The Bottom of Your Heart (8 page)

Livia was certain that this subject was the talk of the town in the most exclusive cafés. She didn't mind it, either, because those green eyes had been the very reason she had moved to this town.

After a lifetime of watching men come as soon as she called, she found the role of suitor strangely intriguing. To hang on a man's lips, to try to fathom his thoughts and foresee his wishes, was something absolutely new for her.

It was hardly easy. Ricciardi was a tough nut to crack. When she was with him, Livia felt as if she could hear a sort of buzz, a background noise that spoke of memories or perhaps of regrets, of ancient sorrows. Livia didn't rule out the possibility that these regrets concerned another woman, but from that point of view she feared no one. She was Livia Lucani, not just any woman. She'd turned the heads of princes and cabinet ministers; for two weeks a Florentine count had flooded her hotel room with bouquets of roses. She wasn't about to be defeated by a phantom.

Moreover she sensed that, even if he didn't show it, Ricciardi enjoyed being with her. When they discussed a play or a movie they'd watched together, she glimpsed a flicker of interest and a tranquil enjoyment otherwise absent in those eyes the color of waves crashing onto a rocky shoal. The man was beginning to thaw.

After that November night last year, there had been nothing more between them. It seemed a dream, when she thought back on it. The rain, his fever. His pain, his hands, his shivering. The enchantment. Who could say if it had really happened at all?

For the first time in her life she had imposed upon herself an abstinence that, in the full maturity of her body and her heart, weighed on her. But if a woman is in love, she's hardly willing to settle.

 

“Vilia, O Vilia, my love and my bride!”

Softly and sadly he sigh'd.

 

Standing at the door to her bedroom, holding an armful of fresh linen, Clara the housekeeper stood listening raptly. Livia saw her in the mirror and gave her a level, inquisitive look.

The young woman couldn't contain herself.

“Signo', I can't help myself, I have to tell you: you are marvelous when you sing!”

Livia burst out laughing: “Oh, come on, Clara . . . I thought I was singing to myself, I didn't even realize that . . .”

“What are you talking about, Signo'? People in this neighborhood come to the windows of the buildings across the way to listen to you! Don't you realize what a stupendous voice you have? If I had a voice like yours I'd do just like the goldfinches do: I'd sing and never stop.”

“Thank you, my dear. Thank you. It's been so long since I sang that I'm out of practice. I loved to sing, when I was young. But now that time is gone . . .”

Clara interrupted: “Are you kidding? I've never heard a voice like yours. And in this city we all sing from morning till night, and even from night till morning. You know what we like to say here? That a heart in love or a heart in despair has no choice but to sing. It can't do without.”

A heart in love, thought Livia. A heart in love has no choice but to sing. That's why when I was with Arnaldo I lost all desire to sing. A heart in love.

She turned to look at her housekeeper, who was now making the bed: “You know what I say? Let's give a party. A party, in celebration of the wonderful summers that you have here.”

“Signo', I've always thought it was a deadly sin to have an apartment like this, with a drawing room that opens out onto a terrace, and never have anyone over.”

Livia stood up and clasped the young woman's hands in hers: “Yes, a wonderful party under the stars. We'll invite two hundred people. I want everyone to be there. And we'll have the piano moved out onto the terrace: you say that the people who live around here like to hear me sing, no?”

“Of course they do, Signo', it's all they can do to keep from clapping, when you're done.”

Livia broke into a little dance step: “We'll have a masquerade party. Let's think of a theme, something fun, I want everyone to be happy. What theme can we come up with? Help me out.”

Clara thought it over, wrinkling her nose in comic concentration. Then she said: “Why don't we pick the sea, Signo'? Here, for us, summer means the sea.”

Livia was delighted: “You're a genius, Clara. The sea. Nothing could be better. And once again I'll sing in public. We'll call a maestro, I need to practice, I can't come off looking like a fool. I want my audience to be amazed. It's going to be a wonderful night. And I'm going to introduce the man I desire to everyone who attends. You said it yourself, didn't you? A heart in love has to sing. I have to sing.”

Clara was caught up in Livia's happiness.

“Signo', listen, you have to sing a song with the words of our land, a song we can understand. A serenade, a tarantella, something that when the people hear it they'll say: ah, the signora sings like an angel. An angel in love.”

“Yes, Clara, you're right. I have to sing a song that everyone, absolutely everyone understands. Even those who pretend to be deaf. It has to be an enchanting song. And I know just where to get it.”

She went to her wardrobe. What she needed was an outfit that would take people's breath away: in that garment, the merry widow would dance her waltz.

N
ot 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.

T
he address that Nurse Zupo had given Ricciardi wasn't far away: he needed only to walk down a long
vicolo
until he reached Piazza San Domenico Maggiore, then walk down Mezzocannone, teeming with university students hurrying to summer school classes, and then follow Corso Umberto I until it took him to Piazza Nicola Amore, a square formed by four perfectly symmetrical buildings arranged in a semicircle, so that it had also come to be known as the Piazza dei Quattro Palazzi. Professor Iovine del Castello had lived there before he fell—or was pushed—seventy feet to the ground.

It wasn't far, no, but before they'd gone two hundred yards Maione was puffing like a steamboat and mopping his brow.

“Commissa', if you ask me, the professor threw himself out the window to get a little fresh air.
Mamma mia
, it's not even nine in the morning yet and already you can't breathe. If things keep up like this, by noon we'll all be on fire.”

Ricciardi was walking beside him, as usual without sweating.

“True, Raffaele, it's hot. The heat is dangerous around here, you know. It drives people crazy. As well as taking away what little inclination they might have to work.”

“Eh, you've got that right, Commissa'. For example, I'd be glad to sit at home in my underwear; in my apartment, if you open the kitchen and bathroom windows, there's a steady breeze that's pure poetry, believe me. I'd stretch out on the bed, ask Lucia to make me a cup of coffee, and I'd lie there reading the newspaper, following the news the rest of you make, the work you do, the cases you crack.”

“But you work twice as hard as anyone else at police headquarters. You wouldn't be able to stay home, even if you had a broken leg.”

A shadow passed over Raffaele's face.

“Everyone knows their own business, Commissa'. Believe me, if I could I'd happily take some time off. Just remember: we work to live, we don't live to work.”

Ricciardi practically stopped in his tracks: “Now you've become a philosopher, too. Tell me, though, what's going on: are you having problems? I don't know, the kids, or else . . .”

“No, no, don't worry about me. Maybe it's just that this heat brings evil thoughts. But to get back to our flying professor, there were no suicide notes. Instead, we found two gifts ready to be given, to two different people. The professor was another hard worker, but he managed to find the time to do lots of other things, eh, Commissa'?”