“A minute ago you said you saw your sister’s image in the mirror.What did you mean?”
She smiled ever so slightly.
“It all began as a game when we were five years old.We would stand in front of the mirror and start talking. But not directly. We would each turn towards the other’s reflection. We kept on doing it, even after we grew up. When we had something really serious or secret to tell, we would go stand in front of the mirror.”
The girl then rested her head on Montalbano’s shoulder for a moment. He realized that it was not to seek comfort, but to alleviate the profound weariness she must have felt from speaking to a stranger about something so intimate, so secret.
Then she stood up decisively and looked at her watch.
“It’s already three-thirty. Shall we go?”
“If you want.”
But hadn’t she said she could stay out until five?
Montalbano got up, feeling slightly disappointed, and the waiter prepared the check.
“Let me pay for this,” said Adriana.
And she pulled some money out of the pocket of her jeans.
But when they were in the parking lot, she made no move towards her car. Montalbano gave her a puzzled look.
“Let’s take yours,” she said.
“Where to?”
“If you’ve understood me, you’ve also understood where I want to go. I don’t need to tell you.”
He had, of course, understood. He’d understood perfectly well. But he was acting like the soldier who doesn’t want to go to war.
“Do you think it’s appropriate?”
She didn’t answer, but only kept looking at him.
Montalbano realized that in the end he would not be able to say no to her.The soldier would go to war, there were no two ways about it.And anyway, the sun was beating down on them like a sledgehammer there in the parking lot. It was impossible to remain out in the open one moment longer.
“All right, get in.”
Getting into the car was like lying down on a grill.
Montalbano regretted not bringing his minifan. Adriana opened all the windows.
For the duration of the drive, she sat with her head leaning out the window, eyes closed.
The inspector, on the other hand, had a nagging question boring into his brain: Wasn’t he doing something incredibly stupid? Why had he agreed to go along? Just because the heat in the parking lot made it impossible to discuss things? But that was only the excuse he’d come up with on the spot.The truth was that he rather liked helping this girl, who—
Who could be your own daughter!
his conscience interrupted.
You stay out of this!
Montalbano replied angrily.
I was thinking of something entirely different, that is, that this poor girl has been carrying a terrible weight inside her for six years, the exact intuition of what happened to her sister, and only now is she finding the strength to talk about it and unburden herself. It’s only right to help her
.
You’re just a hypocrite, worse than Tommaseo,
said the voice of his conscience.
As soon as they turned onto the dirt road to Pizzo, Adriana opened her eyes.
When they were passing in front of her house, the girl said:
“Stop!”
She didn’t get out, but only looked at the house from the car.
“We’ve never gone back since then. I know that from time to time Papa sends a woman over to clean it and keep it in order, but we just haven’t had the courage to come back here in the summer, like we used to do . . . Okay, we can go now.”
When Montalbano pulled up in front of the last house, the girl was already opening the car door.
“Do you really have to do this, Adriana?”
“Yes.”
He left the car open, the keys in the ignition. In any case, there was not a living soul around.
Once out of the car, Adriana took his hand and brought it to her lips, resting them there for a moment, then continued holding it tightly. He led her to the side of the house where one could enter the illegal apartment. Forensics had placed two planks there to facilitate descent.The window to the small bathroom was covered with ribbons of colored plastic of the sort used for road work. From one of these strips dangled a sheet of paper with stamps and signatures. It was the official seal.The inspector removed it all and went in first, telling the girl to wait for him. He turned on the flashlight he’d brought with him and checked all the rooms.The few minutes it took to walk around the apartment sufficed to drench him in sweat.There was a sort of viscous humidity in those underground rooms, and it felt grimy, dirty; the stale, heavy air burned the eyes and throat.
He went back and helped the girl climb through the window.
Once inside, Adriana took the flashlight from him and started walking, heading straight for the living room.
As if she’d been there before, the inspector thought, bewildered, as he followed her.
Adriana then stopped in the doorway to the living room and shone the flashlight’s beam on the walls, the pile of frames wrapped in plastic, and the trunk. She acted as if she’d forgotten that Montalbano was beside her. She said nothing, but was breathing heavily.
“Adriana . . .”
The girl didn’t hear him, but only continued her personal descent into hell.
She started walking, but slowly, as though uncertain. She turned slightly to the left, towards the trunk, then turned again to the right, took three steps, and stopped.
As she was moving about in this manner, Montalbano, who ended up almost in front of her, noticed she had her eyes closed. She was looking for an exact spot, not with her eyes, but with some other, unknown sense that she alone must have possessed.
Having arrived to the left of the French door, she placed her hands on the wall as though bracing herself, her legs spread apart.
“Matre santa!”
Montalbano said in terror.
Was he witnessing a sort of reenactment of what had happened in that room? Was Adriana perhaps possessed by Rina’s spirit?
All at once the flashlight fell to the floor. Luckily it didn’t go out.
Adriana was standing in the exact same spot where Forensics had placed the pool of blood. Her body was shaking all over.
It’s not possible, it’s not possible!
Montalbano said to himself.
His rational mind refused to believe what he saw.
Then he heard a sound that paralyzed him. Not weeping, but a kind of wail. Like a mortally wounded animal’s wail, long, sustained, soft. It was coming from Adriana.
Montalbano sprang, bent down, picked up the flashlight, grabbed the girl by the hips and pulled. But she resisted. It was as though her hands were glued to the wall.The inspector then worked his way between her arms and the wall, shot the beam of the flashlight in her face, but the girl still had her eyes closed.
From her twisted, half-open mouth came the distressing wail, and now there was a thread of drool as well. Dismayed, he slapped her hard twice, with the front and the back of his hand.
Adriana reopened her eyes, looked at him, and embraced him with all her might, pressing her body firmly against him and pushing him up against the wall. Then she kissed him hard, biting his lips. Montalbano felt the ground go out from under his feet and grabbed on to her as if not to fall, as her kiss went on and on.
Then the girl let go, turned, ran to the bathroom window, and climbed through it. Montalbano followed fast behind her, having no time to put the seals back up.
Racing to Montalbano’s car,Adriana got into the driver’s seat and turned on the ignition. Montalbano barely managed in time to get in on the other side as the car was pulling away.
Adriana then stopped the car in front of her house, got out, ran to the door, searched in her pockets, found the key, opened the door, and went in, leaving it open behind her.
By the time Montalbano was inside, she was gone.
What should he do now? He heard her vomiting somewhere.
He went outside and slowly walked around the house. The silence was total. Except for the thousands of cicadas, that is.At one time there must have been a field of wheat behind the house, because he saw a
pagliaro
there, a tall, narrow hut made of straw and agave flowers.
Under a clump of long-yellowed weeds, a sparrow was rolling around in the dry dirt, cleaning itself in the absence of water.
He felt like doing the same. He, too, needed to clean himself, of all the filth that had stuck to his skin when he was in the underground apartment.
Then, without realizing what he was doing, he did something he used to do as a little boy. He took off his shirt, pants, and underwear, and, completely naked, pressed his body against the
pagliaro
.
Then he opened his arms as wide as he could and embraced the hut, trying to stick his head as far inside as possible. He was forcing his way into the
pagliaro,
thrusting all of his body weight forward, moving it first to the right, then to the left. And when, at last, he began to smell the clean, dry odor of withered straw, he breathed it in deep, and deeper still, until he detected a scent that surely existed only in his imagination, that of the sea breeze, which had managed to wend its way into the dense web of dried stalks and remain trapped therein. A sea breeze with a slightly bitter aftertaste, as if burnt by the August heat.
All at once, half the
pagliaro
collapsed on top of him, covering him up.
He stayed that way, immobile, feeling cleansed by every blade of straw that had come to rest on his skin.
Once, as a child, he had done the exact same thing, and his aunt, no longer seeing him anywhere, had started to call to him.
“Salvo! Where are you? Salvo?”
But that wasn’t his aunt’s voice—that was Adriana calling him, just a few yards away!
He felt lost. He could not let her see him naked. What the hell had got into him? Why had he gone and done such a silly thing? Was he insane? Was it the intense heat that was making him fuck up so much? How was he going to find a way out of this ridiculous situation?
“Salvo? Where are you? Sal . . .”
Surely she had just spotted his clothes on the ground! He realized she was drawing closer.
She’d found him.
Matre santa,
how embarrassing! He closed his eyes, hoping to become invisible. He heard her laughing wildly, surely throwing back her beautiful head as she had done at the station. His heart started pounding with increased pressure. Now
that
was an idea: Why couldn’t he have a nice little heart attack? Then, more strongly than the scent of withered straw, more strongly than the sea breeze, he smelled the overwhelming fragrance of her clean skin. She had taken a shower.The girl must now have been only inches away.
“If you stick out your arm, I’ll hand you your things,” said Adriana.
Montalbano obeyed.
“Okay, don’t worry, I’m turning my back now,” the girl continued.
The only problem was that she kept laughing, humiliating him, the whole time he was clumsily getting dressed.
“I’m late,” Adriana said as they were getting into the car. “Would you let me drive?”
She had realized that, when it came to driving fast, Montalbano was a lost cause.
For the entire ride—which was over quickly, with them pulling up in the restaurant’s parking lot in the twinkling of an eye—she kept her right hand on his knee, driving with only her left. Was it this way of driving or the heat that left the inspector bathed in sweat?
“Are you married?”
“No.”
“Do you have a girlfriend?”
“Yes, but she doesn’t live in Vigàta.”
Why had he blurted that out?
“What’s her name?”
“Livia.”
“Where do you live?”
“In Marinella.”
“Give me your home phone number.”
Montalbano said it, and she repeated it.
“Already memorized.”
They arrived. The inspector got out of the car. She too. They found themselves standing one in front of the other. Adriana put her hands on his hips and kissed him lightly.
“Thanks,” she said.
The inspector watched her drive away, tires screeching.
He decided not to drop in at the station but to go directly home. It was almost six o’clock when, dressed in his bathing suit, he opened the French door giving onto the veranda. And there he found three youngsters sitting down, two boys and a girl, each about twenty. It was clear they had made his veranda their home for the entire day; they had eaten, drunk, and taken off their clothes to go swimming there. There were still dozens of people on the beach, taking in the sun’s last rays.
But scattered all across the sand were scraps of paper, leftovers, empty boxes and bottles. In short, a veritable dump. The veranda, too, had been turned into a dump, the deck scattered with a hodgepodge of cigarette butts and roaches, cans of beer and Coca-Cola.
“Before you leave, I want you to clean all this up,” he said, descending the short flight of steps and heading towards the water.
“Okay, but you clean your asshole first,” said one of the boys behind him.
The other two started laughing.
He could have just ignored it, but he turned around instead and slowly approached them.
“Who said that?”
“Me,” said the huskier of the two guys in an arrogant tone.
“Come down here.”
The kid looked at his friends.
“Let’s go help the old man. I’ll be right back.”
The kid plunked himself in front of him with legs spread, then reached out and shoved him twice.
“Go take your swim, Grandpa.”
Montalbano started him out with a left, which the kid dodged, while his right, as planned, got him square in the face and dropped him straight to the ground, half unconscious. It wasn’t so much a punch as a wallop.The other two quickly stopped laughing.