A Season for the Dead

Sixteen

Five minutes after Teresa Lupo returned, Costa made his excuses.

Rossi had been right. There was a practical reason for the three of them to meet that evening. Nevertheless there was an unspoken one too, one in which he was an unwanted witness. Rossi and the woman were beginning to get too close for him to watch.

He drove through the thick Saturday night traffic, down brightly lit streets into the darkness at the edge of the city. It was a clear, starlit evening with a full moon. Even with the windows down, the interior of the old Fiat was uncomfortably hot.

The car swept around the illuminated hulk of the gate of San Sebastiano, out to the old Appian Way, traveled a mile down the narrow road and took the familiar turning to the house, following the rough drive until he parked beneath the vines of the car shelter that leaned drunkenly against the wall.

He stepped out of the car and breathed in the smell of the countryside: parched scrub and dust, with the distant fragrance of wild thyme somewhere underneath. Cicadas rattled in the dead grass at his feet. The black, darting outlines of bats, squeaking frantically, broke the perfect night sky.

The house was an old farmhouse in the dead land between the old Appian Way and the modern, busy thoroughfare of the Via Appia Nuova.

He remembered what he had said to Sara Farnese in front of the altar in the church on Tiber Island. A family was a team against the world, a bulwark against the insanity. He could not imagine what it would be like to be denied its sanctity. He could not begin to understand how anyone could survive the day without someplace like this, some safe, holy refuge in which joy and hope, fear and tragedy intermingled, became controllable through the mutual regard individuals felt for one another.

The light was still on in the front room. Marco Costa was asleep in an armchair. Pepe, the argumentative little terrier his father loved so much, lay at Marco’s feet, curled into a ball. Nic could remember the animal as a puppy, bought after his mother died, as if in compensation. He had been offended at the time, but his father had been right. The dog’s ceaseless need for love and attention, and his instant return of the same, made those dark months bearable. Now the years were taking their vengeance with the same vicious brutality, for both master and animal.

Giulia, his sister, had left a note in the kitchen, where the old man could not find it. She had to go to Milan on business for a week. There had been a call from their elder brother in Washington, young Marco. It was hardest for him. The busy lawyer’s life and the harsh working regime of America left little time for home visits. The slow process of dying was difficult enough to manage when one lived just a few miles from the old man; from the other side of the Atlantic it was impossible.

During the coming week, however, some routine could be maintained. Nic would stay during the evening whenever possible; Bea, Marco’s former secretary from his earliest days in politics, and still a firm friend, would come in for the daylight hours and any other time when work called Nic away. Giulia hated to leave him but she needed the time off too.

Nic read the rest of the note. The old man had taken his pills with his usual bad grace. His mood was up and down. The doctors said…

Her writing had faltered as she spelled out the words: perhaps weeks, not months now.

He closed his eyes and wanted to scream. His father was sixty-one, half a head taller than him, and once a bull of a man, someone who had, on occasion, stood up to the toughest of Turin union hoods and won his bloody way. Now he was some flimsy human husk, eaten away each day by this insidious, invisible disease. It was savagely unjust, whatever the doctors said about the old man’s habits. To move, in the course of a single year, from such strength to such frailty was a cruel transformation, for Marco Costa and those who loved him. It was also implacable, beyond treatment, something his son still found hard to accept.

There was a sound from the kitchen. Bea came in with two glasses of wine for them. She was still a handsome woman, straight-backed, with short auburn hair, attentive blue eyes and a sharp tongue when it was deserved. As always, she wore bright clothes; on this occasion an orange silk shirt with cream trousers. Gold glittered at her tanned neck and on her slim wrists. She was a little younger than Marco, perhaps fifty-five now, and had been single throughout her life.

Their relationship puzzled Nic; there were memories from his childhood, uncertain ones, suggesting Bea had been more than merely a friend to Marco at one time. Seeing him through his illness was now a matter of duty, something she would not shirk. She waved at him to come back into the kitchen, out of earshot of his father.

“Don’t believe everything you read,” she said, nodding at Giulia’s note.

He put down the wine and poured himself some water. “Bea, the doctors…”

“They’re all a bunch of quacks and charlatans.”

“But…” He waved the piece of paper, feeling stupid.

“But nothing. My own father had the same kind of disease, and the same kind of head on his shoulders. Sure it kills them in the end. But I tell you this, Nic. A man like that dies when he chooses to let go, when he thinks there’s no more reason for him to stay around.”

“Of course.”

She gave him a harsh look, with some cause: His answer had been too quick, too easy. “You think I’m deluding myself? Listen. If Marco finds no reason to live, he’ll be in a casket tomorrow. If something holds him—and something does right now—he’ll be sitting down with us at Christmas.”

Bea owned a tiny apartment in Trastevere which she always said she would sell one day, to return to her native Puglia. Nic had come to understand over the last few months when that day would be: once Marco was dead.

He took her hands, which were still young, the fingers long and supple. “I can’t thank you enough for your kindness, Bea.”

“Then don’t. Pay attention to him, Nic. This is a time that will be with you for the rest of your life. There are things that must be said or you’ll always regret them. Perhaps things that must be done too. I don’t know. A woman never understands the relationship between a man and his father. Still, most of them don’t either. There…” She picked up her bag and took out her car keys. “Lecture’s over. I’ll be back as usual tomorrow.”

He watched her go, trying to recover those mental images of her when she was young. Bea was beautiful then: a glorious, colorful presence in the family’s life. There was a time, perhaps when he was seven or eight, that he felt he was in love with her. The perfume she wore—the same invasive scent she still used—continued to prick his memory.

She still had the same exotic air about her, one that his father never seemed to acknowledge. Bea was a mystery. She had never talked of a man, never seemed to need one. Marco Costa, and the cause, had been her life, and now one was dying and the other was already dead.

He went back to the room where Marco still slept, undisturbed by the movement around him. It was late. Nic bent down and placed his arms carefully beneath his father, lifting him out of the chair, shocked by how light he had become.

Halfway to the bedroom, Marco’s breathing changed. The old man’s gray eyelids opened slowly. Nic saw the glint of a welcome recognition in the familiar features which were now creased and wrinkled, like those of an eighty-year-old.

“You should be out chasing women,” his father said in a voice that carried the stain of a lifetime’s tobacco.

Nic carried him to the bed and gently laid him on the clean white sheet, newly ironed by Bea. “I have been.”

“Bullshit,” the old man whispered, then began to smile at some returning memory. “People have been chasing you. I watch TV, you know. I can recognize the way my own son runs even when he’s wearing some woman’s coat.”

It was the body that was failing him. Marco Costa’s mind was as sharp as his son could ever remember.

“Did they know too?” Nic asked. “Did the TV people realize it wasn’t her?”

“No.” Marco laughed. “Do you think I should call? Collect a little tip-off money? I don’t understand where you get this theatrical streak. Not from me.”

Nic began to work on his clothes.

His father slapped gently at his hand. “I can do that. I’m not a cripple. I keep telling Bea that.”

“No,” he agreed. “You’re not a cripple. Bea knows it.”

The old man shot him a curious glance. “She knows everything, Nic. She’s family now. In a way she always was though I was too stupid to tell her.”

“I think she knows. You treat her badly enough.”

“If you pamper me like an invalid, I’ve a duty to be demanding.”

He never gave up, never let go. It was part of his charm and part of his problem too. “Then you’re doing your duty very well.”

Marco Costa’s face grew serious. “She is family. When the time comes, I’d like her around. I say that now. I may not be able to say it when it happens.”

Nic nodded. “Bea will be here,” he said, and walked away from the bed, feeling the familiar stinging in his eyes, hiding his reaction by tidying some stray papers on the desk.

The room had once been the family study, until Marco’s illness and his inability to climb stairs made it the old man’s bedroom. It was still alive with the memories of Nic’s childhood, still decorated just as it had always been, with the striking Communist posters, the bust of Gramsci, his father’s hero, and the piece his mother had insisted upon, a classical head of a handsome man, turning, with an expression of determination on his face, as if to face some unseen enemy.

Much of Nic’s life was rooted in this room. It was here that all three Costa children had been educated, their parents refusing to tolerate the public schools because, at the time, they insisted Catholicism was the state religion, to be taught to every child. It was here that each in turn learned, and quietly rejected, their parents’ own intense brand of politics, here that three studious children read classics and modern stories, Homer and Jack London. And later Marco’s most cherished possession, a first edition of Gramsci’s own Lettere del Carcere published in 1947, a decade after his death.

It was here too that Anna Costa had died, ten years before, refusing to go to hospital, as Marco would refuse when it was his time. Nic had found her, slumped at the desk as if reading, when he came back from a run. A left-wing magazine was spread out in front of her. Her gray hair, still as long as when she was young, had tumbled across the pages. He could still recall the sharp, painful sense of injustice he had felt. Perhaps it was that that had somehow, illogically, propelled him into the police. It had taken a year before his father had forgiven himself for being absent when Anna died; he was in Milan, addressing a conference.

Nothing had been the same after that. Marco’s career entered its decline; winter came into their lives. The bright, vivid joy of childhood—a childhood which Marco Costa had enjoyed alongside his children—had vanished. The practical world beckoned and it was a cold place full of solitary people.

Marco Costa reached out with a scrawny arm and touched his son’s cheek, smiling. “So in between the cross-dressing and the athletics have you managed to oppress anyone today?”

“Not as many as I’d hoped. But there’s always tomorrow.”

Marco chuckled. “Of course. There’s always tomorrow.”

They had discussed the matter, just once, which was as much as Marco desired. For the old man, dying was an inconvenience, like a cab that arrived half an hour before it was due and honked its horn until you came struggling to the door.

He was unafraid, more through practicality than courage. People died, he said, usually before they wished it. He hadn’t achieved as much as he’d hoped, though he knew it was more than most. He had a good family too: two sons and a daughter whose chosen professions, in the police, in the law and as a professional painter, were so far removed from his own it was impossible for him to feel anything but pride. He did not fear the void that he knew lay ahead. He only regretted that it would disrupt unfinished business, work that would now fall to someone else, someone beyond the Costa clan.

His son felt differently. Even after a year of knowing its imminence, Nic still could not come to terms with the idea of a world which did not contain his father’s considerable presence. This was the only secret he dared not share with the old man, and that made it all the harder to bear.