Not even the heat could distract Lucia Maione from her worries as she walked briskly toward the market.
A few nights earlier, from the darkness of the hallway, she’d spied on her husband as he sat at the kitchen table. The light of a candle cast a large shadow of his silhouette on the far wall. He was drenched in sweat, an undershirt covered his chest, and his head was bent over a sheet of paper on which, Lucia felt certain, he was adding up columns of numbers.
She knew that because the same scene always repeated itself as the end of the week and payday drew near. She knew it because the following morning she would extract the sheet of paper from the trash and read it: always the same numbers.
Always the same money.
After the very last of the children had been trundled off to bed and fallen asleep, he would tell her to go to bed, that he was going to have a last espresso and then he’d join her: he just had some work matters he needed to think about. Lucia would pretend to retire and then, barefoot and silent, she’d tiptoe to the kitchen door and watch her husband worrying.
Until the government had decided to cut salaries, a year and a half earlier, they’d been living comfortably. They weren’t wealthy, but they could afford to go out to the park for a stroll on Saturday afternoons and buy a spumone for the children, and once a month the whole family went to the movies. Now even the supplemental payments for especially large families weren’t enough to make ends meet.
Raffaele didn’t talk about it. Every morning he gave her as much as she needed to buy groceries without showing any sign of worry, but Lucia knew perfectly well what was going through his mind, what he kept to himself to spare her the anxiety.
She tried to be as frugal as possible, but the kids were at the age when they were as ravenous as wolf cubs, and God be praised they were all growing up hale and healthy, constantly outgrowing their clothing, which meant she had to test the limits of her remarkable skills as a seamstress and take in outfits to fit the smaller children as their elders grew bigger. She felt a pang in her heart when she saw how much Giovanni, at sixteen, resembled Luca and how proud the boy was to wear the clothing of his older brother, who had been killed in the line of duty. Still, she inevitably had to buy some new outfits, and that always brought her face to face with the harsh reality of constantly rising prices. And so Lucia was forced on long journeys to the market, where there were savings to be had. She always returned home loaded down like a mule; sometimes she made the older children come with her—they always saw the trip as an exciting adventure, which cheered her up.
Then there was Benedetta.
The girl had been orphaned by the brutal murder of her parents, a murder committed by her only living relative, one of her mother’s sisters. She was an only child, and Raffaele, in a surge of sorrow and pity, had brought her home at Christmas; now they had begun the proceedings to adopt the child. She was wonderful. Benedetta and their eldest daughter Maria were practically the same age and had become inseparable. And even if that meant that there was now another mouth to feed, and another small body growing with dizzying speed to be clothed and shod, they would never, because of the money, have given up the opportunity to give that marvelous creature a family of her own; she’d already suffered too much in her short life.
Lucia slowed to a halt. Before her eyes the picture of her husband’s broad shoulders appeared to her, as he sat in the dim light of the kitchen, and those shoulders rose and fell in a sigh, a sign that meant once again the figures didn’t add up.
Raffaele subjected himself to endless overtime, taking on shifts for colleagues who were bachelors or well-to-do. He was killing himself with work, and no one knew better than she did, she who loved him and knew him well, how little of himself he held back in the daily battle against the wrongdoers who infested the city.
It had been, from the very beginning, his way of reacting to Luca’s death, Luca who had decided to become a policeman just like him: even more honest, even more inflexible, even more attentive, even more tireless. But now it wasn’t just because of his mission that her husband was working so hard, it was also so that his family could live better.
When Raffaele had stood up, gently pushing back the chair, and gone out onto the balcony, Lucia had taken advantage of the opportunity to peek at the sheet of figures that lay on the table with a pencil stub. As always, it contained a list, laid out in her husband’s large, neat handwriting:
Bread, 12 kilos: 16 lire.
Pasta, 4 kilos: 9 lire and 50 cents.
Rice, 1 kilo: 1 lira and 50 cents.
Milk, 5 liters: 11 lire.
Potatoes, 5 kilos: 2 lire.
Meat, 1 kilo and a half: 10 lire.
Anchovies, 2 kilos: 7 lire and 50 cents.
Salt cod, 1 kilo and a half: 3 lire and 50 cents.
Eggs, 1 dozen: 4 lire and 20 cents.
Fruit and greens, 15 kilos: 15 lire.
Olive oil, half a liter: 2 lire and 60 cents.
Sugar, a quarter kilo: 1 lira and 60 cents.
Coffee, 150 grams: 1 lira and 90 cents.
TOTAL WEEKLY EXPENSES
86 LIRE AND 30 CENTS.
On top of which, Lucia thought to herself, you had to add sixty lire for the landlord and ten for the weekly rate for electricity and heating. Plus at least thirty lire more for various expenses: cotton, clothing, notebooks, medicine. Too much.
Too much, my poor love.
She’d looked up at Raffaele, who stood looking out at the quarter dotted with streetlamps. In the distance she could hear a man and woman fighting and, closer in, the sound of a piano playing. In the heat, windows opened to let out life and all its passions.
In the silence of the apartment, which was broken only by the regular breathing of the children in their bedrooms, Lucia decided that she wasn’t going to stand by and watch her man work himself to death for her and her children.
You, she had said without speaking, addressing her husband’s back, you’re there at the bottom of my heart, and I’m going to do everything I can to put a smile back on your face. Then, careful not to make the slightest noise, she finally went back to bed.
I’m going to do everything I can to put a smile back on your face, Lucia repeated to herself, firmly. And she started toward the market again.