By My Hand (5 page)

“I know what you mean, and you're not wrong. Maybe it's because it's a little easier during the holidays to fool yourself into thinking that human nature might be better than it really is.”

Once they were out on the street, Ricciardi noticed a dark shape moving toward them along the wall before stopping some ten feet away.

“But isn't that . . .”

The doctor seemed embarrassed.

“Yes, it's the dog of that little boy, the one who died in November, who you brought to me to be autopsied, the boy who was poisoned. The dog just kept on circling the hospital, but he would never come close. A few
scugnizzi
threw rocks at him; he'd go away but he'd always turn up again. Who knows, maybe he hoped his little friend would come back. Eventually I gave him a piece of bread, and he ate it when he saw me leave. The next day he came over to me, and he let me pet him. So then I . . . well, both of us are alone, no? I figured that maybe we could sort of keep each other company. He followed me home, but he wouldn't come inside. He sleeps in the courtyard garden, and that's where I find him the next morning. He follows me around, he never bothers me. There's nothing wrong with that, is there?”

Ricciardi made a wry face.

“No, Bruno. There's nothing wrong with that.”

Ricciardi looked at the dog, which returned his gaze with its warm chestnut-brown eyes, its coat white with brown spots, its muzzle angular, one ear cocked, the other flat. A dog, like any other. Or, perhaps, unique.

“I remember him. He was sitting by the little boy when we found him. I'm happy to see he's made a new friend. You have to admit, Doctor: it's nice to have a friend, especially at Christmas.”

Modo laughed.

“Nonsense. Let's go, dog; let's get out of here, it's windy.
Ciao
, Ricciardi. Come see me at the hospital the day after tomorrow and I'll let you know the results of the autopsies.”

And he walked off under the wobbly glow of the streetlamps tossing in the wind, followed by the dog half in shadow.

A
little boy came from Mergellina to tell everyone about it. He ran barefoot, along the shore, through the wind and the spray, the soles of his feet tough as leather on the sharp rocks that stuck up from the sand, leaping over the jagged shoals.

He came running as fast as he could, to deliver the news.

I was carving wood, getting ready to glue the cut-out figures from the Stella sheet on top of it; even my children need to have a manger scene. All four of them were crowded around me to witness the creation of the ox, the ass, and the Three Kings. I have to paint a few of the figures myself, because certain shepherds are missing from the sheet: Cicci Bacco, Uncle Vicienzo and Uncle Pascale, Stefania, and the Monacone, the “Big Monk.” And the fishermen, of course. The children have to see the fishermen in the manger scene. They have to know that the uncles and friends are there, too. The father. Everyone has to be in the manger scene. Everyone has the right to be there.

The children were clustered around me, watching me carve, while the waves pounded right up against the walls of the castle, like an animal trying to butt down a door with its head. The castle protects the
borgo,
the little fishing village, that's the way it's always been. The black castle, and the
borgo
hidden behind it.

The little boy arrived; he called up from the piazzetta. We all ran outside, all of us who were waiting for it to be time to take the boats out, waiting for another night with heavy seas, another night to find something to eat, another night when the women wait, praying to find out whether their men will make it home.

The little boy arrived, out of breath, and we all ran over and asked him what had happened. And the little boy took a small drink of water, and then he told us about the blood. He told us about the knife wounds, he told us about the police and the doctor, he told us what he heard someone say from behind a wall, words carried to his ears by the icy wind.

We listened, we who had trembled at the sound of that name, we who had seen him arrive a hundred times, and a hundred times we had thought about that blood, the blood that had now finally been shed.

When the little boy was done telling his story, everyone went home. Not me. I went down to the wharf, where we keep our boats tied up, waiting for the night's heavy seas to settle. I went down to look at the sea, with the knife still in my hand, the knife I had been using to carve the wood for the manger scene: the ox, the ass, Cicci Bacco.

I sat down on a mooring bollard, with the spray in my face and the wind in my ears.

I looked down at my hand, still gripping the knife.

And I started to laugh, and laugh, and laugh.

Until tears came to my eyes.

 

R
icciardi retired to his bedroom. From outside his door, which he'd left ajar, he could hear the music of the orchestra that was playing on the radio, the lament of a tango whose notes spoke of loneliness and jealousy. From farther away came the noise of the dinner dishes that Tata Rosa was washing in the kitchen sink.

He went over to the window, with the usual pressure in his chest, the familiar sense of disquiet. He opened his eyes, realizing only then that they had been closed, and looked. Nothing. The shutters of the third floor of the building across the way, on the other side of the narrow lane leading up to Materdei, were locked shut. From between the slats filtered the light from the kitchen of the Colombo home. Every so often he could see a shadow go by. He knew those movements; he'd watched them, enthralled, for months, one performance every evening, the sole concession to normalcy for the soul of a man who knew there was nothing normal about him.

Why did you close the shutters?
he wondered for the thousandth time. Standing there, his arms wrapped around his ribs, his green eyes glittering in the dark like a cat's, seeking an answer that he couldn't find.

He missed Enrica. Even though he'd never spoken to her in any real sense, unless he counted that awkward, clumsy police interview the previous spring; even though he'd never looked into her eyes, with the exception of a few desperate fleeting moments; even though he'd never abandoned her in his thoughts, except for that one time, two months earlier, when he'd allowed his loneliness to overwhelm him.

He missed that normal young woman, a little too tall, who wore long, hoplessly unfashionable skirts and tortoiseshell spectacles, whose left hand embroidered by the light of a table lamp with calm, methodical gestures every evening, for his eyes alone as he watched her from the darkness.

He missed finding in the serenity of her movements—as she made dinner for her parents and siblings, or read or cleared the table, listened to music or tutored children at home—a haven from the blood and sorrow that assailed him at every street corner, a respite from the pain that serenaded him, and him alone, with its horrible song.

He couldn't figure out why she would close even that narrowest of openings that had once allowed him to observe her life, knowing that there was no other way he could take part in it. He had discovered that she knew he was watching her thanks to a single short-lived correspondence. He remembered how long it had taken him to write his letter to her—his difficulties, his hesitation. So much time and effort to produce just a few formal lines, in which he asked her for permission to greet her, even if only from a distance. And her reply, calm and unruffled, in which she informed him that she would be pleased, very pleased indeed, to be greeted by him.

Everything had been moving smoothly toward a greater closeness, a friendship. And then there had been the accident, the hospital: and not a single visit, not a single letter in all those days. Then when he returned home, the shutters were locked tight.

As the tango outside his door gave way to a melancholy waltz, Ricciardi's thoughts returned to the blood of the Garofalos, strewn all over their seaside apartment; and to how brief life could be, how wrong it was to cast off one's feelings. He thought about himself, how he was treading the boundary between life and death without ever truly taking part in either, and about the life he led, caught between profound silences and deafening noises.

He looked up, toward the darkened windows of the fourth floor of Enrica's apartment building. Through one of those windows he saw clearly, translucent and dangling as always, the hanged bride.

A very particular case, in the context of his visions. She appeared and vanished, from one period to another, haunting the apartment where she had put an end to her life; as if her final emotion had come in on a wind, and had then been swept away again into the darkness, to await its return. He could see her clearly, on that chilly December night, the neck elongated by the dislocation of the vertebrae, the eyes bulging out of their sockets, the black tongue lolling out of her mouth, open wide as it gasped for air. And her voice, hoarse and grating:
“You damned whore, you took my love and my life.”
A betrayal, an abandonment, an inability to survive in her solitude.

Ricciardi turned his back on the closed window and on the open one above it: the living woman who refused to let herself be seen, and the woman who was no longer alive but who presented herself to the eyes of his soul in all her grief and suffering. He went over to his desk, he sat down, and he pulled out a sheet of paper. He would write to her, this time without the assistance of the book entitled
Moderno segretario galante
, without a model letter, without an outline. He would write to her, and he would tell his story to someone who knew nothing about it.

 

Dear Enrica,

Ever since I returned home from the hospital you've denied me the sight of you. I know that you heard about the accident; Rosa told me that you were there with her in the first, terrifying moments, when no one knew whether I'd survive. I'm all right now, in case you were interested to know: nothing much, just a scratch on the head, the occasional dizziness. But I'm all right.

I don't blame you for the closed window, for the silence. You're right: a young woman has hopes, aspirations, desires. A young woman wants to be courted, taken to the movies, taken out dancing. A young woman would like a man she could introduce to her parents, invite over for Sunday dinner. A young woman wants to be loved.

I love you, Enrica. Please don't doubt that. If love is a heartbeat, if love is waiting, if love is a faint suffering, then I love you. And my mind and my heart never abandon you, for a moment.

But love isn't a luxury that I can afford. I wasn't born to experience emotions, to try to be happy. I'm a condemned man.

I see the dead. On every street corner, at every window, I see the dead. I see them as they were when they died their violent deaths, their bodies ravaged, blood pouring, bones jutting out from their torn flesh. I see suicides, murder victims, those who were run over by carriages, those who drowned in the sea. I see them, and I hear them obsessively repeating the last obtuse thought of their broken lives. I see them, until they dissolve into thin air, to find a peace that may or may not exist, I don't know where. And I feel their immense pain at abandoning love, for all time.

I'm a condemned man. I've carried this mark upon me since I was a child, and I have reason to believe that my mother suffered from the same terrible malady, and she died a raving lunatic.

I love you, Enrica. And if loving someone means wanting what's best for them, how can I condemn you to a life with me? How can I force you to share the existence of a man who walks among the dead? You who don't have to see them, you who can smile happily in a place where I see shrieking corpses just paces from where I stand: would you want to be condemned to have a man like me by your side?

I love you, Enrica. And there's nothing in the world I'd like more than to hold you in my arms, safeguard your dreams, kiss your smiling lips. But precisely because I love you, I have to stay away from you. And believe me when I tell you that it hurts me more to condemn myself to life without you than it does to see, in this very instant, the ghost of a hanged woman who calls out for her lost love.

I'm heartbroken at the sight of your shuttered windows; but I'm happy because they protect you from me.

I love you, Enrica. And I'll always love you, in the darkness of my soul.

 

A gust of wind rattled the windowpanes.

His eyes gazing into the middle distance, Ricciardi slowly picked up the letter he'd written and tore it into a thousand pieces. Then he stood up, opened the window, and gave the shreds of paper to the chilly night wind.

T
he morning of the Saturday before Christmas was special. Venerable traditions mingled gleefully with new customs, and women with enormous baskets of eggs balanced on their heads walked along followed by swarms of children dressed in junior Fascist
balilla
uniforms, on their way to attend the rally in the square.

On the sidewalks along the more expensive shopping streets there were hundred of stalls selling everything imaginable, robbing space from pedestrians and therefore actually depriving themselves of customers. Chinese vases, wartime relics such as binoculars and spyglasses, combat boots and bayonets, military shoulder patches and hats: each vendor shouting the merits of his wares at the top of his lungs so as to be heard over the roar of the waves.

Maione and Ricciardi walked against the chilly wind along the Via Santa Maria in Portico. As they went past, the beggars and vendors, recognizing the brigadier's uniform, stepped aside, looking away and lowering their voices. It was as if a black wing were sweeping through the market.

Neither of them was in a particularly good mood. They were on their way to the convent of the Reparatrix Sisters of the Sorrow of the Blessed Virgin, which was where the Garofalos' daughter attended school; the idea of coming face-to-face with a little girl who'd just lost both her parents wasn't an appealing prospect.