As he treads carefully down the slippery path to the cottage, the wind surrenders its spite. The sea, however, remains in full voice, blowing dense breakers onto the rocks below and dragging the seabed beneath it as it breathes in, readying for its next assault.
It takes Valeria a while to get to the door and when she pulls it back, she shades her face with her hand.
Valeria lets him stand, dripping in the rain for a few seconds before opening the door wider and stepping back to allow him in. “I am not at my best, Ric, and I was not expecting visitors so late in the evening. You will have to excuse my appearance.”
“Only if you’ll excuse mine,” he replies.
When she turns round to face him, Valeria drops her hand away from her face. Her complexion is mottled with brown and white patches, and the skin around her eyes is so lacking in pigment that it assumes the pale hue of the alabaster walls of the mausolea in the cemetery.
“Yes,” she says, “this is how a woman looks when youth deserts her.”
Ric is embarrassed. He has walked in on the movie star pre-makeup and searches for a response that will alleviate her awkwardness. Sadly, nothing appropriate comes to his rescue.
“There’s a bottle of Amaro Averna on the sideboard, Ric. Be a good fellow and pour us both a good measure. I’ll be back in a minute.”
He pours two generous measures and sits at the kitchen table. His thoughts are punctuated by the thump of the waves as they crash against the stone wall outside.
Valeria comes out of the bathroom. Her headband gone and hair brushed back, she works hand cream into her long, elegant fingers as she sits down opposite him. She has concealed the flesh around her eyes behind large, oval sunglasses.
“So, to what or to whom do I owe your presence, Ric? Please don’t think I am not pleased to see you, but a woman of my age likes a little warning so she can at least soften some of the lines time has sought to engrave in her countenance.”
“I apologise for arriving unannounced and uninvited. I thought that I would stop by and see if you were alright. That’s a pretty unpleasant storm.”
Her eyes flash a brief defiance. “Thank you, Ric. I am grateful for your attention, but I can assure you the storms of April are far less forgiving. This gale will blow through before midnight.” She raises her glass, “To your good health,” she says.
“And yours,” he replies. The chestnut brown liqueur is sweet and yet bitter with herbs.
“I like a glass before bed; it is a digestive and helps me sleep. But tell me, how has your day been, Ric? Touched though I am that you have come to enquire after my health, I think there may be other reasons which have brought you to my door on such a rainy evening. Have you found out any more about your relation, Antonio Sciacchitano?”
“Some,” he replies a little enigmatically.
“How exciting, Ric!” Valeria smiles and leans forward in anticipation. “Tell me, please. On such a dull day as this, good news is always welcome.”
Ric tightens his mouth and wonders, “Trouble is, I’m not sure whether this kind of news will be welcome. Somebody said something the other day about letting sleeping dogs lie. You know the saying.”
“Of course, but unless they are dead, all sleeping dogs wake eventually. So, what have you found out? What extravagant tale has Old Nino come up with this time?”
“I asked him if he could remember any more about the night his father smuggled your mother and Antonio Sciacchitano to Baarìa, and he did. He remembered that the girl’s name was Katarina Maggiore and that she was running away because she was pregnant. He also recalled his mother telling him that Vincenzo Maggiore had betrayed the three deportees to the Fascists, because one of them had been having an affair with Katarina. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, he remembered who it was Katarina Maggiore had been seeing.”
The smile falls from her lips and is replaced by a thin crease of abject indifference.
Whatever reaction he had expected from her, whether eager expectation or nervous dread, Ric is confused. Then Old Nino’s voice leaps into his head: “For what is Valeria, if she is not an actress.”
“Christ, Valeria, you’ve known all along.”
But Valeria maintains her indifference, as though waiting for the director to shout “Cut”. She reaches for her pack of long white cigarettes, passes Ric her lighter, and waits.
He reaches over and lights her cigarette, holding her gaze as he does so, “That’s why you don’t want me to tell Marcello. You don’t want him to know you’re cousins, because if he did, he’d know how much of a grudge you have to bear against the Maggiore family.”
Again, her expression holds firm.
“Unless of course Marcello knows as well and the two of you want to keep Massimo Farinelli’s skeleton permanently locked away in the Maggiore closet? What is this, some kind of code of silence you’ve been sworn to; a kind of filial Omertà about a wrong that can never be righted because it’s already written in stone up in the cemetery; an episode in the family scrap book made all the more unpalatable because your grandfather was responsible for your father’s murder?”
He is inclined to shout to ram home the weight of his disbelief, but he speaks as softly as the wind and the crashing of the waves permit.
“Is that why you live out here in this haunted old house? Are you waiting for your father’s ghost to walk out of the water and forgive the Maggiore family, your family, its sins?”
When Valeria doesn’t respond to his gentle taunt, Ric sits back. He isn’t sure whether she is leading him on with her silence or whether her silence is meant to suggest she thinks him impertinent for poking his nose into her affairs.
“There’s something I’m missing here, isn’t there Valeria; something I’m not seeing?”
Still, nothing; she simply sits and smokes and sips her drink.
Ric studies the swirling grain in the surface of the wooden kitchen table: “It’s got to have something to do with Girolamo Candela, hasn’t it? Somehow he’s tied up in this thing with you and Marcello. But how? I don’t see the connection.”
At last, Valeria leans forward to tap the ash from her cigarette. “There is nothing more to see, Ric. As we say, what you cannot see does not concern you.”
“Concern me?” he replies, as though she’s just prodded him with a skewer. And now Ric feels it is time to release all the uncertainty and frustration which has built up in him over of the past few days. He knows Valeria is fragile and may not withstand the rage of his pent-up emotion, but he cannot hold it back any longer.
“Right at this moment, Valeria, what I cannot see concerns me a hell of a lot,” he growls. “I’ve got a policeman threatening to lock me up because he’s got a body in his morgue which he thinks I put there. He’s got a gun which he believes to be mine, because it’s got my fingerprint on it. And, the only people who I can be sure know I didn’t shoot Girolamo Candela are Marcello and whoever shot him.
“Now, either Marcello lifted the gun from my boat or your chum Salvo did. I get the feeling it doesn’t much matter which of them did it, because they seem to be playing for the same team. That is,” Ric pauses and wonders if he isn’t about to make an even bigger fool out of himself, “unless you stole it, Valeria.”
He waits.
She watches.
Perhaps it is the actress without her makeup, the mottled skin around her grey eyes, or the way her thin, scrawny arms project from her voluminous towelling robe. Perhaps, he thinks, it is both: but she looks to him small and vulnerable and, peculiarly for a woman in her eighties, so strangely childlike. Yet, however hard he tries to provoke her, he cannot seem to draw a response from her. Valeria is like a beautiful oyster, closed tight-shut to defend her pearl. And Ric knows that if he cannot prise it from her, he is lost.
Ric wonders what kind of illness she has that her trips to the hospital can rejuvenate her so. “What type of blood cancer do you have, Valeria?”
She drags on her cigarette and lowers her eyes. “Does it matter?”
“Sometimes,” he replies.
She smiles a brief, hopeless smile. “The curious part of it is that it is not the dying I am frightened of; it is more the invasion of my body that troubles me.
“You see, Ric, I have always believed that a person is free to do with their body as they please. When I was young, there were times when I used my body in an infelicitous way; let us say to achieve my own ends. However, in later years, when one’s body is no longer such… such a marketable asset, one is prone to rely on it for more basic functions, such as walking or talking. But this illness? It is like sharing your heart with a stranger who you do not love and who you cannot be rid of. This illness has reminded me of everything I hate in this world.”
For the want of any more comforting reply, Ric says, “I’m sorry to hear that, Valeria.”
“Don’t be,” she replies, her tone hardening. “I have no need of your sympathy and neither do I want it.”
He is tempted to ask what she does want, but–
“When the doctors told me I have not long to live, my reaction was probably very typical. At first, I refused to believe this could be happening to me. For a few months I even denied the possibility that it could be happening to me. This illness is surely something that happens to other people, not me. Later, when I realised the affect it was having on my body – my tiredness, my loss of weight, other things – I grew angry at the world for all the wrongs it has done me. And it was at that time I began to wonder, to hope, that if I made some of these wrongs right, then perhaps God would release me from this curse.
“Of course, he would not; I knew this. But the idea that I could make something right for those who were no longer capable of doing so: this idea was irresistible.”
“You mean your father, Massimo Farinelli?”
“Yes, among others,” she replies, dreaming. “But in many ways what happened to my father he brought upon himself. Vincenzo Maggiore’s reaction to finding out his daughter – my mother – was pregnant was, given the period, understandable. I can hate him for it, like I can hate Marcello for being his grandson; for being a Maggiore. And yet, I am a Maggiore too, so to hate Marcello would mean I would have to hate a part of myself also. In this, there would have been only more confusion.”
“Forgive me for interrupting, Valeria, but does Marcello know about Massimo Farinelli being your father and about Vincenzo’s part in his death?”
She quiets for a moment before replying, “I don’t know, Ric. Can any truth be found in a rumour that was started so many years ago? Can one know for sure that Vincenzo Maggiore betrayed my father and his companions to the Fascisti? Any one of a number of people could have betrayed them; and for so many different reasons: the snitches, the informers, they were everywhere. People were starving; they had little to hope for and the Carabinieri were not averse to beating confessions out of suspects when they believed they had information that would be of use. To lay the blame for this betrayal at the door of a man who believed fervently in the Resistenza, is to disrespect him. Few would have been brave enough to question his integrity. Who knows? This rumour was probably started by the Fascisti to undermine his position in the community.”
She thinks for a minute in silence; a silence Ric is not inclined to intrude.
“My mother told me this story in the days before she died. She also told me that the Maggiore family were una famiglia di integrità – a family of integrity, integerrimo if you like, like the inscription on Antonio Sciacchitano’s grave. My mother wanted to believe her father would never have betrayed Farinelli and the others, but she could not. However, she told me she ran away because she did not want to bring shame on the house of Maggiore. She told me it was her duty as a daughter to run away like this.
“She carried the knowledge of this secret throughout her life; it weighed heavily in her heart and I sometimes wonder if it was the effort of bearing it that led her to an early grave. On her deathbed, she made me swear never to tell anyone about this.
“As to whether Marcello knows, I am not sure. We are very similar and find ourselves drawn together. He recognises this in the same way I do. Probably, it is why he looks after me. Marcello and I have talked about our attraction for each other, but I have never told him the truth. Sometimes it is better to let the sleeping dog lie.”
“So where does Girolamo Candela come into this equation?” Ric asks, hoping that now that she has started talking, she will continue.
“Candela? Oh yes, Girolamo Candela.”
“Only I heard he started out in Bagheria, or Baarìa as Old Nino still calls it.”
“Who told you this? Nino would not have known this.”
“No, he didn’t. I heard it from one of the escurzionisti down in the Corta. He told me the Commissario, Talaia, was investigating a number of politicians, Candela being one of them. He said Candela had started out in Bagheria before moving on to Palermo.”
“It is true,” she says, lighting another cigarette, “I knew him when he was a young activist in the local communist party. I did not think he was like the others. He had principles and ideals. He had charisma and a burning desire to rescue the common people from the privations their poverty inflicted upon them.” As she talks, Valeria grows increasingly animated, her eyes begin to glow with a hot energy and she sits up straighter, demanding his full attention.
To cool the ardour of her political fires, Ric interrupts, “I gather Candela courted the intellectual crowd. Someone told me that was where the funds for his campaigning came from.”
Valeria exhales a long stream of smoke at the ceiling, “Yes, he was politically shrewd right from the start: he knew which of the intelligentsia to suck up to. That was something else which drew me to him, his perfectly amoral immorality. The writers, the directors, the actors, they all thought Girolamo Candela the perfect standard bearer for the red flag. He came from a poor background, so he was not one of those rich kids passing through the tunnels of their political adolescence. He was sufficiently unsophisticated for the cognoscenti to find him engaging and he was ruthless in his quest for campaign funds.”
“Did you donate?”
Valeria pouts, as though he should know better than to ask, “My first husband was a studio producer; he donated. In fact he donated so much that the studio fell into bankruptcy and he committed suicide.” She quiets.
“Because of the bankruptcy?”
“No, because even though I was much older than him, I had an affair with Girolamo Candela and my husband found out. The bankruptcy may have encouraged him to draw his sword, but my infidelity forced him to fall upon it.”
Now Valeria is back watching him again, waiting either for his sanction or his censure.
“Is that why you changed your mind about Candela?” Ric asks. “The last time we spoke about him I remember you weren’t exactly enamoured of him.”
She teases her thumbnail with her teeth, as if she is trying to make up her mind about how best to answer.
“No,” Valeria replies. “And yes. Perhaps this was a part of it, although I could hardly lay the blame for my infidelity at Girolamo’s door. It was, in the first place, my idea: I seduced him, not the other way round. Remember, Ric,” she smiles, a salacious, lustful smile, a turning of her head and the raising of her eyebrow, “my best years may have been behind me, but youth will never lose its appetite for certain fruits. A precocious young man he may have been, but I knew what I wanted from a political Adonis like Girolamo.
“Oh, don’t look so disapproving, Ric. You British can be such prudes.”
“Sorry to disappoint, Valeria, but you read me all wrong. I’m trying to figure out what else he did that turned you against him?”
Valeria frowns, playfully, “Ric, this constant need for answers is most unbecoming in you. Can’t a woman simply fall out of love with a man?”
Ric shakes his head slowly, without losing eye contact with her, “Not far enough to want to murder him, no.”
She laughs, sitting back and roaring with an abandon he would not have imagined. But her laughter is not attractive; she cackles like a witch, her tone thin and sharply pitched.
“You think I shot Girolamo Candela? You must be out of your mind, Ric. Women of my years don’t exact vengeance on disenchanted lovers.”
“You weren’t home when I dragged myself out of the sea the evening Candela was shot,” Ric states. “So what did you want from him? Were you going to ask him to return all the money you had donated to his cause?”
“I don’t need that kind of money, Ric. As I have already told you, my second husband had more money than sense.”
“And so, it would seem, did you by that time. Or were you still donating to Girolamo’s campaign coffers at that time?”
“No,” she shouts, her voice seething with protest. “After that, I never gave the bastardo any more money.”
“After what, Valeria? After what?” he whispers. “What did he do to you that made you hate him?”
She stares him down the way he imagines she will stare down her God when he admonishes her for her sins. Her poise suggests she is defiant and stubborn and not to be bullied, and yet Ric is still suspicious of her motive. Somewhere deep in the locked vaults of her past he feels there is a darker secret waiting to emerge. Valeria is consumed by a resentment and guilt she will not permit herself to recognise.
“After what?” he asks again.
Finally, her face crumbles and her previously belligerent pose wilts, like a delicate flower surrendering to the needle-chills of autumn. She rests her head in her hands and whispers, “After I got rid of his child.”
But for the waves beating the shoreline beyond the walls of the little cottage, the silence is deafening and extends until it is disturbed only by Valeria’s weeping.
“I am sorry, Ric. This episode in my life, I have never told a soul of this before. It has always been too painful to recall.”
“No one?”
“I said, not a soul. After my first husband’s suicide, I could not bear to have the baby. The child would have been too much of a reminder of the consequences of my infidelity.”
“Your husband knew?”
Valeria nods. “He could not deal with the shame and, after he died, I could not come to terms with what I had done to him. I went to Girolamo and told him we were very suited politically. I told him being married to the daughter of Massimo Farinelli would open many doors for him and that we, with our new child, would be good together. But, as San Bartolo is my witness, he just laughed and walked away. As he walked he said the world would not take him seriously if he had to campaign in the company of yesterday’s actress, a woman old enough to be his mother and a woman with a child some thought belonged to her dead husband.
“I found a doctor in the backstreets of Naples and paid him a handsome price for his silence. It was so much easier back then.”
She dries her eyes. “It was only later, when my mother told me how she had run away to Baarìa and married a man to save me from being born illegitimate, that I understood exactly what I had done. I had killed my child, something my mother would not do. She left me with no place to hide from my conscience.”
Ric fills her glass and pushes it towards her. She looks, now, even more reduced and though he feels oddly rewarded for listening to her confession, he feels guilty that he has had no other alternative than to extract such painful memories from her.
“So you sent Candela a letter asking him to meet you in the Maddalena near where Edda Ciano lived. Your sense of theatre should have forewarned him, but I don’t suppose he could have refused, knowing what had gone on between you. You were the only person on the island who had the power to lure him away from his bodyguards.”
“I did not kill him,” she protests.
“Valeria, face it, you took the gun from the Mara and shot Candela,” he both accuses and pleads. “What beats me is why you threw the gun in the sea at Portinente. Without it, Commissario Talaia would not have connected me to Candela’s murder and without it my guess is you probably wouldn’t have killed Candela. In which case, I must wear some of the blame.”
She looks up and tries to smile at him, but her tears have swept away her defiant veneer in much the same way as the salt-water smoothes the stones of the beach.
“No,” Valeria whispers, “you must believe me, I did not kill him.”
Ric looks deep into her cold grey eyes and remembers what Camille wrote in his letter and what Nino pointed out to him and Talaia not a couple of hours before; that Valeria is, or was, an actress.
“That night,” she begins, “when I heard his speech up in the Mazzini, I learned the difference between man and god. You see, Ric, if you place all your faith in one man, it is inevitable that you will be disappointed. They are, after all, only flesh and blood and therefore prone to weakness. God, on the other hand, is not made of flesh and blood: we construct him in our minds and make him as perfect as we want him to be. We, on the other hand, are imperfect. We only have ourselves to blame.” Her voice cracks and dries; she sips her Averna.
“I hated Girolamo Candela for how he treated me and I swore I would never forgive him. But, after some water had passed under the bridge, I found I was prepared to forgive him in a small way. Why? Because I believed in his dreams and his aspirations for those who could not afford to feed their children.
“I had heard the stories about how he had moved to the Socialists and how he was getting money from the Mafia, but I ignored these stories, hoping he would never change his ideology. So when I listened to that speech about the brave new world in which the people of Lipari would be bribed like Judas to allow this hotel to be built, I realised Girolamo had ransomed his soul, just like all the others. This was when I made up my mind that I had to tell him I would go to the papers with my story. If it was going to be the last thing I could do before I die, I wanted to have the satisfaction of going to my grave knowing that I had destroyed his political career. I thought that in the same way I had rid the world of his child, I would rid the world of his ambition.
“You see, Ric, Girolamo Candela had already destroyed my life once and by coming here and building this hotel, he would destroy the only life I have left: this island, the family I should have belonged to and the father I never knew. To preserve all this, I had to destroy him.”
“You said Candela knew your father’s identity?”
Valeria looks down at the floor; a child accused of talking out of turn. “Yes. In those days I was both romantic and naive; this was a very poor combination in my character. I should never have told him; I have regretted it ever since.”
Ric sits and watches Valeria. He finds himself swimming in a sea of conflicting emotions, unsure as to whether he should reach out in consolation or scold her for her stupidity.
“So what are you going to do, Ric?”
“About what?”
“About this situation I have caused for you?”
“I don’t know,” he replies. “If the gun really does have my prints on it, then I’m done for.”
Valeria looks horrified. She reaches out and touches his arm, “No, Ric. It would be better for you to leave.”
“Funny, Marcello said something like that.”
She rests her head against her fist and grimaces, “Would it be better that I go to this Commissario Talaia and tell him it was me and not you.” She is Garbo and Bergman both rolled into one: she would give herself up for him, for his cause, for…
Ric smiles, “A noble offer, Valeria, thank you. But that would only confuse him even more. Imagine what a feast the press would make of this sordid tale. Imagine the shame you would bring to the Maggiore family? Would it be worth that much?”
She shakes her head. “The papers don’t need to know about my connection with the Maggiore family and,” she frowns, “I have only a few months left to live. A failed actress who once enjoyed a brief liaison with a dead politician? Hah, they are not likely to condemn me to life in the Ucciardone for that,” Valeria scoffs. “I am sure Commissario Talaia will be only too happy to finish with the case of who killed Girolamo Candela.”
“If only it was that simple.”
He thinks to mention the killing of Claudio Maggiore, but thinks better of it when he remembers the argument he overheard was between two men. And though he now thinks Valeria may possess the requisite hatred for murder, he doesn’t reckon she’d be up for strangling a man and burying his body beneath a pile of rubble.
“So I ask again, Ric, what will you do?”
“I don’t know, Valeria, what do you want me to do? Tell you that you were wrong to lure Candela to the Piazza San Bartolo simply to threaten to expose him? Tell you it wasn’t your fault that someone else was waiting to shoot him? Absolve you of your sin?”
“No, Ric,” she shakes her head, her wavy hair flowing around her, “absolution is not yours to grant. The time for la resa dei conti will come soon enough and only God has the wisdom to decide whether I am worthy of absolution.” She is calmer now that she is ready to depart her confessional. “But, Ric, what happens now is up to you to decide.”