LXVIII

We used to go watch the steamships depart. We were little more than children, you know? And we’d go watch people leave for America.

In our neighborhood that was how we spent time together, as if it were an obvious, ordinary thing. A matter of age, proximity, friendships uniting families: a little boy and a little girl, first playing on the ground among the hens pecking up and down the vicolo, then walking together in the street, and finally sharing a life together. Nicola and I were destined for each other. That’s what everyone thought, and he thought so too. Not me, though. I wanted more.

He would have left for America. Not me, I’d never have left. I thought that to leave meant to accept defeat, and I think the same thing now. Still, I’d go down with him to watch the steamships departing. Until the day that I myself departed.

I never believed that he’d wait for me. I went to live in a town in the provinces, pretty far away, with an aunt who couldn’t have children, married to a rich businessman. A man with lots of money. That was where I met Rosario, a few years later.

My aunt had sent me to school. She treated me like a doll, she played at being my mother, she dressed me, fed me, and sent me off to study; but I wasn’t playing. Everything, every exam, every new acquaintance only helped me to improve. I wanted to be rich, respected, a fine lady. I wanted to be happy.

Rosario wasn’t an aristocrat, he wasn’t a prince, but he was ambitious and he came from a good family. And then he was so intelligent, the smartest person I’d ever met. He had a spectacular memory, he only needed to read a sentence once and he’d remember it forever. He could have done anything he set his mind to, and he would have been successful without even trying. But there was only one thing he wanted: he wanted to become a doctor.

He was a good man. I believe that he was a good man precisely because he was so intelligent. He said that wrongdoing makes no sense, it’s incomprehensible because it’s counterproductive. Because it hurts people, for no good reason.

I trusted him. Things were going well, he was climbing the ladder step by step; I was working to help him, I established a network of relationships. You know, Commissario, to start a great career, it’s not enough to be excellent, you also have to make friends, establish relationships. Sniff the wind, and then move in the right direction. I’m good at that. Very good.

So Rosario worked as a scientist and a physician: the things he knew how to do. And he did them very well indeed, he became a sort of guiding light for the entire discipline. And I became the favorite girlfriend of the wives of the powerful, politicians, business tycoons. Gynecology necessarily works through a network of women: and you’d never guess the extent to which women control their men.

When Rosario became director of the chair of gynecology, here in the city, I chose to move someplace other than the old quarter. My parents were dead by then, and I was a different person myself. I couldn’t hope to be happy where I had once been so unhappy and so poor.

We began spending time with those in high society. We were young, famous, and rich. There was no limit to how high we could have reached. I dreamed of Rome, and I would have won it one day. There was just one problem: Rosario’s heart.

That big, kind heart was sick. No one knew it, they’d warned him to keep his illness a secret because it was the sort of thing that could have kept him from getting certain jobs; but he had to be careful. Sometimes he forced himself to take time off, when overwork put his health in danger. He couldn’t let himself rest for too long, or he’d be overtaken by his rivals and he’d lose years. He needed to husband his energies. That was why his assistants needed to be more than just talented, they needed to be able to replace him without doing harm.

Rosario wanted a baby. He really wanted one. To tell the truth, I would have been happy to wait a little longer, but he kept insisting: perhaps he knew that what happened to him might happen.

He had selected two young men to serve as his assistants. They were both brilliant. He enjoyed watching them compete, seeing them intuit things even before he said anything. Then one of them was caught in a scandal, and he was out of the running. Only one remained.

Rosario was always telling me about this Tullio Iovine del Castello, one of the finest students he’d ever had. He always followed in my husband’s footsteps, he knew what my husband wanted before he did, he stayed on at work even when he wasn’t on duty. Rosario would have sent him off to be the director of the chair of gynecology in some smaller university.

But he never had the time.

Rosario died on the job. His heart gave out, unexpectedly.

You see, Commissario, I never knew that I loved my husband. Not as much as I did. I thought of the day we met as an ordinary fact of life, something obvious. Instead, a heart is a great vase full of liquid: the heaviest things settle to the bottom, and you never see them until you dive down in search of them.

Or until they break.

I was pregnant when Rosario died. He was in seventh heaven, he smiled like a little boy, he’d keep his hand on my belly and explain in great detail exactly what was happening inside me: you see, now this or that organ is forming, now you’re feeding it, now it’s moving. It was his pregnancy, even more than it was mine. And then one day he was gone.

I had no money problems, but I was alone. My future had been stolen from me. I’d patiently and laboriously constructed an edifice that had suddenly collapsed. Like a beehive built by a swarm, cell by cell, crushed by a boy with a sledgehammer.

I met Tullio. I’d seen him once or twice before, he seemed like a wide-awake, ambitious young man. After Rosario’s death, he temporarily took his place at the hospital, but he was determined to stay. He came to see me every day, sometimes more than once. He said that as Rosario’s first assistant, he felt morally obliged to keep an eye on my pregnancy, he who had been unable to save his life.

But fate would have it that nothing of Rosario was destined to survive. I had a miscarriage, even though Tullio tried everything to save the baby. In particular, in the days that followed, he reassured me that in any case I could have other children; I didn’t understand why he was telling me that, I wouldn’t even have wanted back the baby I had lost, especially now that Rosario was gone.

Tullio continued coming often to see me at home. At first, his thoughtfulness touched me, then I realized what he had in mind. He had no doubt about my importance to Rosario’s career, and my network of relationships, and now he wanted them for himself.

The idea disgusted me at first, I thought he was a slimy opportunist; then I started to give it some thought. I had spent years developing my network of contacts in the field of medicine, specifically in the gynecological field, and now I was alone, about to lose it all: Tullio would make it possible for me to maintain my prestige and my prominence. He wasn’t as brilliant as Rosario, but he was more ambitious, and he seemed capable of following the paths that I myself could show him. It was the perfect solution.

I started working on it, and he was soon appointed director of the chair of gynecology on a permanent basis. Now all he needed was time to achieve his full stature.

We were married, and Federico was born. I had never felt particularly maternal, but the boy changed me profoundly. I loved him. He was a piece of me, my own life perpetuating itself. Everything that I had wanted, everything I had fought for, struck me as petty and tawdry. My son was the most important thing in the universe.

For Tullio, on the other hand, the child’s presence was an obstacle to his ambitions; I was determined not to move away because I wanted to raise him in a stable environment, I wanted him to grow up here. The position Tullio had his eyes on came open when Federico was three years old, and I made sure he wasn’t even in the running. He learned what I’d done, and from that moment on a gulf opened between us. Life was pushing us in different directions.

Some time ago I was awakened in the middle of the night by violent pounding on my front door. Two huge men had come looking for my husband. This was hardly the first time such a thing had happened, it was normal for a gynecologist. I told them that he was at the hospital, but they replied that that was where they had just come from, that they had taken their boss’s wife there, but he wasn’t there.

The next morning, when he came home, I asked him to account for where he’d been, when he ought to have been on duty at the hospital. We had a furious quarrel. At first he denied everything, then he confessed that he was having an affair, that he was in love. Can you imagine? In love. A snake, an ambitious vulture, a cold-blooded reptile who had never experienced a single emotion in his life, had fallen in love.

I wasn’t jealous, far from it. By now he disgusted me, I wouldn’t have felt a thing if I’d known he was in another woman’s arms. But I was insulted at the thought that he’d never spoken words of love, or tenderness, or even simple affection when it came to my little Federico, and that now he was telling me that he was head over heels in love with this other woman. Head over heels, you understand. Can you believe it?

I told him that I’d created him myself, that he was nothing more than a goddamned puppet dancing on my strings. That just as I’d created him I could destroy him, without pity. That he had better not even think of making my son the talk of the town, or of trying to make a spectacle of him, or he’d have to reckon with me.

I thought I’d frighten him. But he shot back a reply without flinching.

Me? he said. Me, a puppet? Me, dancing on your strings?

You’re so stupid, he said. You’re so ridiculously stupid. Maybe you could manipulate your first husband. Sure. Because all he wanted was to be a physician, and he went along with your frenzy for social climbing, your thirst for power. But not me. Remember? I’m every bit as ambitious as you are.

I slapped it in his face that he was a nobody, that he could never hope to approach the heights Rosario had achieved. That Rosario had been a genius, a superior mind, and that he was just a grimy little wannabe, a small man eaten up with envy. That if Rosario hadn’t died, he’d still be standing in the wings, waiting for his chance.

That was when he told me. I think he’d always wanted to tell me, certainly sooner or later he’d have boasted of how his fierce determination had successfully circumvented every obstacle in his path, including my late husband. Or perhaps he was simply swept away by the horror of that conversation, by my desire to wound him and crush him, by the feeling of omnipotence that people say comes over you when love arrives and makes all things possible.

He would have died anyway, eventually. That’s what he said. His heart would have given out. Anyway? I asked. Yes, anyway, he said after a moment’s hesitation. What do you mean? Tell me immediately what you mean by that, I demanded.

He smiled, that’s right, he smiled and he replied: yes, it was me. Me and no one else, the little man waiting in the wings. I’m the one who eliminated your precious husband, the vehicle of your ambitions. And he told me how he did it.

It was the herbal tea, Commissario. A common, simple, apparently harmless herbal tea of valerian, lemon balm, and chamomile; the tea that Rosario drank twice a day, to ease the tension and agitation of a profession that might threaten his heart. Tullio took over that everyday task, as if currying favor with his boss, assistants do this and much more in that world, and he began adding moderate quantities of extract of digitalis, lethal for someone suffering from heart disease like my husband. Until one day his heart gave out, all at once.

He got away with it easily, Rosario’s weak heart was an established fact, and it didn’t occur to anyone that his cardiac arrest might have been chemically induced.

And then, he said, I took care of you. You took care of me? I asked. Certainly, he replied: do you think I would have raised and supported another man’s child? That I would have tolerated the living memory, the progeny of a man whose life I had chosen to take?

The herbal tea, I said as I remembered. The herbal tea for me, too. I was having intestinal problems, and he, who had been so solicitous about my health, made me an herbal tea of powdered liquorice, to ease my discomfort. What did you put in the herbal tea? I asked him. And he replied, blissfully: Claviceps purpurea, rye ergot fungus, in powdered form. Three days, and the result is a miscarriage, an abortion.

I was looking at the man who had murdered my husband and my baby, Commissario; and at the same time he was my husband and the father of my child. I felt as if I had just plummeted into a nightmare without end. Why did you tell me? I asked him. For what reason?

He said nothing for a little while. Then he told me: I’m in love. And I want to experience this love without subterfuge, happily. Still, I don’t want to lose my career, a career I’ve conquered with so much hard work, and with your presence. So I want you to know what I’m capable of. And I’m sure that you, who have made your own personal success the sole guiding principle of your life, will be very careful not to ruin everything: your son, first and foremost, would be ruined for the rest of his life. And you can’t prove any of this. Absolutely none of it.

He was right, and I understood that instantly. I had no other choice.

We’ll go on exactly as before, he told me. Actually, it will be better, because now everything will be so much clearer. But with our friends, our relatives, our acquaintances: the same as before.

I stopped sleeping with him. I had a bed made up in Federico’s room. I was afraid to leave my son alone, I had no idea what was going through the mind of that lunatic. After a couple of days he came to ask me, as natural as could be, what kind of gift I’d like for my name day. I’ll take nothing from your hands, I replied, but he just laughed and said that it was important to keep up appearances, and that included a name day gift, so I might as well tell him what I wanted. And that’s when I thought of Nicola.

A few months earlier I’d happened to run into an old friend who still lived in the neighborhood and who I hadn’t seen since we were children; I couldn’t even tell you how we recognized each other, when we came face-to-face in the street. We’d chatted for a while, and she was the one who told me that Nicola was still waiting for me. That in all these years no one had ever seen him with a woman; he still lived with his mother, who had lost her mind, and he’d set up in business for himself, becoming the finest goldsmith in the borgo. Now I understood the reason behind that chance meeting: fate had shown me the way.

I told Tullio that I’d heard good things about this goldsmith, and that I’d like a ring. He was happy to have an opportunity to meet me halfway: he thought he was sealing an armistice of some sort. I later found out that he’d also commissioned a second ring for his whore, but by then there was nothing he could do to offend me.

I went to see Nicola. First at home: but I found only his mother, with the woman who looked after the apartment building. Incredibly, the mad old thing recognized me the minute she laid eyes on me. He’s certainly still down in his workshop, even though it’s late, the woman told me, and I went to look for him there.

When he saw me I must have seemed like a ghost to him. He told his young apprentice to go away, then he stood up and walked toward me. Lord, what had become of him. It broke my heart to think what we’d been like, as children, when we used to go down and watch the steamships set sail for America.

We talked. And we talked again, that time and the other times that I went back to that workshop, always at night, always when he was all alone in that deserted vicolo. He listened to me openmouthed, with a half-smile on his face, whatever I told him. He was just as much in love as he ever had been, in fact, much more than before. To his mind, which had never accepted anything else, I was his goddess, the sole custodian of the happiness he had once brushed up against.

I slowly brought him around to think what I wanted him to think. Tullio had gone to see him, to order first one ring, then the second. And Nicola would go and deliver the finished rings to him at night, at the general hospital. There was no need for anything more. I knew what he would do, even though he had never discussed it explicitly. I wanted it, he knew I wanted it. And that was enough.

One night, the last night we saw each other, he asked me what I would do afterward. If it happened that Tullio was no longer on the face of the earth, if he was made to pay for what he’d done. I didn’t have the heart to lead him on, that was more than I could bring myself to do. I told him that I would look after my son, and tend to the honor of his name.

I wouldn’t want anyone else beside me, I added.

He said nothing. Probably he understood. I was different from the little girl he remembered, who had been on his arm at the festival of Our Lady of Mount Carmel.

That night he told me that there was a vow to the Madonna he had to keep, a vow he’d made when I left, and that he had made a heart of gold. I didn’t want to see it, I already felt soiled enough as it was. I bade him farewell with a kiss on the lips. He was trembling.

I prepared myself to wait. I pulled out the pathetic letter that Ruspo wrote, the one that Tullio had laughed at some time ago, and I kept it there, knowing I could use it when the time came.

I only needed to wait. Because I knew what would happen.

I knew it, at the bottom of my heart.