I begin to laugh because you’re strange and you don’t want me to talk. You ask yourself so many questions, seeing my mother there on the floor. I hear them banging around inside your head, I feel you taste them on your palate and try to remove them from your teeth with the tip of your tongue, like a candy that is too sticky. For my dear little brothers and my grandmother, it was like fulfilling a duty, you know? See, the worst thing was discovering the pointlessness, discovering that all my thinking and thinking and thinking wouldn’t affect anything... discovering that the enemy had not been defeated. I’m laughing because I see that you’re uneasy, an uneasiness that is new... you, who believed blindly, now begin to have doubts... and night is collecting its things and day arrives and the light returns and the void comes back to life and nothing seems important anymore, not even this fiction of ours.
Seeing the girl’s faint smile was a strange experience. In the interrogation room, Curreli, Marchini, and Vanni, after sixteen hours, felt like the survivors of a silent shipwreck. That place, that table, every single floor tile, had heard all types of confessions, voices, lies, but never such stubborn silence. Curreli instinctively returned the smile, as if all those sixteen hours spent together were nothing but a long, grueling prologue.
— Did I tell you I have a daughter your age? the commissioner suddenly asked.
The girl couldn’t help briefly shaking her head.
Curreli sat down: I was wondering if you could help me. See, my daughter won’t talk to me, she wants to put a diamond stud in her nose... Well... you seem knowledgeable about these things.
Deborah thrust her head back until you could hear the bones of her neck snap.
— How can we help you kids if you won’t speak to us, huh? What, exactly, have we done to deserve so much hatred? What? Curreli implored with feeling. The face of his daughter Manuela had suddenly superimposed itself on that of Deborah seated before him.
The girl looked at him with a mix of astonishment and affection. Dr. Vanni and Marchini could not believe their eyes when she reached out a hand to caress Curreli’s stubbly cheek.
Then something extraordinarily clear appears in your eyes. What did you do? you ask. Just like that. As if you had realized that, in the tedious course of things, it is nevertheless impossible to get away with a slaughtered body scot-free. And I know what’s left. What’s left is to end it. Get dressed and go, I say. And you? you ask. Me, I’ll manage, I say. I’ll manage. I stand waiting to hear the door close behind you as you leave. I glance around me, looking for... looking for a plausible finale... and it all seems clear to me...
With incredible lightness the girl rose from the chair, leaned toward the commissioner, and whispered a name, just a name.
Part III
Pasta, Wine & Bullets
Christmas Eves
by Gianrico Carofiglio
Translated by Ann Goldstein
Stazione Termini
It was Christmas Eve, in the vast concourse of Stazione Termini. Marshal Bovio, his mood grim, his hands deep in the pockets of his big regulation overcoat, swam against the current of a desolate river of men and women. Small groups of pinched dark faces; lost gazes and a few laughs — too loud — to summon up cheer; the faces of vagrants, of old women bent over shopping carts, pushing their little piles of possessions. Unmindful — or unconscious — of everything around them. Normal faces, having ended up there by mistake, on Christmas Eve, in the cold of the station rather than the warmth of their own houses.
The marshal leaned against the locked door of the information office, looked at his watch — 7:30 — and took out an MS from the crumpled, half-empty pack, lit it, and inhaled deeply.
Many years earlier, he recalled, he had been on duty on Christmas Eve when a traveler was knifed to death, near the track where the last local for Nettuno departed.
The whole night had been spent interrogating the derelicts who lived in the station because they had nowhere else to go.
The murderer had been an illegal taxi driver, a slightly disfigured little man whose name the marshal couldn’t remember.
The man’s face, however, he remembered clearly — a sick-looking face, the jaw shaken by a silent weeping, an animal sob after the last smack. The first gray light of Christmas Day was mixed with the yellow streetlights and the bitter odor of humanity, of fear of officialdom after a night of interrogation. Robbery and homicide for the disfigured taxi driver. Life in prison. Bovio had heard nothing more of him after the trial.
He inhaled the last drag of his cigarette, smoked down to the filter, and let it fall to the ground.
At home they must all be gathered by now for the big dinner — a southern family, traditions still strong — and for the exchange of gifts, after the flavors of Christmas, fragrance of homemade sweets, brilliant colors, and comforting warmth.
The newspaper seller near the information booth was preparing to close. He chaotically piled up newspapers and magazines inside the kiosk with the unconscious speed of one who fears being excluded from something.
An old woman with a cart approached the newsstand. A vagrant, with those dirty bags, those ragged sacks stuffed full of things. But there was something that set her apart — a strange dignity, perhaps — from the desperate, the destitute who wandered like melancholy phantoms through the station and around the idle trains. She wore a thick sweater and a man’s jacket; underneath was a long bright-colored skirt, cheerful; her hair was gathered under a carefully knotted kerchief. She began to attentively examine the magazines that the newspaper seller had not yet put away. She delicately leafed through one, as if she were looking for an article, or something.
Then she turned to the proprietor. She had a thousand lire in her hand.
“L’Unità,” she said.
The newspaper seller looked up and hesitated a moment before answering.
“L’Unità costs two thousand lire today. It’s Sunday, it has the supplement.” He seemed to be apologizing.
The old woman withdrew the money hand with the banknote but remained in front of the newsstand. She was still there, unmoving, when Bovio’s large hand reached out of his dark overcoat and placed a thousand lire in hers.
She looked up slowly, up to the marshal’s face. “What a kind person.” Her voice was thin but firm. “I hope that you may be granted everything you wish for.”
Then she turned, passed the two thousand lire to the newspaper seller, took her paper with the supplement, and moved along with her cart.
He stood looking at her. He was slightly ashamed of that blessing, so disproportionate with respect to his own instinctive gesture, which now seemed to him petty. He watched her move into the distance, into a remote corner of the immense concourse.
He took ten thousand lire from his wallet, clutched it in his hand, and slipped the hand in his pocket. He would catch up with the old woman, give her that money, and then hurry away, before anyone could see him.