Blood Curse Read online

  The old woman had been unlike any other. She used to laugh whenever her idle and bored girlfriends told her how they spent their loveless afternoons, chasing after the dream of a better tomorrow. She’d even gone with them once or twice, only to witness ridiculous playacting, theatrical witches with assistants who pretended to be ghosts and produced sepulchral voices from the Beyond. The problem was that the Beyond was a crawlspace behind a fake wall, not even all that well concealed behind a half-open curtain.

  Then one day she’d met Attilio, after a play. She’d gone to the theater alone as usual, and that same, magical night, she’d had that chance encounter with the old woman. The old woman had approached her with her shuffling gait, and she had mistaken her for a panhandler. She’d ignored her, and was about to pass her by. But then the old woman seized her by the arm, staring at her in the darkness; she stopped, speechless. Then, with the same scratchy voice that she’d later listen to so eagerly, the old woman told her in no uncertain terms that she was unhappy because her heart was empty.

  That phrase: an empty heart. How could she have known that that was exactly how she saw herself—a woman with an empty heart? Attilio had intervened, impetuous, so muscular and handsome, without warning, first under the portico of the theater and then out in the rain. He’d chased the old woman away coldly, with exaggerated indignation. But before leaving her, the old woman had whispered an address in her ear. And the young woman had gone there the next day. Since then, she’d returned at least a hundred times, returning unfailingly, to follow the paths that the old woman indicated, for help overcoming her doubts, to decide which direction to turn at the crossroads that had always made her hesitate. She couldn’t so much as breathe without the old woman’s help. She paid her the pittance she asked for, but she would have given twice, three times, a hundred times more. She was buying the strength to live.

  This time, once again, it was her life that was at issue. She was expecting a definitive response, and she already knew the answer in her heart: this time she’d be able to feel she was alive, perhaps for the first time; this time she’d be able to choose love. She instinctively clamped her legs together at the thought of his hands. Her stockings rustled faintly and she felt ashamed, convinced as she was that the old woman could easily read her thoughts. But the old woman was laboriously sitting down at the card table, with great pain: her bones, of course. The smell of garlic and urine wafted over her, and she blinked slowly. The misshapen fingers reached out for the deck of greasy cards. She held her breath.

  VI

  There were no curtains or candles in the apartment. No concessions to theatrical effects, except for the modest flowers on the wallpaper. It was one of the first things she had noticed and it had caught her off guard when she first came to the place, short of breath from the steep stairs and the stale odors. A simple apartment, from what she’d been able to see: a single room adjoining a small kitchen, and a closed door.

  With the usual startling quickness of her gnarled fingers, the old woman shuffled the deck, whispering something under her breath; Emma had never understood what she was saying and she never wanted to. After reciting her cryptic words, she spat on the cards—three times. Emma clearly remembered the disgust she’d felt the first time she saw her do it. She’d been tempted to leap to her feet and run out the door, but the power in those movements had rendered her helpless. The gobs of spit vanished immediately, wiped dry by those deft hands and by the cards themselves as they slid one over the other. Suddenly, with the elegance of a croupier in a gambling den, the old woman held out the deck so she could cut the cards. Emma heaved a sigh. Her hands were sweaty. The old woman took half the cards and laid them down on the stained tablecloth. With the rest of the cards she made eight small piles, arranging them in the shape of a cross, and then she looked Emma straight in the eye. After a long moment during which Emma, as always, felt as if she were sinking into a sea of petroleum, she pointed to the pile at the center of the cross. The old woman nodded, again without a word. Since she’d arrived in the apartment, not a single word had been uttered.

  With the flash of motion that never failed to startle her, the old woman beat her fist down on the deck she’d pointed to, cawing out: “Munacie’, damme voce!” Spirits, give tongue!

  From the little balcony, two pigeons took flight, startled. In the street, four floors below, the chorus of urchin voices fell silent for a moment. Time stood still, as the woman once again witnessed an act of magic in which she believed implicitly and wholeheartedly. Now the old woman’s eyes were closed and she was breathing hard, lips clamped shut, white hair gathered in a bun, head sunk between her shoulders, both fists clenched on the table. After a moment she relaxed, took a deep breath, and lifted the first card from the chosen deck.

  The King of Coins.

  Filomena Russo emerged from the basso, knotting her scarf around her neck; she was cold, and this year’s winter seemed to go on forever. The icy wind battered her as she stopped to lock the deadbolt on the wooden door. She saw the word “whore” written in chalk. Goddamn them, she thought. Damn them.

  The Vico del Fico was a blind alley, an inset halfway up one of the steep streets of the Spanish Quarter. At the entrance to the alley was a shrine to Our Lady of the Assumption, a few flowers placed there in hopes of response to prayers that had gone unanswered; then there was a little piazzetta, invisible from the street: five bassi teeming with life, surmounted by the tall, darkened windows of ancient, half-empty buildings. Sunlight for just a few hours a day; the rest of the time, shadow and damp reigned uncontested.

  A tiny village in the heart of the city, and she was an outsider in that village.

  Head down, lapels lifted to cover half her face. Her handkerchief covered the other half. The man’s overcoat, old, worn and shapeless, shoes with cardboard soles. She carefully avoided puddles; otherwise, her feet would stay wet all day. And her feet were crucial. They had to support her during the long, exhausting workday in the fabric store on Via Toledo. She walked quickly, looking down at the ground and keeping close to the wall. She could feel the hostile eyes all over her, following her from the windows. She could feel hatred.

  Luckily, that evening she’d be home before her son; she could erase the word on the door. It was chalk or whitewash, and it would come away with water. It had happened before: some lowlife had carved the word with a knife, and she’d had to scrape away at it for an hour. Gaetano had asked about it. Nothing, she’d told him. Nothing. They have nothing else to think about.

  Behind her raised lapel, she smiled wryly. To call her a whore, she who hadn’t felt the touch of a man’s hand in two years, she who shrank from the eyes of everyone. To call her a whore, when she’d only had one man in her life, and one was all she’d ever have, because her Gennaro was dead and she’d never be able to stand anyone else’s hands on her body.

  At the corner of the vicolo, Don Luigi Costanzo stood waiting, as he did every morning. She would have liked to just avoid him, but the one time she’d taken a different route he had shown up that night and knocked on the door of the basso. He seized her by the arm, hurting her and hissing into her terrified face, Don’t you ever try that again, I’ll come and get you where you live. Gaetano watched from the shadows, a scream in his eyes but not on his lips. She had reassured him with a glance: Don’t be afraid, my darling son, don’t worry; this bastard will be out of here any second. Don Luigi was young, but people said that he’d already killed two men: an up-and-coming young guappo and the future capo of the quarter. He was married, with two children born in two years. So what did he want from her? You’re driving me out of my mind; I have to have you. What are you talking about? What did I do to make you lose your head? When I’ve never even looked in your direction, when I live like a slave, working from dawn to dusk, to feed my boy, to let him earn a trade, so he can earn a living, so he can have a future?

  And she had driven him out the door, threatening to scream, to bring shame upon him, to tell his y
oung wife everything, or, worse, to inform his father-in-law, the true capo of the quarter. And he’d left. But before turning to leave, he’d smiled at the boy, the smile of a demon from hell. Why, what a handsome young man, he’d said. Tender flesh, just waiting for a knife. Filomena sobbed all night long.

  The old woman turned over the second card in the pile. Seven of Swords. The old woman’s hand, twisted like a centuries-old oak branch, trembled for a moment, and her eyebrows came together. Emma held her breath and didn’t blink. Garlic, urine. The shouts of children in the street below. The morphology of fate.

  Filomena picked up her pace, as much as her broken-down shoes and the wet cobblestones allowed. She did her best to avoid the man, but he took a few quick sidelong steps and blocked her path. She stopped, head lowered, her face concealed by the upturned lapels of her coat. He emitted a ridiculous sound, smacking his lips in imitation of a long kiss. She stood motionless, waiting. He pulled his hand from his pocket and reached out for her; she took a step back. Then he said, Filome’, it’s only a matter of time. A matter of time, she thought. He asked her, with a laugh: What are you doing, all covered up like that? It’s like you’re ashamed. Are you ashamed? She maneuvered around him and strode off briskly toward Via Toledo. Yes, she thought to herself, I’m ashamed. Filomena Russo was ashamed of her worst defect, her curse. Filomena Russo was the most beautiful woman in the city.

  The old woman turned over the third card: an Ace of Cups. Her lips clamped shut. A fly smacked against the windowpane and the sound rang out like a shot. Emma realized that her own hand was at her throat; she could feel her suddenly racing pulse. Her feet were like ice. Another card, the fourth one: the Five of Swords. The old woman’s expression remained unchanged, but her hand trembled.

  Over time, she’d learned to recognize the card that represented him, the man she loved: the Knight of Clubs. It had always turned up, from the very beginning, accompanied variously by cards that urged flight, change, life. Why was it failing to appear, this of all times, now that she had made up her mind?

  The old woman turned over the last card in the deck, her last chance. It was neither a knight nor a king. It was the Queen of Coins. To her horror, Emma realized that a tear was running down the old woman’s cheek.

  Filomena waited for the first customer to enter the fabric shop where she worked. Standing on the street corner, bundled in her overcoat, with her handkerchief tied tightly around her head, she was indifferent to the wind. She’d have been glad to feel the warmth of the shop’s large stove on her skin—it was certainly already lit by now—but she couldn’t go in yet. She knew that Signor De Rosa, the shop owner, attached a great deal of importance to making sure the place was cozy from the minute it opened, convinced as he was that, that way, women chilled from the cold would gladly linger to make their choices, and therefore, to buy.

  But she also knew that Signor De Rosa, in his fifties and already a grandfather, had been threatening her for some time now. Filome’, out you’ll go. If you don’t come with me right away, I’ll toss you out on your ear. But if you’re willing, I’ll make you rich, shower you with gifts and jewelry. Filome’, you’ve bewitched me. You’ve driven me mad and now you have to heal me.

  Speaking with his wife would have been pointless; Filomena’s word against the word of a respected man, held in high regard for his seriousness and professionalism, and for his love for his family. In the best possible scenario, he’d throw her out, and she couldn’t afford to lose her job, not as long as Gaetano was still an apprentice; she’d be forced to send him to do menial labor, and he’d be poor for the rest of his life. And Gaetano’s well-being came before all other considerations. Standing erect at the street corner, all her beauty concealed in an old overcoat, Filomena Russo waited and wept silently.

  VII

  Ricciardi left his office at eight at night. He hadn’t allowed himself many breaks during the day; around one that afternoon he’d stepped out to buy a pizza from a street vendor, attracted by the column of smoke rising from the oil pot which also served as a sort of sign. Tata Rosa would not only disapprove of his choice, she would have gone on muttering for hours: You don’t think about your health. You might as well just shoot yourself in the head, she would have added. Better to just tell her he’d skipped lunch entirely.

  It hadn’t been a very good day. He’d spent it filling out forms, which were destined to go on moving from desk to desk ad infinitum. He often felt like a miserable accountant, unable even to grasp the few rigid formulas he used to reckon up the evil he encountered, an evil he struggled to express in rational terms. As if perversions, savage emotions, rage, and hatred could be put into words.

  Not that there was any shortage of murders; what was missing now was action, the open air, movement. He never felt comfortable shut up inside four walls, even knowing what awaited him out there; that’s the way it had always been. A leftover from his years at boarding school as an adolescent, most likely. People shunned him back then as they did now, driven away by the instinctive perception of some unnatural sorrow that he harbored within; even in a school full of cruel boys, ready to lash out at the slightest oddity, he went his solitary way, allowed safe passage and a wide berth. He couldn’t remember being pained by the experience; all things considered, he’d been better off that way. When you’re acquainted with the Deed, he thought, what are you going to tell a friend? Are you going to tell them what the dead tell you?

  The hallway was dark. Almost everyone had gone home. That’s how it always was: he was the first one there in the morning, the last one to leave at night.

  He knew what he’d see and, sure enough, he saw them: standing side by side on the second step of the broad, empty staircase, arms linked like a couple of old friends: the cop and the robber, like in the children’s game of that name.

  In their way, they were an anomaly in the world of the Deed: it had been two years now, and Ricciardi could still see them, faintly luminescent in the half-light; maybe because of the magnitude of the surprise, or maybe because there were two of them. He remembered the event clearly. It had been one for the books: a small-time ex-con, arrested after a brawl, had grabbed for the holstered revolver of one of the two officers leading him to his cell and had fired a bullet into his own temple. A bad break: the bullet had shot straight through his head and continued on, killing the officer to his left as well.

  As he walked past the pair, Ricciardi heard for what seemed like the thousandth time the words they kept repeating on an endless loop. The convict was saying, “I won’t go back, I won’t go back in there,” the police officer, “Maria, Maria, oh, the pain.” Not Maria the Virgin Mary—Maria his wife.

  The right side of the jailbird’s head, the one run through by the bullet, was destroyed: the gaping hole, the scorched skin all over his face, the eye socket vacated by the burst eyeball, brain matter splattered across his shoulder and chest. On the left side, only a small wound where the bullet had emerged to go hurtling into the head of the guard. The officer’s right eye was a deep red, as if a gnat had wandered into it, when in fact it was tinged with the blood that had flooded his brain. Eyes downcast on the steps, seeing without looking, Ricciardi whispered along with the dead officer, barely moving his lips, “Maria, the pain,” as though it were the punch line of a familiar joke. He walked quickly through the half-open front door, ignoring the hostile gaze of the watchman who had snapped a sharp salute. He needed some air.

  Even at that time of night, when the shops and cafés were all closed, Via Toledo swarmed with both the living and the dead. It had officially been called Via Roma for sixty years now, but for the people of the city the street’s name had never changed: it was Via Toledo when the occupying Spaniards built it, and it was Via Toledo now, as Ricciardi crossed it, brushing past the mendicants begging for bread, coins, attention. Whatever one wished to call it, the real name of that street was “borderline.” A boundary dividing two populaces as different as night and day, pitted against each
other in a tacit, unending war. Each of those who clutched at the hem of his overcoat considered himself heir to a uniquely unfortunate lot in life. And yet every one of the countless shades of passion could be traced back to two primal needs: procuring immortality through procreation and feeding oneself and one’s family. Power and the abuse of power, honor and pride, comfort and envy: all of them the spawn of hunger and love.

  Enrica ate her dinner while her father and brother-in-law argued. She was accustomed to the lengthy political diatribes that accompanied the evening meal: both she, the eldest daughter, and her mother and siblings had realized by now that there was no avoiding them, much less breaking in or changing the subject; so they might as well just eat their meal and let the two of them keep going at it after dinner, sitting over by the radio. That was the moment she awaited eagerly, all day long and perhaps even at night, as overbrimming with desire as she was in her dreams. She had become a skilled actress, able to feign interest in the argument underway when on the inside she was actually pursuing her own thoughts. She could hardly wait for dinner to be over and for everyone to troop off into the living room, leaving her to wash the dishes. It was a routine she liked: her stubborn, radiant, introverted, and sensitive nature had always made her a precise, orderly person. She was happiest when everything was in its place and everyone was doing their job, and the kitchen was her own personal domain. She didn’t want anyone’s help. She wanted to be left alone.

  And besides, she had a date.