Attilio Romor took the stage midway through the first act. He was playing a handsome, superficial man, full of himself and convinced that he was God’s own gift to the world. Aside from the superficiality, in real life he wasn’t very different from the character he was playing, as far as his opinion of himself was concerned.
He made his entrance with a leap, in the middle of an amusing conversation between the male and female leads. He would say, “Here I am, my friends, at your service!” and then doff his hat with a broad gesture and a bright smile. The male lead, who was also the playwright and the director, would pretend to have been caught unawares and in his fright, would lurch forward, knocking over a chair.
Everyone was expected to laugh at this show of clumsiness; and in fact, they usually did. But when the female spectators, the clear majority of the audience, sat gazing in ecstasy at the handsome Attilio as though enchanted, the chair would tumble across the stage into an embarrassing silence. The playwright couldn’t stand to have another actor steal the scene. And he took his revenge. God, how he took his revenge. Attilio felt persecuted at every turn: during rehearsals he made him act out the same silly scene dozens of times, and during the long weekly script meetings he forced him to read the women’s roles, “to teach him the middle tones,” as he liked to say in a high-pitched voice, humiliating him in front of the rest of the troupe.
Attilio knew he was the better actor; and he suspected that the other man knew it too, which is why he was punishing him. Not only the better actor but also far better-looking.
Long hair, raven black like the coat of a panther. Eyes the same color, strong jawline, tall, slim, broad-shouldered, with a deep voice. He could see the desire in the women’s eyes, the passion throbbing in their breasts; he could see it in their mouths, which blossomed like flowers, in the pearls of sweat that moistened their lips.
That’s how it had always been. Men at his throat, women at his feet. As a student he had been persecuted by his schoolmasters and the treachery of the other boys, while the schoolmistresses doted on him and the girls all fell in love with him. When he was on stage, the women in the audience followed him with glistening eyes, and the men glared at him with eyes full of hatred.
Ever since he was a little boy, his mother had warned him: be aware of your beauty, she told him, consoling him when he complained of other people’s malevolence. It’s your beauty, it makes them crazy with envy. Defend yourself, think of yourself only; look only to your own benefit, and all the better if it adds to those rascals’ misery.
Jealousy dogged his every step. The jealousy of his many sweethearts, none of whom could lay claim to him; the jealousy of the colleagues from whom he stole scene after scene and the jealousy of the husbands whose wives he stole just as easily.
And since decisions in the theatrical world were made by men, Attilio found himself relegated to ridiculous minor roles. He wasn’t blackballed, no; quite the contrary, he was rather in demand. All the impresarios of Neapolitan theater were happy to be able to count on an extra fifty or sixty adoring female audience members for every performance. But if the director of each theatrical troupe could find a way to humiliate him, he gladly did so at every opportunity.
And this one was proving to be worse than all of them. Upcoming playwright that he was, he was eager to follow in the footsteps of the most famous names in the theater; three years earlier his first play had been a spectacular hit, and he’d consolidated his reputation in the two seasons that followed. He was good at blending comedy and tragedy, winning the plaudits of his audiences and the venom of the critics, both signs of indisputable greatness. The playwright’s sister and brother were members of the same troupe, and Attilio, who suspected he was hardly alone in his opinion, found them to be much more talented than the playwright himself. Whatever the truth might be, there was no denying that besides being damnably presumptuous, he was commanding and charismatic, and he knew how to write a hit play. Even though his perfidious treatment of actors was legendary, being a member of his troupe was nevertheless a ticket to fame and glory.
At first, he felt welcome. The Maestro, as the playwright loved to make people call him in spite of his tender years, showed utter indifference toward him, and the impresario had assured him that, when it came to the Maestro, there could be no clearer sign of admiration and esteem. The sister, an unsightly but gifted actress, smiled at him hungrily, even in her husband’s presence. The younger brother mocked him often, though good-naturedly.
Then, predictably, he indulged in a short-lived but torrid affair with one of the troupe’s ingénues. No gift for acting whatsoever, but lovely to look at. What a fool: how could he have failed to understand? What could someone so inept possibly be doing there, in a troupe so select that even the prompter was a seasoned actor with an excellent résumé? The answer was obvious: the Maestro himself had taken a fancy to her.
Everyone else knew about it, but no one had warned him: the women out of jealousy and the men out of envy.
By the time it dawned on him, the damage was done. He was forced to break it off with her, abruptly and without a word of explanation. Sure enough, the woman threw a fit during the dress rehearsal for the premiere. As he knelt before her, a bouquet of artificial flowers in one hand, rather than refusing him she burst into tears and spat right in his face, screaming like a madwoman and pouring out all the hatred and resentment she had inside her.
The Maestro savored the scene from the front row of the empty theater, for once happy to be a spectator and not an actor. After she stormed offstage, slamming the backdrop door behind her, he got to his feet without saying a word to anyone and withdrew to his dressing room.
From that day forward, the Maestro was his bitter enemy. It was as if his only goal was to tear Attilio down. It was a daunting challenge: self-confidence was the pillar of his very being as a youthful actor. But the Maestro could certainly make his life difficult: and so he did, at every single opportunity that presented itself.
After a certain amount of this treatment, all Attilio wanted to do was to leave; to hell with the ticket to fame and glory, and to hell with the chance of a lifetime. But the terms of the contract called for a huge penalty if he did, so he could ill afford to unleash the rancor he felt for that hateful, frustrated buffoon. And so, night after night, performance after performance, the battle of nerves went on. Before long, his part had degenerated into a comic role, so that when he joined the scene, the audience would snicker and guffaw at every line he spoke.
The Maestro was a genuine bastard, but in spite of everything, he was still a genius: even when he was reciting the same lines as ever, he knew how to shift the color and tension of the entire play which he had scripted. And so Attilio lived the nightmare of his own dissolution, of artistic defamation from which his reputation would never be redeemed.
It was during this period of ongoing frustration that he met a noblewoman, wealthy and beautiful, sufficiently impulsive for him to lure her into his web and do with her as he pleased. He saw her as his real ticket to freedom and fame. Seducing her was child’s play. Yes, he could read women’s eyes like a book, but he hadn’t yet detected in those particular eyes the utter abandon and absolute submission he needed to change the course of his life.
He had made use of his usual weapons, judiciously alternating between tenderness and cruelty, passion and nonchalance: all that was needed to bind her to him. Now it was only a matter of time.
Amidst the idiotic laughter of the audience, marionettes whose strings the Maestro manipulated in the darkness of the orchestra seats, Attilio knew that the adoring eyes of Emma Serra di Arpaja were focused on him and him alone.
Concetta Iodice watched her husband. As she put away the dishes and trays and got ready to head home from the pizzeria, she wondered, for what seemed like the thousandth time, what could be the worries that manifested themselves so clearly in his face.
She observed his expression, the furrowed brow, the knit eyebrows. Money, she thought. It couldn’t be anything but money. She knew that business hadn’t been going well, and that they still owed a sizable sum to the usurer from the Sanità.
And that blood-smeared scrap of paper that had fallen out of his pocket the night before, when he’d come home with eyes that glistened with fever: what was it? She didn’t understand what was happening, and she was afraid; but she couldn’t get up the courage to ask Tonino about it. She thought that sooner or later, he would be the one to come to her, that he’d take her face in his hands, smiling, and tell her that everything was just fine.
But right now, at the end of that long day, that moment to her seemed too far in the future.
Ricciardi had a dream about his mother.
He could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times that had happened. When she had died, at the outbreak of the Great War, she was thirty-eight; he had been away at boarding school for seven years and he saw her twice a year, once at Christmas and then for ten days or so during the summer holidays. He didn’t remember much about her other than that she was always sick, tiny, in a bed covered with pillows.
They had brought him in to say good-bye to her, when it was clear that she was not going to recover: left alone in the bedroom with her, he couldn’t think of anything to say, and so he took her hand. He thought she was sleeping, but she squeezed his hand with surprising strength, almost hurting him. Then she loosened her grip, and she was gone. One moment she had been there, and the next she had crossed over.
By the age of fifteen he had already come face to face with the Deed many times. He could hardly turn away from the horror of those violent deaths; and he would see so many of them, too many, in his lifetime.
In his dream he was back in that gray room. Rosa and Maione were looking at him, and he was looking at his mother who lay there with her eyes closed. From the smell of flowers he thought that springtime must be at hand. He waited; he wasn’t quite sure for what. Maybe just for his Mamma to wake up. Without warning, she spoke:
“’O Padreterno nun è mercante ca pava ’o sabbato.” God Almighty’s not a shopkeeper who pays His debts on Saturday.
She said it in a harsh, croaking voice. He realized that she had no teeth and that her long hair was streaked with white.
Suddenly his mother opened her eyes, which were large and green like his. She slowly turned her head, with a faint crackling of the vertebrae in her neck, a sound that in his dream rang out like a string of firecrackers exploding one by one. She stared at him, expressionless. Then she began weeping silently: no sobs, just tears steaming down her cheeks, soaking the bedclothes.
He turned to look at Rosa and Maione; they were crying too. Everyone was crying. He asked Maione why he was crying and the brigadier replied that it’s wrong to hurt your Mamma.
He turned to look at his mother again and asked: What can I do? What do you want me to do?
Green eyes, frantic. A tender smile.
“Study. Study hard. Read everything, get good grades. Be a good boy.”
He felt the anguish of a little boy and the anxiety of the grown man he had become.
“What, Mamma? What should I study? I’m a grown-up now! They don’t make me study anymore!”
From her deathbed, Marta Ricciardi di Malomonte reached out her slender hand, as if to assign a task.
Ricciardi turned to look at Maione, who handed him a notebook with a black cover. There was something familiar about it. He took it and then looked back at the bed. His mother was gone. In her place lay the old usurer, dead, her neck broken, a teardrop of black blood oozing slowly from her empty eye socket.
Outside, in the night, the breeze coming down from the forest of Capodimonte sought out new blood to agitate.