She never expected to feel this bad. Still in bed, with the shutters fastened tight, in the darkness of her room, her pillow soaked with tears. She’d never have expected. Not now.
She had a past, a life that had been difficult more than once. The death of her son, just one year old, of diphtheria, had been the most painful moment of all, and she’d become accustomed to comparing everything terrible that had happened since to that event.
Her husband’s domineering and violent personality—he might have been the most respected tenor in all Italy, a close personal friend of Il Duce, but his genius was matched only by the most staggering egotism she’d ever witnessed. She’d suffered—from his constant betrayals, from the loneliness into which he’d forced her, and from the silence in which he’d left her.
She’d held tight to the one thing she still had: herself, her beauty, a social circle of which she’d become the center through her loveliness, her charm, and her class; the same things that had brought her backstabbing, slander, insults, various other betrayals. Beauty is a crime that cannot be forgiven.
She’d stopped looking for love. It wasn’t that she’d given up on it, no: she’d simply relegated that emotion to a lower rank in her soul. There had been men, men whose courtship she’d decided to accept, men who’d managed to charm her, or at least aroused her curiosity, in the hopes that they might be different from the rest. They all proved, however, to be no different from all the others.
And then there had been that meeting, that ridiculous acquaintance which had unhinged every resolution of solitude and serenity, every plan she’d had to renounce hope of a future. A meeting that took place in the most illogical circumstances imaginable: the investigation into the murder of her husband.
All it took was a glimpse of those eyes, those sea-green crystals into which she had sunk, and from which she could not seem to emerge. Livia had fallen in love with Ricciardi the instant she looked into his eyes, and now she knew it. Certain emotions leave their mark, they enter into uncharted territory in the soul, they cross an unknown threshold in the heart and take possession of it forever.
Livia was crying: because no one before him had ever triggered this feeling, a feeling that would never come again, and which she couldn’t live without.
It was on account of him that she’d moved to that city, a city she’d learned to love, but a place where she’d always be an outsider; the capital—where she had been one of high society’s most admired queens, where she had friendships at the very summit of political and economic life—had seemed to her as empty as the stage of a shuttered provincial theater.
She’d taken an apartment, and furnished it as if it was where she was to live as a newlywed. She’d once again welcomed hope into her life, she who had considered herself already dead.
She’d held him in her arms, in that apartment, on a night of fever and rain, when his eternal defenses had collapsed in the face of a stronger loneliness than usual, a disappointment of some kind, or something else, who knows, she didn’t care: what she knew was that she had had him, on her flesh, in her body. That the kisses, the caresses, and imprint his body had left inside her hadn’t been one of her many dreams, or one of the fantasies that accompanied her own solitary pleasure-taking, but a wonderful reality.
She’d hoped to chip away at his defenses gradually, to pull out whatever it was inside him that brought a perennial look of sorrow to his face, and to help him to erase that grief; she’d hoped for a future, something that fate had set aside for her in exchange for the many tears she’d shed; she’d believed once again that love existed, and that it existed for her too.
Against her own customs and her very nature she’d persisted, she’d courted him. She, who had always taken her pick of many suitors; she, who was gazed at with veneration by men and suspicion by women whenever she made her entrance—alone—into a theater; she, who every day received bouquets of flowers from admirers of all ages. And she hadn’t allowed herself to be discouraged by the locked door guarding his heart, that he claimed belonged to another: Livia was certain it wasn’t true. That he’d told her that just to keep her at bay, perhaps to protect her from some terrible unknown secret.
There couldn’t be another woman. She’d have sensed it, she’d have seen it. He was always withdrawn, absorbed in his life which consisted of his work and his home, the elderly tata who still lived with him, and whom she had met after his accident, at the hospital, and another relative, a tall young woman who had left immediately.
All this was true until yesterday. Seeing him again had left her with her heart in her throat, as always; and she’d been happy to see the doctor, a likeable man, intelligent and one of his friends. She loved the idea of sharing every aspect of Ricciardi’s life, and all the more so one of his very few friendships. And then that pointless, violent barb.
It hadn’t been the words, that vulgar and inappropriate reference to her friendships. It hadn’t even been his tone, flat and chilly as it all too often was. What had wounded her had been the obvious fact that he’d meant to hurt her. And the doctor’s embarrassment had only confirmed that terrible sensation.
She’d started sobbing in the car, ignoring the driver’s cautious words as he asked if there was anything she needed; she’d gone on sobbing when she got home, waving away the housekeeper who asked if she felt unwell; she’d sobbed all night long in her bed, without a bite to eat.
She was weeping over the death of her hopes, the mirage of lost love, the silence that would once again be her life’s companion. Over her loneliness, which had come back, this time to stay.
She’d decided that she would leave. That she could no longer stand to stay in that city, where every day she risked encountering those eyes, the eyes that had once made her think life wasn’t yet over, only to disappoint her in such a painful way.
She’d go back to Rome, where she’d rebuild, piece by piece, a modicum of self-confidence. Back to Rome where she was valued and perhaps, in some strange and unsatisfying way, even loved. Where some friendships remained to her. She’d once again be Livia Vezzi, queen of the night, the most beautiful one. At least she’d have that.
Meanwhile, as springtime was scheming changes all its own, outside the locked shutters, Livia decided that as soon as the holidays were over, she’d leave, and send for her things later.
Turning her back on love.