Tommaso’s hands still rested on the bedspread. He looked at them without lowering his chin, moving only his eyes, as if he were seeing through them to complete the fabric’s geometric pattern of red and blue diamonds. The fingers were spread as if to say: That’s all, there’s nothing more to know, and this time I didn’t leave anything out.
So there was the story I knew and then there was another, secret one. In that secret one, a girl and her baby had died. But Bern had never spoken to me about any of this, he had kept the promise he’d made to the others until the end. Not one story, but two, I kept telling myself, both real, as real as me and Tommaso in the flesh, in this room where the radiators had been turned off for hours. Two versions like the opposite edges of a box, impossible to see together, except with the imagination. The imagination that I had stubbornly refused to use where Bern and Violalibera, their child, and the other boys were concerned. Blind and deaf, and something even more grave. Obstinate. Unshakable.
Yet I said nothing. I hadn’t even said: So that’s how it went. I’d been silent since Tommaso had described Violalibera tied to the olive tree. And now he was silent too. Five minutes had already gone by like that, maybe more.
Then he said, “Could you check on Ada?” and I was almost relieved to get up.
I approached the sofa, until I could make out the slow, rhythmic rise and fall of the blanket covering Ada’s chest. I gave it time to calm me down, then I returned to Tommaso, unsure whether to sit in that torture chair again or remain standing up.
“She’s sleeping,” I said.
He had moved his hands, those bloodless hands of an eternal child, and folded them on the turned-down sheet.
“I have another favor to ask,” he said. “Medea should be taken out.”
I looked at the dog curled up at the bottom of the bed, maybe on Tommaso’s feet.
“She seems to be snoozing blissfully.”
“I’ll go, I can do it.”
Flinging the blankets aside, he set one foot on the floor. He was wearing only white boxers under his T-shirt. The sudden sight of his naked legs threw me for a moment. He stood up but lost his balance almost immediately.
“Maybe I’d better not,” he said, lying down again. “As soon as I move, everything starts spinning again.”
Reluctantly, I took the leash that was hanging from the nightstand. Medea stood up at the faint clink of the snap hook. She jumped off the bed and barked twice before Tommaso commanded her to be quiet.
“If you see other dogs, hold on to her as tightly as you can. Even if they’re behind a fence. She can make impressive leaps.”
I HEADED toward the port. Medea moseyed around, sniffing every inch of the sidewalk for invisible traces of other dogs. It was the weirdest Christmas I had ever spent in my life.
What if Violalibera had wanted to keep the baby? If she hadn’t been alone that morning, if the first sip of the oleander tea had disgusted her to the point of pouring the rest in the sink? It was strange to think that your destiny depended on someone else’s decision, on that person’s moment of weakness. As disappointing as being deceived. “In thought, word, deed, or omission,” the catechism said, but nobody ever worried about the omissions. Bern and I hadn’t worried about them either.
And yet, that was the first time I hadn’t been lonely in months: as I walked to the port with Medea, without another human being around. As if now that I knew the facts, my life stretched backward and sideways, in every direction, crossing over into that of Violalibera and Bern and the other boys. As if I had finally dived into the pool with them, where they swam furtively that first night. Bern would have been able to express those thoughts better than me.
I looked at the dark blob that Medea had left in the middle of the sidewalk, then bent down and used one of the bags that were tied to the leash.
TOMMASO WAS DOZING sitting up. As he’d explained to me at the beginning of that night, it was the only position that didn’t cause the furniture in the room to crash down on him as soon as he closed his eyes. I touched his arm gently, but he didn’t wake up. So I shook him a little more forcefully.
“Wha-a-t?” he groaned.
“So you weren’t sure.”
“You know, even in Guantánamo they wouldn’t force someone in my condition to stay awake.”
“You weren’t sure whose it was.”
“Each of us was convinced that it was his and each of us was convinced that it wasn’t. I don’t think it can be explained any better than that.”
“And you decided to wager the paternity with stones.”
Tommaso didn’t move. These were things that had already been said; by repeating them I was merely being cruel.
“But Bern chose to lose on purpose,” I continued. “He wanted the baby for himself.”
Or her. But neither Tommaso nor I said so.
Medea was snuggling at the foot of the bed again, as if she’d never left there.
“And Violalibera didn’t say anything? Didn’t she have a right to express a preference?”
“Bern had talked to her earlier. I think. He must have.”
“Maybe any one of you would have been fine with her. What if it had been you?”
Tommaso turned his head to face me. He had never looked at me so deliberately as he spoke, it took me by surprise. Then he turned back to the bedspread, slowly, maybe because the sudden movement of his head had caused a stabbing pain.
“I imagine he had explained his intention to Violalibera, that he had promised her he would make the shortest throw. They had started together and they would finish together. A pact between them, something like that. I don’t know, I didn’t think too much about it at the time. Now I think that Violalibera may have realized later that none of us was really fine with her, on the contrary. She was a very strange girl.”
Tommaso rubbed his face, then pressed his palms over his eyes.
“I want to know about the encampment, about that night,” I said.
“I wasn’t there.”
“But this is where Bern was living, right? Here with you. They came to look for him at the masseria, but he was here before he went to that place.”
“It’s two a.m., Teresa.”
But I didn’t budge and Tommaso saw that I would not let up. So after a somewhat longer silence, he surrendered: “Okay. Go get some wine, though. There should be an open bottle under the sink. Unless I’ve forgotten that I finished it.”
“Are you serious?”
“It will do me good. I’m a pro, I told you. And besides, is it or isn’t it Christmas Eve?”
I found the wine, poured him some, and went back to the bedroom.
“Remember the day of the bees?”
“What do bees have to do with anything?”
“Corinne had told me the night before. About the pregnancy. About Ada, I mean. It’s always been a habit of hers to let me in on a situation after the fact. Like the first day at the masseria, when she took my head and pressed her mouth against mine in front of the others. As if to say, Now I’m your girlfriend, they’ve all seen it.”
“I thought you were in love with Corinne.”
Tommaso took a deep breath.
“I suppose, for some, certain questions are more complicated than that. Anyway, Corinne decided to stop taking the pill. Without asking for my okay, with her usual blind, self-centered determination. But the baby, Ada, wasn’t her real objective. She had never dreamed of having children, she didn’t care about them. A pregnancy was simply the quickest way to drag me away from the masseria once and for all. I sound unfair, I know. She must have said horrible things to you about me in recent times.”
“I haven’t seen her in ages.”
“But she didn’t do it consciously. The truth is that she hated the masseria. She’d been okay with it as long as it meant spiting her father, but, once that was done, she had seen it for what it really was: harsh, squalid, grueling. I don’t mean to offend you.”
He’d begun talking somewhat guardedly, but now it seemed he wouldn’t stop.
“Then too, Corinne couldn’t stand Danco anymore: his arrogance, his tirades. But she knew I wouldn’t leave there just because she asked me to. Even though by then I considered her my fiancée for all intents and purposes and I never, or at least rarely, thought about how it had started, especially after you arrived.”
“Why me?”
With his thumbnail Tommaso followed the outline of one of the bedspread’s diamonds.
“We were all paired off at that point, right? But Corinne knew I wouldn’t agree if she asked me to leave. So she didn’t even try, she went off the pill instead, for one or two weeks, for months, who knows. As long as it took. And even when she was already five, then six days late, she didn’t say anything to me. This too I would reconstruct later on. She didn’t say a word even after the pregnancy test, when she was sure. She talked about it with her father and mother first and let them take her to the gynecologist: the three of them together, the family reunited. They also chose the apartment that would become ours. Then she announced to me that she was pregnant. She looked only slightly guilty, but otherwise ecstatic and triumphant. She said that we would leave the masseria as quickly as possible, that the apartment, on the top floor, would be ready in a few weeks, and that all we needed was some furniture, which she wanted to choose with me. Then she said: ‘You don’t have to worry, my father has taken care of everything,’ and with those words she obliged me to forget all the horrible things she had said to me about him. That night I thought I could already hear the breathing of the creature in Corinne’s belly. I kept telling myself: You have to fix everything in your memory, because this is the first of the final nights.”
Tommaso was more and more focused as he spoke, while I was thinking: This is how life chooses where to grow. It chooses without choosing, it germinates in one place and not in another, at random. Corinne and Tommaso and their dysfunctional love were fine. Bern and I weren’t.
“The following day was Sunday,” he continued. “Maybe leaving the masseria at dawn to go to work would hold off my despair, would keep me from staying in bed with Corinne and all those thoughts. The idea of sitting under the pergola, with all of you, aware of the short time I had left there, terrified me. So I jumped out of bed, grabbed my clothes, and went out. I wandered around for a while, before finding myself at the reed bed. The sun’s rays filtered through the leaves. I saw the beehives. Really I hadn’t thought about it beforehand. I didn’t seriously think about it even as I lifted one of the lids, hypnotized by the turmoil inside, by that sticky, teeming mass. The bees weren’t frightened, they just seemed a little agitated, as if startled by the shadow of a cloud. I put one hand in cautiously, then the other. They latched onto my fingers and wrists, searching for something. Abruptly I closed both fists. I don’t remember anything else, only Bern, sitting beside my bed, in the hospital, a little like you’re sitting there now, only on the other side, because I had to turn my head to the right to look at him. My whole body was throbbing, but there was no pain, and Bern’s image was out of focus because the flesh had swelled up on my cheekbones and eyelids. I tried to say something to him, but my tongue was numb and he ordered me to be still and not talk. He promised he wouldn’t leave while I slept. I didn’t want anyone else, only him. I hope my saying that doesn’t bother you.”
Did it bother me? Was I jealous as I listened to him talk? Maybe not. For the first time, maybe not. How silly, that rivalry between us. As if everyone’s heart had room for only one person, and no more. As if Bern’s heart hadn’t been a convoluted rabbit warren, full of tortuous burrows, one for each of us.
“Go on,” I said.
“The apartment had so many closets that Corinne’s and my clothes didn’t even fill half of them. For a month we did nothing but buy. She’d wait for me to come back from the Relais, then we’d walk downtown, exploring the shops. Items for the baby mostly, but also clothes for her and for me, and household appliances, because the kitchen was also half empty: a blender, a toaster, a yogurt machine, and even a popcorn maker. Corinne paid for everything, with a brand-new credit card. We were so different from how we were before, unrecognizable. And we never talked about the masseria, or about all of you. I wasn’t unhappy, not exactly. There was something liberating about being away from it, being rid of all of Danco’s restrictions. I liked seeing Corinne radiant, playful, in a way she was never able to be at the masseria.
“We chose the baby’s name and we got used to referring to her that way. Day by day she became more and more real . . . But no. That’s not entirely true,” Tommaso corrected himself. “Dismembered, that’s how I felt. Dismembered.”
It annoyed me that he kept losing himself in these digressions. It was exhaustion, that and all the alcohol.
“Because I belonged to Corinne and to Bern,” he added, then burst out laughing.
“You’ll wake Ada that way.”
“Or, rather, no,” he corrected himself again, still laughing loudly. “I belonged to Bern, period. That’s really what I mean. But I was very confused at the time. Does it upset you to hear me say it? You have every right to be upset.”
He rubbed his forehead, as if to make room for different thoughts.
“In the morning Corinne would be lying beside me, and I’d again tell myself: Stop thinking, follow the series of everyday movements that will begin in a moment, and you’ll see, it will be better. And on and on for the rest of your life, every day, from here on out. So that . . . well, I was counting the weeks, as I lay with my eyes wide open beside Corinne, who was pregnant. I counted the weeks remaining before the birth, and when there were five I told myself five more and then I’ll have to find another way. You see what I’m talking about? Sex, that’s what. It would all have gone well enough if it hadn’t been for that one little detail, sex. But it’s not such an insignificant detail for a couple, right? No, it isn’t. And you know something else? I spent a lot of time imagining how it was between you and Bern. It’s horrible, I know. But by now this is where we’re at. The whole truth and nothing but the truth, Teresa. I imagined how it was between you and Bern. No morbid details, that wasn’t it, even though I occasionally gave in to those as well. More than anything it was the feeling that I was missing, what it felt like to surrender to such a blissful, complete attraction. So I counted the weeks before that truce ended. Because I could love Corinne immensely, but I could only love her minus the sex. Assuming it means something. She knew it too, I think, even from our time at the masseria, but she was convinced she could change me, that she could correct me. And if she couldn’t, habitual practice at least would straighten me out. Generally Corinne was determined, there were no words or subjects that scared her, but about that, about sex, she never spoke.
“Five more weeks, I told myself, then four, then three, and at a certain point the truce would be over and one fine night we would find ourselves in that same bedroom, as before, with Corinne groping for me fearfully, saying, ‘What do you say, should we do it?’”
TOMMASO LOOKED AT ME. “I’m embarrassing you.”
“Not at all,” I lied.
He poured more wine, brought the glass to his lips, but didn’t drink; he held it poised for a moment, as if he were taking a breath to continue the story.
“One evening we invited Corinne’s parents to dinner. ‘They gave us this house,’ she pointed out, ‘not to mention everything else. And we’ve never officially invited them.’ It made me smile, that qualification, ‘officially,’ typical of her family.
“She asked me at least ten times what I was planning to cook, she was worried. I surmised that she had greatly exaggerated my culinary skills in her father’s eyes. I didn’t reproach her. She had entered the last month of pregnancy and was plagued by leg cramps. She always seemed to be on the verge of collapsing.
“Her parents arrived with a bouquet of pink and white flowers. Her father handed me a bottle of red and ordered me to open it at once. I objected that dinner would be fish. ‘I would prefer to drink this,’ he said, ‘if you would be so kind, Tommaso.’
“The food was fairly good, but Corinne persisted in winning me more compliments than necessary. At one point I met her father’s gaze. He smiled, but it was a smile full of unspoken innuendos, as if to say: Look what we’re willing to do for her, right?
“‘You underestimate yourself, I’m always telling you that,’ Corinne said when they had gone.
“‘If he had been a little less enthusiastic, I might even have believed him.’
“She stared at me, wide-eyed and indignant. She got up heavily from the table and went into the bedroom.
“And then Ada arrived, two nights before the countdown had reached its end. We jumped in the car at four in the morning and less than an hour later she was in Corinne’s arms, while I filled out forms on the floor below.
“She brought a joy that I hadn’t expected, but it didn’t last long, a few weeks, maybe a few months. I’m not saying that afterward I stopped being happy, it’s not that. But the exhilaration over Ada’s birth quickly faded, every day an ounce less wonder and an ounce more discontent.
“The truce with Corinne ended. We resumed being reciprocally offended, as if we had never moved from that evening with her parents. I was constantly asking myself whether I loved her or not, and if so, how much. You can go out of your mind wondering if you love someone or not.”
TOMMASO PAUSED. He let the last allusion fill the air already saturated with revelations.
“In the evening I would hold Ada in my arms. I cradled her to put her to sleep and I could feel that she had imperceptibly gained weight. I looked at the color of her cheeks and thought I couldn’t have generated her. So normal. So perfect. I examined every detail of her, studied her gray eyes, until what I was doing scared me. Then I’d put her back in her crib. If she cried, I let Corinne take care of it. And then I began to spy on her too. As if she were an enemy. Oh, Corinne got back at me later! She humiliated me every way she could. But still, it’s nothing compared to the magnitude of my hostile thoughts during that year. There was the ungainly way she sat, there was the hair she didn’t wash often enough and the crocodile yawns and the odd way she held her fork and her loud voice. There was only one way to stop those thoughts. By drinking just enough, my life in the apartment became tolerable again. At the beginning I would limit myself to having something before going home, at a bar along the way. I drained three glasses of rosé, as if it were medicine, then I got back in the car.”
“It sounds like you’re justifying yourself.”
“Could be. Maybe you’re right, maybe I am justifying myself. But I’m also telling you what happened to me, exactly as I told it to Bern one evening. He was very severe. He said it was shameful, that I didn’t appreciate my good fortune. In fact, no, he didn’t say ‘shameful,’ he used one of those adjectives of his that seemed chosen to hit home. ‘Deplorable,’ that’s what he said. Then he added that I really didn’t deserve a daughter if I couldn’t be joyful over her. It had to do with . . . well, your issue. I already knew about it, but I assure you that before that comment of his I hadn’t even connected the two situations.”
“What issue?” I asked.
Tommaso remained silent long enough to make it clear that he wouldn’t answer, his head slightly bowed.
“What issue?” I repeated.
“I shouldn’t have mentioned it.”
“You shouldn’t have mentioned what?”
I felt like gripping those hands of his, so pale and limp, and crushing them.
“The insemination. Kiev. Et cetera.”
I stood up. Medea abruptly raised her snout.
Tommaso turned to look at me, with no compassion and no remorse. Then he said, “Please sit down.”
And since there was really no place else I could go, I obeyed him. Medea settled down too, her snout once again resting on her paws.
I said, “Apparently not all secrets are worth keeping.”
“Bern and I told each other . . .”
“Everything, yes, I know.”
Tommaso coughed, then he cleared his throat and went on.
“I kept a supply at home to get me through the weekend. Vodka mostly. In that respect I was different from my father: he didn’t touch the hard stuff, just wine, which got him drunk more slowly and then left him completely wrecked. Mine was progress, in a way.”
He gave me an ironic smile, but I remained impassive.
“I remembered Bern’s words, so I invented a toast: To God’s gifts and to deplorable men! I got so used to it that I still say it today. I repeat the phrase mentally. I don’t know to what degree Corinne was aware of all this. Probably more than I was willing to admit. But she didn’t say anything. Sometimes I caught her furtive, frightened expression again. That side of Corinne was a new development. If there’s one thing I would not have guessed about her, it was that she could be intimidated. I said to myself: She’s right to fear me.
“After the night I’d talked with him, I didn’t see Bern for quite a while. At other times I would have worried, but for the first time I didn’t care that much. Besides, all I had to do was adjust the dose of alcohol and it absorbed that disappointment as well.
“Until one day he showed up without notice. It was early summer. Corinne was at the shore with her parents and the baby.
“‘I’ll open a couple of beers,’ I said.
“‘I can’t stay long.’
“‘Is there someplace urgent you have to be?’
“Suddenly we were both struck by how foolish such distance was, the reciprocal wariness. I felt like hugging him; he noticed and smiled at me, then he sprawled on the sofa and said he would gladly accept a beer, provided it was icy cold. We sipped from the bottles for a while, not saying anything, as if getting acclimated to the intimacy. I felt good. At peace.
“‘The mulberries have ripened,’ he said at one point, and I visualized the huge tree at the masseria and us as little boys, trying to reach the fruit at the top. I was grateful to him for that image.
“‘Will you do something with them?’
“But he ignored the mulberries. ‘Teresa and I are getting married,’ he said. ‘In September. I wanted to ask you a favor for that day.’ Now he’ll ask me to be his best man, I thought, and I’ll accept, of course I’ll accept. I’ll get up from here and give him a brotherly hug, as is appropriate for two adults in these circumstances.
“But instead Bern said, ‘I’d like you to take care of arranging the refreshments. We don’t have much money. We’ll have to try to do it all cheaply, but you’re good at these things.’
“‘Of course,’ I replied automatically, just as I had intended to do, though to a different question.
“‘Teresa already has some ideas. Maybe it’s best if you two meet to talk about it. I’m taking care of the rest with Danco.’
“When he left, the sun was sliced in half by the expanse of sea, a sweaty ball that radiated an orangey glow into the apartment. I remained standing until it was dark, then I acted with a resolve that made no sense. I turned on all the lights in the apartment, in every room, then I switched on every household appliance. Washing machine, dishwasher, air conditioners, vacuum cleaner, kitchen exhaust fan, even the blender at maximum speed. I grabbed a bottle of white wine from the fridge and left the door wide open so that the refrigerator too would start humming in pain. I went to sit on the sofa again, the bottle in my hands, surrounded by the vibrating noise of everything that had made my life newer and more respectable, of everything that had invaded and destroyed it.
“Oh, it was a special wedding all right! I arrived already well fortified. I had to make up an excuse to get Corinne to drive us from Taranto to Speziale. I had drunk something very sweet, some Baileys, I think; my stomach was churning. Luckily, Corinne was furious with Bern. ‘To pick Danco as his best man instead of you!’ she kept saying. ‘It’s typical of an asshole like him.’ And she was even more indignant that he had asked me to work that evening. For once I was content to listen to her rail against the masseria, against all of you, to have her on my side. I put my hand on hers and kept it there even after she stopped talking.
“When you came back from the ceremony, happy and a little disheveled, just like the day I’d caught you coming out of the reed bed, the alcohol had not yet worn off. When the guests trickled over a few at a time to ask me where they should sit at the tables, I barely understood them. Once everything seemed under way, I allowed myself to leave my station and dance a little. We even danced together, you and I. Corinne grabbed me by the tie. I kissed her, a kiss more fervent than any other we’d exchanged. For a moment we stood unmoving among all the people. I remember thinking: All this can work, I didn’t think so, but it can work. Starting tomorrow you’ll change, starting tomorrow, sure. Bern was right when he reproached me. Then I left her there and went back to preside over the buffet.
“That’s when Nicola came over. If it hadn’t been for my momentary giddiness, he might not have caught me so off guard. And maybe I could have handled things differently. I found him looking for something under the table.
“‘What can I get you?’ I asked him.
“‘Ah, there you are,’ he said, straightening up. He looked a little spaced out. ‘Where’s the hard stuff?’
“I gave him the flask I had inside my jacket and he told me I was a bastard, that he knew he couldn’t go wrong with me. He said it almost affectionately, then he emptied it in one swig and belched.
“‘Here you go, waiter,’ he added, still staring at me. ‘Or, rather, no. It’s not polite to tip waiters, is it? They’re only doing their job.’
“The need to provoke me came to him just then, I’m sure of it. Something about me riled him. There were two bottles of wine open on the table, right between us. He appraised them, then knocked them over with his index finger, first one and then the other, like skittles. The wine streamed over the table, my pants, and my shoes.
“‘Oops,’ he said.
“‘Shithead.’
“‘So what, you have someone to buy you new clothes now, right?’
“I had no clue where he’d gotten that idea about my life, we hadn’t been in touch for a long time. Only later would I realize that he had never stopped spying on us, all of us, when we were together at the masseria and then afterward.
“He said it was really a shame to see a waiter spill wine all over himself, and that it was a good thing Bern had chosen someone else as his best man instead of me. He knew me well, he knew exactly where to strike. I didn’t even answer him, I just threw the napkin I was using to wipe myself at him, that’s all, but he sprang at me like a wild beast. He grabbed one of the bottles and raised it in the air as if he were about to smash it over my head. He held it there for a few seconds, then he started laughing, as if it were all a joke.
“That’s when Bern came over. He must have only witnessed the final scene, when Nicola laughed, because he didn’t seem alarmed or upset. There we were, we three brothers, together, after all those years. Nicola wrapped an arm around Bern’s neck. ‘Here he is, the groom. Three cheers for the groom!’ he shouted. ‘Waiter, three glasses, right away. Let’s drink a toast to the groom!’
“We actually toasted, with Bern seeming faraway and Nicola more and more revved up. Then he glanced around, as if looking for something. ‘It’s over there that we threw the stones, right? That very spot, I think. Yours, Tommi, went as far as that olive tree. Am I right? Is my memory correct, Bern?’
“‘Nicola, not now,’ I begged him.
“Bern still hadn’t said anything.
“‘Why not? Why not now? When do we ever get a chance to exchange a few good memories! So then, another toast to the groom! Refill the glasses, go on!’
“We drank again, slightly more strained.
“‘So then, bridegroom, tell us.’ Nicola held an imaginary microphone in front of Bern. ‘How does it feel to promise fidelity in this cursed place?’
“Bern took a deep breath. He set the glass on the table and started to return to the dancing. But Nicola wasn’t done. Suddenly he turned serious again and asked Bern: ‘Does she at least know where it is she’s getting married?’
“‘We took an oath,’ Bern said quietly.
“Nicola took a step toward him. ‘Because if she doesn’t know, I can always explain it to her.’
“At that point, it was Bern who stepped forward. He looked up at Nicola, without the slightest trace of fear or submission. He said clearly: ‘If you say even one word to her, I’ll kill you.’
“He said it coldly, and Nicola laughed. ‘Let me remind you that I’m an officer of the law.’
“They faced one another for a few more seconds, framed by the ornate coils of the tiny lit bulbs. Then Bern again turned to leave. But Nicola still hadn’t finished and hurled those words after him.”
TOMMASO STOPPED TALKING. Maybe he was looking for a way to backtrack, to eat his last statement.
“Which words?”
“It doesn’t matter now.”
“Tell me what he said, Tommaso.”
“He said, ‘I heard that you and your wife are having some problems.’ Bern didn’t turn around. But he stopped, his arms slightly away from his hips. ‘Maybe we were wrong that time. If you need some help, just give a holler. We’ll do like old times.’ Even then Bern didn’t turn around. Another few seconds went by, then he started walking again, very slowly, and disappeared among the guests. Later there was the cake and that speech by Cesare. All that idiotic nonsense about the Book of Enoch. Who could really understand him? Only we three: Bern, Nicola, and I. Because who else could the rebellious angels be, if not the three of us? Fallen from heaven, from that paradise that Cesare had created, and plunged into fornication. Damned for eternity. He took that opportunity to tell us that he had not forgotten, that he knew much more than we wanted to believe, and that as long as we persisted in keeping the secret there would be no hope of redemption for us. His Sermon on the Mount, his final lecture. It was a good party, sure. I had some cake and listened to Cesare and watched the fireworks explode. But I was no longer able to enjoy any of it. And my good intentions for the following day had already dissolved.”
“What did you mean that Nicola had been spying on us the whole time?” I asked. I was still stuck at that point. I had heard the rest, but without really grasping it.
“He kept watch on us while we occupied the masseria with Danco. And even after that, I guess, when you and Bern remained there alone.”
“And later still, as well,” I said, now talking more to myself than to Tommaso.
After Bern left, having burned our entire store of wood in a single night, and I was left to sleep alone in the house, surrounded by the sounds of the countryside and by a silence even more frightening, I often had the impression that someone was out there, that someone was watching me. There was no need to go out looking for him to be certain, or even to listen for the sounds any more intently than I already was. But I thought it was Bern. His pride wounded, yet still faithful to the commandment that Cesare had given us on our wedding day.
I must have spoken some of those thoughts aloud, because Tommaso said: “No, it wasn’t him. Bern went back there only once, as far as I know. When he was already living here. And he found Nicola’s car parked on the side of the road. Nicola wasn’t around. That’s how he confirmed that you two . . .”
“That we?”
“It’s none of my business,” he said shortly. “Anyway, I too tried to convince him that it wasn’t like that.”
In the other room, Ada’s breathing had changed. It was heavier now, similar to that of an adult.
“I’m not following any of this anymore,” I said.
“If you would just let me go in order,” Tommaso said, his voice firmer. His right hand went to his mouth and he tapped his bloodless lips repeatedly, as if trying to coax out the next few sentences.
“Remember when we found the solar panels trashed? We thought it was some farmer’s spite work, some rival, who knows. But it was Nicola. Him together with some of his colleagues.”
“You’re just saying that because you hated him. Like Bern.”
Tommaso shook his head.
“And how would you have found out?”
“Nicola told me himself. A few weeks after the wedding, I saw him again at the Relais. He appeared just like that, out of the blue. I went over to a table to take the orders and there he was, smiling, wearing a light brown sports jacket. He introduced me to the three men who were with him, as if I were the reason why they had come from Bari. It was nearly winter, because the tables were set inside. November, maybe? It doesn’t matter. He pulled me to him by the arm and said to his colleagues, ‘This is my brother.’ Then he explained that we had neither a father nor mother in common, no relations, but that was irrelevant, because we were even more intimate than two blood brothers. He said, ‘We jacked off together,’ and his friends thought it was very funny. One of them quipped that I must still devote quite a bit of time to it, since judging by my coloring I didn’t leave the house much. Then they laughed even harder, Nicola included. But when they were finished he pointed a finger at the one who’d made the wisecrack and said that no one should make fun of his brother. I didn’t get it. Last time, at the wedding, he’d done nothing but needle me, and he and Bern had nearly come to blows; now here he was in the Relais’s dining room playing the part of big brother in front of the other policemen in civvies.
“They ordered two bottles of Veuve Clicquot. Nobody ordered champagne at the Relais, the price was off the charts. I worked all evening feeling slightly uneasy. I had the impression that Nicola never took his eyes off me. But maybe it was the other way around, maybe I was the one who couldn’t forget his presence. I watched him from a distance and tried to reconcile the cheerful man sitting at the table with the one who’d been raging out of control at the wedding, and again with Nicola the boy.
“The room emptied and they were the only ones left. It was very late. I’d left them two bottles of grappa and they seemed intent on finishing them. Nacci motioned me to join him. ‘Your friends want to play cards. Did you tell them about it?’ Evidently Nicola remembered what I had told him during our time at the Scalo. Nacci glanced at them for a moment.
“‘I don’t know what you were thinking. They’re cops, for God’s sake! Anyway, it’s fine with me. Have them move into the card room.’
“‘I should go home,’ I said.
“He stepped closer. ‘Listen to me closely. You got us into this situation. Now your friends want to play cards, after all the champagne they drank. And we won’t disappoint them, will we?’
“So I ended up being the dealer for Nicola and his buddies. Blackjack, until five in the morning. They lost at least two hundred euros each, but when they left they were euphoric. I walked them to the car. A ground fog had risen from the fields. Nicola grabbed my head and pressed a chaste kiss on my lips. He also said something affectionate to me, downright soppy. He was really quite drunk at that point.
“After that night they started coming every Saturday. They had dinner and then played cards. Nacci started treating them like guests of honor, and often lingered with them. He paid me for the extra hours with a percentage of what the bank won, as he used to.
“Corinne did not look favorably upon those nights. She knew about the cards, but I didn’t tell her about Nicola. It was as if the most unacceptable part wasn’t the gambling or the drinking, or even staying up so late and then sleeping for most of the following day, the only day of the week that I could have spent entirely with her and the child; no, the most unacceptable part was that those evenings centered on one of my brothers.
“After a few weeks she couldn’t take it anymore and decided to confront me. It was Sunday afternoon and I was still in bed. Corinne came into the room but kept her distance.
“‘Why do you need to do it?’ she said.
“‘It’s extra money. It comes in handy.’
“‘We don’t need more money. We have more than we spend.’
“‘No. You have more than we spend. My account always shows the same amount.’
“I was inexcusably icy when I said it. I did it on purpose. She stood in the middle of the room, while I lay in bed as if it wasn’t even worth the effort to pull myself together. The light pressed against the drawn curtains, spilling out at the edges. I think Corinne started crying, in the dimness I couldn’t be sure; in any case I remained lying down, until she left.”
TOMMASO WIGGLED a foot under the blanket, causing Medea to twitch, though she did not wake up. He smiled faintly at her.
“They knew how to party. Nicola and his pals. One night I caught two of them in the bathroom taking turns snorting a line of coke. They nodded their heads for me to join them but my response was to go look for Nacci. I told him what I had just seen. I think part of me still wanted to get rid of them.
“‘So now you’re being a moralist?’ Nacci replied. ‘Let them have a good time. Or do you want to report the police to the police?’ He went off chuckling at his joke. His reaction had the effect of a perverse blessing on me. From that night on I let myself go. I would often play poker, with my own money, I drank if there was alcohol, and I joined the pilgrimages to Nacci’s private bathroom. It was in that bathroom that Nicola told me. Not because he was sorry, or to provoke me. There was something fiercely sincere between us at that point, as if all outstanding accounts had been canceled and our brotherhood, always obstructed by Bern, had found the chance to express itself.
“‘Remember the solar panels? It was me and Fabrizio. It took us almost two hours.’
“‘Why?’
“‘You hadn’t called me, not even once. In all that time, not once. I’d see you. I saw what you were doing, when you were all together in the evening under the pergola. That place belonged to me too.’
“A few days before Christmas they rented the Relais, all of it, a party in grand style. I helped Nicola with the preparations; by now I was becoming an expert in planning other people’s parties. We decided on a fish-based menu, we found a deejay, and one morning I accompanied Nicola to a wholesale store outside Gallipoli, where we bought up a supply of alcohol and a quantity of party gizmos: glow sticks that became fluorescent when broken, headbands with teddy-bear ears, silver and gold masks with elastic bands, and firecrackers. We showed up at the cashier’s desk wearing the masks, like a couple of kids. I was happy.
“On the way back, Nicola told me about the girl he was seeing. Stella. He elaborated on certain very private details, maybe to impress me. He said they had this agreement between them: one month apiece, each of them had absolute power over the other. When Nicola was in charge, he could order Stella to do anything at any time, and vice versa. Obviously almost all the demands had to do with sex. Often they involved other couples, or unattached men and women, for a fee. He was neither arrogant nor funny as he talked about it. In his mind, it was something very serious.
“‘Do you like those games?’ I asked him at one point.
“Nicola narrowed his eyes to stare more intensely at the road that wound through the vineyards. He said, ‘If I don’t do that, I don’t feel anything. Nothing at all.’ He spoke those words with great sadness. Then he added, ‘Isn’t it like that for you too?’
“But I avoided the question. ‘Have you introduced her to Cesare and Floriana?’
“He burst out laughing. ‘Have I introduced her to them? Hell no. No way!’
“‘And do you still think about her a lot?’
“I still couldn’t get over the fact Nicola and I had ventured into such intimate territory. But for years I’d misjudged him. When I asked him if he still thought about her a lot, I was referring to Violalibera. Instead Nicola replied: ‘She’s married to him now. What can I do?’”
I STOOD UP ABRUPTLY. “Do you mind if I open the window for a moment? It’s stuffy in here.”
“Whatever you like,” Tommaso said.
The cold air hit me in the face; it smelled vaguely of the sea, although you couldn’t see it from there, only other buildings, all dark. I breathed in that fresh air for a few seconds, then closed the window and went to sit down again. Tommaso waited patiently, somewhat lost in thought.
“Do you feel okay?”
“Yeah.”
“I can stop if you want.”
“No, go on.”
“You should drink some wine too.”
“Go on, I said.”
“There were about eighty people at the party, all policemen with their girlfriends. After dinner, when the deejay turned up the volume, they all got up to dance. Nacci stood in the doorway counting the buckets of Veuve Clicquot that went by him.
“Nicola and his little group climbed up on a table and danced on that improvised stage. Stella was there too. Seeing her there, you wouldn’t have said she was capable of what Nicola had described to me.
“I took advantage of the coke supplies available in the bathroom and downed countless glasses left half full, before putting them in the dishwasher. I remember thinking: Corinne’s father should see me now; I wouldn’t be able to touch the tip of my nose with my eyes closed, but I can still carry a tray with thirty glasses. I found myself standing on the table, a whole new perspective on that dining room that I had walked through thousands of times.
“Nicola was dancing behind me. I ended up crushed between him and Stella. Then other people climbed up. I was moved by the packed contact with all those bodies.
“After that I have a kind of memory gap of a few hours. I remember going into a long, narrow apartment, like a corridor, where there was a wall painted black that you could write on with colored chalk, and I wrote something on it that the others found funny. Outside it was already lightish. There were five of us, the next morning, at least.
“I woke up on the carpet and went down to the street. It seemed a Sunday morning like so many others, bright and warm for December. I realized I was a few blocks from home. I went into a bar and in the bathroom I tried to pull myself together; my vision was slightly clouded.
“When Corinne saw me, she couldn’t speak for a few minutes. She kept pacing nonstop through the rooms.
“‘It’s eleven o’clock,’ she said finally, as if she had counted the hours that had gone by, one by one.
“‘The party ended late. I slept at the Relais not to wake you up.’
“‘Not to wake me up? Really? I called the Relais at eight. They told me you’d left a long time ago.’
“I went over to her. I touched her arms, but she stiffened as if I’d scared her to death.
“She said, ‘I have to go out. And you have to change Ada. You have to watch her.’
“Then she took her things and left, still in a kind of trance.
“I was in a state of confusion. And tired. My hands were shaking. I was well aware of the effects of a hangover, and if it were just that . . . But there was all the cocaine as well, I had no idea how much even. And those memory flashbacks of the night before. I sat down on the couch and probably collapsed immediately. What woke me was Ada crying in her little room. By then she was really shrieking, I don’t know how long it had been going on. I lifted her out of the crib and held her in my arms. I was starving, I hadn’t eaten anything since before the party, but when I tried to put her down on the floor, she instantly started screaming again, so I picked her back up. I put a pot of water on to boil, looked in the refrigerator for some leftover sauce, found the pasta. I held Ada with my left arm, I’d done it hundreds of times. Maybe she made an abrupt move. She lurched backward. I’d left the cabinet door open.
“There was so much blood, I couldn’t even see the wound. The emergency room doctors said she’d been deprived of oxygen for several seconds, not because of the blow, but because she’d screamed so hard. She’d suffocated from fright. Corinne had already arrived and her parents had come, and some other people—I didn’t even know why they were there. Someone brought me tea from the vending machine, which tasted of lemon concentrate; I took a sip, then left it to cool. I kept wondering why Corinne wasn’t pouring out her anger at me. The doctor spoke with her, then left without adding anything about being confident, about being hopeful. Cesare came to mind and I felt a wrenching nostalgia. At a time like that he would have said the words that were needed.
“Toward evening the swelling of Ada’s head had gone down. Corinne went home to get some rest. The nurses asked me to step out of the room for a moment. Corinne’s father was in the hallway. He put a hand on my shoulder. He spoke kindly, a true diplomat, I thought. He gave a brief recap of the events, as if I could have forgotten them. He said that he had never seen his daughter as unhappy as she’d been recently, not even during the worst years when she was a girl. He never called her by name, he always said ‘my daughter.’ It was time for me to undergo treatment, my problem had become a serious concern. My problem. ‘Right now you’re sorry, you’re certain you want to set things right and that the recent scare will give you the strength to do it. But that’s not so. You could go back to her and promise her that from now on it will be different, but you and I know that’s not true.’
“Then he explained the solution that he had arranged in the last few hours, or that more likely had been ready for some time and had only been waiting for the right opportunity. He explained about the apartment that had become vacant, this apartment where we are now. Not to let it slip away, he had already paid a few months’ rent, and he wouldn’t ask me to repay him. I could consider it assistance to start over again. Naturally, I would continue to see Ada, everything would be decided very civilly before a judge. I might have to put up with his wife being present with us, at least at the beginning, as long as it took for me to get back on track. However, if they had wanted to prevent me, it would have been all too easy, given how things had gone, right? But you don’t punish a man for an accident. You don’t expunge a father just because he has weaknesses. Who doesn’t have any?
“In exchange for clemency, all he asked was that I do him the favor of not reporting any of that conversation to Corinne, that I take full responsibility for the plan. She would suffer a little at first, but ultimately she would appreciate it. Because women can recognize when men have the courage to act on their decisions, he said. If he were me, he would wait a couple of weeks, allow enough time to recover from the scare. If he were me, he would let New Year’s go by, but no longer, because later it would be more complicated for everyone. If he were me . . . So I let him be me.”
TOMMASO PAUSED AGAIN. He seemed to be pondering something, and finally he asked me to bring him a cigarette.
“Won’t it make you feel worse?”
“No. It won’t make me feel worse.”
I went to the other room, found the packet, and returned to the bedroom. I lit Tommaso’s cigarette, then mine. We used his glass as an ashtray.
“It was what I wanted, deep down. To get out of there. To be rid of Corinne and her expectations. My debt had been repaid for some time. Yet the first few weeks were the worst. When I wasn’t at the Relais, I was at the bar across from the harbor. I’d meet Ada there, together with Corinne’s mother.
“‘Why don’t we go to your house?’ the woman urged me after a few times. ‘It’s important that the child see where you live now. So she won’t think her father doesn’t have a home.’
“‘Her father doesn’t have a home,’ I replied, and she did not insist.
“Those meetings were torture. Ada may have been the only one who wasn’t aware of it. She wandered among the tables in the bar, and the customers smiled at her. Corinne’s mother always brought toys, toys that I myself had bought before I left. But she didn’t know it. Who knows what Corinne had told her. She explained how to play with them, but I preferred to watch. As soon as they left, I would order a drink. It went on like that for a couple of months, though, looking back, it seems like a very long time. Sitting in that bar, watching the virtual cards scroll by on the slot-machine screens. Then Bern showed up. Out of nowhere, like always, there he was in the bar. The place on earth least suited to him. He scrutinized the surroundings for some time before coming over.
“‘Let’s get out of here,’ he said.
“‘Why?’
“‘Let’s just go. Where’s your house? I have my bag in the car, but I have to take the car back to Danco before evening.’
“And so he kept the promise he’d made to me all those years ago at the masseria, the night we’d stood in front of the window and he’d promised to take care of me.
“The next day we started stripping off the stained wallpaper. We took the most battered furniture to the dump and bought new pieces at a warehouse. Bern talked a lot, practically nonstop. In recent days he’d been living with Danco in a kind of encampment. ‘The Presidio,’ he called it. Since the Xylella pandemic had begun, Danco and some others had mobilized to prevent infected olive trees from being cut down. They had formed some sort of militant group and slept in camp tents around a farmer’s cabin. It was the farmer who’d convinced them that cutting down the trees was useless, that there were undoubtedly some profits to be made behind the operation. He was treating the infected olive trees with copper sulfate and lime. Bern was animated as he told me all this. The voice was his, but it was Danco talking. And meanwhile, he tore off strips of wallpaper and painted the bare walls a ridiculous pink, which that little girl would like.” He stopped. “Why are you looking at me like that now?”
“I’M NOT LOOKING at you in any way.”
Tommaso crushed his cigarette out in the bottom of the glass, then held the makeshift ashtray in his lap.
“Yes, you are. You’re looking at me because I haven’t said anything about Bern and you. I haven’t said anything about what he told me. But he didn’t talk about it much. That’s the truth. Only one evening, while we were eating Chinese food, sitting on the floor, he said: ‘Chasing after an egoistic desire tore us apart.’ Then he blamed your doctor. He had gone to see him a few days earlier. I think he must have made a scene, that he threatened him in some bizarre way. Saying he’d tell everyone what he was up to, talk to the newspapers about it.”
“Did Bern tell you that? That he went to Sanfelice and threatened him?”
“He was a little ashamed of it, I think. Or maybe not. Anyway, he must have been distraught when he did it, so he didn’t elaborate much on the details. All he said was that he’d burst into the clinic right in the middle of a visit, that the secretary had tried to stop him, and that he had let the doctor have it. We were sitting on the floor, all smeared with pink paint, passing the container back and forth, the Chinese noodles all stuck together in it. Then Bern said, ‘Teresa slept with him. With Nicola. I saw his car parked outside the masseria. A few nights ago.’”
“And what did you say?” I asked.
Tommaso turned toward the window.
“Didn’t you say anything to him? You had already talked to Nicola at that point. You knew that he came to the masseria to spy. Why didn’t you say anything?”
Tommaso lay still, as if by not moving, my voice would pass over him without touching him. I grabbed him by the arm, but he pulled away brusquely.
“Look at me, Tommaso!”
His eyes had changed, they were open wider now, full of rage, or terror.
“Why didn’t you tell him the truth?”
“I couldn’t be sure,” he replied in a faint voice.
I took a deep breath before hurling my accusation: “No. You didn’t tell him what you knew about Nicola because you wanted to keep him there with you. You kept quiet and let him go on believing what he already thought.”
Tommaso’s eyes were still wide open, his gaze riveted on me.
“Isn’t that right?”
“I guess so.”
I stood up, went to the kitchen, and got two clean glasses. I poured some wine for both of us. I wanted to put on my coat and leave, not listen to anything more. But not this time. I would hear him out, to the very end. I went back to the room and gave Tommaso the wine. He sipped it slowly.
“And then?”
“Nothing. At least not for a while. In a couple of weeks the apartment was ready to welcome Ada. Corinne’s mother came to check. She stood aside and watched as Bern, ‘Uncle Bern,’ twirled Ada around. Bern doted on Ada, and she on him. Anyone else would have made me jealous, but not him. They were happy months. The best, maybe.”
“It sounds like a dream come true,” I said spitefully.
Just then Tommaso started crying. Trapped in the bed as he was, he covered his eyes with one hand, sobbing. I watched him for a while.
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”
He wept almost soundlessly. I waited for him to take his hand away from his face.
Then he took a sip of wine. Wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
“Bern took me to the encampment. The infected trees were marked with a red cross painted halfway up the trunk, waiting to be chopped down. Danco and his group swore they wouldn’t let anyone get near them.
“In the evening we cooked hamburgers outdoors on a greasy black grill. There wasn’t much to do, to tell the truth. No immediate threat to counteract, no plan. Many of the young people were university students and they lay sprawled out with open books on their stomachs. When it got dark, they lit a bonfire. Danco gave one of his speeches. A somewhat disjointed speech, in fact. But they were all younger than him, attracted by his citations. I wanted to go home, but Bern insisted on sleeping there. He went to Danco and Giuliana’s tent. I found myself with two guys, inside a sleeping bag that smelled like sweat.
“The next day, Bern and I left very early, everyone was still asleep. We drank some cold leftover coffee from a thermos.
“‘Did you like it?’ he asked me in the car.
“‘It’s a shame about those olive trees.’
“‘It’s not a shame. It’s a crime,’ he said, keeping his eyes on the road.
“So now I spent some nights at home with Bern and the child. I spent some nights at the encampment. And I spent those wild nights with Nicola and his buddies. Separate lives, which had nothing to do with one another: my specialty.
“I was at the encampment when a couple of reporters came to interview Danco. The Xylella had spread farther north. The protocol called for cutting down olive trees within a hundred yards of every infected specimen, but this would have meant deforesting the entire region. Danco blew his top, shouting at the journalists that it was all a pack of lies; he spoke about multinationals and lobbies. To all of us it seemed effective.
“That evening we gathered in the farmer’s house. The clip was one of the last items on the news. Danco’s interview had been cut to a few seconds, in which he claimed that Xylella was a media invention. In the video he appeared outraged and maniacal. After him a ministerial official was questioned, who provided precise data on the extent of the disaster.
“We returned to the tents with a sense of defeat and frustration. Bern went to sit under one of the olive trees. He remained there, staring wide-eyed, until late at night.
“In June, Ada turned three. She celebrated it with Corinne and her grandparents, then with me and Bern. We made a cake and got all dressed up. We acted a bit ridiculous. At the end of dinner, I turned off the lights and brought in the cake. We sang shamelessly and Ada was radiant. Bern had bought her wooden blocks carved with letters and numbers on them. Ada didn’t pay much attention to them, and he was disappointed. He darkened even more when he saw her so excited by my gift, a doll. ‘It’s all plastic,’ he said angrily.
“Then he stormed out of the apartment, leaving us there. He returned a few days later and we didn’t say a word about the birthday. It went on like that all summer long and throughout the fall. Bern was spending more and more time at the encampment, but every so often he came over. He no longer talked to me about what was happening over there and I wasn’t very interested. Even when he showed up with his shoulder bandaged, he was vague, but that time he stayed longer. In retrospect it all seems so obvious, I should have realized what was coming.
“In December the bacterium reached the Relais dei Saraceni. Actually, Nacci never had the trees analyzed, he merely studied them and showed me the yellowed branches. They could have been that way because of the sun, the drought, but he had decided that part of the olive-tree reserve had to be cleared out. He had already made arrangements.
“‘The special regulations on Xylella allow him to,’ I told Bern and Danco one evening.
“‘But why?’ Danco said, worked up. ‘It makes no sense, it’s a loss for him too.’ He made some mental calculations that didn’t add up, and he couldn’t see what Nacci got out of it. So I added, ‘He’s cutting down the olive trees because he wants to put in a golf course.’
“Silence fell. Danco and Bern looked at each other. This was the action they’d been waiting for. A grand, momentous, concrete move. They’d had enough of removing the red crosses painted on the tree trunks and drinking second-rate beer with an illiterate farmer, waiting for who knows what.
“After that evening Bern didn’t show up again. A couple of months went by without hearing from him. A couple of months, yes, because when I found him at my house, by surprise as always, it was already February. I immediately noticed the big box next to the sofa, and asked him what was in it.
“‘Some stuff,’ he replied evasively. ‘Don’t touch it, please, I’ll get it out of here right away.’
“Naturally I looked inside as soon as I was alone. I peeled off the scotch tape slowly, so I could put it back exactly as it had been. There were bags of ammonium nitrate, which I was familiar with because we used it as a fertilizer at the Relais.
“I was at home with Ada when Bern came back a couple of weeks later. He didn’t even take off his jacket when he came in but went straight to the carton. The next day the bulldozers would be at the Relais.
“‘Will you be with us?’ he asked.
“‘You know I can’t. I have a job there.’
“At that moment I realized that I should have thrown everything away while he was gone.
“‘Leave it here,’ I said.
“‘Will you be one of us or not?’
“‘Leave it, Bern. It’s a stupid idea.’
“He lowered his head. ‘From now on it no longer concerns you, Tommi.’
“I sat on the box, like a child.
“‘Get off,’ Bern said.
“His voice changed. The severe tone had been replaced with the same emotional, regretful voice with which he’d begged me not to read the Gospel of Matthew under the holly oak, the same one with which he’d asked me to steal from the cash drawer at the Relais.
“He took my hands and made me get up. Then he bent over the box. ‘You can come with me, we can be together this time too. It’s our most important mission.’
“But it wasn’t like that. That wasn’t my most important mission. Ada was sitting on the couch, mesmerized by the cartoons.
“‘No,’ I said.
“Bern nodded, the box poised in his arms, the door already open.
“‘Call the elevator, would you?’
“I stepped beside him. I pressed the button. In the time it took for the elevator to arrive, we didn’t say another word. The doors opened, Bern got in, the doors closed behind him. After that, I never saw him again.”
TOMMASO SUDDENLY pushed the sheet aside, uncovering his pale legs. He stood up.
“Be careful,” I said.
He seemed to have suddenly gotten a grip on himself. He padded out of the room barefoot and went into the bathroom. I heard the stream in the toilet bowl, then flushing and water running, for a long time. There was no need for him to add anything else. I knew the rest from his deposition at the proceedings against Bern and Danco. I knew it from the testimony of all the witnesses and from the newspapers’ reconstructions.
That night Tommaso had called Nicola. He had panicked and didn’t know who else to call. Maybe Nicola would be able to talk some sense into Bern and the others without resorting to arrests. Like a friend. Like the brother he was.
Nicola went to the Relais with his colleague, Fabrizio, both of them off duty, both of them armed. The bulldozers were already there, ready to move into action, and the guys from the encampment had formed a human cordon, holding hands, with caps lowered over their eyes and scarves in front of their mouths against the cold.
Nicola and Fabrizio arrived just when Nacci was putting his hands on Danco, him first of all, of course, reaching for his face to pull the scarf down from his mouth. Danco reacted by shoving him and Nicola separated them. He said he was from the police and grabbed Danco’s arms to handcuff him. Then Bern leaped at his brother to free his friend, and Nicola’s colleague, Fabrizio, lunged at him. Nacci ran back toward the Relais.
The chain of activists had broken at several points. The two men in the vehicles started up and proceeded through the breach that had opened. One guy panicked—although during the trial it was never clear who he was—and set off one of the bombs. The explosion wasn’t very powerful, but it sent the activists scattering among the olive trees.
Nicola and his colleague pulled out the guns. Fabrizio ran after the group and Nicola found himself facing Bern and Danco, the three of them alone.
Only the man on the bulldozer saw any of what happened later, confusedly, through a pall of dust and smoke that had not yet dissipated.
He saw Bern on the ground and Nicola kneeling on top of him, with his gun aimed. Then he heard a thud, not a gunshot, a muffled clunk. Nicola lay stretched out and Danco stood beside him, still holding the spade in his hand; he gripped it tightly for a few seconds before tossing it away.
At that point the man got out of the bulldozer to help Nicola. By the time he reached him, Danco was already on the run, while Bern stared down at his brother’s body, incredulous, stunned. The man tried to hold on to him at least, but Bern also started running, down through the sloping grove of olive trees that would soon no longer exist, transformed into a golf course with spongy bright grass beneath the sky.
TOMMASO CAME OUT of the bathroom, but lingered in the living room for a few moments. Watching Ada sleep, I thought. When he returned to the room he smelled vaguely of toothpaste.
“We can sleep a little,” he said.
“I’ll go now.”
“It’s too late to go. Stay here. That side of the bed isn’t as filthy as you think. Get down, Medea, move.”
I was tired. If I got in the car, I would have to struggle to keep my eyes open all the way home. And maybe I didn’t feel like waking up in a few hours, Christmas morning, alone again, after all I had heard.
Meanwhile, Tommaso was on his hands and knees on the mattress, completing the job of brushing Medea’s hair off the sheets.
“That’s it, done,” he said. “And it’s been at least a week since I’ve seen a bedbug.”
“What?”
“I’m kidding. Relax.”
He grabbed the pillow that he’d kept crushed beneath the one under his head most of the night. He tried to plump it back up to a respectable shape, to no avail.
“It’s fine like that,” I told him. “Don’t worry about it.”
He lay down on his side of the bed, very close to the edge to leave me as much room as he could. I took off my shoes, keeping my shirt and jeans on, and slid under the covers.
Tommaso had his back turned to me. He was still, as if he were already asleep, but he wasn’t sleeping. My rival from the beginning. I put a hand on his shoulder; I had no right to do it and it wasn’t something I would ever have thought I’d do with him, but I did it. He left it there for a few moments, then he put his own hand over it. Then we managed to sleep a little, just a few hours, but a deep sleep, as I hadn’t had in years. The lamp was still on next to me. Outside, dawn broke, but I didn’t see it.