Rosina Mastriani had developed the habit of not spending her day in Pianura. Every morning she got dressed and went into the quarters of town where her husband trafficked. She wanted to see, one by one, all his rotten apples. Rosina Mastriani needed convincing arguments. She was no innocent, but she wanted to redeem with her ruins the shortcomings of others.
Her husband told her that he knew she had murdered her boyfriend. What the children had lost was a mother with her picture on the front pages of all the newspapers and luckily what he had lost was an ugly cow.
By revisiting the well known streets, Rosina managed to overcome the stunned daze of her first return.
Almost every day, she tried to walk past his apartment building, no longer his. She’d been going to look at it for as long as she could remember. The old building had a narrow side that gave the structure a v shape: in the girl’s imagination, under her short cropped hair, it was the throne of the sun. The opening toward the exterior of the outside walls formed wings, jammed into the earth that belonged to him.
I suffocated the violence, enormous and cast iron, I managed the rage within a narrow body. I should have expected that Vialdi would understand immediately. Her husband amused the singer. He took him into his business dealings, which Rosina hadn’t understood all that clearly. She knew only that there was money and there were possessions. An enormous quantity of possessions: televisions, blenders, stoves, clothing, toys, motorcycles, jewelry.
For Vialdi, his friendship with Rosina’s husband meant a chance to go back to the places he’d started out from, and when he came back he wanted to be dressed in his best gala wear. It was hardly necessary, his fame had taken him for strolls in far more magnificent venues, but he want to be acknowledged as king in those places where he had once been nothing more than the son of Concetta Mangiavento, aka Sette Carceri.
At first, Vialdi just looked at her and nothing more. By the time he started talking to her secretly, his eyes had already told the whole story. A fever grew inside Rosina, whispering incessantly you of all people, you of all people.
Her heart was stirring, even though she had no longer had any idea of how to love, even that tiniest bit that could distract her from her troubles.
She felt pretty. The color that she’d once had in the mornings as she set off for school, on her way to meet progress, returned to her face.
The Sanità district shed its destiny and became the beautiful center of every city in the world. That was where this unexpected story of the heart was taking place.
Love changed her eyes.
She began only to see lovely streets, narrow and cheerful. She drew close to the people who had wedded the traditional cult of the remains of the Fontanelle Ossuary with the desire for the new. She got to know the ordinary people who prepared meals for the homeless, ordinary just like her. She went to pay a call on a priest who had organized a magnificent revolution, with the local kids in tow, and he explained to her the history of art, with warm words of the kind that she’d long ago forgotten.
The story of the heart had infected all the places of her birth: now Rosina could not recognize anything that wasn’t beautiful.
Her children had the benefit of a brand-new mother, just learning to love. Then came Vialdi’s transformation, his loss of interest, the disappointment that brought her thudding back to earth. Her eyes closed. When they opened again, Rosina realized that she’d also lost her obedience, her children, and her home. All that remained to her were the cuts on her arms.
Her affair with the singer went on until it withered and died. During one of their last encounters, the chemical that he’d taken before the appointment led Vialdi to confide in Rosina about her husband. If he’d been straight, he’d never have done it.
“He helps out the bosses of certain gambling rings. He’s a two-bit crook, don’t be fooled, he makes his little bit of cash and invests it in small-time loan-sharking, they pay him in trinkets and knickknacks. These days the local craftsmen have all been outsourced, they’re part of a larger business cycle. He just picks up the crumbs left over from the network.” At the time, the information hadn’t been of any interest to her: it was just a length of rope that was already too taut leading toward the end of her love affair.
Then knowing became important.
Persisting in her visits to the Sanità neighborhood, Rosina finally hit pay dirt. Vialdi had told the truth, at least when he told her what he did about her husband’s business activities: he had something like a subcontract on collecting gambling debts, shaking down shopkeepers, money from bets of all kinds that just didn’t seem to want to come to papa. In the comings and goings of relatively small sums, he had a license to subtract a 5 percent commission. Frequently retailers paid off what they owed in kind, and therefore: televisions, blenders, stoves, clothing, toys, motorcycles, jewelry. Her husband invested the cash by loaning out small sums at exorbitant rates.
The last service announcement, as unwelcome as all the others, took her to Santa Lucia. The address had been given to her by a seamstress in the Sanità neighborhood. But Rosina decided, as she looked out over the waves, that what she knew already was enough, and so she went to the Borgo Marinari.
The morning’s beauty, the bridge to cross on foot to fetch up beneath the magnificence of Castel dell’Ovo, the boats, the sea—it all restored a bit of her strength.
She drank in the ancient beauty of the gold that, before experiencing the love of the sun, had been nothing but stone. A single solitary cloud was casting its shadow on a single solitary tower, darkness too wanted to get a taste of the glittering yellow. She felt hungry. She greeted the need in her saliva.
“Dear singer of mine, though mine you never were, if you’ve learned how to die, maybe my husband can learn the same lesson. I’d be glad to offer him a little tutoring. Then I could follow him down.” She went in search of her spouse and sure enough she found him.
She poured over his head the whole bucket of things she’d discovered, covered his feet with the whole barrel of bad apples. He seized her by the neck and told her how sorry he was, but now she had become the villain of the story. That she should have thought carefully before becoming a vigilante out for justice. When she was still a saintly, weary mother, when someone might still have listened to a thing she said.
On her way back home, Rosina passed the castle again, and the desire to go to some discarded king and ask for help surged within her. The temptation inebriated her, but in her drunkenness she realized that she lacked the strength for a new term of imprisonment.
All the same, she needed to find a place to hide, she wouldn’t be able to make it on her own. Or else she needed to get her hands on a gun.