Blood Curse

XLIII

Sunday surrounded Enrica without touching her. The world left her out of its colors and tones, and she had never felt so lonely in her life.

Like an automaton, she’d taken part in the family rituals: breakfast, Mass at the church of Santa Teresa, the streetcar to Piazza Vittoria. She wasn’t talkative by nature, and she’d been able to conceal her melancholy; her father and siblings’ excitement about the excursion was something that she and her mother tolerated, certainly not something they shared.

Villa Nazionale, even though it was a place she liked, struck her as noisy and vulgar that day. The carabinieri on horseback in dress uniform rode along the tree-lined path reserved for pedestrians next to the viale; the horses were as restless and uneasy as she was. She continued to curse herself for the way she acted during her interview at police headquarters, for having acted so differently from her true self.

Walking one step behind her parents, leading her brothers and sisters by the hand, and preceding her sister and brother-in-law, who in turn were pushing the baby carriage with her little nephew, she thought that she might grow old without having a family and children of her own, as a result of her grumpy disposition; still, hadn’t her mother always told her that it was her finest quality? The sun flooded the blossoming trees, the children were playing with their cheerful little pedal cars, and a street organ was playing Duorme, Carme’. Sleep, Carmela. How ironic, considering that she hadn’t slept a wink.

From beyond the tops of the pine trees came the slow sound of the calm sea. They stopped at a stand selling seeds and nuts; her father, as always, pretended he was giving in to the pleas of her brothers and sisters so that he could buy a few paper twists of nuts for himself. She loved her family, but today they were intolerable to her. She would have liked to return to the darkness of her bedroom. They started up again, walking in the direction of the zoological park’s aquarium, another obligatory stop on their Sunday promenade, where they’d look at the starfish, feigning astonishment for the hundredth time; it meant so much to her father.

Passing close by the little temple with the bust of Virgil, absentmindedly listening-for perhaps the hundredth time-to her father’s stories about the Roman poet’s feats as a sorcerer, she mused bitterly that the sorceress to whom she had turned hadn’t been of any help to her: quite the contrary. Then she felt a flush of shame at the thought, as she remembered the woman’s atrocious death.

Her eyes fleetingly met the gaze of a man with an idiotic smile on his face; she looked away as quickly as she could. There was no room in her mind for anything other than a solution to her current dilemma.

Still, there was something familiar about that man. Before erasing his image from her mind, she wondered for an instant where she might have seen him before.

Doctor Modo shouldn’t have been at the hospital at all, but there he was regardless, as was often the case. The night before Ricciardi, in that distinctively cold yet vibrant way of his, had told him the story of the man who had stabbed himself, a man with whom neither the commissario nor the doctor had ever spoken, and he’d felt the urge to come see how he was doing.

Standing next to his bed, wearing his lab coat, he looked down at him, pensively running his fingers through his white head of hair. He was reflecting on the power of dreams.

Who says that dreams have no power over reality? the doctor thought to himself. You were fine, until you started dreaming. You’d experienced all sorts of things, many of them good: you had three children; you held them in your arms; you played with them and made them laugh. Working every day and sometimes at night, you always made sure that they had enough to eat and drink.

You held your woman in your arms, in tight, sweet embraces. You made love to her, winning yourself a small patch of heaven. You went out whether it was raining or the sun was shining; you sang, perhaps you wept; you smelled the earliest perfume of the blossoms and of the snow. Your gaze met dark eyes and blue eyes; you saw the sky and the moon. There were times when you were thirsty and no one refused you a cool glass of water. Then, Modo thought, you started to dream. And from that day on your happiness wasn’t enough for you anymore. You decided to start climbing the ladder. But tell me this: aside from the sheer difficulty of the climb, how hard you struggled to make the ascent, what ever made you think that you’d be happier at the top of the ladder?

Without changing his expression and without waiting for a reply, the doctor pulled a sheet over the corpse of Antonio Iodice.

The first Sunday of spring was over.