Quirino shrugs.
“Not soccer,” the street sweeper continues, carried away by the heat of his words, “everybody knows what soccer is... No! And where do they want to play that crazy game? In Pigneto! In our neighborhood!” He shakes his head again, ripping some shredded paper off a wall. He looks around gloomily. “They can all go to hell, a person has his own problems...”
“His own problems,” Quirino echoes him, watching the man drag the garbage bag and the broom toward the end of the street. Then he sighs. He stays there a few moments longer to watch Sor Pietro come back up the pedestrian strip, dragged along by his mastiff, a coal-gray hulk that devours the street in great strides. He watches the man dig in his heels, tug on the leash — “Tito, heel!” — take off a loafer with a threatening gesture. The man argues with the animal, his small body shaking, his eyeglasses crooked on his nose. The mastiff lowers its head and, docile now, lets itself be pet; it slows its gait, now and then turns to its master, who adjusts his eyeglasses and nods blissfully.
“To each his own problems...” Quirino murmurs with a half-smile, closing the shutters and moving toward the little cage. “Good morning, Cesarì.” He takes out the drinking tray. “Some fresh water, hmm, Cesarì?” He goes to the sink. “A little lettuce... a slice of apple...” He sticks his hand in the cage, arranges everything on the tray. Then he holds out a finger. “Like a ray of sunshine, my little canary!” He begins petting the soft yellow feathers, feels the beak delicately nip his finger. “Hmm, Cesarì...” He slides his hand out slowly, watches the bird cock his head and look back at him. “Good boy, Cesarì!” he exclaims, observing the white cage with the small trapeze hanging in the center. “Go and play, Cesarì, Papa has things to do now.”
He looks up over his reading glasses when he hears a knock at the door. He lays the pen down on the notebook. He glances at the wristwatch that his father gave him more than fifty years ago. “So early...” he murmurs, surprised, pressing his hands down on the tabletop and rising. “Is that you, Massimì?” he says, standing on tiptoe and squinting at the landing through the peephole. He sees the curly, grayish fuzz that crowns the small, turtle-like head of Signora Lavinia. “What’s happened?” He opens the door, peers down at the woman’s pinched face.
“May I come in?” she stammers, through lips that are even paler and thinner than usual, her pupils glistening beneath her long, dark lashes.
Quirino pulls the edges of his robe tightly together. For a moment he remains motionless, half-framed by the partly open door.
“Something has happened,” Signora Lavinia whispers, her voice almost hoarse from sobbing. “Something... terrible,” she says.
Quirino runs a hand through the steely gray hair that gives him a fierce, youthful look that he has been proud of since he passed the “critical threshold,” as he says, alluding to his accumulation of years. “Come in then.” He shoves his hands into his wide, roomy pockets. “Shall I make some coffee?”
Signora Lavinia brings a hand to her chest, struggling against the tremors that shake her body. “No, thank you. My heart...”
Quirino takes off his glasses, presses two fingers against his eyelids. “Ah, the heart... the heart... When it goes, there’s trouble...” Then: “Well, Signora Lavinia?” He gestures for her to sit down. He settles himself in his place, on the other side of the table, facing her, his hands on the notebook.
Signora Lavinia’s eyes, now even brighter, look at him imploringly.
“We’ll talk about this later, when the time is right,” Quirino reassures her, closing the notebook.
Signora Lavinia lowers her head, presses her palm against her forehead. “What happened is that... my Valentina...” She bursts out in a deep sob that cuts off her breath.
“She was old, poor thing...” Quirino says.
Signora Lavinia shakes her head forcefully. “They killed her, Sor Quirì,” she says, gulping a mouthful of air and then getting swept up in a vortex of words. “This morning I woke up and she wasn’t there. She must have gone to take her usual little walk, I told myself. Still... I had a kind of premonition... a foreboding, Sor Quirì... I don’t know. So then I went down and started calling her. Here, there. And... do you know, I found her under the little bridge, in the gravel on the railroad tracks.”
“She was hit by a train?” Quirino asks with a sorrowful expression. “If you knew how many cats I saw end up like that when I worked for the railroad... Poor things...” He reaches a hand out to Signora Lavinia, who shakes her head again, holding back her sobs as best she can. “Killed, Sor Quirì. Killed by someone. Her head bashed in by a rock, or a club... I don’t know... With all these terrible people running around... I don’t know, Sor Quirì... Now what am I going to do?” She twists her handkerchief into a knot around her fingers. “Ten years... we ate together, slept together... everything, Sor Quirì. Now what will I do without those beautiful eyes of hers... a companion, Sor Quirì.”
Quirino swallows a sour globule of saliva, glances toward the cage. He brightens when he sees Cesarì swinging slowly on the trapeze. “What can you do, Signora Lavinia...?” he murmurs. “Get yourself another one, another cat. What can we do against the blows of fate...?” He shrugs.
“Fate...” Signora Lavinia repeats bitterly. “So those people can kill another one.”
“Those people who, Signora Lavinia?”
“Those people, them... One of those newcomers in the neighborhood, I’m sure of it, they have no respect. What do they care about my little cat, about an old woman... There’s no respect for anything anymore, Sor Quirì.”
“What do you mean, Signora Lavinia? It was an accident. Surely. An unfortunate accident... Now go downstairs, go home, make yourself a nice hot cup of chamomile... And later, when you feel up to it... when you feel up to it” — he taps two fingers on the cover of the notebook, looks at his manicured nails — “we’ll talk. All right?” he says, composing his face in a stern, paternal expression.
Signora Lavinia starts. She nods. “Yes, I know that the outstanding amount is considerable... but my pension check still hasn’t come and so... I don’t have the money, Sor Quirì...” She holds out the palms of her bare hands.
Quirino puts his index finger to his lips, as if to say, Hush. “Some other time, some other time,” he whispers, getting up and walking her slowly to the door. “Tomorrow...”
Signora Lavinia looks at him despondently. “Tomorrow?” she stammers.
“Or the day after...” Quirino says obligingly. “That way we’ll deal with the rent issue and the loan issue in a single stroke, otherwise the interest...” He slowly raises his hand, levels it in front of her eyes in midair. “The day after tomorrow,” he repeats, meeting Signora Lavinia’s forlorn gaze.
“The day after tomorrow, all right,” she murmurs. Then she plunges back into her own thoughts: “They killed her,” she begins to mumble, holding onto the banister and slowly moving down the stairs.
In the sunlight filtering through the skylight, the down on her head shines like an evanescent halo, as Quirino says: “Animals... there’s no doubt about it, they’re better than people.”
“What’s the deal with arriving here at this hour? So late!” Quirino says, looking his son straight in the eye.
“A problem.”