I reach the meadow above the famous photographer’s house. The police van and the ambulance are parked on the driveway in front, just where I imagined they’d be; the wheels of the Land Rover Defender are turned sharply, showing off the deep treads carved into the tires, and the doors of the ambulance are flung open. Two carabinieri turn toward me without curiosity.
They brought me into the house where Malik and his wife were sitting off to one side, with fear in their eyes, and Giletti, the only eyewitness, was telling what happened.
They had been in my courtyard for five minutes; they’d tried ringing, but no one answered. Then Mosca had called me, and the misunderstanding was cleared up. At that point Giletti went into the woods after Hello, who had run off toward the chestnut trees for no apparent reason. Wandering in the woods, he didn’t recall passing by the limestone bluff that hangs over the old ocelot enclosure, Durga’s pen. After twenty minutes of looking in vain, though, he continued down the hill and emerged behind the famous photographer’s villa; hearing a dog’s bark, he entered the property by way of the meadow that I’ve so often walked across with the kids.
Then the long glass barrier caught his eye, and behind the glass the shape of a dog much bigger than Hello, standing motionless. For a moment he thought it was a ceramic dog, but as he got closer he noticed it was breathing hard — its torso was swelling rhythmically. He thought, I’ve never seen a striped Doberman before, but since he didn’t know much about dogs, he wasn’t particularly surprised. After looking at the Doberman, he rose up on tiptoes and saw Hello’s corpse, the white fur striped with blood: Durga had ripped a fist-sized hole between the dog’s throat and his belly. Giletti clearly recalled the Doberman turning her head toward him and then looking back at the rear of her pen, with the same petrified stance he’d first seen.
So Giletti, too, looked toward the bluff that closed off the rear of the horseshoe-shaped pen, and he came closer to the glass and cupped his hands around his face to block out the reflections. He saw a dark mass of rags stirring, and he recognized that it was Mosca trying to stand up. His nose was bleeding, his clothes were torn in more than one spot, and he’d lost a shoe. He had broken his ankle falling from the bluff, but despite the pain he managed to take four wobbly, fainting steps. Durga took off, trotting toward him, and when Mosca saw her he dropped to the ground. While Giletti ran toward the house to call for help, Durga crouched next to the corpse, standing guard, as if she would never let it go.
The policemen’s reconstruction of events was detailed and almost totally complete. They would never find the missing piece. The missing piece was me. Sure, I couldn’t have known what would happen; I didn’t know that Indra would show up at the edge of the woods that morning, making Hello shoot off after him and dragging both the dog and Mosca toward death. But I wanted it to happen, just as I had wanted it to happen to Conti.
I didn’t have to pretend to be pained, or shocked, or even simply surprised about what had happened. I was cold and indifferent through my whole deposition, and nobody asked me why.
But Mosca’s demise has had an odd effect on my imagination. Whenever I thought about Fabio’s death before, I was always distracted by something inside me. Now the image of Durga standing guard over Mosca’s corpse is superimposed on the last hug I gave Fabio, and it makes it possible for me to look directly at that older memory. I picture the tiger-striped dog against the robust form of the man with the receding hairline, and I see my brother and me again, with my father watching us from the door; and then my mother coming in and sitting on the edge of the bed, behind Fabio’s back, and taking him in her arms from behind, squeezing me into her embrace; and me pulling back and leaving Fabio in her lap; and her looking at me and then at my father. My mother is dressed; she hasn’t slept, she spent the whole night shut up in her bedroom, on a chair, rigid, alone. Fabio’s head drops back, and his arm is dangling loosely, and my mother is still supporting his weight, and I lower my eyes because I can’t bear the look that passes between my parents; I lower my eyes and stroke my brother’s hand for the last time.