I’m so sorry, Brigadie’.
I’m especially sorry for those two days and those two nights spent with my eyes focused on the ceiling, trying to figure out what to do. How to get out of this situation.
You can’t imagine what hell is. What it means to have a circle closing in on you a little at a time. In those green eyes I glimpsed the spark of understanding from the very outset. From the minute he assembled us all backstage to talk to us. And yet I thought it was all clear: Gelmi had killed the whore, because a whore is what she was, Brigadie’, and the very worst kind. Some whores do the work just to survive, she did it to have everything and keep from feeling old, but old is what she was becoming.
In short, he’d fired the shot, with his own pistol, in front of artists and spectators; that idiot Romano had even wet his pants and no longer wanted to get up off the floor. It was hard to keep from busting out into open laughter, he truly was ridiculous. No one had any doubts, did they? Then why did the man with green eyes keep insisting on asking questions, Brigadie’? Because he didn’t believe it. He’d never believed it.
I’ve always hated Gelmi. For years, long before I ever met him, before I first saw that fake face, made up like a woman, with his dyed hair and his tailored outfits. I’ve hated him from the stories my father told me.
It was his fault that my father became the way he is now, did you know that? No. Of course you didn’t. All it took was the charitable act of giving us jobs, my mother and me, to erase those memories. My father has no longer even mentioned it, and neither have we. Thank you, Signor Gelmi. Thank you for giving us food to eat, thank you for rescuing us.
But no, Brigadie’. The way he tells it wasn’t the way it worked at all. The captain had failed to order the retreat in time. He’d been too afraid of leaving the trench. He’d waited for the enemy to come because he was paralyzed with terror, it hadn’t been an act of courage, at all. And when the grenade landed, he’d hidden behind the thing that was closest to hand: my father. That’s who the hero really was. The officer decorated for military valor.
As soon as Papà was able to speak again and we understood that he would live, unfortunately, because the fate that awaited him was worse than death, he told me everything. And I began to hate Gelmi’s face, the face that appeared on posters or on the silver screen. There he was, handsome and strong, smiling and rich, in the limelight and on magazine covers; while my father was ravaged, deformed, and poverty stricken; we were condemned to scrabble for a living amidst hardships.
Still, I managed to put up with it. When he hired me, making my dreams as a little girl come true, my dream of dancing in front of a packed house to the applause of the audience, I even considered forgiving him.
Then on the boards of the stage I met Aurelio.
There aren’t many young men in the revue, have you noticed? There’s Pio Romano, but he . . . well, he’s not especially interested in women.
Aurelio is special, you hear him play and you’re immediately enchanted. You can’t understand, Brigadie’, no disrespect but you’re not an artist. His hands extract words from his instrument: he’s a genius.
We took to each other almost from the very start. Who could be luckier than me? I was dancing, I was in love, and he loved me back. He was the first man in my life, and at this point, he’ll also be the last. What a pity.
But my happiness didn’t last long. Because one day that tremendous whore laid her eyes upon him.
If you ask me, she wasn’t even interested in him, and you can trust me on that. But he was the youngest one in the troupe. And she was obsessed with age. She was constantly looking at herself in the mirror, applying makeup, massaging her face. And she’d ask each and every one of us: How do I look? Do you think I look pretty? I don’t have any wrinkles, do I? Does this dress hold my breasts up?
Brigadie’, Aurelio was nothing more to her than a cosmetic, a makeup kit. Like a jar of face powder or greasepaint. He was just a tool that helped her forget the passage of time. That said, even the whore’s obsession, if you stopped to think, was Gelmi’s fault: because as he drank and aged rapidly, he showed her day by day what was bound to happen to her, eventually. So what could be better, if she wanted to continue to feel young and desirable, than a young man, already betrothed, in the prime of his life, hungry for success, and blinded by the image of such fake beauty?
Aurelio told me: Forgive me, Ita’. I can’t afford to lose my job. And neither can you, right? If we’re not careful, they’ll fire us both. And he was right, Brigadie’. I cared about my job, too.
That was then I started to cast about for a solution. Every day, three times a day, I witnessed the fiction of Gelmi killing the whore, shooting her down like a bitch, the cheating bitch that she was, while my Aurelio embroidered on the melody. With all the times that I’d watched her die, wishing with all my heart that it really could happen, I started to wonder how my wish could finally come true.
As you’ve seen, I’m quite familiar with handguns. To help my father feel he’s still alive, I keep his uniform and pistol clean and in good order—that same pistol I used to shoot the commissario, the same model handgun as was used onstage. I practiced at home, I calculated the shots, I ran through the steps over and over again. It wasn’t even necessary to make it complicated: I only needed to replace Gelmi’s clip with the one from Papà’s gun. It took me a minute, no more.
My mother stands guard on the dressing rooms. I involved her because her help was indispensable. She needed to alert me when Gelmi left his dressing room.
She didn’t want to do it, Brigadie’, even though she hated him, too. It was still a murder. I had to explain to her that I wouldn’t be killing anyone. No, it would be that worthless, pitiful man, that coward, who would actually shoot the whore. I would simply put him in the position to do justice, that’s all, to do what he ought to have done if he hadn’t been a miserable wretch. Because Gelmi knew, Brigadie’, he knew perfectly well that his wife was cheating on him, and not just with Aurelio, but also with other friends of theirs, but by now the only reason he still had work was her, and he couldn’t afford to lose her. Which is why he whined and sniveled, why he got drunk, and why he said nothing: out of self-interest. Like I told you, a coward.
I switched the clip before the 5:30 performance. Mamma let me know when he went out to get a bottle; he always drank at that time of day, sometimes he had trouble staying on his feet. After 8:30 he’d recover a little, and that’s why I chose the second show: I was afraid that for the first show he’d be too tipsy and by the third show he’d be too tired. I put my money on the fourth bullet, hoping that his aim would be better. And so it was.
How I rejoiced as I watched her breathe her last, Brigadie’. She fell against the backdrop drooling blood: ugly, so horribly ugly. Do you remember? She looked like a broken doll. And if you ask me, it looked as if she’d aged. I took a close look and she had wrinkles around her eyes, once she was dead. She could no longer stretch and massage her skin.
I thought I’d gotten away with it. Then that damned green-eyed man started asking question after question, digging into the manure and the filth as if he knew what he was looking for. When you two came to talk to my father, I realized that by now you had almost reached the truth.
But I fooled myself into thinking that it was an idea of his, of the commissario’s, an idea that he still hadn’t shared, because it was just too farfetched of a theory. A man murders his faithless wife in front of hundreds of spectators and there’s actually someone who believes it wasn’t him. How absurd.
I thought to myself that if he still hadn’t talked about it with anyone else, then I only needed to get rid of him. Certainly, if he’d entered the Teatro Splendor and summoned me in front of my fellow cast members, I would have simply denied everything, I’d have pretended to be stunned and outraged; whereas if you and he, Brigadie’, had detained me, I’d have known that he’d told you about it, or else that he’d probably put it all down in writing somewhere.
Instead he approached me all alone, in the street, and so I thought: now I’ll kill him and that will be the end of it. I can still get away with it. There was all the noise of New Year’s Eve, firecrackers and rockets, noisemakers, and showers of old plates and glasses tossed down, off of balconies. Veterans from the Great War shooting their guns out of windows in celebration. It could easily have been a stray bullet, or a criminal just settling an old score. I would shoot him, one bullet to the chest, and then be gone, I’d slip into the theater. I’d blend in with the others, commenting: Oooh, look at that, isn’t that the commissario who questioned us all? Poor soul, I wonder who could have done it.
But that woman in an evening gown appeared out of nowhere. I should have known it would turn out badly, and you know why, Brigadie’? Because of the gown she was wearing.
It was purple: for theater people in Italy, purple is unlucky.