They had brought him in to say good-bye to her, when it was clear that she was not going to recover: left alone in the bedroom with her, he couldn’t think of anything to say, and so he took her hand. He thought she was sleeping, but she squeezed his hand with surprising strength, almost hurting him. Then she loosened her grip, and she was gone. One moment she had been there, and the next she had crossed over.
By the age of fifteen he had already come face to face with the Deed many times. He could hardly turn away from the horror of those violent deaths; and he would see so many of them, too many, in his lifetime.
In his dream he was back in that gray room. Rosa and Maione were looking at him, and he was looking at his mother who lay there with her eyes closed. From the smell of flowers he thought that springtime must be at hand. He waited; he wasn’t quite sure for what. Maybe just for his Mamma to wake up. Without warning, she spoke:
“’O Padreterno nun è mercante ca pava ’o sabbato.” God Almighty’s not a shopkeeper who pays His debts on Saturday.
She said it in a harsh, croaking voice. He realized that she had no teeth and that her long hair was streaked with white.
Suddenly his mother opened her eyes, which were large and green like his. She slowly turned her head, with a faint crackling of the vertebrae in her neck, a sound that in his dream rang out like a string of firecrackers exploding one by one. She stared at him, expressionless. Then she began weeping silently: no sobs, just tears steaming down her cheeks, soaking the bedclothes.
He turned to look at Rosa and Maione; they were crying too. Everyone was crying. He asked Maione why he was crying and the brigadier replied that it’s wrong to hurt your Mamma.
He turned to look at his mother again and asked: What can I do? What do you want me to do?
Green eyes, frantic. A tender smile.
“Study. Study hard. Read everything, get good grades. Be a good boy.”
He felt the anguish of a little boy and the anxiety of the grown man he had become.
“What, Mamma? What should I study? I’m a grown-up now! They don’t make me study anymore!”
From her deathbed, Marta Ricciardi di Malomonte reached out her slender hand, as if to assign a task.
Ricciardi turned to look at Maione, who handed him a notebook with a black cover. There was something familiar about it. He took it and then looked back at the bed. His mother was gone. In her place lay the old usurer, dead, her neck broken, a teardrop of black blood oozing slowly from her empty eye socket.
Outside, in the night, the breeze coming down from the forest of Capodimonte sought out new blood to agitate.
XXIV
Walking downhill from his home, Maione stopped at Vico del Fico. How could he help himself?
The thought of Filomena had found fertile soil in which to put down roots and germinate in the brigadier’s pragmatic mind. Leaves, blossoms, and fruit, all bearing the same sad smile, those eyes with the night inside them, that bandage: like a beautiful coin caught under a carriage wheel.
Maione felt a dull ache. His innate sense of justice could not stand to see such an atrocity go unpunished. Whoever had dared to ruin that work of perfection, that creation of God, deserved to spend many years in a prison cell, meditating on what they had done.
Was he falling in love? If someone had so much as dared to ask him that, he would have flown into a rage. It was a policeman’s duty when faced with a crime, whatever its nature, to investigate, delve into it, uncover the truth, and make arrests.
Still, he preferred not to admit to himself that, faced with any one of the countless other crimes that stained the city’s streets every day, he wouldn’t have spent a sleepless night staring at the ceiling, awaiting the first light of dawn with such overwhelming desire. And he wouldn’t have left the house so early, even before the sound of a woman singing on her way to wash clothes at the fountain came wafting along on the first morning breeze.
Maione started walking down from Piazza Concordia, his pace just a little faster than usual; the difference was so slight, so slight as to be undetectable to the naked eye. But the two sad eyes that observed him from the crack between the shutters, which were just barely ajar, could see even what was invisible.
The door of the basso on Vico del Fico wasn’t bolted; the slab of wood that served to shut out the night had already been removed. Gaetano, Filomena’s son, had to be at the construction site where he worked as an apprentice by dawn. Maione stopped several feet short of the threshold, respectfully; he removed his cap, then after a moment’s hesitation, clapped it back on his head. With his cap in place, he was the on-duty Brigadier Maione, whereas without it, he really wouldn’t have known how to explain what he was doing there.
One story up, a window slammed shut decisively. He looked up but saw no one. The vicolo observed and sat in silent judgment. He took a step forward and knocked gently on the doorjamb.
Filomena had cleaned and disinfected her wound before getting dressed and preparing the bread and tomatoes that her son ate for lunch. She hadn’t slept a wink all night: out of pain, anxiety, the thought of the tests she’d been through and those that still lay ahead for her. Out of remorse. The large ungainly silhouette that appeared in the doorframe brought her equal measures of uneasiness and security.
“Buongiorno, Brigadier. Please, come in,” she whispered, serenely.
“Signora Filomena,” said Maione, touching a finger to his visor and taking a single step forward, without entering the room. “How are you feeling? Doctor Modo said that you should go see him whenever you like, in case you’d like to have him change the dressings for you.”
“Grazie, but no, Brigadie’. I can do it myself. If you only knew how many times my son hurt himself when he was little, playing in this vicolo. The mammas of the Spanish Quarter are all nurses of sorts.”
Maione took off his cap and began turning it in his hands. There was something about Filomena’s voice that always made him feel at fault. As if he were somehow partly to blame for the wound beneath her bandage.
“Signora, I know that this isn’t a pleasant subject for you. But my line of work isn’t like any other; if I see, if I learn about someone who has done something like. . like this thing that happened to you, well, I told you before, it’s my duty to investigate, to get to the bottom of it. I can understand that you’re afraid, that if you talk and you say something that. . if there’s someone who could, you know, do something to you, to your son. I. . you don’t have to worry. I’d never do anything to put you in danger. But if someone’s hurt you, they have to pay for what they’ve done.”
Filomena listened, her eyes fixed on the eyes of the brigadier. He, on the other hand, had no idea where to look. In the still chilly air of that third morning of springtime, Maione was sweating as if he were climbing a volcano, surrounded by molten lava.
“Brigadier, I thank you. I told you before and I’ll say it again: I don’t want to press charges against anyone. Sometimes certain. . situations develop that look like one thing but are really another. That’s all I can tell you and that’s all I have to say.”
“But if. . if you. . I have to ask you, if you have. . if you’re in a relationship with someone, in short, how can I put this. . Jealousy can make people lose their minds.”
A silence fell that was as thick as the earth covering a grave. Far away, out in the world, a woman’s voice was singing: