Blood Curse

LVIII

Tata Rosa was surprised to see him home so early. Out in the street, the last rays of sunlight were still illuminating the highest stories of the apartment buildings. She had imperiously demanded to check his temperature, laying her calloused hand across his forehead.

Ricciardi wasted no time arguing; he knew from his own sad experience that Tata Rosa was unstoppable. He explained that he felt just fine but had come home early to rest since he’d be out late that night for work. He thus managed to sidestep the usual jeremiad on woolen undershirts and the perils of weather during the changing of the seasons, but not an egg frittata with macaroni left over from last night’s dinner.

Once he had finished his snack, already bracing himself for the first burning stabs of stomach pain, he went to his window. In the Colombo apartment-he now knew the last name of the family across the way-preparations were underway for dinner. He saw Enrica go by. He was relieved to see that she looked healthy, but at the same time, he was disheartened by her expression, which was sad, preoccupied.

If only he could, he would tell her how important it was to him to be able to watch her movements, day after day, to imagine the words he couldn’t hear, her serene, left-handed motions. If he could, he would have erased their awkward meeting at police headquarters. It never occurred to him that Enrica’s state of mind might be roughly analogous to his own.

In that reflected life, he’d learned how to live, he who was a prisoner of his own curse.

He remembered that about a year ago, on the floor above the one where Enrica’s family lived, something terrible had happened: a young bride, abandoned by her husband, had hanged herself. Lost love, shame, humiliation: it was hard to imagine the hell to which she’d been condemned. The same home that had seen her arrive overjoyed, carried over the threshold in the arms of one man, saw her leave in the arms of four, asleep now and forever. Since then, the shutters had been shut tight.

In the two months until the ghost vanished, Ricciardi watched the same double vignette every night: on the floor below, the peaceful, smiling warmth of a large family celebrating the life of an ordinary day; on the floor above, in the black empty eye socket of an unlighted window, the swaying corpse of the dead bride. The two faces of love: the two extremes of the same emotion.

And while his sweet Enrica went on with her left-handed embroidering, her head tilted over her right shoulder, in the cone of soft light from the table lamp, the dead woman-her neck unnaturally elongated from the rope, her eyes bugging out, her swollen tongue lolling out her open mouth-cursed the unfaithful bastard who had killed her without laying a finger on her.

His arms crossed, hidden from her sight by the fading light of sunset, the commissario mused that a man who bore the perennially bleeding wound of the deaths of others had no right to dream of a life like other people’s; like the life he could see out his window. The man who watches may not be able to live, but he can still try to set things right.

’O Padreterno nun è mercante ca pava ’o sabbato, Iodice’s mother and Carmela Calise had both said. God Almighty’s not a shopkeeper who pays His debts on Saturday. But sooner or later, He pays them.

Reluctantly, he pulled himself away from the window and grabbed his jacket.

The muffled noises from the vicolo filtered in through the dim light of the basso. The words that Filomena had just uttered had landed between them like a live bomb, but the woman’s calm, straightforward tone of voice had made it clear to Maione that this was a statement of fact, not an accusation.

“But why? Your son, Gaetano. . why would he do such a thing?”

Filomena smiled, and in that moment she resembled a Madonna painted by Raphael. Her gentle voice was that of a woman who was finally at peace.

“I grew up on a farm in Vomero. We were a big family, poor but happy, even if we didn’t really know it. Life on a farm is hard work, at every hour of the day and night. If you don’t work, you don’t eat, and if you don’t eat, you die. Everything’s simple. But nothing’s ever easy.

“Once, when I was a little girl, maybe seven, maybe eight, our hens started going missing. We’d find feathers, blood. We never heard a sound. Could be a fox, maybe a weasel, my father said.

“He set out a trap, one of those wire traps that snap tight to capture the animal. The next morning we found a small paw dangling from the wire. Just the paw: coal black. You could see the gnaw marks of sharp teeth and there was blood all over the ground. That fox had chewed it off, little by little, without crying out. We slept right next to the henhouse, and we hadn’t heard a thing.

“My father explained to me what had happened, Raffae’: that animal, that fox, had been forced to make a choice. Either live without that paw or be caught. And it made that choice.

“I’ve lived my whole life with my paw in a trap, Raffae’. And I never realized that I had the ability to choose freedom. Even when my husband was alive, the minute I was alone someone would approach me, using their hands or using their words. That’s no way to live, believe me. It’s no way to live.

“And for all the time we’ve been alone, Gaetano and I, things have been intolerable: my boss was threatening to fire me, another miserable wretch threatened to take it out on the boy.

“We talked it over again and again; we couldn’t come up with a solution. Then, one evening, Gaetano came in, hand in hand with Rituccia, the girl you saw, and said to me: ‘Mamma, maybe we’ve thought of something.’ And while we were talking I remembered that little black paw dangling from the henhouse door and my father shaking his head. That’s when I made up my mind. But I never could have done it myself. Four times I raised the knife, and four times I set it down again. I looked over at Gaetano; I didn’t say a word to him. I was crying, he was crying: only Rituccia’s eyes were dry. But she was pale as a sheet and she didn’t move a muscle. She looked at Gaetano too, and he got to his feet; he picked up the knife. And he freed me. And he freed us. He did what I wanted to do myself, Raffae’. I left my paw dangling behind me.”

The silence that followed her words closed in like a fog. Maione thought he could hear his heart pounding; he felt a crushing pity for Filomena, for Gaetano, for Rituccia. And for himself, too.

Then his thoughts went to Lucia. He imagined her locked in a cramped cell, a prison made of memories; hanging from a trap by her paw, ever since that accursed evening three years earlier. And he thought: What am I doing here?

He got to his feet, gazing into her magnificent eyes, the eyes of a stranger, glistening with tears, and that beautiful, Madonna-like smile. And he realized that he loved Lucia, even more than he loved her when he glimpsed her at the fountain at the age of sixteen, washing a sheet and singing, that he’d never seen anything lovelier since then, and if he were to die someday he wanted it to be with that face before his eyes.

He said good-bye to Filomena. The word he used was arrivederci, until we meet again, but what he meant was addio, good-bye forever, may God be with you. She told him addio, hoping it meant arrivederci. Maione walked out into the street and turned his footsteps toward police headquarters.