By My Hand (33 page)

“So then what happened?”

“What happened is that the hoodlums, since things weren't looking as easy as they'd hoped, took off down the
vicolo
. Chance would have it that at that exact moment Biagio's wife and children arrived, and if the thieves had decided to run off in the opposite direction, they would have run right smack into them. A huge danger averted.”

“So it was a close call.”

“That's right. We were also helped by the fact that, right when those robbers were all in here, we heard a whistle like the ones the coppers . . . I mean to say, that
you
all use. But then there weren't any policemen around after all . . . Odd, don't you think?”

Maione put on an uncertain expression.

“You know, there are kids who can imitate a police whistle so well you'd swear it was real.”

“Add to that the Fascist squads, which make the rounds in the neighborhood, too. They're worse than you, no offense, Brigadie'; they tend to beat you up first and ask questions later. But it's the same thing with them: they're never around when you need them.”

Maione looked the man in the face with a slightly grim expression. He'd been there, all right, but he couldn't have shown himself.

“So then why are you closed today?”

The proprietor flashed a broad, magnanimous smile.

“I decided to give the young man half the day off, partly as a reward for what he did yesterday. He went off to the Villa Nazionale, to take his children out for a little fresh air and a few roasted almonds, I gave him a little cash. Then later today, after lunch, we'll reopen.”

The Villa Nazionale, Maione thought. A happy little family, out strolling on the day before Christmas Eve.

He went over to the counter and picked up a terra-cotta Saint Joseph, very similar to the one they'd found shattered in the Garofalos' home. He hefted it, feeling its weight.

“Nice, eh, Brigadie'? Our products, if I do say so myself, are refined, not like the trash they produce around here, where you can't tell which part is the face and which is the body, they're painted so badly. Look at the features, the beard, the staff.”

Maione furrowed his brow.

“In your opinion, what does Saint Joseph represent?”

He would have guessed work, carpentry, craftsmanship. Instead, the man replied:

“The father of children, that's what he represents, Brigadie'. All the love and all the pain that a father carries with him in life. Because everybody always says: the mother this, the mother that. But what about us? We sweat blood without complaining, all day long, from morning to night, and who do we do it for, if not for our children? But no one ever thinks about the fathers. So that's what Saint Joseph represents, a father who sits quietly off to one side, working away in the shadows and in silence for a whole lifetime, for the good of his children.”

Maione listened, surprised. Then he said:

“We do everything for our children. They're what matters most, aren't they?”

“Yes, Brigadie'. Last night, when I found myself face-to-face with those knives, that's what I thought to myself: that all a man wants is to be left alone to work in peace, for the good of his children.”

The policeman was suddenly overcome by an immense anguish. The good of the children, yes. But whose children?

“
Grazie
, be well. And take my advice: At night, close up shop when everyone else does. The thieves love an empty street.”

O
ne last trip out, onto that ice-cold sea that looks like a slab of black glass, pressed down under a sky as heavy as marble.

One last trip out, in defiance of the weather, to tear another breath of life from the salt water. In the hours in which the day battles against the night, when the lights quiver in the still air and hands numb from the cold can no longer grip ropes and oars.

One last trip out, a shorter one, and thus more desperate, with emphatic gestures rendered frantic by the weather and by necessity.

Your only choice is to run from one side of the boat to the other, to make sure there are no tangles or knots in the net, so that down beneath the black surface the meshes don't twist up and catch nothing but themselves, or else all the tugging and hauling on earth will yield nothing but a mass of cords and seaweed, after all that careful planning, all that exhausting work.

Just one trip, and in half the usual time, to see what we can carry away in our wicker baskets to the market, to display before the eyes of people whose only thought is what to cook for Christmas dinner.

One last trip out, with our aching bones, sure to confine us to a chair by the time we're fifty or a little older, paralyzed by pain, watching young men who will wind up the same way. Just one last trip, in this icy dawn the day before Christmas Eve, so different from all the others.

Dreaming of pulling up a net full of picarels and calamari, meagre and silver-bellied gilthead sea bream, lobsters and saltwater eels, so many that they fill the deck of the boat, and we can feel their tails slapping around at our feet, their lives for our lives and the lives of our children.

One last trip out, life against life, for a pocketful of change.

And for another Christmas.

 

Ricciardi decided to swing by home, instead of remaining at police headquarters until the afternoon or going to Gambrinus
 
for his usual quick sfogliatella.

It was a fairly rare occurrence. Normally he wasn't willing to give up the time that it took to walk to Via Santa Teresa and back, more than an hour all told, time that he didn't like to take away from his work duties, and the tedious bureaucracy that went along with them.

But this time he wanted to go home. The crowds filling the street in spite of the cold would have invaded the café, forcing him to stand and wait for a table for God knows how long, so that his lunch hour would be more work than break. But that wasn't the main reason.

The main reason was Rosa. In the past few days he'd noticed that the background noise of the woman's complaints about the lack of routine in his life, the unpleasant soundtrack of his evening hours, had faded to the point of vanishing entirely. His
tata
had something on her mind, and she seemed irritated, almost preoccupied.

At first, it had been nothing more than a feeling, but with time it had become a certainty. He wanted to ask her how she was, if she was having any trouble with her health; he wanted to ask her, even though he knew it would inevitably lead to a long tirade about him being alone, the importance of starting a family, that usual line of conversation: in other words, Rosa's favorite hobbyhorse.

He reflected, as he made his way through the mass of people that crowded Via Toledo, on the fact that he actually already had a family. And that family consisted of one person: that very same old woman, strange, energetic, and simple, fragile and incredibly strong at the same time, who had been with him since the day he was born. Always present, always vigilant in her rearguard position, more of a parent than his father who died when he was young, more than his mother who was always sick, more than anyone else had ever been. His family, which was much dearer to him than he'd be willing to admit, much more than he was capable of showing.

Along the street, the crowd of the living was punctuated here and there by the dead. A young man who'd fallen from a scaffold, his neck broken, who called out for his mother; a man who had been beaten to death, and who inveighed against a certain Michele through his shattered jaw; a woman run over by a car in the middle of the road, who recited like a prayer the list of items she was going to buy, while blood from her leg, shorn clean off, pumped out into the empty air.

Here I am, thought Ricciardi. Just another face in the crowd. Neither fat nor skinny, neither tall nor short; small active hands plunged deep into the pockets of an overcoat, a rebellious lock of hair dangling over the forehead. Just another face in the crowd.

The only real difference, he reflected bitterly, is the crowd itself. My crowd is made up of the living and the dead, indifference and sorrow, cries and silences. I'm the sole citizen of a city made up of people who are dead but think they're alive, or of people who breathe but think they're dead.

When he got home he opened the door and realized that someone, in the drawing room, was crying.

 

The Villa Nazionale was teeming with people, in spite of the cold.

It was full of people because the Villa Nazionale was yet another one of the battlefields of December twenty-third, where opposing armies of vendors and purchasers of all manner of merchandise squared off and clashed. Every square inch of open ground was occupied by stands and stalls, behind which the merchants huddled, fighting off the cold and the damp that came in off the water, bundling themselves in every item of clothing imaginable, all the way up to their eyes.

The playful experience intrinsic to the Villa Nazionale also influenced the selection of merchandise on display: balloons, wooden and tin toys, candies and sweets; but also conversation pieces, ceramic items, chinoiseries, and cooking utensils. The result was the usual particolored cacophony of wares-hawking and feverish haggling, under an increasingly dark sky that promised only bad weather in the offing.

It took Maione a little while to identify the people he was looking for, a family like so many others, a young couple with two small children. He adjusted his pace to match the gait of the Candela family, three hundred feet or so ahead of him, shielded by a curtain of strollers preparing for Christmas with one last walk among the trees, down by the sea.

They couldn't afford a perambulator; the little girl held her mother by the hand, and the little boy rode on his father's shoulders, with the man holding both the boy's tiny feet. Maione noticed that, unlike most of the children there, Biagio's weren't constantly pestering their parents for a piece of candy or a toy. They'd been brought up to resist temptation, or else they were simply happy to go for a walk in the park and didn't feel the need for anything more.

After a while the little family stopped in a clearing and sat on the lawn, not far from the bandshell where a chilled, haphazard little orchestra sat playing operatic arias without vocal accompaniment. Out of her bag the mother pulled a little bundle containing some pieces of bread, which she gave to her husband and daughter, then sat breaking something into small bits and feeding them to the toddler. Maione lurked behind a tree, about seventy-five feet away.

What am I doing here? he asked himself. What do I want from these people? Why do I keep watching them, memorizing their gestures and expressions? It's not as if by spying on their lives I'll be able to figure out what I want to do. Or what I ought to do. It'll just make things worse, when the time comes. Knowing how the man smiles at his son and daughter, having seen him roll around on the grass with his daughter the way he's doing now, or watching him carve with his left hand, with the tip of his tongue protruding between his teeth like a little boy, or seeing him risk his life to protect money that doesn't belong to him from a robber—none of that's going to help me. Not one bit.

All around him, the Villa Nazionale was teeming with excitement, expectations for the future, enthusiasm and optimism. The expressions on people's faces were cheerful; poverty and desperation seemed far away, when in fact they were right here, just below the surface of the holiday that was fast approaching and would be over all too quickly.

Maione was confused and frightened. For the first time in his life, right and wrong kept changing places before his eyes, losing their proper outlines and transforming into floating, elusive concepts, like the balloon that had just escaped the hands of its young owner and was now flying off into the gray sky.

He could feel a chill, and he realized that it was coming from within. He wished there were someone close to him who could help him. He passed his hand over his eyes, disconsolate.

“You could talk to me about it. There was a time when you used to, and you could do it again.”

He turned around with his heart in his mouth. Just a few inches away from his own, he saw the blue eyes of his wife.

R
icciardi rushed into the drawing room and found Rosa sitting in her armchair in tears, with something in her hand,. As soon as she saw him, the woman tried to get to her feet, wiping her face with the hem of her apron, but she soon gave up that effort.

“What's happened?” asked Ricciardi anxiously. “Are you hurt? Did you fall?”

Rosa didn't even try to control herself. Between sobs, she choked out:

“Useless, I'm useless . . . a useless old woman . . . You should just commit me to an institution, one of those places where they keep old people like me . . . I can't stand it, being unable to take care of things myself . . .”

Ricciardi looked around the room, trying to guess the reason for all this drama. In all the time he'd known her, which is to say as long as he'd been alive, he'd only seen Rosa in tears once: when his mother had died. He'd accompanied her to the funerals of several of her brothers and sisters, and they'd experienced sad moments together, like when they'd left once and for all the home in Fortino where he'd grown up, but he'd never seen her cry again.

But now here she was, dissolving in unstoppable sobs in her armchair in the drawing room.

“Rosa, please, stop crying. I don't know what to do. You're starting to worry me! What are you saying, you're not useless, I need you. Please, stop talking nonsense.”

As he said it, he realized that every word was true, and that what he'd been thinking the whole way home had been this, and nothing else: the elderly
tata
was all the family he had, and without her he'd have been infinitely more lonely than he felt now.