I’m sorry, Brigadie’.
I’m so very sorry.
But it’s worth the trouble to try to explain it to you, because maybe it’s not my fault, when we come right down to it. Or really, not entirely my fault. Even though it was my finger that pulled the trigger.
The blame, if you ask me, ought to be put on dreams. Dreams are such stinkers, Brigadie’. They’re devious and treacherous, dreams are. They’ll convince you that reality, deep down, isn’t entirely real, that you can change it, that you can improve on it. Dreams create something in your head that tricks you and defrauds you, because afterwards, without them, you can’t bring yourself to go on living.
Dreams, you know, Brigadie’, aren’t always the same. It depends on the time of year. When the difference between the world that spins around you and the one that you have in your head grows larger, when the abyss that separates them grows deeper and gives rise to subtle, insidious melancholy, impossible to get out of your head, that’s when you become sad, and then sadder. That’s when you find yourself behaving like a fool.
When you reach the depths of despair.
And of all the times of year, this is the worst. Because Christmas, with its sweetness and joy, with its candles and bagpipers and season’s greetings, is over now, and it won’t be coming back, and you look around and suddenly see the smoking ruins of everything you’d hoped for and the fog envelops and conceals what truly awaits us. These are the days of shattered dreams.
New Year’s is an awful thing, Brigadie’. Just awful.
Objectively speaking, it’s just another ordinary day in the middle of this winter, and this time it’s a Saturday, too, not even the end of the weekend, so that afterwards you still have Sunday to collect your thoughts.
But for whatever reason we’ve all agreed that it’s New Year’s, the one day of the year when you have to reckon up a balance, add up the pluses and minuses, draw a nice straight line to separate the old, unsuccessful dreams from the new ones. New Year’s. What a con game.
As if you could really be reborn. As if everything that we are, everything that we’ve built, was no longer worth anything and now we must—or at least now we ought to—venture off on who knows what hazardous undertaking, just because we’ve pulled a sheet off the calendar representing a day, a month, a year. As if that really changed anything.
You know, Brigadie’, dreams are what we live on. Our own dreams and the dreams of others.
If you saw what I see every night, three times a night, in the eyes of those who look at us, you’d understand that it’s dreams that keep life going. And that if dreams are a way of running away from reality, and madness is living in another reality, then we’re all crazy, Brigadie’. Every last one of us. Stark raving mad.
In the midst of the music, through the smoke and the gleam of the glasses, I can see people’s eyes. I can see their eyes as they lean closer to understand the lines that we recite and sing, as they’re captivated and swept away by the characters, tinged with joy or rage, as they turn damp-eyed with emotion, as they pause, raptly, at the sight of the chorus girls’ bare legs.
People’s eyes, as they fill up with dreams.
What do you think, Brigadie’? That’s what people are looking for when they come to the theater. They don’t just want to spend an evening, take their wife or girlfriend out to get a breath of air or fill their bellies with cheap wine. They want to dream. They want a reality that’s different from their everyday lives, for a couple of hours, including intermission. If you stop to think about it, it’s cheap at the price, isn’t it? Just a few lire for two hours of dreams.
But the problem is that we have dreams too. All the illusions that we scatter over the audience from the stage, three times a night, infect the actors and actresses too, the musicians and chorus girls. Impossible to be immune. Any more than it is for doctors who treat typhus or cholera. There’s always a risk of contagion.
And when that happens, then one of us, one of the cast with a smile stamped on their face under the greasepaint, shedding fake tears, with a dramatic quaver in their voice, wearing a threadbare stage tailcoat or a top hat or fishnet stockings—one of us starts to dream. And when that happens, there’s bound to be trouble. Big, big trouble.
Because our dreams are born of dreams.
In order to do this job well, you have to believe in it, even if you’re a two-bit musician, even if you’re nothing but a dancer in the chorus line or a green, apprentice actor, and that goes double if you’re the starring actor or the leading lady. By sheer dint of repetition, you wind up believing the sweet words of love you whisper, or sigh, or sing, or bellow, Brigadie’. And you start to confuse real life with the life you churn out on the dusty floor-boards of the theater’s stage.
And that’s why New Year’s is the worst day of them all. Because you think to yourself: I can’t take another year of this. I need to reshuffle this deck of cards. Until even the craziest solution starts to seem possible to you.
You have to put the blame on dreams. Dreams just fool you, they make you do the craziest things. In a sleepless night, as you ache from missing a familiar hand and smell, that special taste, that special smile, you wonder to yourself: Why not? After all, if you stop to think, if I just do this or that, it might turn out fine, everything might take a turn for the better. You just remove an obstacle or two; it’s no big deal.
But it is a big deal, Brigadie’. It’s a very big deal. There are so many things that have to fit together, so many details that don’t come up in dreams. Life isn’t like the stage, where all it takes is a song to conceal reality. Life is different.
Now I know that. Now I understand.
So that’s why I’m telling you that it’s not my fault, not all my fault. I put the blame on this time of the year, these damned holidays when people hug you and tell you: Happy end of the old year, happy beginning of the new year. But there is no end, and there is no beginning, everything continues exactly the same as it was before. These damned holidays when we pop corks on the stage and in the audience, when we exchange our dearest regards as if it were going to be years and years, literally forever, before things finally go back to ordinary life, the usual gestures, the usual hidden sidelong glances, those glances that bespeak yearnings and frustrations, hopes and despair. Best wishes and joy of the season, we all tell each other, and it’s never clear that one person’s joy must necessarily be another’s despair, that one person’s life can become another’s death.
Best wishes and joy of the season. What utter nonsense.
I put the blame on dreams, Brigadie’. On the fake lives we lead in the secrecy of endless nights. The imaginary lives that transform ordinary everyday moments into an unbearable burden, and so you find yourself doing things you would never have imagined. Then you have no alternative but to hide what happened, hoping that no one else will figure it out and that your dream can come true. The dream, then, is really to blame. The dream is the real culprit, Brigadie’.
Then, all of a sudden, you read in someone else’s eyes the one thing you’ve always dreaded: the spark of understanding.
God, I’m so very sorry.
That’s the worst moment of them all, you know that? When you realize from some small act, some stray gesture, that there’s someone else in the world who has figured it out. And the dream, which sat there until just a moment ago, glittering, solid, real, and eminently attainable, starts to crumble, to dissolve into empty air. From that instant, the only thing you can think to do is protect it. Somehow erase that spark of understanding. Because, you tell yourself, if I eliminate it, I can still get away with this. I can still get away with it.
And that’s why I pulled the trigger, Brigadie’. I had to defend myself. I had to defend that dream.
I was fighting for the life I’d built night after night, for the dream I’d constructed moment by moment and that I thought I’d achieved by now. And not just on stage. Not just in a song. Not just in make-believe.
Happy end and happy beginning. Maybe it’s true, Brigadie’. If you want there to be a beginning, then there necessarily has to be an end.
That’s why I’m telling you all this, and I need you to believe me. I had to do it, and you understand that, don’t you? Because I’d glimpsed the spark of understanding in those eyes. In those damned green eyes.
I’m sorry, Brigadie’.
I’m sorry I shot Commissario Ricciardi.