Rome Noir

Christmas Eves by Gianrico Carofiglio

Translated by Ann Goldstein

Stazione Termini

It was Christmas Eve, in the vast concourse of Stazione Termini. Marshal Bovio, his mood grim, his hands deep in the pockets of his big regulation overcoat, swam against the current of a desolate river of men and women. Small groups of pinched dark faces; lost gazes and a few laughs — too loud — to summon up cheer; the faces of vagrants, of old women bent over shopping carts, pushing their little piles of possessions. Unmindful — or unconscious — of everything around them. Normal faces, having ended up there by mistake, on Christmas Eve, in the cold of the station rather than the warmth of their own houses.

The marshal leaned against the locked door of the information office, looked at his watch — 7:30 — and took out an MS from the crumpled, half-empty pack, lit it, and inhaled deeply.

Many years earlier, he recalled, he had been on duty on Christmas Eve when a traveler was knifed to death, near the track where the last local for Nettuno departed.

The whole night had been spent interrogating the derelicts who lived in the station because they had nowhere else to go.

The murderer had been an illegal taxi driver, a slightly disfigured little man whose name the marshal couldn’t remember.

The man’s face, however, he remembered clearly — a sick-looking face, the jaw shaken by a silent weeping, an animal sob after the last smack. The first gray light of Christmas Day was mixed with the yellow streetlights and the bitter odor of humanity, of fear of officialdom after a night of interrogation. Robbery and homicide for the disfigured taxi driver. Life in prison. Bovio had heard nothing more of him after the trial.

He inhaled the last drag of his cigarette, smoked down to the filter, and let it fall to the ground.

At home they must all be gathered by now for the big dinner — a southern family, traditions still strong — and for the exchange of gifts, after the flavors of Christmas, fragrance of homemade sweets, brilliant colors, and comforting warmth.

The newspaper seller near the information booth was preparing to close. He chaotically piled up newspapers and magazines inside the kiosk with the unconscious speed of one who fears being excluded from something.

An old woman with a cart approached the newsstand. A vagrant, with those dirty bags, those ragged sacks stuffed full of things. But there was something that set her apart — a strange dignity, perhaps — from the desperate, the destitute who wandered like melancholy phantoms through the station and around the idle trains. She wore a thick sweater and a man’s jacket; underneath was a long bright-colored skirt, cheerful; her hair was gathered under a carefully knotted kerchief. She began to attentively examine the magazines that the newspaper seller had not yet put away. She delicately leafed through one, as if she were looking for an article, or something.

Then she turned to the proprietor. She had a thousand lire in her hand.

“L’Unità,” she said.

The newspaper seller looked up and hesitated a moment before answering.

“L’Unità costs two thousand lire today. It’s Sunday, it has the supplement.” He seemed to be apologizing.

The old woman withdrew the money hand with the banknote but remained in front of the newsstand. She was still there, unmoving, when Bovio’s large hand reached out of his dark overcoat and placed a thousand lire in hers.

She looked up slowly, up to the marshal’s face. “What a kind person.” Her voice was thin but firm. “I hope that you may be granted everything you wish for.”

Then she turned, passed the two thousand lire to the newspaper seller, took her paper with the supplement, and moved along with her cart.

He stood looking at her. He was slightly ashamed of that blessing, so disproportionate with respect to his own instinctive gesture, which now seemed to him petty. He watched her move into the distance, into a remote corner of the immense concourse.

He took ten thousand lire from his wallet, clutched it in his hand, and slipped the hand in his pocket. He would catch up with the old woman, give her that money, and then hurry away, before anyone could see him.

So he began walking, feeling strangely embarrassed.

The old woman, meanwhile, had taken out a small broom and had begun to sweep her corner. All around, against the walls, under a scaffolding in front of the billboards that displayed the timetables, the homeless were preparing for Christmas.

Some were already asleep, rolled up in newspaper sheets, sheltered in cardboard huts, having closed their eyes knowing nothing of tomorrow. Others, awake, scanned the void or tended to themselves like tired old cats. One had his pants rolled up; his calves were covered with scabs that he picked at conscientiously, one by one, concentrating, his eyes, like a stray dog’s, red with some awful disease.

Now the marshal was just a few meters from the old woman. She had her back to him and continued to sweep. Serene, with the air of one who is placidly seeing to her own domestic affairs. Bovio was about to call out to her, when he felt a pang of nostalgia and the blurred memory of some distant Christmas. Corridors, lights, and lost rooms. Voices of excited children, yearnings from the vortex of the past.

Absurdly, he realized that it was not his memory.

Just as absurdly, he thought that he must return it to the old woman.

He took a few more steps, almost staggering, with a buzzing in his head and the hand in his pocket contracted around the ten thousand lire.

“Marshal.”

The voice of the young police officer was like a rock smashing a window. The marshal turned suddenly, with a guilty expression, it seemed to him. He quickly pulled his hand out of his pocket as if hiding evidence; he began walking away in a hurry.

“What is it?” The voice sounded too high, and fake.

He didn’t turn back.

Beret by Carlo Lucarelli

Translated by Kathrine Jason

Vicolo del Bologna

There’s a radio’s playing. It’s coming from one of the upstairs apartments, and it’s got to be turned way up because we can hear it clearly, low but clearly. So much the better. It helps drown out the noise we’re making.

Moretti gives me a look and nods, as if he’s read my mind. This has been happening more and more often recently. He looks at me, nods his head, and says what I was going to say. Either we’ve become telepathic or he can read my face like a book.

“Hurry up, move it!” Moretti says, and Agello pushes the key further into the keyhole. It makes a loud, metallic squeak, but it’s muffled by the music. The click of the lock is even louder, but now it’s a question of moments, split seconds.

Moretti raises the pistol, holding it near his face, the back of his hand against the wool fabric of the beret covering his forehead. He gives the door a kick, straight-on, with the sole of his shoe, and it opens. In split seconds, one split second, we’re all inside, me with the MP5 raised, selector set to rapid fire. Albertino, ready with the twelve-caliber SPAS, Moretti aiming the Beretta with two hands, thumb on thumb, and Agello, with another Beretta and his arm raised to hurl a grenade, the pin already out.

But hurl it where? The apartment is just this, this room behind the door — table, chairs, kitchenette, a fake brick archway from which a transparent curtain hangs, and beyond it a bed. The apartments in Trastevere are usually tiny, but this is extreme.

A split second. Being the closest, I take a step, brush the curtain aside with my arm, turn the barrel of the gun, but I can see right away that there’s nobody here.

No, actually, there is somebody: There’s a sound like a sigh behind a small door in the wall, next to the kitchenette. It’s barely louder than a murmur and it’s muffled in the music that floats down the stairwell to where we stand.

A split second. Moretti kicks the door and the lock in the small door rips away from the jamb. Moretti and Albertino and I step in, weapons raised, and Moretti yells, “Police, stop!” hollering so loudly that the music from upstairs suddenly stops.

The girl sitting on the toilet clearly has no intention of moving. In fact, if not for her lips, which are trembling, she could be dead. She’s sitting paralyzed, a roll of toilet paper in her hand and her underpants at her ankles, eyes fixed on us, in our black body suits and ski masks, crammed together in a bathroom of a few square feet, shower and all.

Moretti raises his fist and we all lower our weapons.

“Shit,” he mutters.

There’s a radio playing. It’s from an apartment across the hall, at the end of the landing. I know that because the last time the girl brought me food, I asked her and she told me it was coming from over there. She says she listened at the door and heard it. MTV, she said. It’s on practically all day, and it reaches all the way to my apartment, through two closed doors, not loud enough to be annoying but loud enough that I can hear it, as if the TV is on low in another room.

I’ve gotten used to it. That must be why I realized the second it stopped. Or maybe because first I heard a door slam, and then that shout I couldn’t understand. Rude assholes, I thought, but then the music stopped and that made me suspicious. So I got up from bed, grabbed the 356 from the bedside table, and went to the door.

“He’s not here,” Moretti yells down the stairwell, and moments later everyone comes up: agents in uniform, top brass, the chief of the mobile squad, and even the judge. They rush up the stairs to the landing. “Stay back, please. Police!” shouts an official as doors open. Nobody comes out, except one woman in a bathrobe and slippers on an upstairs landing who won’t back off from the railing, so we have to send an agent up.

“Bad tip,” says Moretti to the judge. “Marcos isn’t here and the girl’s got nothing to do with it, she’s shoots video for television. She went back into the bathroom, but I’ll bet she raises hell when she comes out.”

“Vicolo del Bologna,” the judge says. “Number 5B. The informant was sure.”

“The informant was wrong. This is number 5 and Marcos isn’t here.”

“What if he only got the side of the building wrong?”

I hear them knocking at the door. Police, open up! And they don’t rush right in. They’re cautious. They’re right to be.

We go in with our weapons ready, shoo away the people on the landing, take a quick look around, then the agents follow and we move on to other apartments. We begin on the third-floor landing. A huge dog leaps out from one apartment and Agello nearly shoots him. Next door there’s a journalist who wants to come along, and we have to shut him inside. Outside, the vicolo is blockaded and nobody can pass.

On the lam you can spend your dough well or badly. I spent it badly. I’m not saying on chicks and champagne — even though this one does bring food and she’d be willing. But at least I should have planned on having somewhere to run. That, yes. A skylight, the possibility of jumping down to another street. Here there’s no way out, just a clothesline suspended across a closed courtyard.

So I’m thinking there are only three possibilities. I surrender, open the door, slide the gun down the stairs, say, I’m alone and unarmed. Or I don’t surrender, grab the grenades on the dresser, throw them down the stairs, and then make a run for it with the submachine gun I keep next to the bed, and either I make it or I’m fucked. Or else, I stand ready with the pistol, the door open a crack, and decide what to do when the first mug appears.

The door of that last apartment is slightly open. Maybe they left it like that by accident and nobody’s home, or maybe some cooperative citizen opened it and is waiting for us to arrive. I’m the nearest to it — clutching my MP5 like a pistol, my hand ready to give the door a shove — in my black combat fatigues and waterproof boots that keep sticking to the tile floor. Then, suddenly, something that hasn’t happened to me in a long time happens. I can’t stand the beret, and the wool ski mask is itching the hell out of my sweaty skin. My wet breath is slimy on my lips and I feel like I’m going to barf. It’s broiling today, though I’m used to the heat. Still, this time I can’t seem to go on. So I pull off the beret with one hand, then let out a sigh of relief, but fuck, the TV’s off now. I reach out again with the ski mask clenched between my fingers and push the door open.

I’m thinking I already have three life sentences. I’m thinking I’ll be better off if they kill me. I’m thinking: Now these asshole Rambos have me really fucked.

So I raise the barrel of the 356, and when the door opens, some guy’s big red face appears right there in the viewfinder. His eyes are bugging in surprise, his mouth’s hanging open, and a clump of sweaty hair is sticking straight up on one side of his head; it looks like he couldn’t even brush it back down if he wanted.

Split seconds. Three. One, to mentally superimpose the mug shot onto that face: It is Marcos. Two, to realize I’m a goner. Three, to take the first shot. But then there’s no need because he raises his arm, aiming the pistol at the ceiling, and keeps it like that until I grab it. Then the other guys rush in.

He keeps on staring at my head, even when we pull his hands behind his back to cuff him. He seems to be laughing. I put a hand up to my head and feel a stiff shank of hair that the beret pressed up at a weird angle. It sometimes looks like that in the morning if I’ve slept funny on the pillow. When I was little, my brother and I called it the arrow. I push it down with my hand but it springs back up.

“Hey, cop,” Marcos says as I grab him by the arm to escort him out. “That hair of yours there, it looks like it needs a cut.”

And he laughs, the jerk.

Remember Me with Kindness by Maxim Jakubowski

Calcata

His budget flight landed in Fiumicino. It was a hot, humid summer day.

Even though he held a CEE passport, the uniformed border officer at immigration control looked up and actually asked him whether he was visiting Rome for business or pleasure. As inquisitive as an American airport official.

“Sentimental reasons,” he answered, and was then allowed through with no further comment.

Maybe the border guard had been bored or something, as he had never been asked any such question on the occasion of his previous, numerous visits.

He had only hand luggage so went straight through into the main terminal’s arrivals hall and made a beeline for the car rental desks. He had no need for anything fast or fancy in the way of transport, but he still had to convince the rental clerk that he actually prefered a car with a manual gear shift rather than an automatic. Habits die hard. After filling in the forms and signing on all the dotted lines, he was handed the keys to a dark blue Fiat and given the directions to the parking lot where it was kept.

He walked out into the midday sun and looked around. On his last time here, she’d been waiting, with her usual both wanton and joyfully innocent smile, wearing a white skirt and carrying a huge canvas bag embroidered with sunflowers, an accessory she’d bought six months earlier in Barcelona and which made her look like a schoolgirl rather than a full-grown woman.

He settled into the driver’s seat, keeping the door open for a few minutes to allow the heat to escape from the car’s interior before the air-conditioning kicked in, while his feet found the measure of the pedals, getting himself accustomed again to driving a car on the opposite side of the road and having the steering wheel on the left-hand side. It always took a little acclimation, however many times he had to rent cars abroad.

And finally, he drove off toward the city. Considering it was the main road connecting Rome to one of its major airports, there was something old-fashioned and narrow about this street which made him think of all the legions of Caesar and past emperors and despots who’d in all likelihood marched down these avenues upon returning from or departing for battle many years before. No modern highway this, more of a cobblestone alley in places, with twin ramparts of trees on either side and occasional low stone walls pouring with ivy, possibly erected long before even Mussolini.

It was as if the twenty-first century hadn’t yet broken here, despite the gleaming modern cars racing up and down the road, all splendidly oblivious to any speed limit. He was in no real hurry and, irritated by his leisurely pace, some of the other drivers honked at him repeatedly.

He’d found a room on the Internet in a small residential hotel close to Piazza Vittorio Emanuele II. It was a quiet side street and easy to park, even though he wasn’t sure if the parking space he had chosen was illegal or not. At any rate, he couldn’t be bothered about parking tickets and was confident the Fiat wouldn’t be towed away since it wasn’t blocking anyone, and many other local vehicles were lined up on the same side of the street. The hotel was situated on the fourth floor of a massive apartment building and suited him fine: a clean, spacious, if somewhat Spartan place, just a reception desk manned by a young student busy revising her journalism and publishing exams, she informed him, and a small breakfast salon at the other end of the corridor from his room. He didn’t require anything more. There were bars all across the city, and anyway he didn’t drink. Never had. More taste than principle, even if he found that it led to some people gossiping behind his back back in London, and he was often suspected of being an ex-alcoholic. Print the legend, he thought; it’s miles more glamorous than the truth.

He changed into a clean shirt and walked toward Via Cavour and Stazione Termini. Here, the package he had ordered was left, as promised, in the luggage locker he had been sent a key for the week before. The transaction had not proven cheap, but then again, money was now the least of his worries. The gun had been left at the bottom of a plastic Rinascente bag in which the seller had buried it, with no sense of irony, under a crumpled mess of seemingly used women’s silk lingerie. This was not the ideal place to check the weapon out, but it appeared in good shape, and should contain six bullets. He would not require more. He treated himself to an espresso at one of the station’s cafeterias and watched with melancholy how the two spoons of sugar drifted slowly toward the bottom of the small cup. Just the way espresso coffee should behave, he recalled her teaching him when they were still together. He sketched a wry smile for any curious onlookers. The coffee and sugar boost gave him a fresh sense of purpose, renewed his determination to see this all through.

He walked away from the bar and the busy train station and took the direction of the Campo dei Fiori, past the unescapable ancient monuments surrounded by wide-eyed tourists. Shortly after crossing the Piazza Vidoni, the Roman streets became quieter again, as if foreigners no longer ventured this far, beyond their self-circumscribed tourist enclave, and he made his way down Corso Vittorio Emanuele II until he reached the Feltrinelli bookshop. He walked upstairs and ordered his second espresso of the day and a panini and sat at the edge of the store’s balcony watching the customers mill below as they picked up random books and shopped at their leisure. She had once written to him, a long time ago, before they had even slept together and were still enjoying a mildly flirtatious stream of e-mail communications, that this was her favorite spot in all of Rome to waste time, meditate, observe others, casually do her homework. On his fateful initial visit here, this was also the first place she’d taken him and they had spent an hour here, nervously silent most of the time, knowing that a few hours later they would be in bed together for the first time. He remembered every single moment — the perfume she had worn, the heat radiating from her white skin as their knees brushed against each other and she contrived to make her cappuccino last forever as if scared to move on to the next, concrete and physical stage in their affair.

He didn’t expect to find her here today. She was now studying in a different area, but still he had to come visit the place again. Just in case. To commune with the past. To reopen old wounds. To feel the hurt inside. It was foolish, he knew, but if he had to march down this calvary road of his own making, the Feltrinelli bookshop could not be avoided. The latest novel by Walter Veltroni and the Italian edition of the final Harry Potter book were piled high by the cash registers and staff kept on replenishing the displays on a steady basis. He’d sent her the English-language edition of the Rowling when it had appeared, but by then they were no longer on speaking terms and she had not even thanked him or acknowledged the gift, one of many over the months they had known each other. The first book she had sent him as a gift was a collection of stories by Italo Calvino. Strange how he remembered every single, irrelevant detail.

Finally, his stomach reminded him he hadn’t had a real meal since a dim sum in London’s Chinatown the day before, so he left the bookshop and headed across the Corso Vittorio Emanuele II toward the Campo dei Fiori and the Pollarolla restaurant where he had a pleasant memory of fragole di bosco with a fine dusting of sugar. Of course, he had also taken her there, once upon a time. Because of a stomach condition, she was not allowed to eat any spicy food, which he’d always considered something of a tragedy. But the meal today, insalata verde and risotto ai funghi, could not feed the pain inside, and later, as he walked back to his hotel, he made a detour by Stazione Termini and under cover of darkness surrounded by rushing commuters and loitering teenagers he slipped his left hand deep into the plastic bag he had now been carrying for half of the day and felt the hard grip of the gun down there. It felt real. By Stazione Termini he sat down and wept.

He woke up early. Escaping the inevitable dreams of her, of them. The sheer epiphany of her body, the ever so subtle and patently unique color of her nipples, the broadness of her smile, the terrible harshness of her words on the phone the last time he had called her, the luscious sound of her sigh every time he had penetrated her. The places they’d been, the things they’d said.

He always woke up early these days, maybe as an automatic reaction to the sleeping memories of her and the abominable pain they invariably inflicted on his soul.

He adjusted his eyes, wiped the night away, and moved his right leg.

Yes, he was in Rome.

Alone.

He passed on breakfast, picked up a map of the city from an older woman now manning the hotel’s reception desk, and, avoiding the elevator and its ornate metal grille, walked down the stairs to the street and found the rental car. He hadn’t been ticketed, after all. Small mercies.

He pulled the gun from the depths of the Rinascente plastic bag and moved it to the glove compartment. Not an ideal place to keep it, but there were few good hiding places in the hotel room. He would just have to drive carefully and not attract police attention. The busy Roman traffic would help.

Before driving off, he phoned Alessandra, Giorgio, and Marina and made appointments to see them separately throughout the day. They were all surprised to find out he was in Rome, but sounded happy enough to meet up with him.

With the festival organizers he talked about books and movies and cultural politics. As they always did when they met at events. It was amazing how buoyant they remained every single year in the face of mounting difficulties in obtaining funding, grants, and sponsorships. Of course, they asked him why he was in Rome. “Just passing through,” he would answer with a fake smile, and this seemed to satisfy them. They embraced and made a vow to see each other again at the next festival and went their separate ways.

Alessandra knew a small trattoria in the Trastevere, concealed within a labyrinth of cobbled streets and small churches only a local could navigate with impunity and find a way out of again. He meekly followed her. Night was falling. Inside, he felt ever so empty. Following the break-up with Desi, he had almost fallen into bed with Alessandra since both had been on the rebound from heart shattering affairs. But it hadn’t happened. They knew each other professionally, and she had also been aware of his relationship with Desi, as they both freelanced for the same magazines. Maybe it was because neither of them were sufficiently head over heels about the other, or maybe they both lacked the energy for purely recreational sex. Sometimes you want the tenderness and the feelings, and the physicality wasn’t enough to conquer the inner thirst. At any rate, after a failed attempt at meeting up in Paris for a tryst, they’d drifted apart, either to other adventures or, in his case, a desert of loneliness. He expected nothing of tonight either. It was just a way of saying goodbye to a friendship. No less, no more.

The cuisine was Sicilian and for the first time ever he tried pasta with sardines, followed by great bowls of steamed shellfish, with a succulent sauce they both soaked up with freshly baked local bread. The small piazza outside the restaurant was shrouded in darkness as he looked out of the windows of the restaurant, somehow expecting Desi to walk by at any moment, like a ghost from the past.

“Still thinking about her?” Alessandra asked.

“Yes,” he answered. “It’s a sickness. I know. Don’t tell me.”

“There’s a character in Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera who tries to cure himself of a case of unrequited love by bedding 622 women,” she remarked, as if proposing a cure.

“It would feel too much like revenge,” he pointed out. “Anyway, it wasn’t unrequited. I have pages and pages of e-mails, text messages, and letters to prove it. And I know every square inch of her body at rest and play, every obscene crease and every single silky surface.”

“You always had a wonderful way with words...” Alessandra sighed.

“But words are insufficient now,” he answered. “Powerless. She no longer answers my messages, listens to me. She probably thinks I’ve gone mad. And she’s probably right.”

“Did you come to Rome to try and see her?” Alessandra asked.

“No,” he said. “I don’t know. Maybe I just came for myself...”

He offered to drive her back to her apartment on the other side of the river.

The car moved along the Tiber on the Lungotevere heading north. Even at this time of night, the traffic was thick. Alessandra insisted on smoking a cigarette. He opened his window and looked out. Across the river was an old-fashioned building, white and functional under the light of a three-quarter moon: the San Filippo Neri Hospital. A knot twisted inside his stomach — wasn’t this where she had been born or where her father, the surgeon, worked? Or both?

Alessandra invited him up for a final coffee, but he declined.

“I have to get up early in the morning,” he said. It would have been pointless.

Back on the hotel bed, he prayed for sleep. When it finally came, hours later — the sounds of the Roman night punctuated by sirens and the odd boisterous laugh of passersby in the street outside — it was an ocean of despair and memories that he just couldn’t banish. It was a warm night and he kept wiping away the sweat between his legs and under his chin, as he thrashed around feverishly between the crisp white sheets.

Even sleep was no longer a refuge.

She lived in the hills behind the Olympic Stadium.

He painfully managed to find his way there, maneuvering the car with difficulty with an unfolded map on his knees and dodging cars that sped past him. She had pointed out the area to him when they had driven nearby on the way to secret places where they could fuck, but he had a hell of a time today finding his way past the Olympic Stadium. Once in the hills, it was no better and he arrived at the top by mistake, enjoying a view of both central Rome and all the neighboring hills he remembered from his history and Latin lessons all those years past. Oh, there was the Vatican. And there was the road that led out of town to the lake and Calcata, past the neglected area whose name he couldn’t recall where, she had told him, prostitutes and low-life came out at night, then further down the road the RAI buildings. She had confessed to an unholy fascination with the whores there when she had been a teenager and how she had always imagined what they were doing and how she would act if she were one.

He studied the map carefully and found her street. He drove off downwards in its direction.

Via Luigi Credaro was a cul-de-sac and a small supermarket occupied the ground floor of the apartment building where she still lived with her parents. He managed to park a hundred meters away on the opposite side of the road.

Though he had never been here, he seemed to remember her saying that the apartment occupied the top two floors of the building. Did her bedroom overlook the street, or was it on another side of the building facing the hills or a different part of the city?

So, this was where she had mostly grown up, apart from those years in the country when she had commuted to school in the city by train. It felt strange being here. He kept his eye on the door to the building; the supermarket was open and customers trickled in and out.

He opened the glove compartment and took out the gun and placed it between his thighs on the car seat. He’d never fired a gun in his life, let alone owned one. But he had read enough books and articles and knew the basics — the safety, the caliber, the damage it could invariably cause.

I’m crazy, totally crazy, he thought. He’d been in love before, of course, but never had he been so obsessed with a woman, a girl, or missed her so much. Without her, he had sadly realized, he was nothing.

However much he knew that things could never have worked out between them after the initial year-long honeymoon of covert meetings and fiery fucks in forbidden places, he still couldn’t give up on her totally, admit defeat, let her, and him, get on with their respective lives. She was younger. She still had a life — adventures, as she’d put it — ahead of her. He didn’t. Not without her.

It was a few weeks before when he had been doing some Internet research for a story that he had stumbled across a pornographic website replete with photos submitted by nonprofessionals; openly voyeuristic images of nudity, both simple and extreme, and of couples having intercourse. He had distractedly spent a quarter of an hour surfing through the images and noting the monotonous repetition of positions and angles, when he had come across a series of eight shots in which the woman’s face was out of the frame but her opulent white ass stood front and center, her wet, pink gash circled by unruly black curls, fully exposed along with the puckered, darker areola of her back door. The young woman was on her knees, her rear right in the camera’s face. From image to image the ass came nearer and nearer to the fore, and in the final three photographs a resplendently thick and hard penis took aim at the woman’s cunt and was then seen entering it and finally deeply embedded up to the ball sack.

He had of course seen a thousand photographs of this kind before, but this time the shape, the color, the details of the woman’s ass recalled hers in indelible resemblance. He’d been violently sick, rushing to the bathroom and spewing out all the contents of his stomach over the carpet long before reaching the safety of the ceramic bowl. It had been like a knife to his heart. Naturally, he knew that he could not expect her to keep on being faithful to him in the whole year since their break-up, and since when do women in their twenties have to act as nuns? But somehow the images on his laptop had brought it all home, the idea of another man fucking her, owning her, playing with her, and, worse, getting her to allow him to broadcast photographs of their terrible intimacy across the web.

A few hours later, he had hesitantly peered at the photographs again and realized it wasn’t her, couldn’t be her. A few meshes of the woman’s hair were in the frame of one of the images and the color was not hers; also, there was a distinctive mole absent in a familiar area of her lunar landscape, he discovered, to his relief. But the scar was still there. Inside him. Who was she with now? Who did she love now, she who had once loved him?

The door to the building opened and a woman walked out, plump, dark-haired, almost a vision of what Desi might look like twenty years later. Her mother?

The heat of the day hammered against the parked car, but he couldn’t switch the air-conditioning on or the battery would go flat.

Was she now alone in her room in the large two-floor apartment?

Or maybe she was now in a small hotel room by Lake Bracciano, being ploughed by another man. It had been, after all, she who had discovered that hideaway.

Enough. Enough.

I am sick. I am sick.

Sick enough to climb the stairs to the apartment, ring the bell, confront her when she opened the door, and brandish the gun? If you can’t be mine, you can’t be anyone else’s...? The pitiful stuff of tabloid journalism. Come on!

He could sit here all day and not see her, he realized. And even if she did emerge, what would he do then? Follow her? Stalk her? He’d lose her in traffic most likely.

In her anger, when he would refuse to let her go and beg for a last meeting, a final embrace, a penultimate conversation, she would always fire back that he had no respect for her and could not accept what she felt. She had these crazy ideas about respect, but he did understand what she meant.

In a letter, one of so many, too many, he had written that loving her was also knowing when to let her go, but it was a precept he had proven incapable of adhering to.

What the fuck was he doing in Rome? What the hell was he doing with a gun?

There’s no way he could kill her.

Damn.

He drove off, found the highway that led out of town, past the desolate and empty marketplace where the whores were said to congregate at night like in a Fellini film, sped past the RAI buildings and into the countryside.

The sky was blue.

Maybe he could find peace after all.

There was a junction with a road that led to Lake Bracciano and Trevignano. He sighed and drove past it, his mind assaulted by more memories of nearby hotel rooms where they had made love and had once been unbearably happy. Watching her emerge from the shower, her wet, unfurled hair hanging all the way down her back. Putting that cheap necklace around her throat.

The next turn-off was for the medieval town of Calcata. He was just over forty kilometers from the city, in the Parco Treja Tuscia. Here, behind the high, fortified ramparts in a small stone house, where the February cold had chilled their bones to the marrow and forced them to spend almost two whole days in bed — talking nonstop between the tender fucking, learning about each other, getting accustomed to the taste of each other, growing bolder with mind and body and plunging headfirst into transgression — he had moved inside her for the first time and fallen in love with her. Forever.

Calcata looked the same. In all likelihood it had not changed in a few hundred years. Once abandoned, the small town had been repopulated several decades ago by hippies and was now turning into a historical arts center, with medieval summer houses for rich Romans, artists, or visiting lovers, art galleries, and a handful of tiny country restaurants. The whole town, whose population still didn’t number more than nine hundred people normally, was built on a hilltop of volcanic rock.

He parked the rented blue Fiat outside the ramparts and walked up the stone street into the town, past the arches and fortifications.

The small cottage where they had frozen and spent thirty-six hours all that time ago was still there. He wondered what sort of couple was now inside in that unforgettable bedroom you could only access through a shaky wooden ladder (aaahhhh, the vision of her climbing those stairs, stark naked, his eyes looking straight at the voluptuous and bouncing flesh of her ass as he ascended behind her, his cock hard and ready, his mind aglow with tenderness and desire...).

He walked by the steep stone steps to his forgotten paradise and ventured past narrow alleys, closed craft shops, and clothes hanging loose from windows until he reached the narrow promontory that dominated the valley below.

The view was quite beautiful, rugged, untamed. In the distance, forests dominated the landscape, but below the damaged stone walls protecting this side of Calcata was a giant lunar expanse of rocks.

He sighed.

Best remember the good times.

When she smiled at him and her eyes expressed a million things unsaid.

He pulled that silly gun from the plastic bag and hurled it into the void. It fell in a large arc and it felt like almost a minute before he saw it actually hit the ground some five hundred meters below. It didn’t go off. He had left the safety catch on. No need to draw attention to himself, even though there didn’t appear to be a soul for a mile around.

He closed his eyes.

My sweetie, she would call him.

He took a deep breath.

My wild gypsy, he would often say to her.

He pulled his left leg over the wall, raised himself energetically so that he now stood on the edge of the precipice.

Looked down a final time.

Those fierce and distant rocks should do the job, he reckoned.

And jumped.

Eaten Alive by Evelina Santangelo

Translated by Anne Milano Appel

Via Ascoli Piceno

Springtime in Rome, a dawn populated with chattering birds. An impalpable veil of smog that slowly dissipates, as though steadily absorbed by the great sponge of the sun in its methodical climb toward the vault of the sky. White wisps of clouds scattered here and there in the blue that watches over the peaceful city and its outlying areas, still sunk in a stubborn Sunday morning slumber, broken by the din of garbage trucks, the rumble of a bus. “The 105 or the 81,” Quirino murmurs, rinsing the coffee cup under the faucet and placing it on the drain board. He fills a glass, takes some big sips. “Ah, the taste of Rome’s cool waters!” With a mechanical gesture he tightens the tie of his light woolen blue-and-white striped robe and gazes at the beautiful, mutilated structure of the Colosseum, licked by the first rays of the sun: the “big windows,” as he calls them, that run along the circular walls. “Solid,” he murmurs, satisfied, the tip of his index finger following the play of depressions and reliefs carved out of the fake marble with industrial precision, imitating with the touch of a master the irregularities of the stone worn away by time. “Centuries,” Quirino murmurs, drawing himself up and resting the palm of his hand on the edge of the credenza. He slips his bare feet into his slippers, and goes over to the window that looks out on the street, a modest strip closed to cars and flanked by low houses: The cables of television antennae hang down along the façades from the rooftops like improbable, permanent festoons, working their way somehow or other into window frames or cracks in the walls below the sills. “Television... everyone has a television...” He lowers his eyes to the street littered with beer bottles and small shapeless piles of trash. A cat emerges silently from an empty dumpster still sunk in shadow, and quietly licks a paw.

The stillness is broken only by the monotonous swishing of a street sweeper’s broom. The cat turns to watch the almost phosphorescent green plastic bristles, then resumes licking, indifferent to the other paw. It starts suddenly when it sees the broom rise — “Drunken kids!” — and angrily thump the dumpster’s grimy metal, barely missing its tail. “Drunken kids,” the street sweeper mutters again, wiping his forehead with his arm, his hands stuffed into enormous work gloves.

Quirino leans out, nods to him. “Got a bee up your butt tonight?” he says, relishing those first words of conversation. “Nice morning,” he adds, throwing his arms wide in a gesture that embraces heaven and earth.

“Nice morning, nice morning...” the other man repeats, shaking his head and crouching down on the sidewalk to retrieve a bottle stuck between the wheels of the dumpster. He raises it toward the window, dangling it between the black fingers of his bulky gloves. “They’ve trashed the neighborhood, those sons of bitches,” he says, waving the bottle in the air and tossing it in the bag. “You should see the garbage in front of that shitty store, where those deadbeat godless immigrants make money selling beer to young kids until 3 in the morning... A bottle factory? A piss factory!” he adds. He shrugs helplessly, looks around. “Filth everywhere... on the ground, on the walls...” He points to the layers of mimeographed posters pasted on the façades. “A person has his own problems, no place to live... rents here being what they are now... and there, they go and put stuff all over the walls... What a life it would be without rent... What a life it would be without rent...” he reads, stressing each word. “On all the walls... Some like it hot, some like it cold. And they think they’re fascists... social fascists... and there, they go and print these and stick them on the walls! And they still have revolution in their heads... And they go printing that crap about their laboratories for revolution... and there... they go and stick their proletarian solidarity on the walls. Those spoiled brats! To them, going to live in Pigneto seems revolutionary... with money, of course! Not to mention those other... beauties... Chinese, Bengalis, Pakistanis, Indians, Senegalese. Only they know what the hell they are... They come to our country to bust our balls... with their posters... because, what do I know, they have their holidays and they want to celebrate them however and wherever they say. They have houses like this... and they want them like that... Do we have houses like that? Oh, do we? Eight hundred euros a month, yours truly, in Torpignattara...” He holds three black fingers up against the sky. “Eight hundred!” he repeats. “So much for rent control...”

Quirino, with a sudden feeling of embarrassment, puts on a contrite expression. “That’s how it is,” he says, “with these new euros...”

“That’s how it is? The hell it is! Yesterday... yesterday, at the corner of Tor Pignattara, right next to my house... flyers everywhere. And why? Because these kids, immigrant sons of bitches, want to play cricket on Sunday... at Villa de Santis, in the park... and our kids follow right along, now they, too, want to play crick-e-crock... And what does it mean, huh, do you know what We want to play crick-e-crock means?”

Quirino shrugs.

“Not soccer,” the street sweeper continues, carried away by the heat of his words, “everybody knows what soccer is... No! And where do they want to play that crazy game? In Pigneto! In our neighborhood!” He shakes his head again, ripping some shredded paper off a wall. He looks around gloomily. “They can all go to hell, a person has his own problems...”

“His own problems,” Quirino echoes him, watching the man drag the garbage bag and the broom toward the end of the street. Then he sighs. He stays there a few moments longer to watch Sor Pietro come back up the pedestrian strip, dragged along by his mastiff, a coal-gray hulk that devours the street in great strides. He watches the man dig in his heels, tug on the leash — “Tito, heel!” — take off a loafer with a threatening gesture. The man argues with the animal, his small body shaking, his eyeglasses crooked on his nose. The mastiff lowers its head and, docile now, lets itself be pet; it slows its gait, now and then turns to its master, who adjusts his eyeglasses and nods blissfully.

“To each his own problems...” Quirino murmurs with a half-smile, closing the shutters and moving toward the little cage. “Good morning, Cesarì.” He takes out the drinking tray. “Some fresh water, hmm, Cesarì?” He goes to the sink. “A little lettuce... a slice of apple...” He sticks his hand in the cage, arranges everything on the tray. Then he holds out a finger. “Like a ray of sunshine, my little canary!” He begins petting the soft yellow feathers, feels the beak delicately nip his finger. “Hmm, Cesarì...” He slides his hand out slowly, watches the bird cock his head and look back at him. “Good boy, Cesarì!” he exclaims, observing the white cage with the small trapeze hanging in the center. “Go and play, Cesarì, Papa has things to do now.”

He looks up over his reading glasses when he hears a knock at the door. He lays the pen down on the notebook. He glances at the wristwatch that his father gave him more than fifty years ago. “So early...” he murmurs, surprised, pressing his hands down on the tabletop and rising. “Is that you, Massimì?” he says, standing on tiptoe and squinting at the landing through the peephole. He sees the curly, grayish fuzz that crowns the small, turtle-like head of Signora Lavinia. “What’s happened?” He opens the door, peers down at the woman’s pinched face.

“May I come in?” she stammers, through lips that are even paler and thinner than usual, her pupils glistening beneath her long, dark lashes.

Quirino pulls the edges of his robe tightly together. For a moment he remains motionless, half-framed by the partly open door.

“Something has happened,” Signora Lavinia whispers, her voice almost hoarse from sobbing. “Something... terrible,” she says.

Quirino runs a hand through the steely gray hair that gives him a fierce, youthful look that he has been proud of since he passed the “critical threshold,” as he says, alluding to his accumulation of years. “Come in then.” He shoves his hands into his wide, roomy pockets. “Shall I make some coffee?”

Signora Lavinia brings a hand to her chest, struggling against the tremors that shake her body. “No, thank you. My heart...”

Quirino takes off his glasses, presses two fingers against his eyelids. “Ah, the heart... the heart... When it goes, there’s trouble...” Then: “Well, Signora Lavinia?” He gestures for her to sit down. He settles himself in his place, on the other side of the table, facing her, his hands on the notebook.

Signora Lavinia’s eyes, now even brighter, look at him imploringly.

“We’ll talk about this later, when the time is right,” Quirino reassures her, closing the notebook.

Signora Lavinia lowers her head, presses her palm against her forehead. “What happened is that... my Valentina...” She bursts out in a deep sob that cuts off her breath.

“She was old, poor thing...” Quirino says.

Signora Lavinia shakes her head forcefully. “They killed her, Sor Quirì,” she says, gulping a mouthful of air and then getting swept up in a vortex of words. “This morning I woke up and she wasn’t there. She must have gone to take her usual little walk, I told myself. Still... I had a kind of premonition... a foreboding, Sor Quirì... I don’t know. So then I went down and started calling her. Here, there. And... do you know, I found her under the little bridge, in the gravel on the railroad tracks.”

“She was hit by a train?” Quirino asks with a sorrowful expression. “If you knew how many cats I saw end up like that when I worked for the railroad... Poor things...” He reaches a hand out to Signora Lavinia, who shakes her head again, holding back her sobs as best she can. “Killed, Sor Quirì. Killed by someone. Her head bashed in by a rock, or a club... I don’t know... With all these terrible people running around... I don’t know, Sor Quirì... Now what am I going to do?” She twists her handkerchief into a knot around her fingers. “Ten years... we ate together, slept together... everything, Sor Quirì. Now what will I do without those beautiful eyes of hers... a companion, Sor Quirì.”

Quirino swallows a sour globule of saliva, glances toward the cage. He brightens when he sees Cesarì swinging slowly on the trapeze. “What can you do, Signora Lavinia...?” he murmurs. “Get yourself another one, another cat. What can we do against the blows of fate...?” He shrugs.

“Fate...” Signora Lavinia repeats bitterly. “So those people can kill another one.”

“Those people who, Signora Lavinia?”

“Those people, them... One of those newcomers in the neighborhood, I’m sure of it, they have no respect. What do they care about my little cat, about an old woman... There’s no respect for anything anymore, Sor Quirì.”

“What do you mean, Signora Lavinia? It was an accident. Surely. An unfortunate accident... Now go downstairs, go home, make yourself a nice hot cup of chamomile... And later, when you feel up to it... when you feel up to it” — he taps two fingers on the cover of the notebook, looks at his manicured nails — “we’ll talk. All right?” he says, composing his face in a stern, paternal expression.

Signora Lavinia starts. She nods. “Yes, I know that the outstanding amount is considerable... but my pension check still hasn’t come and so... I don’t have the money, Sor Quirì...” She holds out the palms of her bare hands.

Quirino puts his index finger to his lips, as if to say, Hush. “Some other time, some other time,” he whispers, getting up and walking her slowly to the door. “Tomorrow...”

Signora Lavinia looks at him despondently. “Tomorrow?” she stammers.

“Or the day after...” Quirino says obligingly. “That way we’ll deal with the rent issue and the loan issue in a single stroke, otherwise the interest...” He slowly raises his hand, levels it in front of her eyes in midair. “The day after tomorrow,” he repeats, meeting Signora Lavinia’s forlorn gaze.

“The day after tomorrow, all right,” she murmurs. Then she plunges back into her own thoughts: “They killed her,” she begins to mumble, holding onto the banister and slowly moving down the stairs.

In the sunlight filtering through the skylight, the down on her head shines like an evanescent halo, as Quirino says: “Animals... there’s no doubt about it, they’re better than people.”

“What’s the deal with arriving here at this hour? So late!” Quirino says, looking his son straight in the eye.

“A problem.”

“On a Sunday? The Lord’s day and... your father’s?”

“On a Sunday, on a Sunday...” Massimiliano says, irritated. “A problem on a Sunday. That can happen, can’t it?”

“All the time, Massimì? Every Sunday?” Quirino says, putting on his glasses.

“The kid threw up all night, his mother wanted to take him to the hospital this morning... a lot of talk... Let’s go, let’s not go... let’s see if he gets better...”

Quirino sits down at the table, opens the notebook. “And how is he now?” he asks, running a hand over the rough stubble on his chin, as if to say: More of your usual nonsense.

“He’s better,” his son says abruptly, sitting down in front of him and crossing his hands.

“And the new notebook? Did you get it?” Quirino asks, taking the key out of the pocket of his robe and inserting it in the lock of the drawer beneath the tabletop.

“I bought it, I bought it...” Massimiliano opens a plastic folder, pulls out an ordinary gray account book.

“What’s that? Quirino asks, startled.

“What we need,” Massimiliano says, adopting a professional tone.

“Me, I don’t need that thing! For me... this one here... is all I need.” He bangs the notebook down in front of his son’s eyes, points to the gilded face of Botticelli’s Venus printed on the cover. “I have my method, do you understand? My own way!”

Massimiliano gives him a dirty look, puts the account book back in the folder, and closes it angrily, with an abrupt snap. “A fine way...” he hisses between his teeth. Then: “Let’s see, come on, it’s getting late.” He leans across the table.

“All right then, let’s begin with the two small buildings. This one here should be nearly in order.” He takes a stack of bills from the drawer. He counts them, moistening his fingertips with saliva from time to time. “Punctual, these ‘out of town students,’” he says, stressing the words.

Massimiliano runs the bills through his hands, quickly glancing at them. He confirms. He watches his father record the figures carefully in the notebook. “And the ones from the catacombs?”

“Those... they asked me for a little more time,” Quirino says, concealing his annoyance.

“A little more time... after being a week late?” Massimiliano exclaims, fidgeting in his chair. “So, even with ten of them, those deadbeat immigrants can’t manage to scrape together the pittance that they owe! And if they can’t even pay for that rathole... why are they complaining, huh? Now they’ve even started kicking up a fuss at the Local Rights Department because There’s mold on the walls, they say! Because the electrical system is not up to code! What do they expect, those deadbeats!”

Quirino looks at him bewildered. “And what does this Rights Department do?”

“What does it do, what does it do...? It’s a pain in the ass! But they can stuff it, those jerks, because it’s not like they have proof that they’re paying us! It’s not like anyone sees the money they hand over, right? Who’s ever seen that money? Are there checks? Money orders? No!”

“So then?”

“So then, if they continue to give us a hard time, we’ll evict them for arrears, and they’re gone! Problem solved.” He slaps down the palm of his hand as if crushing an insect. “What shit...”

Quirino runs his fingers through his hair. “A person does all he can to try to please them... turning a blind eye... putting ten people in a house... ten... and just look at what they do—”

“Case closed, I told you,” Massimiliano cuts him off. “Let’s continue.”

“Fine, let’s continue... So then” — he clears his throat. “So then, the other small building... in order, let’s say.”

“And the girl? The ‘artist’?” Massimiliano urges him on with sarcasm.

“The girl on the top floor... she’ll pay in a few days, she says. Because it’s a little expensive for her...”

“And we have a painter in our building who wants to be an alternative artist!” Massimiliano retorts. “And the Chinese?”

Quirino takes the money out of the drawer. “On time.” He puts the bills on the table. “Decent people, who work... and pay the rent.”

“Decent people, fine people,” Massimiliano mimics his father, shaking his head. “Do you know how many clothing stores they supply, those people? Do you know?”

Quirino shrugs.

“Of course they pay... that pathetic amount we charge.”

“A storeroom, Massimì. How much should we make them pay for a storeroom?”

“And how much do you think they pay those poor devils who work for them day and night like chickens? Nothing! So let’s take it out of their hide, why not?”

Quirino doesn’t answer, he counts the hundred-euro bills, enters the amount in the notebook. “There, done,” he murmurs. “And then,” he adds quickly, almost taking the words out of his son’s mouth, “and then... there’s the whole thorny matter of this building here.” He taps his finger on the tabletop.

Massimiliano twists his lips into a grimace that distorts his handsome, carefully shaved face. He suppresses a sudden fit of anger.

“Where sometimes they pay, sometimes they don’t pay...” Quirino continues. “Their pensions aren’t enough... Sor Quirì, another day or two... And a little loan here, a little loan there... and the interest is too high... What can I do about it, Massimì, if the bank doesn’t want to lend them money?”

“What can you do? Throw them out, once and for all, that’s what you should do!” his son snarls.

“What, I should start throwing people out on the street now? All these old people whom I’ve known a lifetime, Massimì? I have to keep duplicate keys to their apartments, in case they leave theirs inside, they’re so forgetful... What can I do? I raise the interest on the loans... What more can I do?... And then they come crying to me over a dead cat and whatnot... and what am I supposed to do? We’ll talk about it later, I tell them.”

“I’ll tell you what to do!” Massimiliano barks. “Sell, that’s what you should do.” He bangs his palm on the tabletop an inch from his father.

Quirino looks at him stubbornly. “Sell...” he says ironically.

“Sell, that’s right. To my real estate friend, who tells me every day, Whatever you want, Massimo, for that building there on the pedestrian strip. Name your price and I’ll pay it on the spot.”

Quirino throws up his arm. “Your friend the real estate agent...” He gives his son a scornful glance that makes him draw his head back between his shoulder blades. Then he points a finger right between his eyes. “Get it through your head.” He shakes his finger. “Quirino buys, he doesn’t sell. A little at a time... A loan here, a loan there... That’s how you get ahead: a little at a time.” He lowers his hand, begins stroking the open page of the notebook with his fingertip. “Was Rome built in a day? A little at a time, that’s how the urbs was built! Was it those real estate agents of yours who think they’re God — did they build Rome?”

Massimiliano offers a doglike expression. “What does Rome have to do with it?” Then he raises his voice. “Everything’s changing fast,” he exclaims, snapping his fingers. “The people, the money that’s circulating... And if we don’t jump at the chance we’ll lose our ass, get it, with all these whining beggars. We have to be shrewd, Dad! Shrewd!” he repeats, almost shouting. “And then” — his eyes travel over the room — “if you, too, were to go, to—”

“To...” Quirino interrupts, flaying him with his eyes. “Where is it that your father should go?”

“Away from here... if you were to leave here,” Massimiliano says hastily, changing his tone, “to a nice apartment, I mean... You can afford it.”

Quirino drops the pen on the notebook. He sets his eyeglasses on the table. “Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s,” he says, pronouncing the words one by one. Massimiliano frowns, not understanding. “And I,” Quirino continues, “we... are not God, who can create the world in seven days. We have to take our time... without biting off more than we can chew... in our own way... in our own house,” he adds.

Massimiliano shoves his chair back abruptly. “Then go on... go on letting these good-for-nothings take you for a ride.”

He sneers as he heads for the door, followed by Quirino’s voice: “The notebook, don’t forget!” Quirino then puts everything back in the drawer, turns the key in the lock, slips it carefully into his pocket. He gets up. He goes over to Cesarino’s little white cage. He watches for a while. He removes a golden feather stuck between the bars, blows it away. “Beauty is important, Cesarì,” he says, as if to justify himself. “Money and beauty... and some manners, as well...” He lets the bird peck his finger. “With good manners, everything is possible.” He smiles faintly.

“Killed!”

Signora Iolanda spreads her arms wide as she wanders desperately around the small courtyard that opens up beyond the entrance to the building. “They’ve killed them...” she whispers, turning her eyes toward her husband, who watches helplessly as she bends down, her breasts hanging like swollen pouches on her belly, brings her fingers to her mouth, then places them on the small bodies lying on the ground. “They’ve killed them,” she repeats, racing around like a madwoman in the courtyard’s faint light. She turns suddenly, frightened, when she hears a key fumbling in the door. She clings to her husband, who presses her head to his chest.

“It’s probably one of the tenants coming home,” he stammers, also turning toward the entrance in a rigid, unnatural movement.

Sor Quirino closes the door behind him. He leans the umbrella against the wall. He straightens his light overcoat that has been pulled to one side. “Some spring,” he mutters. “Who can figure out this crazy weather anymore...” Then he falls silent. He squints in an attempt to bring into focus the two shadows framed in the space beside the open glass door leading to the courtyard. He picks up the umbrella and takes a few steps. “Who’s there?” he calls out to bolster his courage, then breathes a sigh of relief. “Signora Iolanda...” he says, as the woman comes toward him, unspeaking, gesturing for him to follow.

He walks the few meters that separate him from the courtyard and turns a questioning glance toward Sor Antonio, the greengrocer, who mutters, “An atrocity,” pointing mechanically at the ground.

Quirino apprehensively lowers his eyes. “Poor things...” he whispers. He gets down on his knees with some difficulty, reaches a hand out toward the bloodied neck of a tiny kitten, curled up in the doorway, then spots another ragged heap behind the cistern, then another, and another... He turns his head, incredulous. He gives a start when he sees the red drip, drip, drip slowly staining the ground behind the cleaning bucket, where the body of the mother cat hangs, upside down and gutted. “Poor thing...”

“And there were two more,” Signora Iolanda whispers, “that... I can’t find anywhere.” She starts searching again, desperate.

Quirino pulls himself back up, holding onto the handle of his umbrella. “Who was it?” he asks, just to say something.

Sor Antonio widens his arms. “Who could it have been? Someone—”

“The person who... who also stoned Signora Lavinia’s cat, who scalded Sor Giacomo’s dog with hot water in the middle of the street the other morning,” Signora Iolanda breaks in, still wandering around the courtyard. “That poor dog, he was just going around doing his business, not bothering anybody. Who would Sor Giacomo’s dog bother, right, Sor Quirino? Who could he bother...? The drunks who live it up until the early-morning hours? Who? Who were these kittens bothering? So clean, their mother licked them every morning... and how they meowed in their tiny voices when I came down to give them their food. And someone... someone... without a heart... Who knows where the other two have ended up... They must have eaten the other two... I’ll bet you anything, they ate them... those Chinese people!” Signora Iolanda finally bursts out. “Those... those...” She covers her face with her hands.

“What do you mean, Signora Iolanda?” Quirino exclaims, looking for some sign of agreement on the stony face of Sor Antonio, who, lowering his eyes, mutters, “They must have eaten them.”

“What do you mean, eaten them?” Quirino asks, pointing to the mangled bodies of the cats in the courtyard. “What about these? Did someone eat these?” His hand moves to his neck, he opens the top button of his shirt, takes a deep breath. “Those sons of bitches,” he cries out suddenly, starting up the stairs, climbing faster and faster as a thought begins gnawing at his brain; he stumbles, and his hand trembles as he fumbles with the lock, and “Cesarì!” comes out in a stifled scream that dies in his throat when he sees the little bird curled up quietly on his perch, his head tucked under the beautiful feathers that slowly rise, swelling in rhythm with his breath.

There is a dazed silence in the lobby. “Like during the war, when we were all quiet, mute, so we wouldn’t get bombed,” Sor Giacomo whispers, wringing his hands.

“Under siege,” Signora Iolanda echoes him, following Quirino’s restless steps, as he paces up and down in silence, waiting for everyone to sit down on the chairs, which have been arranged in a circle.

Signora Iolanda looks up at the ceiling, stares at the naked bulb of the lamp hanging overhead. She shudders. She twists in her seat. “Who could have told Tito, poor thing, that it would end like this?” Sor Pietro looks at her, beside himself. “In his sleep,” he adds. “In his own house... in our house...” His head sags, he cleans his glasses and places them on his sweaty nose. “A good dog, a decent soul... big... I taught him everything... hanged by the neck from the television cable, with his teeth out... such a decent dog.” His eyes hidden behind the glasses turn toward Quirino, who continues to pace, trying to come up with an idea, something appropriate to say, fingering the drawer key in his pocket as if it were an amulet. He clutches it in his fingers. He hears an agitated whispering in the corner. “Let’s begin the meeting,” he says uncertainly, but giving his voice an authoritative pitch. All the residents start, as if those were the first words of God on earth. They instinctively turn their heads toward the front door, to make sure that it is firmly shut.

Quirino watches the two Zorzi brothers, who are huddled together. “Do you have something to say?” he asks, trying to maintain his tone.

The two exchange a few nervous glances. Then: “Yes,” says Sor Paolo, raising his hand to ask for the floor. “I do.” But he is silent when he sees all those eyes turn toward him expectantly.

“The fact is,” Sor Geno intervenes, with a nod of agreement toward his brother, “the fact is that we two... we don’t have animals at home and... who are they going to take it out on, those people, if they get it into their heads to break a window, a door, whatever... in our house...”

“We’re the only ones they can take it out on,” Sor Paolo concludes, his bald cranium sinking between his shoulders, while Sor Antonio says, “Because the point is, Sor Quirino, that now they’re even entering our homes, you see? Entering our homes...”

“To terrorize us,” Signora Iolanda chimes in.

“When we’re asleep, when a person... How does one defend oneself, Sor Quirì? How can a person defend herself alone,” Signora Lavinia wails.

“By talking to the district committee,” Sor Antonio speaks up. “That’s how we defend ourselves!”

Quirino gives him a dubious look. “And since when has there been such a committee?”

“The district committee,” Sor Geno says sarcastically. “That bunch, all they do is make up questionnaires ‘to survey people’s needs,’ they say... And what are the people’s needs, according to them?” He spreads his fingers and starts to count: “Bike and pedestrian paths, maintaining the green spaces, urban quality of life, chemical toilets... chemical toilets, for God’s sake! How much do you think people like us are worth in their eyes, huh? A bunch of penniless old people...” He feels his brother nudge him in the ribs and turns. “Am I wrong, Paole?” he mutters, his face livid.

“So what do they want, then? For us to go away? Is that what they want? To throw us out?” Sor Pietro says in a low voice. “To hang us all?”

“They want to eat our hearts,” Signora Lavinia breaks in, pressing her hands to her chest.

“All those drunken kids, those filthy immigrants, those Chinese, those junkies, those spoiled daddy’s boys, those building speculators who buy and sell and buy... and open new businesses... and we don’t have the slightest idea what they’re planning to do with this neighborhood of ours...” Signora Iolanda rants, to a murmur of agreement. She fidgets in her chair while her husband grabs her by the arm and casts a furtive look at the door.

“Calm down,” he says quietly. Then he turns firmly toward Quirino. “Let’s get back to the point. Who’s the one who has keys to our houses?” he hisses. “Who’s the one who can come and go as he pleases? Who’s the one who takes the bread out of our mouths...” He breaks off, stifling his rage and continuing to stare at Quirino, who turns pale.

“What are you trying to say, Sor Antonio?” Quirino murmurs, sneaking a glance at his watch and cursing his son, who still hasn’t shown up. Finally, trying to compose himself, he says: “If you want the keys, we can give them to you,” as if to evoke, with his words at least, the son who should already be there, at his side.

“Keys, what keys?” snaps Sor Pietro. “I... I’m going,” he says, leaving them all dumbfounded.

“Where are you going? To Stazione Termini?” Sor Geno asks with a flare of sarcasm.

“To join the beggars?” Sor Paolo is more precise, helping his brother out.

Signora Lavinia, looking around as if lost, moans: “Now what will we do? After forty years...”

“We’ll occupy a building,” Sor Antonio interjects. “We’ll certainly be better off than here, with all this moisture—”

“It’s eating us alive,” Signora Iolanda interrupts. “It’s eating us alive,” she repeats, glancing at Quirino, who leans against the wall.

“I’m eating you alive,” Quirino mumbles in bewilderment, clinging to the key to the drawer jammed in the bottom of his pocket. Then he bends down and opens the leather folder on his chair. Feeling the breath of all those angry dogs hot on his neck, he begins rummaging, dumps everything out, then lifts his head, his hair falling over his forehead. “They’re not here,” he whispers with a groan, “the keys... they’re not here.” A voice insinuates itself furtively amid the confusion of his thoughts, rivets him there in the middle of the lobby. Well? What do you think, Sor Quirì? Then the voice impels him up the stairs. He’s getting away now, Sor Quirì! One floor, then another. He’s going down, he’s going down... and he finally reaches his door.

Ready to drop, he rushes to the drawer and searches it frantically. “They’re not here,” he repeats, sunk in evening shadow, while the voice has now become a phrase stuck in the exact center of his brain: We have to be shrewd...

“That son of a bitch!” he hisses in a flash of lucidity, slamming his fist on the table. “He thinks he can throw people out just like that!”

He feels a sharp pain start along his arm and spread throughout his body, now trembling with rage. He takes a deep breath. He tries to calm down. “Cesarì, see what he did, that son of mine?” he groans, holding onto the credenza and making his way with unsteady steps toward the cage — “Cesarì... Cesarino... Cesa...” — which hangs there, shattered.