Maione gaped, opening and then shutting his mouth twice, like a fresh-caught mullet wriggling on the deck of a fishing boat. He was experiencing a sense of bewilderment, as if Lucia had suddenly materialized before him in response to a mystical invocation. As if she’d been transported to the Villa Nazionale on his own thought waves.
He stared at her, her hat fastened to her head with a ribbon, her overcoat with the fur collar, the one he’d bought for her so many years ago and that she kept in perfect condition, her cheeks red from the chilly air, her blue eyes turned in the same direction he’d been gazing until just a few seconds ago.
“Luci’, what are you doing here?”
His wife didn’t answer; she just looked at him with her lips pressed firmly together and a determined expression on her face. Then she said:
“You’re not working. Don’t even try to tell me that you’re here on a case, that you’re tailing some criminal the day before Christmas Eve. Those people aren’t fugitives; they’re just a normal family, out for a little fresh air in the Villa Nazionale. Don’t you dare try to lie to me, Rafe’.”
Maione knew his wife. Joking around at home, back when Luca was still alive, they used to say that she was the real policeman in the family. All the same, he tried lying to her anyway.
“What’s that supposed to mean? If you only knew how many people seem normal, harmless, but then it turns out they’ve done things that you can’t even imagine. Believe me, people aren’t always what they seem.”
Lucia, without taking her eyes off Biagio’s family, replied:
“Nonsense. A minute ago you put your hands on your face; you only do that when you’re confused, when you don’t know what to do next. And you never have doubts or uncertainties about your work. There’s some other problem here, and I want to know what it is.”
Maione didn’t know what to say. The woman went on.
“I’ve been following you for two days now. Ever since you came home that night three days ago, your mood has changed. You’ve seemed sad, distracted, pensive. You try your best to seem normal, but I know you: you can’t pull the wool over my eyes. When an investigation gets under your skin you bring it home with you, but there’s always been a limit. This time it’s different, and I want to know what it’s about.”
Her tone of voice brooked no objections.
“Come here, Luci’. Let’s sit down on that bench and I’ll tell you all about it.”
A few shafts of sunlight slanted down, making their way fitfully through the thick black clouds, hitting the sea here and there. The bench was cold, but the fact that there was no wind made it tolerable. The strollers were thinning out as lunchtime drew near, but the orchestra played on heroically, keeping the Christmas spirit flying, like the banner of a regiment fighting in the trenches.
“Do you think that certain things can ever end, Luci’? Do you think that it’s possible to put an end to certain sorrows, and start living again?”
Signora Maione sat stiffly, her face sunk deep in her fur collar. The brigadier couldn’t see her expression. All the better: it would make it easier for him to find the strength to tell her everything.
“I think that pain and joy both leave their marks. And you have to deal with the marks they leave. They never end, no; they leave you a different person. But you have to provide those who depend on you with an explanation of some kind. That’s something that took me three years to learn—you know. And we never talked about it; one day I smiled at you, and you wrapped your arms around me. That’s what I know, and that’s all I want to know.”
Two seagulls shrieked at the winter weather. Candela’s wife was telling the children something, and they both listened, spellbound; he sat on the ground, looking out at the sea and smoking a cigarette.
Lucia and Raffaele, sitting just some fifteen feet away from the man and woman and their children, watched them and, beyond them, watched the sea, pierced here and there by shafts of sunlight. Christmas was looming over everyone, midway between a promise and a threat.
“Tell me. Tell me the whole story. I can tell that it’s not something that’s yours alone, that it concerns me as well. If that’s true, and I know it is, then you have to tell me everything.”
It was true, and Maione knew it. His simple mind grasped the fact that he ought to have shared what was happening with Lucia, but his terror at the thought of shattering the fragile equilibrium that they’d only recently managed to recover after Luca’s death was overwhelming.
He suddenly realized that he’d crossed that line at the very moment he had learned that that fair-haired young man, so gentle and inoffensive in appearance, who was sitting in the grass mere feet away, was their son’s murderer.
Maione heaved a sigh. And he started to tell her the story.
He told her, and his voice sounded like the murmuring of the waves on the deserted beach. He told her, and his hushed words carved a groove as deep as hell itself. He told her, and as he told her he told himself as well, creating order among the vague and rebellious thoughts that had been traveling between his mind and his heart, giving him no peace.
He told her, and it seemed as if a century had passed since that evening just three days ago, when he had found Franco Massa standing on a corner on Via Toledo, ghostlike, waiting for him.
He told her about the scratchy voice pouring out of the broken heart of a father who’d never had children of his own, and through that voice he told her the story of a confession extorted through a last act of deception, and the final truth that had come out of that confession.
He told her about a man who was guilty of many crimes and murders but innocent of one, a man who had died in the belief that he was cleansing his soul in the presence of a priest, and about that fake priest who had decreed the death sentence for a man who was guilty of nothing except that one murder. And how that death sentence had been entrusted to his hands, the hands of a father who’d once had a son but no longer did.
He told her about how he’d climbed all the way up to Bambinella’s garret apartment, of a name and address whispered in a setting of silk curtains and dying pigeons. And about the walk to San Gregorio Armeno, in the midst of a Christmas that seemed like an empty collective charade surrounding the song of death that played to him in his heart.
He told her about the hollow feeling in the pit of his stomach and the way his head spun, when in the light of dawn he’d first laid eyes on that hand, the hand that had changed everything for him, the color of the sun and the very taste of happiness. He told her about the horror he’d felt when he saw the same blond hair, the identical youth of both the murderer and the victim.
Lucia sailed silently over the waves of the story her husband was telling her, as if in a dense fog. She felt as though she were listening to a story that didn’t concern her, as she observed from a distance events and characters like those you could watch in a movie house.
Maione went on talking, staring straight ahead of him, following the flow of his own emotions. He felt as if he’d been crushed, but was slowly climbing out of the rubble.
He told her about the hand that still gripped a knife, but now only to give shape to a piece of wood, not to pull it out of their son’s back. About the shop owner’s pride, the smiling young wife on the balcony of the building across the way, the joy of the little girl throwing her arms around her father’s neck.
He told her about the robbery, the young man’s instinctive reaction, the bandits who ran off as fast as their legs could carry them, but he didn’t realize that almost within arm’s reach his Lucia had witnessed the same scene, and had wondered why her husband had failed to intervene, hoping that the reason was just an instinctive aversion to risk.
Then he stopped. But he started talking again, in the same tone of voice, whispering into the cold, still air of that December twenty-third, as the city held its breath in anticipation of Christmas; and he told her about the tempest that was raging in his miserable soul, the soul of a policeman who wanted to be a father but whom circumstances and Franco Massa seemed determined to transform into a judge and executioner.
He told Lucia about Lucia, about how her sorrow, her days sunk in the abyss, lying in her bed staring at the sliver of sky, were the chief responsibility he felt in his heart, driving him to carry out that death sentence. About the burden he felt pressing down on his shoulders, the weight of the suffering that they all carried, day after day, without ever speaking of it.
Finally, he fell silent. And in that silence they both realized that they were staring at the back of the neck of the man who’d murdered their son, who in turn was looking out at the sporadic shafts of sunlight on the dark sea. The two seagulls called out and responded to each other.
Lucia spoke. Her voice was harsh and spare and it came from the depths of a soul that had never stopped dying. Listening to her, Maione realized just how false his impression that she had emerged from the abyss really was, and he understood that his wife had merely learned how to live with her sorrow, had simply stopped struggling against it.
“You know, there are times I think I can still feel him suckling at my breast. That’s absurd, no? I saw him all grown-up, strapping and tall; I used to iron those immense shirts he wore. He’d pick me up in his arms and whirl me around until I was breathless, you remember the way he’d spin me through the air? And I’ve had five other children, and I love them all dearly, you know how much I love them all. But I can still feel him suckling, sucking the life out of me. My firstborn, Rafe’, there’s no replacement. He’s the one who tells you who you are, and who you’ll be for the rest of your life. A mother. A mother, and nothing else.”
Maione fought back his tears. He nodded his head, but his wife wasn’t looking at him.
“I married the only man I’ve ever loved in my life. I married him because he made me laugh and because I cared about him. I married him because he’s hard-headed and honest, because he’s a policeman. Because he fights against evil, and especially because he knows how to recognize evil, and he teaches my children how to recognize it, so they’ll know what good is. And what the difference is between the two.”
Maione heaved a deep sigh. It all felt like a dream. Candela’s little boy scampered over to his father and sat down beside him, running his tiny hand up and down the man’s back. The man didn’t stir. Lucia’s voice went on.
“My love for my son. My love for my husband. That’s all I am, Rafe’: nothing more, nothing less than my love for my son and my love for my husband.”
She turned to look at Maione, and her eyes looked like a window over the summer sea.
“It’s Christmas, Rafe’. At Christmas Luca used to write us a letter, you remember? He’d put it under your napkin, and you always pretended to be so surprised when you found it, the same way you do now with the letters from the other children. Do you remember the things he used to write to us, in those little letters? I still have them all; I kept every last one. He told us that he wanted to be a good boy, good just like you.”
Maione felt as if he were on the verge of dying, then and there on an ice-cold bench in the Villa Nazionale, just a stone’s throw from the sea. About to die of heartbreak and regret.
“It’s Christmastime, Rafe’. Luca’s not coming home for Christmas. I’ll set a place for him, the way I always do, with a plate and silverware. But he’s not coming home. He’ll never come home again. And after a whole lifetime, you want to tell him now, now that he’s in the world of almighty truth, that you’re willing to commit this horrible crime, to take a father away from his wife and his two innocent children? Whether they’re our children or someone else’s, they’re still children.”
The brigadier looked uncertainly at his wife.
“What should I do, Luci’? What should I do now?”
From the sleeve of her overcoat emerged a hand, slender and pale. It rose toward her husband’s face and caressed it, drying a tear that Maione hadn’t even realized he’d shed.
“I’ll tell you what we ought to do. It’s Christmas. We ought to stand up and go away from here. I still have to cook the second dish for tonight, and you have to finish your shift. And then we’ll celebrate, because it’s Christmas and we have five children who want a smiling mamma, and an honest papà to write their little Christmas letter to.”
In front of them the little girl had fallen asleep, and the father had picked up the little boy and was holding him as his gaze, lost in the distance, continued to follow the phantoms of his conscience.
Lucia stood up and took her husband by the hand, turning to leave the Villa Nazionale, while behind them the orchestra went on playing and the sea lay calm beneath a few shafts of sunlight and a great mass of black clouds.
The city above them, climbing up the hillside, slowly turned on its lights. And it looked exactly like a nativity scene.