Nothing like one of Rosa’s dinners when you have a headache, thought Ricciardi; her cooking is so devastating that your stomach, in its grueling efforts to digest it, demands so much of your attention that any other minor discomfort fades into the background. And there’s no choice about whether or not to eat every last bit: she’ll start sulking and the atmosphere at home will become intolerable.
That night she’d inflicted upon him, in an alleged attempt to raise his body temperature to what it ought to be, a zuppa maritata: in a bowl roughly the size of a small city piazza, there sailed sausages, lard, beans, celery, and a number of other objects that could not be readily identified. There was a perfect storm of garlic and onion, as he had been able to tell the minute he walked into the lobby downstairs. Ricciardi estimated that digestion wouldn’t be complete until forty-eight hours out, unless he died before then.
The thoughts had never stopped running through his mind, even as he battled the unholy stew under the cook’s vigilant gaze, standing as she always did in the kitchen doorway and watching him eat. The faces of Don Antonio, Carmen, and Eleonora, the downcast gazes of the boys, and the ambiguous figure of the sexton followed one another through his thoughts, alternating with the mysterious junk seller, the owner of the food warehouse, the thousand suspicious and malevolent eyes that looked out at him from the shadows of the vicoli as he went by, like the eyes of the young tough who’d asked Cristiano if he needed any help. He couldn’t seem to put together a complete picture of the dead boy’s life: there was something that continued to elude him.
He was starting to understand the dull, powerful yearning for affection that drove Tettè to comply with those who surrounded him, and which pushed those same people to take advantage of him, to persecute him; everyone except for Carmen and the dog. The thought of the dog sent a shiver down Ricciardi’s spine, as he listened to the arabesques of a jazz orchestra on the radio. He couldn’t get used to seeing that dog appear just ten feet away, sitting silently, barely visible through the rain. In some strange way, it seemed to him that this little spotted mutt, with one ear cocked, was commissioning him to pursue this investigation.
He coughed, and his throat clutched painfully. Too much rain and too much cold wind: it seemed to be the onset of a head cold. He could feel the weariness in his limbs that always precedes a fever.
It was painfully ironic to think how reassuring it would have been to glimpse the little boy’s ghost, possibly in a vicolo not far from where he’d died.
Perhaps a man on his way home from work late at night had found the corpse outside his own apartment building, in the rain, and in order to avoid getting involved in a police investigation and having to give answers about something he knew nothing about, he’d picked the little body up, carried it to the monumental staircase, and left it there, after positioning it respectfully and tenderly.
Perhaps a woman had found him dead in the atrium of an apartment building and had lacked the courage to raise the alarm so she chose to put the dead child where the first passerby would be sure to see him.
Perhaps the boys from the parish, his companions in his nightly raids, had brought him there from some distant corner of the city where they’d stolen something. After all, Cristiano had taken Ricciardi straight to the warehouse, without any hesitation.
But the image of the Deed had refused to appear. And it hadn’t been in the large room at the parish, nor along the street that ran into the Tondo di Capodimonte, nor anywhere else he’d been in the past few days, as he retraced the steps of Tettè’s life.
The thought took him back to that lolling neck and the pain of mingling lonelinesses. Pardoxically, he thought, it would have been comforting to experience once again the extreme anguish of death, to feel the Deed taking hold of him, and to hear the last sorrowful words of the child’s departure from this earthly life. Perhaps to see the boy in the throes of the immense burning pain of the poison, the convulsions, the yellowish foam on his lips, his limbs seized in one last terrible spasm. He would watch him, his own eyes locked with the boy’s dull, dead ones. He would listen to his last words, as always in keeping with the last moment of a life, once again revealing how, when a person dies, he goes into nothingness looking back at life.
Then at least he’d know; then he’d be able to make peace with it. He’d approach the dog, give it something to eat, and then each would go his own way. Each with his own intolerable memories.
The radio presenter announced that a certain brand of rhubarb liqueur was bringing their listeners the next song, Polvere di stelle (Stardust): and the orchestra struck up a melancholy tune.
He got up from the armchair, his head on fire, his throat on fire, his stomach on fire. Unaware that he was being watched by a pair of curious eyes from the kitchen, he spotted a sealed envelope on the table by the door that he somehow hadn’t noticed before. He picked it up hesitantly; he immediately guessed what it was, and was instantly overcome by a fierce wave of fear.
Enrica’s answer. She’d written back.
His head spun, and he felt a surge of nausea, but he concealed his queasiness lest Rosa inflict upon him some terrible herbal tea from Cilento that would deal the coup de grâce to his precarious condition. There was still a flimsy chance he could avoid vomiting, and he wasn’t taking any risks.
He asked Rosa:
“Who brought this letter? It didn’t come by ordinary mail: it isn’t postmarked.”
The tata, who hadn’t missed a single move Ricciardi had made, pretended to be startled.
“Mamma mia, you scared the life out of me! I thought you were asleep in the armchair. That letter? How would I know who brought it? I just found it in the mailbox, downstairs in the front hall of the building.”
“Ah, you did, did you? And since when have you been collecting mail from the mailbox?”
Rosa put on the same truculent expression she wore every time she found herself with her back to the wall.
“What, I can’t look in the mailbox? What about the bills that come from the village, the invoices and all the other documents that need to be dealt with in order to manage the farmland, who do you think looks at them, the signorino, by chance? Don’t I take care of those things, even though I’m old and my eyes are shot, and every bone in my body aches?”
Once he realized his misstep, Ricciardi abruptly changed gears:
“For heaven’s sake, forget I ever said it. Of course you can look in the mailbox: why shouldn’t you? I was just wondering who might have put it here, that’s all.”
He entertained the notion of some complicity between Rosa and Enrica, but dismissed the idea immediately. It was inconceivable that his tata knew that he watched her from his window, much less that he had written her that letter. He’d been very careful; she couldn’t possibly have noticed. He excluded it categorically.
Feigning indifference, he sat back down in the armchair. His hands were trembling, but he didn’t want to run the risk of tearing the letter along with the envelope. He waited until he’d calmed down a little to open it. The handwriting immediately stirred a feeling of tenderness in him: it slanted to the wrong side; she wrote with her left hand. Absurdly, he thought about how she’d managed to resist any efforts to correct this aspect of her personality—and, needless to say, he liked it.
He couldn’t bring himself to read it. He’d glimpsed the signature at the bottom, which meant she’d only used one side of the paper, and it read: “Cordially yours, Enrica Colombo.” Not very long; but for that matter, his hadn’t been either. He was afraid: there’s nothing quite as concise as a flat refusal.
He’d been turning the sheet of paper over in his hands for more than a minute when Rosa spoke up.
“Well? If I want to know what a letter says, I read it.”
His tata’s voice was like a rifle shot, and Ricciardi started.
“I’ll read it, I’ll read it. It’s for me, it’s something . . . something having to do with work, that’s all. Office business, nothing to worry about. Go on, go to sleep, it’s late. Buona notte.”
His tata replied with a gruff “Buona notte.”
But she smiled as she headed for her bedroom.
Finally, Ricciardi read the letter, all at once; then he reread it, and when he finished he reread it again, savoring each word, pronouncing them in his own mouth as he read, going over them in silence, like a poem he was trying to learn by heart. In them he found the exact image he’d formed of her: tranquil, sweet, serious, but quick to smile.
Now he knew the most important thing of all: she wasn’t engaged; she hadn’t promised her heart to anyone else. He knew that she wanted a family one day, and a home of her own, where she could move around, at her ease, calmly, quietly.
That she found him neither annoying nor disgusting, that she was not bothered by his crudeness or the ineptness he knew he suffered from in his personal relations. That she liked his eyes, even though they were accustomed to observing pain and grief and to recognizing their sounds.
Just like every time he thought about it, the rational part of him ordered him to keep his distance, to tear up that leter, close the shutters, and never see her again; to stop dreaming of a future in which the Deed would perhaps be passed on to innocent children, in which he’d have to share his curse with those he loved most.
The other part of him, the one that with each passing day yearned more and more for a normal life, the everyday existence that only he had been denied, pushed him instead to run to the window, throw it open, and call Enrica at the top of his lungs.
Of course, he chose the middle path. He stood up from the armchair, turned off the radio and the overhead light, went into his bedroom, and stepped over to the window; he looked across the street to a window with a light on, as he did every night; he waved slightly with one hand, and in return he received a lovely tilt of the head from the girl with glasses, who was doing needlepoint with her left hand.
He smiled, hesitantly, and held up the sheet of paper with his trembling hand. She blushed and dropped her embroidery to her lap for a moment. Then she picked it up again, with a smile on her face, too.
Ricciardi decided that he definitely had a fever.