head. “I can’t even begin to tell you how I felt. They took me to the hospital in a civilian car, without handcuffs. I knew that he’d look different, older. It had been eleven years. I’d last seen him as a child; now I’d be meeting him as an adult. But I didn’t care.” He coughed. “I went on believing in the miracle until I saw him. He shouted ‘Papà!’ and hugged me. But I knew.”

  “You knew that it wasn’t him,” said Colomba in a whisper.

  “No. It wasn’t Dante. It wasn’t my son.”

  28

  Valle poured himself another glass. He gestured toward Colomba with the bottle, but she shook her head coldly. “Go on.”

  “If you insist.” Valle licked his lips. “The boy kept talking about things that Dante had done when he was little. He didn’t get a thing wrong. Only he wasn’t Dante.”

  “But you said nothing.”

  “What would you have done in my shoes?”

  “I’d have told the truth.”

  “So I could be sent back to prison even though I was innocent? I protected him! I gave him a roof over his head! And I loved him . . .” A burst of coughing forced him to break off; then he added in a subdued tone, “Or I tried to love him . . .”

  “You sent him away.”

  Valle shrugged. “He was starting to notice that there were differences between what he remembered and reality. They upset him. Sooner or later he would have figured out that something wasn’t adding up.”

  “And he would have ruined your life,” said Colomba contemptuously.

  “He would have ruined his life. Suddenly he would have found out he was . . . nothing.”

  Colomba gazed longingly at the bottle of cognac, now regretting her rejection of a glass. But she’d rather have drunk poison than touch anything in that home. “He’s much more than nothing,” she murmured.

  “Maybe now he is. Thanks in part to me,” said Valle.

  “No one ever had the slightest doubt that Dante was your son?”

  “No. They all fell for it, judges and cops. Bodini had put Dante’s name in his suicide note. And back then, people didn’t do DNA tests. It seems like a century ago . . .” Valle stared at Colomba. “I could have reported the two of you to the police before you even got to the lake. I could have stopped you.”

  “So why didn’t you?”

  “Because I was sick of waiting for someone to find out the truth. You have no idea of what it’s like to carry a secret like that inside you.”

  “I don’t have any sympathy for you,” Colomba said harshly.

  “No, of course you don’t.” Valle turned the glass in his hands. “You’re the avenging angel, come to right all wrongs. What was in the album that alerted you?”

  “The pictures at the beach,” Colomba replied. “They show your son bare-chested. He had a birthmark on his chest that looks exactly like the one you have on your face. The Dante I know doesn’t.”

  Valle nodded. “Good job. And did you also figure out why they would do such a thing? Why they would make him believe that he was my son? That’s something I’ve never been able to figure out. However hard I tried. There’s not a good reason on earth.”

  There is one. To prove it could be done, thought Colomba. With drugs and torture. A successful experiment. But all she said was: “I don’t care if you understand. In your fashion, you were an accomplice.” Once again she pulled out the stick with the cotton swab for the sample. “Now please put this thing in your mouth, and let’s get this thing done.”

  Valle took it. “Then what?”

  “Your DNA will be compared with the human remains fished out of the lake. To see if one of those corpses belongs to your real son.” Colomba stepped closer to him and talked to him, her face just inches from his. Her eyes were the color of a windstorm. “And you’d better hope there is a match. Otherwise you’ll just go back to being the one guilty party.”

  Valle hesitated again; then he quickly put the stick into his mouth.

  “That’s good,” said Colomba, taking it and placing it in the test tube.

  “Are you going to tell Dante?” asked Valle.

  “No, you’re going to tell him.”

  Valle grabbed the armrests. “You’re insane. I can’t do it.”

  “Dante loves you, God only knows why. If he hears it from you, it won’t be as hard for him. And in any case, I’m not offering you a choice.” Colomba stood up. “Get your ass in gear.”

  Valle wasn’t capable of covering the distance on foot, and he refused to drive. Colomba had to call a taxi to cover the few hundred yards from there to the Hotel degli Artisti, the fashionable, centrally located hotel where Dante had reser
ved two rooms. Colomba had already gone by that morning before the meeting to take a shower and put on the clothes that Minutillo had picked up for her from her apartment. In prison, she’d had to make do with what she’d been wearing at the time of her arrest and the underwear she’d been able to purchase at the commissary.

  When Dante opened the door to his room, he was ready to scold Colomba for disappearing after the meeting, but when he saw Valle he forgot all about that. “Papà, has something happened?”

  “The two of you need to talk,” said Colomba.

  “About what?” asked Dante.

  Colomba didn’t answer. “Call me when you’re done if you feel like it, okay?”

  She left, doing her best to appear untroubled, but when she entered her room she grabbed a pillow and shouted all her frustration into it. She felt like breaking something or running down the street as fast as she could. She made do with three sets of push-ups and sit-ups; then, covered with sweat, she flopped onto the bed with a bottle of beer, which she drank while channel surfing. She wasn’t hungry. She counted at least four different daytime talk shows where the topic was the prisoners in the containers, and appeals were being made to try to identify the nameless ones. Colomba wondered whether the parents of some of them were simply pretending not to recognize them, to avoid having to take them back, with all their baggage of issues and maladjustment. She also wondered whether she’d judged Valle too harshly, even though right now the only person she cared about was Dante. How would he take it?

  After about half an hour of pointless programs watched with a distracted eye and not even a smidgen of her brain, she heard the door across the hall slam shut. Thinking that was the signal that the conversation was over, she hastily put on her shoes and ran to Dante’s room. She knocked. “Everything all right?” she asked. “Come on, let me in so we can talk it over.”

  The door swung open, and Colomba was surprised to find herself face-to-face with Valle, who was scrambling around, trying to get up onto his feet, up off the floor that was sticky with coffee and cigarette ashes. Dante had shoved him aside and burst out of the hotel.

  29

  Dante was walking at a brisk pace away from the center of town.

  The cellar door, he was thinking. That damned door.

  He’d chosen a direction at random, and now he was walking down the tree-lined boulevard leading to the iron bridge over the Po River, at the edge of town. It was a road he knew well. He remembered walking down it dozens of times with his real father to get to the first newsstand, which stood half-hidden behind the plane trees. There his father had bought the daily newspaper, and he would always get a special treat, a pack of soccer trading cards.

  Except that obviously it wasn’t true.

  The cellar door, holy Jesus, he thought again.

  As a boy, he had always stopped in front of one of the houses along the boulevard, which had a strange shape midway between a castle and a minaret, with an enormous iron spider on the facade. He’d always thought a wizard or a monster might live there. It had both scared him and attracted him.

  But no, actually, he’d never done that.

  Sometimes he’d ride that stretch of road on his bike, before they put in the bike path. He remembered the first time he’d ridden without training wheels, his mother running behind him, clapping her hands.

  But that, too, was an illusion. Like everything else he thought he’d done or seen before the silo.

  Yet the sensation of freedom from his first real bike ride seemed real to him; he could feel it in his body. Perhaps it really had happened, but in another city, in another world, where the woman who had held the back of the seat and called out “Good boy!” was still alive. His real mother—deleted a piece at a time by the Father—though he couldn’t even remember what her face looked like.

  Maybe it was all fake. Not only his childhood, but his memories of the silo, too. He’d never run away, he was still inside, and he was just imagining all this.

  Maybe I’m dead.

  At that thought, it seemed to him that the whole world began to unravel and fade around him, that his own body began to become insubstantial. Unable to go on walking, he stopped and leaned against a fence. He pushed his back against the bars: they were real. He could feel them through the fabric of his trench coat. He grabbed on to that sensation, allowing it to flow through him, until he was finally able to move his hands again. He stuck them into his pockets in search of cigarettes; he lit one.

  I should have realized, he thought. From the cellar door. Now, only now, did he understand that that had been the first sign that there was something wrong with his memories, the first wrinkle in a past that had been constructed for him. The mental equivalent of stepping off a stair that doesn’t exist.

  When he’d gone home to the place where he thought he’d grown up, with a man he’d believed was his birth father, newly released from prison, he’d been convinced that in the kitchen he’d find a door that led down to the cellar pantry by way of a steep, narrow stone staircase. He even remembered the color of that door: red. A faded red through which you could see the grain of the wood. In winter, terrible drafts pushed through that door, partially blocked by a roll of cloth that gathered dust, but in the summer it was nice to lie on the floor in front of it and feel the cool breeze caressing his face.

  The only thing was: that door wasn’t there. It couldn’t be there, because the apartment of his supposed father was on the fourth floor of an apartment house. If there had been a red door, it would have opened into the neighbors’ bathroom. But Dante still continued to perceive its presence whenever he was in the kitchen. He could feel it right behind him, as if it were just a hair outside of his line of sight and someone was moving it every time he turned around to look for it.

  Now that he thought about it, though, the door had only been the first of a series of signals. The courtyard that seemed so cramped, his bedroom that was the wrong color. Where he remembered blue-striped wallpaper that looked like a huge tent, he’d found a white wall that his supposed father told him had always been white. All of them signals that he’d ignored. Just as he’d failed to realize that his escape had been far too easy. When he’d struggled with the German on the banks of Lake Comello, it had been clear that the man was monstrously strong in spite of his age. He and Colomba had only barely managed to force him to the ground. Twenty-five years earlier, the malnourished child he had then been could never have caught that same man off guard and escaped. The man had let him go; that was the only explanation. Even what Dante had always considered the most heroic moment of his life had never existed.

  The Father and his platoon had seen to everything. The false escape, Bodini’s fake suicide, the fire: Dante was living proof that their system worked. They wanted him out in the world, to test him in the field. He’d started walking again, but now he froze in place, crushed by an intuition too horrendous to be a product of his imagination. The other boy, he thought. The one he’d seen before the German killed him. Who could he have been but the boy whose place he had taken? The real Dante Valle, who would never become Dante Torre, who would never play blackjack in Dubai, would never know the taste of a Bellini at Harry’s Bar, never drink Kopi Luwak coffee and consider it proof of the existence of God. When he’d described the boy in the other silo, he was describing himself. No one had ever found him, because no one had ever thought he was missing.

  He saw a taxi go by with the dome light illuminated, and he hailed it on impulse. When he told the cabbie where he wanted to be taken, the man objected to the distance but took the fare all the same.

  Dante threw himself into the backseat and watched the landscape go streaming past him without trying to catch any of the details, his face pressed against the glass. They immediately left the boulevard and pulled onto the fast county road that ran through the small towns between Cremona and Mantua. The unbroken walls of apartment buildings soon became small clusters of low houses, with cafés displaying Mokarabia and Segafred
o coffee signs, churches with small playing fields next to them. Then solitary houses, open countryside. When it began to get dark, the first real farmhouses appeared, the first white metal silos, the first fields with round hay bales. When they reached the turnoff for Acquanegra, Dante gave the driver detailed step-by-step directions. He knew the road very well; he’d taken it a hundred times at first in pilgrimage, and then never again for twenty years and more. Those were his own memories, from after his escape or, really, his release.

  At sunset he told the taxi driver to pull over onto a dirt road that led to the ruins of a farmhouse built around a large courtyard, the windows boarded up and moss covering the roof tiles.

  “Are you sure you want me to leave you here?” asked the driver.

  “Yes. This is the right place,” Dante replied, paying the fare.

  “If you need to go back, there aren’t any cabs around here.”

  “But there’s the train,” said Dante. “There was back in my day, anyway.”

  “I don’t know if it runs anymore. Anyway, the town is in that direction.” He pointed the way. “It’s a long way to walk.”

  “I like to walk.”

  Dante got out of the cab and went over to the farmhouse with a knot in his belly; behind it an enormous swollen sun was sinking out of sight. The walls were covered with graffiti and the tags of local crews, obscene phrases and slogans glorifying Marco Pantani, the great local racing cyclist who had died tragically young. The stink of irrigation ditches and dead leaves. The smell hadn’t changed.

  I’m home, he thought. The only home I’ve ever had.