The Bottom of Your Heart (16 page)

But why, he wondered, as he trudged up the last stretch of road, why had she gone there? Had something happened? Did she need help? A doctor for one of the children? No, impossible. She would have turned to Modo, and before doing that she would have let him know.

He walked into the apartment and was overwhelmed by the hugs of his three youngest: the two boys leaping onto him in a pretend ambush, and the little girl who began laughing the minute she laid eyes on him. He stopped to play with them, tousling their hair and pretending to be a big baboon. Then he went into the kitchen.

The first thing he ought to have said was:
Ciao
, my love, why were you in Via Toledo a couple of hours ago? Why didn't you stop by to say hello? Of course that's what he ought to have said. But, he thought, I'm a cop.

And so he played the cop.

“Mmm, what an appetizing smell,” he said. “What delicious treats are we cooking today, my fair ladies?”

At the table, Maria and Benedetta were mixing flour and water into a dough as carefully as a couple of elderly housewives. They even look alike, thought Maione, they really could be sisters.

Lucia raised her face, reddened from the steaming cookpots, and blew him a kiss.

“Don't worry, we won't throw a single morsel away. Go get changed and let us work in peace.”

Was he mistaken or had she been a little brusque? Wasn't she a little behind schedule today?

He feigned disappointment: “What, dinner isn't ready yet? I'm so hungry . . .”

“Don't worry. Dinner will be served at eight, like always. Go get changed like I told you to, you're dripping with sweat, worse than your children. Get going!”

Raffaele headed for his bedroom roiled by an unpleasant sensation. The dress, he thought. The dress that the person he'd seen was wearing. The black dress embroidered with roses of the same color.

He pulled open the armoire: there it was, in its place, on a hanger. But not on the usual hanger, in the middle of the curtain rod, where his wife kept her best dresses. Instead, it hung on the first hanger, the one closest to the bedroom door. As if it had been put away in a hurry.

He tried to distract himself by stopping for a chat with his oldest boy, Giovanni, who wanted to hear all about his work. The boy's mother worried about the fact that her son wanted to be a cop like his father and his murdered brother, so certain conversations were better held far from Lucia's ears, in undertones, like a couple of conspirators.

Maione told him about the professor who'd fallen out the window, without lingering on the more macabre details. He didn't want to encourage the boy, but he was pleased that he wanted to carry on the family tradition. And after all, becoming a policeman was better than becoming a criminal like so many other young men from the neighborhood, who chased after rewards both easier and much more dangerous to come by.

The dinner table was cheerful and loud, and Maione joined in the confusion; he didn't want to give his wife the impression that anything was bothering him. He waited until the kids were in bed and the dishes and pots and pans were in the drying rack, and when Lucia, exhausted, finally let herself drop into the chair next to his, he said to her in a neutral tone of voice: “
Mamma mia
, this heat makes everything so laborious. Just walking a few feet in the street outside is torture. Lucky you, that the only reason you have to go out is to buy groceries; and this evening it was hotter than it was in the middle of the day. But here at home there's a bit of a breeze, don't you think?”

“Yes, with the windows open on both sides of the apartment there's a slight draft. Anyway, it was hot this morning at the market too, believe me.”

Raffaele nodded. He stared at a point outside on the balcony because he knew all too well his wife's ability to read his thoughts in his eyes, and he didn't want to give anything away.

“I really wouldn't want to have to make that uphill climb home more than once a day. I think I'd die of a heart attack.”

Lucia was convinced that he wasn't looking at her because he was distracted by his worries. My poor love, she thought to herself, if only you could make up your mind to set aside this absurd pride of yours and confide in me. I'd reassure you, because I know there's always a solution to be found. But if you won't talk to me, then how can I talk to you?

“What are you talking about! Don't even joke about a thing like that. No one dies of a heart attack because of a little heat. Don't worry.”

“Sure,” responded Maione laconically. Then, after a pause: “Still, it really is hot, and tomorrow Mistrangelo—he's the one who takes the crime reports—tells me it's going to be hotter still. Don't ask me how he knows, but he always seems to get it right. You don't have to go out tomorrow, do you?”

“No, this morning I did the grocery shopping for tomorrow as well. You won't even have to leave me money. We don't need a thing.”

Maione nodded.

“And today? You only went out this morning, right?”

Lucia stared at him, surprised: “Say, what are all these questions for? Of course I went out this morning, I told you that I went to the market. And yes, it was hot. You keep asking me the same things. But do you even listen to me, when I answer?”

Maione raised one hand in apology: “Of course I listen, why wouldn't I? I was just worried that the heat was too much for you, the way it gets you down.”

“Truth be told, the one who suffers when it's hot out is you, what I hate is the cold. And in fact I'm not minding the heat all that much.”

“No, it's just that you always dress in black, don't you?” Maione went on, as if pursuing a train of thought. “And black attracts the heat. It's not a good idea to go out in bright sunlight if you're wearing black. So really there'd be nothing wrong with doing your shopping in the late afternoon, or even in the evening, when the sun isn't straight overhead, in other words.”

Lucia didn't know whether to laugh or to ignore him and just drop the subject: “Raffae', have you gone out of your mind? Now you're saying that because I wear black, I should do my grocery shopping in the evening? Then when would I do the cooking, at night? And then you'll have to go tell the people who sell groceries at the market to change their hours, have them open up in the evening. You can tell them: Excuse me, I'm Police Brigadier Raffaele Maione, would you be so kind as to put out your stalls in the evening instead of the morning, otherwise I'm afraid my wife might break a sweat?”

“No, I wasn't saying that, just . . .”

“Or else,” Lucia went on, continuing to imitate him, “would you do me the favor of simply bringing the groceries to my home, so my wife doesn't even have to use the stairs? Sure, that would be great, thanks, just choose the finest fruit and fish, that way she doesn't have to tire out her little hands by squeezing them.”

Maione sighed: “So now it's a crime if somebody worries about his wife. It doesn't matter, tire yourself out, sweat yourself silly, you can even faint in the street, just don't come crying to me about it. Today, for example, you went out in the morning, didn't you? So too bad for you.”

“I went out this morning, and I'm fit as a fiddle. Now let's go to bed. Tomorrow, you'll see, I won't go out at all, that way you'll be happy.”

T
he dialect of this city, a city that sings songs of love and tells tales of passions, has a special word to describe a gust of wind.

The word resembles another in the mother tongue, in Italian: but it's feminine, not masculine, so its meaning is profoundly different. And the word doesn't describe gusts of wind in general, but
one
gust of wind. A very special one.

Rèfola
.

Not the Italian word
refolo
, which is just a silly drizzle of air, a draft that can last for a while, bringing you nothing more than a brief sensation, the feeling on the skin scarcely registering in the mind. Nothing like that at all.

There's something magical about the
rèfola
, a short enchanted breath that vanishes even before you notice it's there. A faint awareness, perhaps the echo of a memory or the premonition of some future regret.

It presents itself as a sigh of cool air. It brings relief, it speaks of airy lands and snowy peaks, almond trees in bloom and foamy waves crashing on the rocks.

But it's merely an illusion.

 

I should have been there.

I should have been there, while you were falling to earth. While you were abandoning your life, all your memories, all the people, the faces, the sounds, the flavors.

I should have been there, while the ground was rushing up at you at dizzying speed, as you were embracing death, you who had always lived every breath in full, as if you were immortal, as if there were nothing that existed outside of you.

I should have been there, to ask you while you were falling whether there was a a thought in your mind of the harm. Of all the harm that you might have done, with those arms windmilling through the air, with that brain that was about to be smashed open on the stones in just a second or so.

And I would have relished the show. I'd have laughed at your pain and your death. I'd have danced around all that was left of you, in the moonlight. I'd have spat on your corpse, a hundred times, mingling my disgust with your blood and your brains.

I should have been there.

 

That's what it does, the
rèfola
.

It arrives when everything is stagnant, airless, when it seems as if nothing will ever change again, and that the world and the entire universe are going to sink into a sea of heat. When you feel, keeping vigil throughout the night as if wrapped in a boiling shroud, as if you'd been hurled down into the inferno, and that in just a moment Beelzebub might come to ask you to account for your sins.

But the
rèfola
brings a smile, vanishing before a single thought can be completed.

 

I love you, you know. I love you.

I'll say it to you in the silence of this night I'm passing elsewhere, far from my bed and my things, far from the thoughts that I now know were those of a little girl. Far from you and your gaze through the window.

Perhaps one needs to go far away, in order to understand love. Perhaps one needs to get away from the books on the bookshelf, from the glass of water on the nightstand, from the dresses neatly hanging in the armoire, to understand how much one might want a kiss, how much one needs a hand, in the night.

I love you. Not because of an image behind the glass, not because of the color of your eyes in the half-darkness, not because of your lips, grazing mine in a strange snowfall.

I love you because I want you in this bed, here and now. Because I'd like to take you against my breast and in my arms, because I don't know the flavor of your skin and I'd like to taste it.

I love you in the flesh and in the blood. That's what distance has taught me, and I wish it had taught me the opposite, that it had told me of a silence to be filled with other music, of empty spaces to be furnished with other wood and other glass and other silver. I wish.

But I love you. Now and yesterday and tomorrow. I love you.

 

The
rèfola
tells, in a fleeting second, all the stories that we'd tell ourselves, if only we had the courage.

It doesn't have the time to carry things through to the end, and it wouldn't even want to. It suggests the beginning, the first notes of the song, the opening strains of a well-known symphony.

Our soul does the rest.

 

I'm not sleeping, no. And how could I sleep?

Death isn't a joke. Death is an enormity.

It's one thing to struggle, to stand up for your convictions, to affirm your will to survive. Death is another.

Death means you no longer exist. That by your hand, a person who once loved, hated, felt pleasure and pain, from one moment to the next becomes a heap of bloody rags, without breath and without emotions.

Death means that by your hand a creature that till then had been at the center of a spiderweb of feelings and passions, someone who might have been a father and a husband, a friend and a son, disappears from the list of the living and becomes a name engraved on a headstone, the phantom of a memory.

I'm not sleeping. I can't.

Because death isn't a game, something that you can patiently reassemble, with nimble fingers or careful eye. Once you've dealt it, you can't take it back. Death is definitive. From death, there's no returning.

Then why do I see you here, sitting on my bed? Why do I hear your voice, why do I still see the surprise in your eyes?

I'm not sleeping. I can't.

Someone who's dealt out death can't sleep.

Ever again.

 

Since it's feminine, the
rèfola
always knows what it's doing. It never wavers from the task it has set itself.

Since it's feminine, it seduces intentionally, never by chance. Who knows how much time it takes, in the cool depths where it originates, choosing the right plunging neckline, the right swivel of the hips. Since it's feminine, it knows the right buttons to push in the fraction of a second it will have available to act. Since it's feminine, it knows the power of a touch that barely grazes, apparently by chance, to churn the blood gone stagnant against the heat.

Since it's feminine, it knows how much destruction lies concealed in a passion. And how much fun it is to trigger that destruction and then stand to one side, observing its terrible effects.

 

And now? What will we do now?

We'd gotten used to the prosperity, the tranquillity, as if they would never come to an end. To the gifts, the money, the clothes.

We'd gotten used to them.

Because they came from those womanly hands, smooth and restless, and from the desire to receive compliments and smiles. We thought they'd never end.