And then, Brigadie’, there’s the fact of this fog.
Up till now, perhaps, we were fighting but equally matched, don’t you think? You were searching, and I was hiding. And you were stumbling around in the dark; you need to know something to find it. What you had received, and what the commissario had received, were just scattered words without meaning.
And the idea of bringing everyone into Fedora’s dressing room, what sheer absurdity: as if sitting in the middle of all that bric-a-brac would make it possible to capture the meaning.
Instead, there was fog the whole time. A fog made up not of vapor, not water suspended in the air, but fragments, objects that served to construct an illusion of truth. Objects for pretending, the way she pretended.
Because Fedora pretended, Brigadie’. That’s something you need to understand.
Obviously she did, you might say, after all, she was an actress. That was her job. But it’s not obvious by any means, believe me. Generally speaking, if the artists’ dreams arrive on the stage, it’s only for a moment; then they get their feet back on firm ground. Instead, she used her talent and her beauty, because she was certainly talented and beautiful—no two ways about it, that much is certain—to befog people’s minds.
Which is why this thing about the fog is so strange. Almost symbolic, really. It represents what Fedora did in life, and not only onstage: pumping smoke in people’s eyes.
Take a woman, Brigadie’. A normal woman, one like all the rest. Give her a talent, the talent of make-believe, and give her the tools: the clothing, the makeup, the perfumes; striped stockings and high-heeled shoes. Cut her hair in a bob, put the most fashionable little cap on her head and a fur stole around her neck. Then watch her smile, with those dazzling white teeth that make your head spin just to look at them, or laugh with a voice that sounds like pearls falling onto the floor. A woman like that has no limits, Brigadie’, let me tell you. If a woman like that wants a man, she’ll just reach out and take him.
Yes, fog conceals the truth, but it doesn’t change it. If you search carefully, it pops out in the end.
Instead, Fedora and people like her change the truth, and then some. Because they are the lie. Because they’re smugglers of dreams.
A dream and a fog, my dear brigadier, each works in a different way. Dreams poison you, and fog convinces you. So I thought I could get away with it, make off scot-free, when we all woke up in that strange fog. I believed that it had descended around us specifically to conceal my dream, to save it.
It seemed like a good omen, that fog.
But you already know how it turned out. The fog wasn’t enough, and I was forced to defend myself.
If Fedora was no longer among us, that was because I had chosen to make it so.
As if I were God, as if I were the Lord Almighty.
She was no longer among us, with her incessant charades, with the constant playacting that she introduced into everything she ever did. With her betrayal, in other words.
Because betrayal isn’t just having a lover, Brigadie’. Betrayal is also allowing others to believe that you’re one thing when you’re actually another. It’s a betrayal to be short and become tall. It’s a betrayal to be pale and seem tanned. To be ordinary and appear beautiful.
Everything that women like Fedora do is a betrayal.
The venom they inject into your blood is a betrayal. Dreaming of possessing them is a betrayal. No longer looking at women at all is a betrayal.
When you betray and when you’re betrayed, Brigadie’, then you start to dream.
The reality that you have no longer pleases you, so you cherish your damned dream and you think you can conceal it.
And the fog helps you.
The problem is that, sooner or later, that fog is bound to lift.
And indeed that’s what happened.
I realized that, with the new beginning, the turn of the year, my dream had dissolved, so I shot Commissario Ricciardi.