Blood Curse

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Even with the door open, the light was faint. Silence: only the occasional creak of hinges, a window or two left open to let in fresh air. The knife blade glinted in a flash that no one saw, without so much as a moan.

Donna Vincenza went out into the vicolo very early each morning. She didn’t like to keep a full chamber pot in the apartment until late, and she also enjoyed stepping out for a walk. The winter seemed to stretch on forever, and windows still had to remain locked tight to ward off the damp of night that seeped into her bones. She’d been walking with a hunched back for months now, looking even older than she actually was. That drunken lout husband of hers, in contrast, never stirred until the church bell rang; thankfully, it chimed so loud and so close that it made him leap out of bed and start the day with a sonorous oath.

She emerged from the narrow little door, tugging her shawl tight around her head. Chamber pot in hand, she walked past the locked door of Rachele’s basso, and her thoughts ran to the poor woman who had died a year ago, leaving behind such a young orphan girl. Still, better her than me. She trundled along for a few more yards, toward the drain that topped the cesspit. She noticed that the front door of the whore’s basso was ajar. That’s odd, she thought. She knew that the little boy was the first to leave in the morning; he was an apprentice with some relative of theirs who was a builder. Then the whore went off to that shop in the Via Toledo, to ruin who knows what family.

The woman gave in to her curiosity and drew closer to the narrow aperture. She placed one hand on the doorjamb and the door creaked open. She looked inside and as soon as she got her breath back, she started screaming.

Brigadier Maione walked briskly. He wasn’t late for work; in fact, he was early. He liked to take his time, make a pot of ersatz coffee, get the police officers set up, assign the staff their jobs for the day. Still, he walked briskly, because he wasn’t the kind of person who liked to waste time, and because he was heavily built and he was walking downhill.

He didn’t have far to walk. From Piazza Concordia he walked up a long vicolo, the Via Conte di Mola, and that took him straight to Via Toledo, just a minute’s walk from police headquarters and the start of a new day, which he was already fully immersed in mentally. The buzz and bustle around him was that of the city awakening: a shutter or two creaking open, a woman singing, a small child wailing. Then there were the smells: dust, excrement, yesterday’s food, horses.

The scream shattered the air he was breathing, along with every other memory and thought: Maione had a sharp ear, and he knew that that was a scream of terror, not a shout of anger or a roar of despair. The sound reverberated in his ears, and so far no rubberneckers had come out to their balconies. Maione was already racing toward the source of the sound, his hands clenched in fists. A policeman is a policeman. It had never occurred to him to tell himself, Raffae’, just mind your own business.

It was a woman’s voice, and it was coming from the Vico del Fico. He was the first one to reach the scene, where he found an elderly woman with a shawl on her head and her hand over her mouth, a shattered chamber pot beside rivulets of urine, the front door of a basso halfway open. With his eyes he followed the direction of the old woman’s gaze, trying to register and record as many details as possible: door opened from within, unbolted; silence inside, no sign of movement. A partial footprint, possibly a man’s shoe, between the floor and the street, black. Black: why black? Then he understood.

“Don’t move, stay right here, Signo’. Did you see anyone leave?”

Donna Vincenza, still overwrought, shook her head no. On the second story a shutter swung open and slammed hard against the wall, and an elderly man stuck out his head.

“Vince’, what’s going on? Have you lost your mind, screaming like that so early in the morning? Who’s down there. .”

Maione raised his hand in one sharp movement and the man fell silent at the sight of him. His reaction was so prompt in fact that he closed the shutters on his fingers; this was followed by a muffled howl of pain, and then finally by the sound of bolts shooting home. The brigadier detected a flash of satisfaction in the old woman’s eyes. That must have been her husband.

He stepped onto the threshold and waited a second for his eyes to adjust to the dark. He began to make out the outlines of things: a bed, a sleeping loft, an armoire, a table. Two chairs. One was empty; the other wasn’t. Silence. A noise, or rather, something dripping, slowly. He took another step, and was able to distinguish the profile of the person who occupied the chair. A woman sat there bolt upright, motionless, facing the wall. Something about her posture made the hairs on his back stand on end. Absurdly, he asked: “May I come in?”

Slowly, the face turned toward him, entering the narrow blade of light that filtered in through the half-open door. He glimpsed a long, white neck, locks of hair as black as night. Temple, ear, forehead, a perfect nose. An eye, calm, steady, not a flutter of the long lashes. Even in the dim half-light, to the unsettling metronome of falling drops, Maione could see that this was no ordinary beauty. The profile was transformed into the full vision of a face caught in the morning light. Maione was breathless. When the woman had completed her movement, the brigadier saw what Donna Vincenza had seen just a few minutes earlier.

Filomena had been disfigured by a broad slash, running from her temple to her chin, across the right side of her face.

Another drop of blood fell from the wound onto the red-stained floor.

Maione let out the breath he’d long been holding, and along with it, a moan.

Teresa had gotten up early that morning: it was a habit that she had maintained from when she lived in the countryside, before she came to work as a servant in the city. She had often thought about going to see her father and her numerous siblings, who still lived in the single large room that was so icy in the winter and hot in the summer, and which still haunted her dreams. But then laziness won out, along with the faint fear that something or someone might keep her there, making her as poor and miserable as she has been before.

In order to placate her conscience, therefore, she sent money to her family now and then through a farmer who brought a load of vegetables into the city once a week. She told him to send them her greetings and tell them she was doing well. For the time being, she held tightly on to her job in the distinguished palazzo in Via Santa Lucia, down by the waterfront, in the midst of elegant carriages, fine clothing, and even automobiles, which she could see driving by from the balcony.

It was a good job. There were no children or elderly people to look after, many of the palazzo’s fifteen bedrooms remained unused and closed off, and she herself, who was theoretically responsible for keeping them clean, entered them no more than twice a year. Moreover, Teresa enjoyed living in close contact with the gentry, watching the life they led. She wondered how it was possible to own all those fine things and not be happy. And yet it was very clear, even to her naïve eyes, that her employers lived in a constant state of misery.

The signora was much younger than the professor. She was remarkably beautiful, and she reminded Teresa of the Madonna dell’Arco with her jewelry, her dresses, her shoes; and, like the Madonna, she always had a look of sorrow on her face, sad eyes that stared off into the void. Teresa remembered a woman back home in her village who had lost a son to a fever: she had the same eyes as the signora.

The professor was never home, and when he was, he didn’t say a word; he just sat and read. Teresa was afraid to look at him. He intimidated her with his white hair, tall man that he was, invariably elegant in the stiff collars that she starched for him, his golden cufflinks, his spats, his monocle on a fine gold chain. She’d never heard him speak to his wife. They seemed like strangers; once, she thought she’d overheard them quarreling as she was walking into the green parlor to bring them their coffee, but who could say, it might just have been the radio. They came together for meals, but he read at the table and she would stare into space. Occasionally, in the early hours of the morning, she’d seen the signora come home after spending the whole night out.

That morning she was doing the laundry. It was still early, and off in the distance the fishermen were hauling their boats onto the beach, shouting loudly one to another. It must have been six, perhaps even earlier. Suddenly, the professor appeared before her, in a state of disarray unlike anything she’d ever seen before: his hair was tousled, his collar was unbuttoned, and there was a shadow of whiskers on his normally impeccably clean-shaven cheeks. His staring eyes rolled frantically, and his monocle dangled from the breast pocket of his jacket like a broken pendant necklace. At this hour he should have still been asleep in his bedroom; he was never up before eight o’clock.

He walked up to her, grabbed her by the arm, and gripped it tightly.

“My wife. My wife. Has my wife come home?”

She shook her head, but the man did not release his grip.

“Listen to me, pay attention to what I’m telling you, what’s your name, Teresa, right? All right, then, Teresa: my wife will be home before long. You mustn’t say a word, you understand? You keep your mouth shut. I came home last night and you haven’t seen me since. Understood? Keep your mouth shut!”

She nodded her head yes. She’d have done anything to get her arm free of that man’s grip, that man who looked like a demon out of hell. A fisherman was singing; the slow morning waves murmured gently.

Still staring at her, the man let her go and, walking backward, exited the laundry room. Teresa’s heart was pounding in her ears. The professor had vanished: perhaps she’d been dreaming; perhaps she’d never seen him. A powerful shiver ran through her body, and she lowered her eyes.

On the floor she saw the footprint left by the professor’s shoe; it was black, as if from mud, or blood.