Everyone in Their Place

XXII

Sitting in an armchair and knitting, Rosa watched Ricciardi eat. Or really: she watched him play with his food, pushing it around the plate with his fork.

This truly was an unusual turn of events; even in his darkest hours, he’d never lost the ravenous appetite that was a crucial element of his personality. It wasn’t like he savored his food: he bolted it fast, one mouthful after another, his forehead creased by a single deep wrinkle of concentration, as if he were intent on completing some challenging task. But when he was done, the plate was wiped clean.

Not this time. The sheer rarity of the situation upset his tata, and in fact she hadn’t even reacted with her usual daisy chain of criticisms and complaints to the effect that, if he insisted on eating street food, he was bound to ruin his digestion once and for all. He was ashen, preoccupied, and even more silent than was customary for him. She’d asked him whether he was having troubles in the office, and he’d vaguely nodded his head; nothing more.

Rosa decided that whatever it was, it must have something to with the conversation that the Signorina Colombo had had with her suitor in the drawing room across the way. And she couldn’t understand why a man like Ricciardi wouldn’t finally take action, seizing the initiative and establishing some direct contact with the girl. He had everything he needed to make him a presentable prospect: he was young, he had money, he was educated. To her eyes, he was also stunningly handsome.

As she went on knitting, she shot him occasional glances over the top of her eyeglasses, and heaved a sigh; happiness is a rare bird, and it lands only rarely, and then where it wills. Rosa remembered Ricciardi’s mother; she’d been very fond of the woman, and was at her side till the day she died. She too, like her son, was silent, with a vague, incomprehensible sense of suffering that served as a kind of basso continuo to her otherwise gentle character. She too, like her son, had long spells, times when she absentmindedly looked into the distance. At times like that, no one could say where she was wandering in her mind; she too, like her son, had everything she needed to be happy, and yet she was not.

Ricciardi got up from the dinner table; he understood that Rosa was worried about him, but he couldn’t bring himself to pretend that everything was all right. Not tonight. He feared the moment when he’d have to look out his window; he was attracted and repelled by the illuminated rectangle on the far side of the vicolo, where the healthy customary life of a family had always gone on, the life that gave him so much peace. After all, what could be healthier, what could be more customary, he thought with bitter irony, than a woman and a man being introduced, getting engaged, and getting married, and a new family coming into being?

I’m the one who isn’t normal, he thought; I can’t forget that. I’m the one who’s persecuted by the dead, the dead who incessantly tell me about their pain, who infect my soul and my life. I’m the one who can’t dream of a woman and a family, much less think of having children.

And so he asked himself for the thousandth time, why does this hurt you so much? Why won’t this knot in your stomach unravel, why such despair? You’re not consistent, that’s your problem. And you’re cursed, just as your mother told you twenty-five years ago.

He closed the bedroom door behind him and walked over to the window with his eyes shut tight. He heaved a deep sigh and opened them, only to see the shutters in the Colombos’ kitchen pulled to. Over there, on his left, the aggravating glow of the drawing room lights.

Enrica had gone back to her father’s shop wearing a mask of steely indifference. In her heart, fury was taking the place of sorrow; irrational though it was, she felt betrayed, as if she’d caught Ricciardi red-handed. And she felt like more of an idiot than ever before: why on earth would she expect a man like him, handsome, upper-class, young, and attractive, not to see other women? For all she knew, this woman was his fiancée and, since she lived up north, as her accent suggested, the two of them saw each other only rarely. In spite of herself, she had to admit that she, the other woman, was captivating, if you liked that sort of thing. Too flashy for her tastes, but charming. Even the insipid Sebastiano, on their way out of the café, had been unable to keep from darting the woman an admiring glance.

It might be true that every night he came to his window and watched her embroider; but after all, what did that really mean? The stupid pastime of a man with a girlfriend far away. She’d even kissed him goodbye. The very thought made her stomach lurch violently. How strange, she mused: jealousy is a physical sensation. So different from the elegiacal descriptions of sentimental suffering given by poets and novelists; it’s a genuine form of pain. Like a case of gastritis.

She hadn’t said a word to her father, who’d been visibly relieved; instead she’d agreed when Sebastiano had asked if he could come see her at her home, after dinner. After all, why shouldn’t she? It would take her mind off things, and anything would be better than sitting by the window stitching, looking out at the darkness in the window across the way. That other woman was in town, and he’d certainly be going out tonight.

On her way home, she thought of the days ahead of her, without the evening to look forward to. And the nights without dreams. She felt her wet cheeks, and realized those were tears.

Ricciardi went into the dining room but didn’t twist the light switch on the wall. In the darkness he walked over to the radio and turned a dial. The music of an orchestra filled the room. The yellow glare of the front panel illuminated the outlines of the sofa and the two armchairs; he sat in the one from which it was possible to see a corner of the window across the way, which was illuminated. He tried to picture to himself, as he always did when he was listening to the radio, the room from which the music was coming: the people who were playing the instruments and the faces of the dancers, each man staring raptly into the eyes of his female partner, the way they twirled on a shiny marble floor. In the picture in his mind, there were no dead people, no translucent, suffering figures repeating obtuse, meaningless phrases; there was only life, in his thoughts. Just as there was only life in the drawing room of the Colombo family, where every now and then he’d see the mother or the father walk past, smiling or involved in an animated discussion about something. He didn’t see Enrica, and he imagined her sitting somewhere, she too staring raptly into the eyes of the young man he’d bumped into that morning.

Now there was a man singing on the radio. It was a song from a couple of years ago; the tune was familiar, a tango, but he’d never paid any attention to the words. The man sang, in a slight falsetto:

That tore it: he’d had enough. He stood up brusquely from the armchair, switched off the radio, and went to get his jacket. He needed some fresh air.

Two hours later he was still walking. The streets were deserted, save for the occasional hurrying figure slipping furtively into some half-empty doorway. The city never stopped its dealings, day or night, in the heat and in the cold.

Every so often, some corpse or other appeared before Ricciardi’s eyes, faintly illuminated by the passion of its death; a delegation that never failed him. He considered that at least he could always count on their company. How ironic: the loneliest man who ever lived can never hope to be entirely alone.

A woman was standing in the doorway of a basso, with a yellowish foam oozing out of her mouth and running down the front of her black dress. Who knows what she swallowed, Ricciardi thought. As he walked past her, he heard her say:

“You told me that I was the prettiest one. Then why are you with her?”

Right, he asked himself. Why? And who’ll give you an answer now, in the darkness of night? You’ll be forgotten, or perhaps you’d already been forgotten, even before you decided to end your life. Wouldn’t it have been better, really, to go on living, so that you could have forgotten him, that liar?

Brokenhearted suicides made up the bulk of them. The misery and the shame, certainly; but above all this damned illusion, as the Duke of Camparino had put it, that makes you think you can’t survive without her for even a day. And so you put an end to your sufferings, amid even more atrocious torment: a leap into the void, a noose, an open gas valve, or else poison, like the woman he’d just encountered.

He was reminded of a man who dangled from a butcher’s meat hook, which he’d carefully positioned right below his chin, and then kicked away the chair on which he was standing. He remembered the excrement that had gushed from his twitching sphincter, the blood that had streamed out of him, drop by drop. It had taken him hours to die: without a shout, a plea for help, a second’s reconsideration. He’d stood there looking at him for a long time when he was assigned to inspect the scene: he listened to his last words, addressed to a certain Carmela:

“What a nice white dress you’re wearing today, Carme’.”

His sister, in tears, had told him that the man’s fiancée had left him to marry another. The very day of the wedding, he’d gone to the church with a gift in his hands. And then he did what he did.

Ricciardi hadn’t understood, and he still failed to understand. But now, in the heat of the night, amidst the mutterings of the dead and the sound of his footsteps echoing on the cobblestones, the stabbing pain that clamped his stomach began to give him at least some slight idea. You learn something new every day, he mused.

He turned the corner and found himself in a little piazzetta. From a building with a closed street door came a faint sound of music, either a radio or a small combo. Without quite knowing why, he stopped in the shadows, just as the door cracked open, letting out a shaft of light and a figure dressed in black.

Ricciardi looked closer, because the movement of the person who had just emerged struck him as familiar. He heard a nervous giggle. The music had suddenly become a little louder, as if the door behind which it was being played had been left open. He saw an arm reaching out the door, as if to catch and halt the person who was leaving.

“Don’t go. Not yet.”

Not much more than a whisper. He’d been able to distinguish the words only because there was no other noise.

The figure that had walked out the door turned around, and the face was illuminated by the glare of light from within. Ricciardi felt certain that his impression-that he had seen that person somewhere before-was correct. But he had never seen the other person, the person who leaned out the door and, taking the brightly lit face tenderly in one hand, placed a long, leisurely kiss, a kiss that was sweetly requited.

It was not so much the scene that made an impression on Ricciardi, nor the fact that he’d understood who the person was who’d been the object of such powerful and requited passion. It was neither the hour nor the music nor the laughter that came from inside, unmistakable evidence of a party that would no doubt continue for many hours to come.

What left him standing there openmouthed, at the street corner, was the clothing worn by the person who had given the kiss.