[Ricciardi 09] - Nameless Serenade Read online

  ALSO BY

  MAURIZIO DE GIOVANNI

  IN THE COMMISSARIO RICCIARDI SERIES

  I Will Have Vengeance:

  The Winter of Commissario Ricciardi

  Blood Curse:

  The Springtime of Commissario Ricciardi

  Everyone in Their Place:

  The Summer of Commissario Ricciardi

  The Day of the Dead:

  The Autumn of Commissario Ricciardi

  By My Hand:

  The Christmas of Commissario Ricciardi

  Viper:

  No Resurrection for Commissario Ricciardi

  The Bottom of Your Heart:

  Inferno for Commissario Ricciardi

  Glass Souls:

  Moths for Commissario Ricciardi

  IN THE BASTARDS OF PIZZOFALCONE SERIES

  The Bastards of Pizzofalcone

  Darkness

  for the Bastards of Pizzofalcone

  The Crocodile

  Europa Editions

  214 West 29th St.

  New York NY 10001

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  www.europaeditions.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously.

  Copyright © 2016 by Maurizio de Giovanni

  Published by arrangement with The Italian Literary Agency

  First publication 2018 by Europa Editions

  Translation by Antony Shugaar

  Original Title: Serenata senza nome. Notturno per il commissario Ricciardi

  Translation copyright © 2018 by Europa Editions

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  Cover Art by Emanuele Ragnisco

  www.mekkanografici.com

  ISBN 9781609454616

  Maurizio de Giovanni

  NAMELESS SERENADE

  Nocturne

  for Commissario Ricciardi

  Translated from the Italian

  by Antony Shugaar

  To Severino, my dear Severino.

  Deep in the heart.

  And in each individual story.

  NAMELESS SERENADE

  PROLOGUE

  There’s not enough light. It’s what the young man has always thought, from the first time he came here: there’s not enough light in this room.

  At first, he thought it was because the the old man must be practically blind, those eyes of his veiled over in white. Now, though, he’s not so sure anymore. Of course, people who can’t see very well find their way around familiar ground without difficulty, they often almost seem to move better than the sighted. But that old man, as the young man knows very well by now, is special. In any number of ways.

  The old man always receives him in the afternoon and the first thing he asks him to do is to open the shutters, which he usually keeps half closed. By now, he, the young man, knows by heart the path to the window, a path that leads through stacks and stacks of books and old newspapers, phonograph records and boxes with mysterious contents, stacked up messily. That way he’s able to open the shutters without doing too much damage. But still, he thinks to himself, there’s just not enough light in that room.

  The message reached him right after he’d finished performing. While he was on his way to his dressing room, followed by a surge of applause and cheers, everyone trying to stop him for an autograph and a hello, he glimpsed the woman in the shadows, a scrap of paper in her hand. It took him a minute to place her; when you see someone out of context the mind doesn’t connect at first. Then he remembered, and his heart skipped a beat. After all, he’s an old man. A very old man.

  He shrugged past the hands and the smiles and went up to her. Every time he goes to see the old man, she silently answers the door and leads him inside, but at this moment the young man realizes he has never really looked at her before. She’s a nondescript little woman, hair pulled back, eyes downcast. She wears a dark overcoat and stands off in a dim corner of the hallway that leads from the stage to the dressing rooms.

  The young man stood waiting, his heart full of grim foreboding. The woman handed him the note. The slanted, wavering handwriting: tomorrow evening at six.

  The young man has been going to see the old man for months now. He’s always requested the meeting, pestering insistently to be received. And again and again he has been greeted at the door by the woman murmuring: the Maestro can’t see you today, come back tomorrow. Now, unexpectedly, he’s actually being summoned, no less. The young man asked if something had happened, if the Maestro was all right, but she did no more than shrug her shoulders, and then turned to go without a word of farewell.

  Now, tomorrow is today, and the young man, in the doorway, blinks because there’s too much light.

  The window is open. The old man is standing there, arms folded across his chest; his white hair, long and thinning, tosses lazily in the breeze. The young man shivers.

  “Buonasera, Maestro,” he says, tugging the lapel of his overcoat snug around his neck. Up there, the air seems different from down in the street: chilly, cutting. The sunset cuts the sky in half, the night and the clouds press in from the other side. The sea, which the young man can glimpse from the doorway, surges uneasily.

  He thinks to himself that he can’t have seen the old man on his feet more than twice, in all these months. He’s almost always been slumped in that shapeless armchair, seemingly immersed in partial slumber, except when he suddenly speaks to him, as if the old man could read his mind. He’s also usually bundled up warmly, even on scorching hot summer days, his shirt buttoned up to his chin, a vest and a light blanket over his legs. But now there he stands, in the draft gusting impetuously into the room. A few sheets of paper from the stack behind him flutter to the floor. The young man coughs softly, takes a step forward, and says: “Please, Maestro, it’s cold out. Let’s shut the window, come sit down, why don’t you. Don’t you feel the wind?”

  The old man doesn’t even turn to look at him, his eyes veiled with a film of white seem instead to scrutinize a corner in the distance, between the sea and the sky. He says, in a serious tone: “That isn’t the wind. That’s the autumn. Do you know the autumn?”

  The young man has learned that there are no answers to certain of the old man’s questions, to all appearances incomprehensible: neither a right answer nor a wrong one. For a while he just assumed the old man had lost it, that he no longer had a solid grip on reality and that he couldn’t really teach him anything. That was before he realized that he learned more in an hour spent in that strange room filled with old age than in a hundred hours being tutored by renowned conductors and bandleaders.

  “All I know is what everyone else knows, Maestro. It’s an intermediate season, between summer and winter. It rains often, some days are hot and others are cold. School starts. That’s what I know.’

  “What about music, though?” he thinks. “When are we going to talk about music? That’s what I’m here for. Why did you send for me?”

  The old man half turns toward him.

  “An intermediate season, you say. No. That’s not right. Autumn is the beginning. Autumn is the end. And you know why?”

  Ah, it’s about music. He’s talking about music again, the young man thinks, with a shiver. He’s remembering something that has to do with music. One time, when it was still hot out and the smell of the sea came in through the half-open window, instead of the chilly air, the old man told him: “If we’re ever talking about feelings, we’re talking about music; don’t forget that.” And the young man doesn’t forget it.

  “Because in autumn, there is loss. That’s why.”

>   The old man says it in a different tone. In a tone that contains stories and memories. In a tone that has departures but no returns home. The young man, if nothing else, is at heart an artist, and his soul trembles with a long shiver.

  “Loss, Maestro? Loss? What loss?”

  The old man turns around completely and looks at him for the first time. The wind changes the direction it’s tossing his long white hair. Half his face is illuminated by the sunset, tinged blood-pink; the other half is black with shadow and defeats and wrinkles. The young man notices the instrument in his hand, hidden until now, held by the neck as if it were an extension of his arm: a red spruce prosthetic extension, concave, with four pairs of strings.

  When he sees the mandolin, the young man feels a sort of whiplash. His muscles tighten, his skin ready even before his mind to greedily absorb every chord, every magical variation of those deformed fingers, still capable of drawing exquisite sounds from the strings. That’s why he’s there in the first place, the young man. To learn that unique sound. Because all of the people who come to hear him sing and worship him like a little god come to earth, have no idea that the real music, the music that he’d gladly give one of his legs to know how to play, actually lives in a small room halfway up the hill, in the arthritic hands of an old man who doesn’t want to share it with anyone. And he comes there to steal it from him, note by note, almost hoping to be infected.

  He speaks cautiously, his eyes fixed on the instrument as if he were afraid that, in the throes of some transport, the old man might hurl it out the open window.

  “Loss, yes. Will you tell me, Maestro, about the loss that is there in the autumn?”

  The old man smiles at him and suddenly seems to have gone insane, in a sweet and despairing insanity. “I can’t possibly tell you about loss. Loss, you know, is in the song.”

  “Which song?” the young man asks. He hopes that the old man might pull out some unknown song; it would be wonderful to be able to add it to his repertory. His audience would be stunned, their jaws would drop.

  But the old man, in answer to the question, reaches out in a fluid and decisive gesture, seizing the mandolin with absolute precision. The young man understands that this exact gesture has been repeated thousands, perhaps millions of times before. It’s simple, definitive. He’s only ever seen him play sitting down, the old man; it never even occurred to him that he might have the strength to hold the instrument without balancing it on his knee. But now here he is, by the light of the sunset and in the autumn wind, without a strap and without support. He usually doesn’t look at his hands, or at the strings. In general, his eyes are fixed on some faraway point in time and space, on the heels of who knows what forgotten memory, who knows what illusion. Now, however, those filmed pupils are fastened on him, on the young man, along with a faint, melancholy smile.

  The old man strums a pair of chords and the young man recognizes them instantly. He feels a hint of disappointment; not only is the song not an unfamiliar one, it’s one of the most famous songs around, perhaps the most famous of them all.

  But, as always, in the dusty room where Music lives, that sound splits his heart in two. And the celebrated introduction becomes something new and and ancient, sweetly familiar and yet never heard before.

  The old man stops, as if someone had spoken into his ear. He turns again into the wind. “Yes,” he says. “This is where loss is. The despair of loss.”

  The young man shakes his head: “But Maestro, why loss? This is a serenade, isn’t it? It’s a lament, yes, that I undersand, and suffering, certainly; but loss?”

  The old man sighs. He moves closer to the window; by now evening has won out over the sunset. He carefully seats himself, dragging his feet; he arranges the blanket over his legs, but clutches his instrument the whole time.

  He speaks softly.

  “This song,” he says. “This song: you play it well, and you sing it well. And yet it’s the one song you especially get wrong.”

  The young man thinks of the applause, the rapt silence of his audience, the triumphant reception when he finishes playing. Of the fact that that is the piece most frequently requested, the one that he always keeps for his last encore. And he wonders, once again, when it was that the old man ever heard him perform it.

  “Maestro,” he asks: “How do I get it wrong? I follow the original score, and I sing it from start to finish . . . Some of my fellow musicians only sing two verses. If you could just explain to me . . . ”

  “You get it wrong. Because you don’t infuse it with the loss that is in it. The key to the story that the song tells is loss. He goes to sing under her window because he has lost her.”

  The young man whispers: “Why no, Maestro. He hasn’t lost her at all. In fact, afterward they marry, and actually . . . ”

  The old man slaps down his open hand onto the mandolin case; a flat blow, sharp and angry. Like a gunshot.

  “No! At the moment that he’s writing, he’s lost her. You always make the same mistake, you think that a song is a song and that it was written to be sung. That’s not the way it is. A song is a message, don’t you understand? A message. She has married, he has lost her. And it’s autumn, and even if it isn’t, it’s as if it were. It’s over, don’t you see? Over!”

  The young man pulls his head down into his shoulders, astonished by the power of that voice as it resonates around the room, charged with resentment and rage. “What the fuck is the matter with him?” he wonders. “I should tell him to go to hell and be done with him, I’m not putting up with this anymore, who the hell does he think he is?”

  But the old man continues.

  “That’s why you’re singing, when will you get that through your head? You sing to tell that story, eternally. You sing every night to bring that sentiment into time. The little girls who come to hear you mean nothing, nor do the men and women who leap to their feet to give you a standing ovation. It doesn’t change a thing whether you’re singing all alone, in your bathroom at home, or up on that stage. The story isn’t yours, but you’re the one who has to tell it. He’s down in the street, in the night; she’s behind a window, with the man they put next to her. He knows her sorrow, he knows her resignation; he doesn’t want to hurt her, but he can’t remain silent. He can’t leave her. He can’t bring himself to leave her.

  “He wrote it in an hour, his fever is raging. His friend, too, cut and stitched the music in just an hour’s time. In the silent darkness, in the chilly autumn wind, the one who sings is a blinded bird who has lost his mate. Forever, of that he has no doubt. He’ll never be happy. He’s a convict, sentenced to death, singing all the regret and all the yearning of his life. He’s waiting for the light to go out in the window so that his eternal damnation will begin, then he tells her why he is there. He sings to her of his loss. He sings to her of the autumn.

  “Now listen.”

  He takes the instrument in hand again. In spite of himself, the young man leans forward to listen. The old man’s fingers dart like butterflies up and down the neck, in the strange positions dictated by their deformities. As the old man plays, he looks the young man in the eyes as if he were delegating the telling of the story to the mandolin, underscoring the bends and curves in the music as it runs down to the sea, like the most unpredictable of rivers.

  Then he starts to whisper the words. And the young man whispers them along with him, his eyes wide open in the dim light that surges fitfully through the window.

  Si ’sta voce te scéta ’int’a nuttata,

  mentre t’astrigne ’o sposo tujo vicino,

  statte scetata, si vuo’ sta scetata,

  ma fa’ vedé ca duorme a suonno chino.

  Nun ghí vicino ê llastre pe’ fá ’a spia,

  pecché nun puó sbagliá ’sta voice è ’a mia . . .

  È ’a stessa voice ’e quanno tutt’e duje,

  scurnuse, nce parlávamo cu ’o vvuje

  (If this voice awakens you in the night,

  as yo
u hold your husband close,

  stay awake, if you wish to stay awake,

  but pretend that you’re sleeping soundly.

  Don’t go over to the window to peer down,

  because there can be no mistake about it: this voice is mine . . .

  It’s the same voice as when the two of us

  shyly, shamefully, spoke to each other with formality).

  The old man’s voice is warm and sorrowful. The old man’s voice resonates agelessly, hovering through the nights of centuries and sorrows. Nights without sleep.

  Autumn nights.

  I

  Cettina couldn’t tear herself away from the window. He had told her that he would come, and he’d never failed to live up to his word before; still, it was getting late and she feared that any moment her father and mother would be home from the shop: at that point, she’d no longer be able to speak to him.

  She’d finished cleaning up, and she’d also made dinner. Then she’d combed her hair, gathering her long tresses back into a braid that she’d rolled up at the back of her head; she had her little cap within reach.

  The weather was turning nasty, but it wasn’t raining yet. That’s the way October is, Cettina thought. One day it’s fine out, the next it’s foul.

  For the umpteenth time, she flew over to the large mirror, the one in the front hall, to make sure she was ready to a T. Her brown muslin skirt, her white blouse. Sober enough to avoid giving the impression she was planning to go out, in case her parents came home before he arrived, but still elegant enough that she’d be able to go downstairs into the street to greet him.

  Cettina was fifteen years old and had a heavy heart. Because Cettina was in love, and she was afraid that she was about to lose him, her beloved. Still, she was determined to fight for him.

  The war had carried off so many men in that year and a half, and still more would be killed in the months to come. It was no joke. Many would never return home, and far too many were home already, wounded, crippled by shrapnel from grenades and mortar shells. That war was incomprehensible, to Cettina. Just as it was for nearly all the women who stayed home to guard and protect a hollow shell of their former lives, waiting heart in mouth for either a familiar footstep or a telegram. Lands too far away to be called part of the fatherland, places too distant to need to be defended with their lives; and the memories of the old folks, who remembered another king and a different nation, were translated into accounts of an ancient grandeur, making even more meaningless the reasons for a conflict that was already hard to accept.