Blood Curse

II

Springtime came to Naples on the fourteenth of April of the year nineteen thirty-one, just a few minutes after two in the morning.

It showed up late and it came the way it always does, with a gust of fresh wind from the south, following a cloudburst. The dogs were the first to detect it, in the courtyards of the Vomero farmhouses and in the alleys down by the waterfront; they lifted their muzzles and sniffed at the air and then, heaving a sigh, went back to sleep.

Its arrival went unremarked upon as the city got its last couple of hours’ rest between the dead of night and early morning. There were no celebrations, no regrets. Springtime didn’t demand a festive welcome, and required no applause. It occupied the streets and the piazzas. And it stood patiently outside the doors and shuttered windows, waiting.

Rituccia wasn’t asleep; she was only pretending. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes he’d just stand there, looking at her, and then turn and go back up to the sleeping loft. Then she’d hear the creaking of the old bed, his body tossing and turning, followed by his sawing snore, a horrible sound that greeted her ears like a thing of beauty because it spared her such horror. Sometimes. Sometimes she was allowed to sleep.

But that night, the springtime had come knocking at the window, stirring his blood, blood curdled by the cheap wine from the tavern at the end of the vicolo, the dark, narrow Neapolitan lane. Pretending to sleep wasn’t going to do her any good. As always, when she felt her father’s hands on her body, she thought of her mother. And she cursed her for being dead.

Carmela whimpered in her sleep; arthritis was a red-hot iron jolting and crushing her bones. She wasn’t cold, the heavy blanket covered her snugly, and the walls were dry. If she’d been awake, rather than deep in a dreamless slumber, the old woman would have looked around proudly at the flowered wallpaper she’d recently had installed. If she’d been awake, she’d have mused that with all those flowers on her walls, she had bought herself a springtime of her own, and with the new season on its way, the flowers would be competing, out on her balcony and there in her apartment.

But Carmela would be denied the springtime. Not the flowers, though; she’d have those. It’s just that she wouldn’t see them.

Emma turned over on her side, careful not to awaken her husband, who lay sleeping to her left. Experience told her that when the movement of the soft woolen mattress roused him from sleep before he was ready, the selfish old man’s thousand-odd afflictions became that much more exaggerated. She scrutinized his profile in the dim light; the glow of the streetlights filtered in through the silk curtains. Had she ever loved him? If she had, she certainly couldn’t remember it now.

She smiled in the darkness, her cat eyes illuminated. Not another night, not another springtime without love. Her husband was sleeping with his mouth agape, his hairnet wrapped over his head, and his nightshirt buttoned snugly around his neck. God, how I hate him, she thought to herself.

Beyond the wooden planks that secured the door of the basso, the airless, windowless ground-floor hovel apartment, Gaetano could hear the rats in the vicolo. During the day, the rats vanished down the drains of the new sewer system, except for the big sick ones, which the children hunted down and killed; but at night, and all the past week, he’d heard them scurrying past. Maybe it was the warm weather on its way. His mamma had finally dropped off to sleep. He’d listened to her muffled sobbing, close by his side, until just an hour ago; then the weariness of her long day had won out. Two hours of peace for her, maybe three, before she had to start all over again. But he wasn’t sleeping; he was thinking about the decision they’d made. The decision they’d been forced to make. They couldn’t go on like this. He closed his eyes and, as he did every night, waited for sunrise.

Attilio couldn’t get to sleep. That night he’d been wonderful but, as usual, no one had noticed. He could feel the brooding frustration that was his frequent nightly companion poke at his stomach as he lay smoking a cigarette in the darkness. Unable to see, he let his gaze roam the walls; what did it matter, he thought, there was nothing to look at, nothing but poverty. Still, he knew, and he’d always known, that someday he’d be rich and famous, revered and adored. Like that conceited lout who had nothing that he didn’t have in spades. It all starts with money. When you have money, the rest follows. Mamma had always told him that, ever since he was a little boy. Money before all else. Just one more week. Then he’d be done with dreary rooms in tawdry boardinghouses.

In the depths of her uneasy slumber, Filomena was dreaming. In her dream, she was standing outside her own front door and watching herself emerge from the house, bundled into a long black shawl, her face covered, as always, to conceal herself.

The door was emblazoned with a word, written in red paint in huge letters: WHORE. Just that one word, simple and straightforward, as though it were a last name. She saw her head droop in shame, guilty without guilt. Whore. No men, no love affairs, no lingering looks or smiles. A whore all the same. In her dream she felt the anguish, the fear that her son would see the word when he came home. Her fingers wet with tears, she tried to rub it off, but the harder she tried the bigger it grew, staining her hands red. Red with an age-old crime: the crime of being beautiful.

Enrica was sleeping on the first night of the new season. On the night table were her eyeglasses, a book, and a glass half-full of water. Her nightgown was folded on the armchair, under the frame with her embroidery.

In the black shade of dreams, an unfamiliar touch, a strange scent, and two eyes staring at her. Green eyes. In her dream, the young woman felt the arrival of spring, stirring her blood.

Just a dozen feet away, but so far he might as well have been on the surface of the moon, the man had fallen asleep. He’d eaten his dinner, then he’d listened to the radio as he watched her at her embroidery, through the window. Entering into someone else’s life, as if it were his own. Touching objects with someone else’s hands, laughing with someone else’s mouth, imagining sounds and voices that he couldn’t hear through the glass.

Then sleep-bringing a new sense of disquiet, a different anxiety under the skin-seemed like an affliction, but in fact it was the arrival of spring: blood searching for a way out. And at last, the darkness that contained the images of his greatest fears, the last remnant of his innocence.

In his dream, the man was a little boy again, and it was summertime; the heat scorched his skin. He was running head down through the vineyard next to the courtyard of his father’s house, playing by himself, as always. In his dream, he could smell the scents of his own sweat and of the grapes. And then the scent of blood. The blood of the dead man sitting on the dirt in the shade, his legs stretched before him, his arms resting on the ground, his head lolling over onto one shoulder. The handle of the field knife protruding from his ribcage like a stump, an abortive third limb. As the man slept, he gasped in childlike astonishment.

Like before, the corpse lifted its head, and like before, it spoke to him; and the most horrific thing was that, like before, it seemed perfectly natural to him for the corpse to speak. In his dream, he turned and fled once again; and the man who the child had become uttered a lament through his slumbering lips. There was no chance of escape; a hundred, a thousand dead men would speak to him from unknown mouths; just as many times, they would look at him with empty eyes and reach out to him with broken fingers.

Outside the window, spring was waiting.