62

Everyone follows predetermined patterns. His weak father had chosen to be an alcoholic who abused his wife and three children. Being a bricklayer was no excuse for staggering home every night, reeking of alcohol and shouting insults at his children and the bewitching woman to whom he was married. He was cursed for life with the responsibility of being the head of a family… or at least that’s what he blabbered during those long sessions with a belt in one hand and a beer in the other.

His mother never intervened. She always ended up asleep at the table, deaf to their wails and their father’s roars. When he tired of beating them, he knocked her awake and dragged her to the bedroom, slamming the door. A few minutes later the creaking of the bed could be heard.

For years he hated his mother for her weakness, her lack of concern for them, for falling asleep during almost every supper, for having to take her plate away so that her stringy blond hair didn’t get in the food, and for leaving them at the mercy of his father’s belt. Sometimes he saw her swollen face or eyes, a look of suffering, or a more pronounced limp in a woman who must have been very beautiful once.

He spent the best hours of the day in school, when his father didn’t make him come to work with him. He learned to read, though poorly, joining the syllables together with difficulty and stammering over the words like someone with a speech impediment.

One day when he was twelve, he found a book on a shelf in his parents’ bedroom, the only book in the house, and started reading it every night. He heard it mentioned in the Mass they attended every Sunday morning. His father would shave, his mother dressed them in their best clothes — his only pair of shoes and the only shirt that wasn’t torn — and they went with other parents and children to hear a man talk about Jesus and God. It was probably the only thing his father feared — not that he wouldn’t quickly forget everything that very same night, when he would return to his drunken ways.

At first he read with great difficulty, but then he made progress. It was the best story he’d ever heard. He had no idea what the title, The Holy Bible, meant, nor did he understand everything he read, but the impression of the stories as a whole was overwhelming. He started reading it every day, over and over, imagining the worlds described, the stories of Abraham, Isaac, Rebecca, Moses and the freeing of the people from slavery in Egypt, the crossing of the Red Sea, the fall of Jericho, Samson, David and Goliath, David and Jonathan, Absalom’s rebellion, the wisdom of Solomon, the birth of Jesus, His baptism, temptation in the wilderness, turning water into wine, calming the storm, finding refuge in Jesus’s parables, in the special child whose parents loved him, sometimes at the end of one more violent night. The Bible was his fantasy world, Joseph and Mary the parents he wished he had, the Apostles his only friends.

One night he discovered something. His father poured a colorless, odorless fluid into his mother’s drink and kept it in the bathroom in a cupboard full of dozens of medicines, many past their expiration dates. His mother slept at the table during supper; his father beat them with the belt. He thought of the Bible, the stories and Jesus, while he endured the belt. His father loosened his trousers to do the rest, but he recalled the Bible and shouted, ‘God will punish you. God will punish you.’ Then he shut his tearful eyes. He trembled and prayed, Help me, Jesus, help me, Joseph and Mary. His earthly father stopped hitting him with the belt.

‘What did you say?’ his father demanded, holding the belt up to hit him again, but the boy didn’t say anything.

His father put down the belt and said nothing more. He staggered from the table, grabbed his mother, carried her to the bedroom, slammed the door, and moments later the bed began to squeak.

His father never touched him again, even if nights at home didn’t change much. His mother appeared with her arm in a sling and her lip swollen, but for him it was as if he had achieved a new status as an untouchable, silent witness, until he couldn’t take it anymore and retired to his room to take refuge in his book. But his brothers’ cries and frightened gasps pierced his ears without his being able to do anything about them. ‘Make him stop, Jesus. Make him stop,’ he begged. He opened the Bible at random and read the first verse. The crying had quieted, and the bed in his parents’ bedroom had begun to creak.

The next day he went over to his father, who was sleeping at the table and would not wake again. He struck his head so hard with a heavy plate that it broke. His mother thought it was strange when she felt her son’s hand on top of hers. ‘He’s not going to hurt us any more, Mother.’

She got up, upset, and tried to wake her husband without success. ‘What have you done, Nicolas?’ she asked in panic. ‘What have you done? What’s going to become of us?’ She couldn’t even look at her son.

One afternoon a few days after the funeral, two men in white coats came to get him from his room, just when he was about to read a passage from the Book of the Apocalypse. He struggled but couldn’t free himself, and was dragged to a white van, clinging to his book.

Young Nicolas never saw his brothers again.

He was placed in a school, required to follow a rigid schedule of classes and study a lot of subjects, most of which he’d never heard of before. He learned Latin, Spanish, English, French, and Hebrew, but his favorite class was biblical studies, about his favorite book. Of course he read other books, getting to know other stories — The Odyssey, Oedipus Rex, The Satyricon, The Decameron — but none of them moved him with passion like the Bible. Perhaps because it had been his lifesaver until the death of… the man who said he was his father, but acted like a lunatic. His real father was Father Aloysius, who mentored him to adulthood and gave him his first mission with instructions. ‘This is God’s will,’ Aloysius told him. ‘Fulfill it.’ Nicolas executed that mission perfectly and continued to do so until the present moment at this corner of Via Merulana and Via Labicana.

Night closed over Rome, but the activity remained frenetic, with sounds of cars, motorcycles, buses, vans, pedestrians, horns, and shouts. The impatient Rome of late afternoon. He looked at his watch, which read six thirty. It was time.

He took out his cell phone and waited for the call, which was not long in coming, just six minutes. When he saw the Mercedes, he crossed the street, taking out his gun.

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