Everyone in Their Place

XIII

Standing in front of the mirror and knotting his tie, Giulio Colombo was definitely angry. And to make matters worse, he couldn’t really be angry with anyone other than himself.

Upon his return home that evening, when his Enrica, as always, had come to take his hat, his cane, and the usual kiss on her forehead, he hadn’t had the courage to look her in the eye. The whole way home he’d done his best to talk himself into believing that what he’d done had actually been for his daughter’s own good, but instead he couldn’t shake the deeply unpleasant sensation that he’d played a nasty trick on her.

This is the way matters stood: that morning, when his wife had confronted him with grim determination, setting forth the urgent necessity of doing something to protect Enrica from a terrible fate of loneliness and poverty, even though he knew the woman was exaggerating, he’d lacked the strength to push back, and he’d allowed her to talk him into it.

Just a short distance from his shop there was another large establishment, which sold fabrics; the manager of the place was an old friend of his, Luciano Fiore, who worked with his wife Rosanna. The couple, decidedly well-to-do, had an only son, Sebastiano, who at age twenty-eight was still a bachelor. This was due to the fact that to his parents, and especially to his mother, every girl out there seemed inadequate in terms of beauty, health, or property. Actually, Giulio suspected that none of the girls were interested in the young man, who was fatuous and superficial, and who lived far too well at his parents’ expense to have any interest in starting a family of his own. He had confided his suspicions to his wife, who had roundly accused him of lacking the courage to face up to the matter. And so he had given in, and had gone over to Fiore’s store to invite him to dinner, with wife and son, that very night. His friend’s wife had appropriated the situation and had informed him of her enthusiastic approval: actually, she had long thought just how adroit a solution it would be, and was already dreaming of a single, immense shop specializing in hats and fabrics, and run by her son.

Giulio found Rosanna Fiore to be deeply unlikable, and felt the same way about her son, whom he had only met once or twice. Poor Luciano, he thought, was the constant victim of his wife’s personality. Then it occurred to him that he himself might be in the same situation, and that thought only further blackened his already dark mood. It was hot out, very hot, and the idea of putting on jacket and tie even at night, even at home, certainly did nothing to improve the situation.

Once again he asked himself why he’d allowed himself to be talked into organizing this ambush for his poor sweet Enrica.

Maione was walking uphill, following the vicolo that led him home. It had been a long, difficult day, made worse by the terrible heat that persisted, even now, in the dark. He was thinking about what Bambinella had told him about Capece, and about how love leads to passion, and passion to rage, and rage to bloodshed. What Modo had said, concerning the fact that the duchess had been beaten before dying, fit in neatly with the account of what had happened at the theater.

In a certain sense, even the clumsy effort to arrange the duchess as if she were sleeping was an act of posthumous respect; the brigadier had gotten used to accepting the contradictions implicit in crimes of passion, where the murderers first killed without pity and then performed acts of tenderness toward their victims.

As he was mulling over these thoughts, he heard his name being called, and his heart suddenly raced; he remembered all too well that deep, musical voice. He replied: “Buona sera to you, Filomena. How are you?”

The woman was standing at the entrance to the little alley known as Vicolo del Fico, beneath a votive shrine with an ancient image of the Madonna painted on the wall.

“I’m just as the Madonna wishes me to be, Brigadie’. You see, I’m in charge of the flowers and candles; every so often I light one myself, and say a prayer for the well-being of the people who are dear to me. I include you in their number: I haven’t forgotten the help that you gave me.”

She underlined those words with a brief caress of the scarred side of her face, which was turned to the shadows. The other profile, faintly illuminated by the streetlamp, was as Maione remembered it: heartbreakingly beautiful.

“Don’t think twice, Filomena; after all, it’s my duty to help people. And with you it was a pleasure, as you know. In fact, I only wish I could’ve done more. Your son Gaetano, how’s he doing?”

“Fine, thanks. He’s no longer an apprentice, the master mason has hired him, he says he’s good at what he does. He took the place of Rituccia’s father, do you remember her? That little girl who lived nearby, now she lives with us.”

Maione remembered her perfectly: a serious little girl, with a sorrowful, unsettling look in her eyes. One of those encounters that punctuated the events in which he had been embroiled a few months earlier; when, one fine spring morning, he found himself stanching the bloody wound that had forever altered that woman’s face. In a single dizzying instant, the brigadier relived the new and profound emotions that spending time with Filomena had stirred in him.

“Would you care to stay for dinner? I could make you something cool, maybe macaroni with tomato and basil. As I recall, you liked that dish, or am I mistaken?”

Maione could hear his stomach rumble, like distant thunder.

“No, thanks, Filome’, I’m having some digestive problems; I’m going to just skip dinner, tonight.”

In the partial darkness, the woman stepped closer, scrutinizing his face.

“Are you all right, Raffae’? You strike me as pale, hollowed out. And you’ve lost weight. Don’t you worry me now, you know that I care about you.”

Maione couldn’t have hoped for a more flattering compliment. He’d lost weight. As if someone had told him he’d grown wings and a halo.

“Don’t be ridiculous, no, no, it’s just that I’ve had a long day, a very long day. Maybe I’m just a little tired.”

Filomena was eyeing him with concern, her head tilted over on her shoulder. She was beautiful. Without warning, she reached out her hand and caressed Maione’s face. The hand felt light and cool as a breeze to him. He barely touched the visor of his cap, then turned and fled, feeling like a coward the way he did every time he saw her.

Rosa Vaglio was one of those women of bygone times who expressed her love by making food. And since she’d been born dirt poor, the greater the love, she thought, the more the food, condiments added. And since she loved Luigi Alfredo Ricciardi more than anything else on earth, she cooked for him a succession of terrible dishes that would have easily killed a full grown bull, if that bull had ventured to eat her eggplant parmigiana.

The first time she had seen him, he was covered with blood, cradled in the midwife’s hands, with his beautiful green eyes still shut. She’d held him in her arms even before his poor mamma, the sweet Baroness Marta, who had died so many years ago. And she had watched him at play a thousand times, while she knit or washed clothing with one eye out to make sure he was in no danger, silent and reckless as he always was.

She had sat up, watching over his restless sleep, wondering what terrible things he might be dreaming when she saw him jerk and murmur in his sleep. She’d kissed his forehead a thousand times, trying to detect the slightest warmth of fever that she was infallibly able to discern. When his mother died, and even before that, she had become the inflexible administrator of the family’s substantial assets, which Ricciardi ignored entirely; it was she who maintained the correspondence, in her unlovely, oversized handwriting, with the overseers and sharecroppers: she never overlooked a cent, and she set everything by so that it would be fully accounted for when Luigi Alfredo finally woke up from his obsession with being a policeman and made up his mind to take his rightful place as the Baron of Malomonte, and started a family of his own.

This matter of the family was Tata Rosa’s one great obsession and regret. Her simple mind had few bedrock certainties, and one of those was that without children, no life could be considered complete. She had devoted her own life to Ricciardi, and he had repaid her with more worries and concerns than ten children could have given her, with his stubborn solitude; what she could not accept was the idea that he was willing to let his family’s name die out. All too often, even though she was aware that she was becoming obsessive and intrusive, she had tried to push him to socialize more, to get to know girls, and all she got in return was a shrug and a pat on the cheek. She’d even wondered whether her boy was one of those who just didn’t like girls: but her heart told her that that wasn’t the case, his only problem was that he was not yet ready. He was waiting for the right moment.

And now, after all these years, as Rosa set a mound of baked macaroni, spiced up with every condiment imaginable, before him, she finally thought that the time had come. She had noticed some time ago that, when he looked out his bedroom window at the young woman who lived across the way, Ricciardi had begun to wave a hasty greeting with one hand. Of course, he had no idea that she could look through a crack in his doorjamb to see what was happening in his bedroom; for that matter, how else could she be sure that he was all right, when he shut himself in at night?

And the girl, she had seen from her own window, responded with a slight nod of her head. The ice was beginning to melt. As far as that went, in this heat wave the ice had never really had a chance, thought Rosa. And she smiled.

As usual, Ricciardi had first begun to smell the odor of Rosa’s cooking from at least two hundred yards away. He was well aware that he had a highly developed sense of smell, but still he wondered how it could be that the entire neighborhood failed to rise in open mutiny against the toxic fumes that filled the air, fumes that clearly originated in his tata’s kitchen. Still, he had to admit that the smells that came from his apartment were no worse than the varieties of rot that wafted out of the surrounding vicoli. In other words, there was just no getting away from it.

Along the way home from his meeting with Modo, he had continued to mull over what the doctor had told him. There was no mistaking the fact that the duchess knew her murderer: the padlock hadn’t been forced, the keys were in their place in the drawer, nothing had been broken among the countless items in the anteroom. Still, there had been a struggle, and it was demonstrated by the marks on the victim’s body; as well as the cushion pressed down on her face, forcefully, clearly to make sure that the duchess was unable to scream. Perhaps Maione was right: before heading home, he had said that in his opinion it was the murderer himself who had arranged the dead body, out of respect, out of love.

Out of love. How many strange, absurd things he had seen people do out of love. And how treacherous, he thought as he ate under Rosa’s vigilant gaze, this sentiment could be as it made its way into the folds of one’s thoughts, infecting one’s soul. He had struggled and continued to struggle, but he couldn’t seem to keep himself from thinking with growing anxiety about his innocent nightly appointment, and the slight wave of greeting that he exchanged with his across-the-street neighbor. He couldn’t have said whether it was worse or better than before, as he watched her embroider from hiding, just to drink in her normality, like some healthful herbal tea.

He knew nothing about love. But if he were ever to talk about it, he would’ve said that it was important to protect the object of one’s affections from evil, even if the evil happens to be in the person in love. Especially if the evil happens to be in the person in love. And so in his case, if love was what he felt for Enrica, then it was incumbent upon him to keep her safely distant from his curse, from the savage and terrible pain that he carried within him.

That was why he continued to stay far away from her, why he never looked for an opportunity to meet her, to be able to talk to her, look her in the eye, hold her hand. That’s the way it had been for over a year, until fate finally put them face to face. And now that pure, sweet emotion, experienced from a safe distance, had been tainted with the scent of flesh. For twenty-three hours a day, Ricciardi wished that the previous situation of checkmate could be reinstated; unsatisfying though it certainly might have been, it was at least reassuring.

But for an hour a day, for that hour, on the other hand, he’d have gladly flown the twenty-five feet that separated them to embrace her and kiss her a thousand times. And now that hour had arrived.

With his heart in his throat, after closing his bedroom door, Ricciardi went over to the window.

Enrica was distraught with rage and despair. A trap had been laid for her, without even asking her views or opinions. She’d tried all night long to catch her father’s eye, but he’d taken great care to look anywhere but at his daughter’s face. As for her mother, of course, she was perfectly at her ease in her role as the lady of the house, never stopping once as she regaled her guests with Enrica’s domestic gifts.

She had found her father’s two friends intolerable, a badly matched couple in which the wife was an unctuous, bullying harridan while the husband was a miserable wretch without qualities, practically a mute. As for the son, he was the main reason for her rage. An unpleasant, ignorant, uninteresting man; he knew how to talk-and never stopped for an instant-about nothing but clothing, automobiles, and high society, topics that could not have been any further from her interest.

It had been her mother, of that much she was sure. She had decided to go on the offensive, after whining for years about how urgent it was to find her a fiancé. She had become increasingly insistent, but Enrica never thought that she would stoop so low: to bring a man home, and without even asking! Her upbringing and her social standing kept her from being openly rude, but no one could force her to be pleasant. And so she had remained silent throughout the meal, for once served in grand gala in the drawing room; the hours went by slowly, with the incessant chitchat of that prettified dandy in her ears, and she was forced to tolerate her mother’s continual invitations to take part in the conversation and the harridan’s compliments, why, what a lovely young woman, what lovely hands, what a lovely smile. She was nauseated.

And now she was also desperate, because it was already ten o’clock and the guests showed no signs of leaving. And she wouldn’t be at the window to see the only man she wanted to listen to, if only he would say something to her.

Ricciardi had spent half an hour watching the darkened kitchen window, waiting in vain. The sense of disappointment had grown within him, along with some slight concern for Enrica’s well-being; he’d been certain that she would never miss their appointment except for some serious reason, some disaster, and it pained him not to know.

Just as he was about to give up and go to bed, he glimpsed out of the corner of his eye a gleam of light from the corner of the apartment building across the way: another room in the Colombo home had its lights turned on. There was a part of him that recoiled at the thought that he wanted to see who was there and what was going on, intruding into another family’s life like the lowest and most common gossip: but the other part of him easily won the battle.

Justifying his actions with the thought that he was only trying to ensure that Enrica was well and safe, he rapidly calculated just which window in his apartment would offer the best view of the illuminated room, and to his horror he realized that would be his tata’s bedroom.

Rosa was just about to go to bed, having completed her rosary with the invocations of the proper saints. She had a nightcap on her head, her hair gathered inside it, a long nightshirt, buttoned from neck to feet, and she was pulling up the bedclothes when she heard someone knocking at her bedroom door.

“Who is it?” she called out, absurdly.

“It’s me, who did you think it was? No one lives here but you and me,” said Ricciardi.

“What’s the matter, don’t you feel well?”

“Yes, I feel fine, don’t worry. I just want to see something from your window. Can I come in?”

“Of course, be my guest.”

And Rosa saw Ricciardi open the door; she saw him give her a guilty look; she saw him go over to the window, muttering something about having seen some suspicious activity in the street; she saw him stand for several long seconds with both hands gripping the windowsill, holding his breath; she saw him brace himself against the wall with one hand, as if he were about to faint; she heard him moan softly; she saw him turn, pale as death, biting his lip; and last of all, she saw him leave the room, shutting the door behind him, after saying, “It was nothing, nothing at all, I must have been mistaken. Buona notte.”

At that point Rosa got out of bed, slowly pushing the covers aside, and in her turn went over to the window; there she saw a certain young woman sitting primly on a sofa, as stiff as if she’d swallowed a broom, with a smiling well-dressed young man whispering into her ear.

At first, she was worried. But then she decided that the ice tends to melt faster if you light a nice hot fire underneath it.

And with a smile, she went back to bed.