The Past is a Foreign Country (19 page)

ONE MORNING, a SERGEANT from the drugs squad, just back in Bari after three months’ temporary transfer to Calabria, saw the drawing on Pellegrini’s desk.

‘I know this guy. I saw him one night last year, in a gaming club. We were working undercover, trying to get that gang of drug
dealers
in Madonnella. He was playing poker. And losing, losing really badly, but he seemed quite calm about it, as if it wasn’t his problem. I’ll never forget that face. Those eyes. Hold on, I remember now. After a while, I had the impression he realised who we were. From the way he looked at us. I was with Popolizio, the guy from
Altamura
who got transferred, and we both had the same impression and decided to leave. We didn’t go back till a few nights later, and he wasn’t there any more.’

He broke off and picked up the photocopy of the drawing. He looked at it for a few moments without saying anything. ‘It’s him, I’m almost sure of it.’ Then he turned to look at Pellegrini. ‘Good drawing. Who did it?’

When they entered the club, the players were trying to sweep the cards and chips off the tables, but they ignored them. Chiti turned to the sergeant from the drugs squad.

‘Who’s the manager?’

The sergeant made a movement with his head in the direction of a bald, dark-complexioned man of about fifty who was coming towards them.

‘Now look, what the hell–’

Chiti slapped him. Hard, with the whole hand, almost calmly. It was a way of saving time.

‘Carabinieri. We have to talk. If you behave, we’ll leave
without
asking any questions about what goes on in this dump. Is there somewhere quiet we can go for five minutes?’

The bald man looked at each of them in turn. Without a word, he gestured to them to follow him.

The office they entered was filthy. The stench of cigarette smoke was even stronger here than in the gaming room. The bald man gave them a questioning look. The sergeant showed him the identikit picture, asked him if he’d ever seen this man, told him to think carefully before he answered.

He thought carefully and said yes, he had seen him, he knew him.

From that moment on, things moved fast. Very fast.

Within a couple of days they had identified him. According to the local register, he lived with his widowed mother. But he was never home. There was no answer when they tried his entryphone.

They questioned people coming out of the building. Signora
Carducci
? She’d died about three weeks earlier. Which meant that the death certificate hadn’t been registered yet, Chiti thought. The son? Did they mean Francesco? No one had seen him since his mother’s death. No one knew anything. Maybe he’d gone to stay with
relatives
in another town. No, they didn’t know that for certain, it was just a guess, they didn’t even know if he had any relatives in another
town. To tell the truth, they didn’t know anything at all. Neither he nor his mother had ever been what you’d call talkative. In other words, they were completely in the dark.

It was at this point that Cardinale, once again, had an idea.

‘Lieutenant, let’s try to get in.’

‘And how do you suggest we do that, Cardinale? No prosecutor’s going to give us a search warrant. We don’t have anything.
Anything
at all. Just conjecture piled on conjecture. It’s quite possible this man had nothing to do with the assaults. What do we tell the prosecutor?’

‘I wasn’t actually thinking of a search warrant…’

‘So what were you thinking of? What do we do, go along there with a crowbar and break into the apartment, and maybe some neighbour sees us and calls 113 and the police come and arrest us?’

Cardinale said nothing. Pellegrini seemed fascinated by the tops of his own shoes. Martinelli stood stock still, gazing into the
distance
. Chiti looked at each of them in turn, an expression of
dawning
awareness on his face.

‘So that’s it. You want to bend the rules. You want to break the door down and…’

‘There’s no need to break the door down,’ Cardinale said. ‘I have a set of keys we took off a burglar.’ Then, as to justify himself, ‘We arrested him for at least ten jobs. Before you came to Bari. I think he’s still inside.’

‘Are you telling me you took a bunch of picklocks, obviously without recording them – in other words, you
stole
them – and you’re keeping them for your personal use?’

Cardinale pursed his lips, and said nothing.

Chiti was about to say something else, but then thought better of it. He took out a cigarette, lit it, and smoked the whole of it. The three men waited. Nothing stirred in the office. At last he put out the cigarette, took a deep, weary breath, propped his right cheek on
his clenched fist and his elbow on the desk. Again he looked at each of them in turn.

‘Tell me exactly what you want to do.  

ONE DAY I met my sister.

I was wandering as usual through the centre of town, looking in the windows of the expensive clothes shops I’d spent money in over the past few months.

I was vaguely thinking I ought to buy a few things for autumn and winter, but the whole business of going into shops, calling the assistants, trying on clothes, choosing, seemed altogether too
complicated
and tiresome.

When I bumped into Alessandra I didn’t recognise her, or
perhaps
I should say I just didn’t see her. She was the one who stopped right in front of me, practically barring my way.

‘Giorgio?’ There was a curious tone in her voice that must have been due to more than the fact that I hadn’t seen her or recognised her. Maybe it was something she saw – or
didn’t
see – in my eyes.

‘Alessandra.’ As I said her name, it struck me I didn’t know how long it had been since I’d last spoken it. Whenever it had been was lost somewhere in the mysterious depths of childhood.

She was twenty-seven, but looked a lot older. Her face was
prematurely
lined: she had little wrinkles at the corners of her mouth, around her eyes and on her forehead. Looking closer at her face, I noticed she even had a few thin white hairs, near the temples.

‘Giorgio, why the hell are you walking like that? You look like a junkie.’

How long was it since I’d last seen her? I couldn’t remember. I had no idea when both of us had last been in our parents’ apartment at the same time. I wondered if it had been after my new life had already started. Probably not, I thought. It must have been before I’d begun spending time with Francesco. In other words, at least ten months earlier. That was it, she had come home at Christmas, and I hadn’t seen her since. How strange, I thought. She’s part of my past. She’s part of the life I used to lead, before I got to know Francesco. That life seemed – was – so far away. I couldn’t have said if I felt nostalgia for it, or anything else. It was just…far away.

‘How are you…?’ I was about to say her name again, but I felt strangely embarrassed and left the sentence hanging.

‘I’m fine. And you?’

It was so weird, meeting like this, like two casual acquaintances. Because that was what we were, nothing more. How are you? Fine, and you? Oh, fine, and how about the family? Which family, mine or yours?

What was weird was that I really wanted to talk to her. It had never happened before. But I was so alone. Drifting. Just having a sister seemed strange. So I asked her if she felt like a coffee. She looked at me with an expression I couldn’t categorise. It wasn’t
exactly
surprise: it was something like surprise, but a little different. And a little sad. Then she said yes, she’d like a coffee.

We walked in silence for a couple of blocks until we came to a famous old pastry shop, full of wooden fittings and wonderful bygone smells. It was almost always empty these days, and the tea room seemed suspended in some indeterminate past.

‘Is it true you’ve given up studying, Giorgio?’

I was stunned. How did she know I’d given up studying?
Obviously
, my parents had told her. But that meant that my parents and my sister were on speaking terms. And that they talked about me. I found both of these things hard to believe.

‘Yes, it’s true.’

‘Why?’

‘Did Mum tell you?’

‘Both of them told me.’

We sat down at a table. They were all free, apart from one on the other side of the room, where two seventy-year-old ladies with blue rinsed hair sat smoking filter cigarettes, surrounded by bags from clothing shops.

‘When did they tell you?’

‘What difference does it make? What’s happening to you? Are you fucking up your life?’

Was I fucking up my life?

Yes, I’d say this was an economical, maybe slightly simplistic, but basically accurate definition of the past few months.

I didn’t say that, but it’s what I was thinking, word for word.

‘Oh, no. It’s just that I’ve been going through…’ Then I thought, no, I didn’t want to talk bullshit. I’d have liked to tell her
everything
, but that was impossible, so I fell silent.

‘In a way, I’m not surprised you stopped studying that stuff. I never thought you were cut out for law. When I was small you said you wanted to be a writer. You used to write those stories in your exercise books when you were in elementary school. I never read them, but everyone said they were very good.’

In other words, my sister had noticed that I used to write when I was a child.
Those stories
in my exercise books when I was in
elementary
school. I’d always thought I was completely invisible to her, and now I’d discovered that she knew a few things about me. I couldn’t believe it. I felt like crying and so I passed my hand over my face, like someone who’s worried but is trying to keep things under control. I signalled to the waiter. He came to our table and we ordered two coffees.

‘Would you like a cigarette?’ I said taking out my packet.

‘No. I quit.’

‘How many did you use to smoke? A lot, right?’

‘Two packets a day. Sometimes more. Apart from the other crap I used to put inside me from time to time.’

I looked at her without asking the question out loud. What had she
put inside her
? Had I understood her correctly?

Yes, I’d understood her correctly. I’d understood her perfectly well. My sister had been a heroin addict – with occasional forays into other mind-altering substances – for five years. I’d never known anything about it.

‘When…when did you quit?’

‘The cigarettes or the crap?’ Her lips were slightly pursed. There was a hint of a smile, partly bitter, partly mocking. Obviously I wanted to know when she’d quit shooting up. Actually, what I wanted to know more than anything was how, when and why she had started.

She told me a story I’d only known a part of until then. It was a common enough story. The time in London, then in Bologna and other places. The abortion, the thefts, a bit of dealing to get hold of drugs, her life with
that man
– she never said his name, and I couldn’t remember it and didn’t ask her – the community, and her life since. Which wasn’t exactly paradise on earth. Far from it. She told me about the dull, difficult life she was leading now. She told me about her sense of failure and emptiness. About how, when things get really bad, you think how good it would be to shoot up. Just once, to get past the bad times. But of course you know it won’t be just once, so, one way or another, you keep going. She told me about how you keep going, the tricks you use to keep going, her friends – she didn’t have many – her work. About things that were all – or almost all – so different from the way I’d imagined them.

Now, she said, she would like to have a baby. If only she could meet a man who was worth the bother.

She did almost all the talking. I listened to her, feeling a kind of dazed tenderness.

‘You’re not fucking up your life the way I did, are you,
Giorgio
?’ She stretched her left hand across the table and for a moment touched my hand.

‘Giorgio?’

I was sitting there, looking down at the hand she had touched. As if a trace of her hand was still there. It was so strange.

Then I pulled myself together. ‘No, no. Don’t worry. I’ve been going through a bit of a rough time. I’ve been kind of mixed up. It happens, I suppose. In fact, if you get a chance to talk to Mum and Dad, please tell them. I mean, tell them you talked to me – but don’t tell them I told you to talk to them – and that everything’s fine. We don’t communicate much at the moment, but I don’t like seeing them like that. Will you do that, as a favour to me?’

She nodded, and smiled, too. She seemed relieved. Then she looked at her watch and made a face, as if to say, Damn, it’s really late, when you’re talking you lose track of time, I really have to go now. She didn’t use those words, but that was the sense of it.

She walked around the table and before I had time to stand up she bent down and kissed me on the cheek.

‘Bye, Giorgio. I’m glad I spoke to you.’

Then she turned and walked out quickly. I was alone now in the tea room. The two ladies with the blue hair and the filter cigarettes had long gone.

The place was silent and unnaturally still.