XXXV

Listening to the sounds of the zampognari rising from the street below, Lucia Maione was thinking about life.

And she was thinking that life is a strange thing, that no one had ever understood it, neither philosophers nor songwriters, much less her, ignorant as she was, who only knew how to be a mother and a wife.

She thought back on her own life, as it had been until just a few months ago. If you could call it a life. She just lay sprawled on her bed, almost all day long and most of the night, never really sleeping, in a state of waking sleep or sleepy wakefulness, a trance populated with images, broken thoughts, memories. If you take a mother’s son from her without warning, if she still has his shirts to iron, if she can still hear his laughter echoing in her ears, then it’s impossible to say what will become of her.

She went on working busily in the kitchen. Her children were playing in the next room. These are my children too, she’d thought. They have a right to a mamma.

Still, that thought hadn’t been sufficient for almost three years. Nor had her home, or her husband, seemed like sufficient reason to start living again. The only thing that she wanted to do was to stare out at the sliver of sky she could see from her bed, waiting for a blond angel to come down and take her away with him.

Then one day, without warning, she’d gotten up. There was something in the spring air, a new perfume, or an unfamiliar smell. And she’d leaned out the window and looked down. She’d seen the piazzetta, the vicoli running uphill and down. She’d seen life, flowing along as always, and she’d realized she missed it.

And just in the nick of time, she thought to herself, as she lined up her ingredients on the kitchen table. She’d come that close to losing her husband, and the love of her children. She’d run the risk of being left alone in an inferno of endless grief. And she’d realized that her handsome son, that fair-haired boy, his hair the same color as hers, who used to come home and lift her in his arms, spinning her around till she was breathless, who called her “my girlfriend,” would never have wanted to see her in this pitiable state. So she’d brushed her hair and changed her clothing. And she’d tested out a hesitant smile in the mirror of the vanity table in their bedroom.

Since then she’d revived all the family traditions, one by one. And now that Christmas was once again drawing near, she was expected to lay the finest dinner table in the whole quarter, which meant that her husband and her children were the envy of all their friends.

Hands on her hips, her apron damp, she reviewed everything she’d laid out on the table, reciting the names of the items under her breath as if uttering a prayer: rinsed broccoli, with their broad dark-green leaves; broccoletti, with their long narrow leaves; chicory; cabbage; and torzella, a local curly-leafed cabbage. All the vegetables were present and accounted for.

It’s easy to say minestra maritata. Married soup. And yet, for all its simplicity, it was one of the most challenging dishes of the whole year; but without minestra maritata, what kind of Christmas would it be?

Then after the vegetables came the meats: a prosciutto bone, pork rinds, salami, pork ribs, pezzentella sausage, fresh pork. To an inexpert eye, all these were scraps, the kinds of odds and ends one would feed to the family dog, but in fact they were the secret of a perfect soup. And, naturally, lard, fresh sausages to be crumbled into the mix, and dried caciocavallo cheese, a crucial ingredient. Then her own signature touch, a spicy red chili pepper and a glass of red wine.

She smiled as she thought of Raffaele, who loved her minestra maritata in particular. But her smile dimmed.

He’d been odd lately. There was a bass note, just barely detectable, in his expression, as hard as he might try to conceal it: a sadness or perhaps a hint of melancholy. Perhaps the impending holiday, or perhaps the thought of Luca, which kept her constant company, had snuck up unannounced on her husband, with the sound of the zampogne and the memory of Luca as a child, when he asked for gifts that were as expensive and unattainable as the moon.

Still, there was something that, as far as Lucia was concerned, just didn’t add up: that dark shade in Raffaele’s eyes had come on far too suddenly. It had already been there when he’d come home Saturday night.

The new investigation? His compassion for that little girl, suddenly orphaned in that horrible manner, which he’d told her all about? Perhaps. But it still didn’t add up.

As she diced the lard on the cutting board, she thought back to the previous spring, when she’d suspected that Raffaele might be interested in another woman. This had been a wake-up call, the push she needed in order to regain her will and desire to reassume her place in her household. She’d never let anyone cast a shadow over her life again.

Because life is important. If you lose it and you regain it, to lose it again is a pity, but also a sin: a mortal sin.

She focused on Raffaele, singing as she diced the lard into neat, compact cubes.

 

Angelina took little Vincenzino’s temperature, placing her lips on his forehead. He was burning up. Again.

The sea, crashing just a stone’s throw from their home, went on incessantly roaring into the wind, but there was a different smell in the air: the old people had told her that the north wind was going to subside in the next few hours, and the cold would continue to rule alone.

That wasn’t good news for Vincenzino. His lungs made a whistling sound at night with every breath, and Angelina listened to it as if it were a death chant. She couldn’t sleep anymore.

The doctor had told her what medicines she needed to get, but if he’d asked for gold, myrrh, and frankincense—the gifts carried by the wooden silhouettes with the images of the Three Kings glued onto them—it would have amounted to the same thing.

Medicine is for the rich. Doctors are for the rich. Or else for thieves, like the centurion who had ruined her husband.

She thought about their large, luminous apartment. How warm it was in there, as if the winter were showing respect for those walls, as if the cold were afraid to come inside. All those lights, the glistening silver, the gleaming floors, the soft carpets like sand at the beach in summertime, when you walk on it barefoot and it feels like stepping onto a cloud.

And she thought about Garofalo’s wife, her courteous, sarcastic, false smile. Hat and gloves? she’d asked. She’d asked them, people who’d never worn gloves in their lives; she’d asked her, who had the same black shawl her mother had worn covering her head; she’d asked Aristide, who was wearing a cap that smelled of salt water and of pain, of a thousand nights spent out on his boat praying for fish.

Suddenly, as she sat thinking about the pair of them, as if their black souls were somehow able to pull strings from down in hell like puppeteers, Alfonso, her eldest son, came in. Mammà, he said, excitedly and upset, Mammà, they’re here. They’re here in the piazzetta, asking about us.

Angelina thought about her husband, and about the contemptible dark sea that every night did its best to gobble him down, but which still gave them all enough—just enough!—to eat. She thought about Vincenzino and the way his lungs whistled, and how you could even hear it in the daytime now, and how his forehead was burning up. She thought about her mother and her father, who had taught her to be forthright and honest. She thought about groceries, medicine, carpets, and silver.

For a long moment she thought about doing nothing: about not telling anyone their name, not going out, not opening the door. About pretending that they were all already dead, as they certainly would be if they didn’t do something to remedy their horrible situation. She thought about it for a moment.

Then she sighed and stood up. She took her shawl and wrapped it around herself and over her head. She glanced at herself in the mirror on the wall, perhaps the one luxury they had in the twenty by twenty foot room that was her home, and she was shocked at the sight of the old ashen-faced woman she saw reflected there. She ran her eyes over the cold fireplace, the brazier that she kept dangerously close to Vincenzino’s bed, in the hopes of saving him from the death whose face was drawing ever closer to his, and the sad little manger scene that Aristide had carved and decorated with dried seaweed, so that even his children would have a little bit of Christmas.

She looked closely, but she saw no hope.

Then she walked out into the wind, to meet the policemen.