Blanca stood up to see Mara Scacchi and Julia Marin to the door. She brushed her hands along the edge of everything she encountered.
Liguori watched her as she left the room; he rested his eyes on the pale white nape of the neck, the shoulders, the waist, the feral hips of a woman who can run even in pitch darkness.
Martusciello noticed his gaze:
“Let her be, Liguori.”
“Jealous?”
Mara Scacchi hurried off.
Julia Marin extended her hand to say farewell to the sergeant. Blanca overlooked the movement of the woman’s arm: she was still distracted by the detective’s gaze on her back.
Julia Marin stood there, motionless and uncertain, and only then did it dawn on her that the policewoman must have some problem with her sight.
“Well, I’m leaving, I’m heading back to Verona, if . . . ”
Blanca sensed the variation in the woman’s voice and connected it to the sense of embarrassment previously experienced by others who had noticed her eyes. She knew the diverse array of rections by heart: some displayed something verging on annoyance that they hadn’t been previously informed, as if it were her duty to wear a highway sign announcing limited visibility hanging around her neck. Others, the majority, started talking to her in simpler words, enunciating more clearly. To them, partial blindness turned her into a child who was also hard of hearing. And others diluted their words into diminutives, in a display of saccharine courtesy. Nearly all of them avoided stating exactly what they’d understood, beating around the bush to a ridiculous extent. Nearly all of them. But none of them knew just how unpredictable her darkness could be. A switch, over which she had no control, could suddenly flip and give her a much more accurate outline of the shadows. It was a mystery, this ungovernable ability. She often told herself that the lack or the intensification of light might be a result of weariness, her mood, everyday irritations, but then there were times when the images came to see her just when she was as at her weakest and most out of sorts.
And so she’d resigned herself to the cruel whim of chance, said nothing, and obeyed changes she was helpless to guide or direct.
Julia Marin called her back to the present and surprised her.
“I’m so sorry, I didn’t realize.”
“It almost never happens that someone says to me I didn’t realize.” She laughed. “I feel like a cup of tea. Would you care to join me? Would you like something? Right next door there’s a famous four-star tea room.”
“Gladly.”
Blanca strode confidently toward the little broom closet that Càrita had set up as the office bar and coffee shop.
Ever since Giuseppe Càrita had chosen to tread the path of Art, a sense of desuetude had hovered over the broom closet. The checkered oilcloth no longer gleamed and the tins and bottles were in disarray. Still, it offered the considerable advantage of free access, which in past moments of greater glamor and coffee Càrita would never have permitted.
As she watched Blanca move confidently to put the kettle on the fire and prepare the teacups, Julia Marin quickly and easily forgot.
Blanca, in the restricted space, was better able to recognize the woman’s calm presence.
“You strike as somehow distant. Just the right degree, frankly. Despite your recent loss.”
“That’s right. What is left is my prerogative to say and do what at the moment strikes me as the lesser evil. In any case it won’t change a thing. What I did for a living was organize concerts, in my private life I was always a negotiator, I’ve always been mild mannered and quick to give up. Then I met Gennaro. He desired me with an arrogance that I loved. Perhaps it was a question of age. Perhaps, for the first time, I made a decision. I couldn’t say. But I went ahead and bothered to choose the death that in any case will certainly come along sooner or later in this kind of a love affair. Only in this case, what came along was a death of the flesh.” She dropped her voice. “My body’s dead too, the years all came rushing back together, with compound interest. Excuse me.” Blanca shredded three mint leaves into her tea and then sniffed her fingers. The pleasure spread to her mouth. Death could still make her furious with life and with despite.
“Who did it, Julia?”
“I can guess, but I won’t say. It’s too late. Don’t try to push me, we’re alone, I’ll deny everything. Or else I’ll surprise you, who can say? Why don’t you come see me? I’ll let you hear the sound of the river Adige running under the bridges. Beautiful.” Julia Marin took Blanca’s hand to say farewell. “See you again soon. You are a very pretty woman.” Blanca sought with her fingertips the wrinkles on the back of the other woman’s hand.
“I don’t believe that and in any case I’d have no way of knowing, my memory of me dates back to when I was thirteen. I don’t know what I’ve turned into. In any case, beauty would just be one more luxury that I can hardly afford. It was a pleasure to meet you.”
Julia Marin went back to her hotel to get her luggage. She didn’t have much time before she was due at the central station.
They’d given her the usual room.
She went to the window that overlooked both the entrance and the Bay of Naples. With distant eyes she stared at the water as if it weren’t the sea, then she looked at the trellis of bougainvillea and jasmine that ran along the entry drive.
She remembered every step she’d taken along that drive with Vialdi at her side, the laughter, the girlish excitement as she gave her ID to the desk clerk, the sound of her heels on the stairs, the hasty kisses before entering the hotel room. She closed her eyes and saw all the rest that could no longer touch her.
She left her clothes in the closet.
She arranged two toothbrushes in the bathroom.
“I brought you one, you always forget yours.” She sat down on the bed and looked through her purse with its well organized contents for her telephone.
“This is Julia Marin. I’m well aware that you know about me. I have something to say to you.”