Cabaret (13 page)

I remember with a shudder his hands that felt like slabs of hot lard smeared on my skin. His sweat-drenched body, heavy as a dead weight, crushing me, the airlessness of the cupboard exacerbating the foul odors he emitted.The streaming mucus that pored from his mouth and nose. And, much later, when the sneezing eventually slowed and finally stopped, the voices began with their obscene comments and suggestions.

The morning was an extremely long time in coming.

When the first feeble rays of the sun penetrated the skylight of the broom cupboard, I realized the truth: I hated Alberto.

It was June 25, 1972, and the first day of our married life.

O
bstinacy, I suppose, kept me from ending the marriage—I wouldn’t admit that I had been wrong, and everybody else had been right. Of course, secretly I accepted that I had been a fool for marrying solely on the strength of Mamma’s dying words—I had learned the hard way that prophecies are a load of nonsense. In the first few months, all sorts of people—even total strangers, like the woman whose poodle bit my bad leg in the Piazza Navona—

urged me to leave Alberto, but after that they stopped mentioning it.

Fortunately, from the start, and without any need for discussion, he and I resumed our separate lives. I continued to put all my energies into my work, and was building quite a reputation for myself.With the escalating violence of the city, there were always new and fascinating challenges for me, and, of course, a growing workload. Murders, like everything else, tend to follow fashions. At one time there was a craze for ears to be cut off, then noses, then lips. The only time Signora Dorotea and I were really stumped was when the notorious gangster Tusco Gozzini had his whole face hacked off in the most vicious vendetta we had ever encountered. Although we managed to rebuild the missing features, the resulting face didn’t resemble the Tusco of the “Wanted” posters everybody knew. Nevertheless, the family were terribly grateful for our efforts, and his widow even said she preferred him without the broken nose and the cauliflower ear.

What little free time I had, I devoted to Pierino, although he had, I knew, transferred his affections to the ventriloquist.

Alberto and the dummy remained on the cruise-liner circuit and were often absent for months at a stretch. Occasionally I would receive picture postcards from Sydney, the fjords, Alaska, or Madagascar, and I felt a bright moment of joy knowing they were so far away.Yet Pierino would pine all the time they were gone. His feathers fell out by the handful, and he would ask constantly, “Where’s Papa? Where’s Papa?” until both Signor Tontini and I were ready to scream.

When they returned (causing Pierino to collapse in paroxysms of delight), reluctantly I allowed them to stay at my apartment, although I insisted Malco remain in the suitcase. They performed where they could, and in addition to regular appearances at the Berenice cabaret club, they took bookings for kiddies’ parties, corporate entertainments, and the magic grotto at the Condelli department store.

Although I didn’t like Alberto, I wasn’t unhappy. After all, I had no idea what marriage should be like.The only one I had seen at close quarters was Uncle Birillo and Aunt Ninfa’s, and they certainly didn’t seem to like each other. Did Fiamma like Polibio? I don’t know—we never discussed it.

Of course, I felt just as frustrated as I had before the wedding, and if anything the rashes, palpitations, and embarrassing surges increased. From time to time I encountered Ernesto Porcino at trade fairs, but he ignored me. Besides, I was wary of having an affair—I knew replacing one unsatisfactory man with another wasn’t the answer. Once or twice I tried masturbation, but I was no good at it.

“Well, Freda, what you never had you never miss,” Signora Dorotea announced one day, apropos of nothing.

I supposed she was right, and tried to suppress all thoughts of a passionate nature, but when I met the Detective, all my old symptoms returned with a vengeance, and new ones—most disturbing, the fantasies—were added.

I
intended to spend the whole of Sunday searching for Pierino, but I received an urgent call from Signora Dorotea, which I couldn’t ignore.

All twenty-seven residents of the Crepuscolo nursing home had died of botulism from canned sardines, and the coroner had just released the bodies for burial. We would have to act fast to embalm them all, particularly in this heat, as our cold storage facilities were already stretched to the limit. I hurried to the Vicolo Sugarelli, keeping my eyes peeled for Pierino, but I saw only a crow and two seagulls.

As I worked alongside Signora Dorotea, she said:

“That Detective’s a bit of a dish, isn’t he?”

“The Detective?” I was flummoxed. “Has he been here?”

“Oh, yes,” she replied. “I had to help him with his inquiries. Nice eyes, I thought. And so tall. I like a tall man.

Porzio was tall when I met him, but of course, age shrinks us all. Anyway I was thinking to myself, Freda could do a lot worse than that Detective…”

“So what was he asking?”

“Oh, you know, this and that. Wanted to know about Alberto. Nasty little creep, I said. Never liked him. Smelled funny. I happened to mention that the best thing for you would be to find a nice new man, a tall one this time…”

“You didn’t!”

“I certainly did. He was interested, Freda; he was definitely interested…”

Knowing how subtle Signora Dorotea’s hints were, I would never be able to face the Detective again. But for now he was the least of my worries. We worked all day and late into the night, restoring the Crepuscolo’s residents to their former glory. The very final one turned out to be Signor Felice, Signora Pucillo’s paramour. At first neither of us recognized him, for the sardine poisoning had ravaged his mellow charms, reducing him to a puckered and suppurating shadow of his former self. But by the time we finished with him, he looked just like Rudolph Valentino in
The Son of the Sheik.
Up in heaven, Signora Pucillo would be putty in his hands.

I fell into bed exhausted in the early hours of Monday morning and hoped to sleep a little later than usual, but at eight the phone rang insistently and I had to pick it up.

“Freda, he’s cheating on me,” screamed Aunt Ninfa in my ear.

“No!” I shouted back, over the roar of traffic noise in the background.

“How much longer are you going to be in there?” yelled someone else. “I need to call a doctor.” There was the sound of a scuffle, and then Aunt Ninfa came back on the line panting.

“He’s been to confession,” she bellowed. “That man hasn’t been to confession in twenty-five years. Why would he go to confession if he didn’t have nothing to confess, Freda, huh?

You tell me, why?”

“I don’t know,” I said, “but it doesn’t have to mean he’s cheating. There’s probably some other reason. Have you talked to him about it?”

At this point the rumpus flared up again. There was the sound of shrieking, maybe some blows being exchanged, a loud bang, and then the line went dead. I never found out exactly what happened, but shortly afterward my uncle and aunt finally got a phone installed in their apartment.

I was pretty sure Ninfa was wrong. Although I knew my uncle found her irritating at times, I really couldn’t imagine him as the lover of someone else. I tried to picture him in a candle-lit restaurant toying with the fallen tresses of another woman; the two of them strolling hand in hand through the gardens of the Villa Borghese; him ripping off his baggy Y-fronts and leaping into her bed for a night of passion. It was no good. It didn’t work. Uncle Birillo just wasn’t the type to have a mistress.

Diverting as these thoughts were, I had my Pierino to consider, and he had to come first. So I dressed hurriedly and raced to the printers in the Via Santa Anna. There I wrote out a message and had it run off, fifty copies, offering a generous reward for the safe return of my parrot. Immediately, the printer’s assistant and five of the seven customers told me they had found just such a bird, but I remained skeptical. I had to be wary of fraudsters.

Then, equipped with a reel of sticky tape, I wandered around posting my notices on statues, parked cars, posts, trees, and walls throughout the district.

“You see, she doesn’t offer a reward for the return of the husband.” I heard a voice and tittering behind me.

“I saw them take him, you know.” It was the butcher, Carlo Martello. I joined the crowd that quickly gathered around him, and elbowed my way to the front.

“Yes, Signora Lippi,” he continued, juggling a monstrous flap of tripe in his hands, “I saw it all. There were seven, no eight assassins. I did what I could to save him, but they had guns, big guns, machine guns, in fact. I will never forget the look on his face as they bundled him into the back of the van and drove away. I will see it until my dying day…”

“That’s garbage,” interrupted Giangiacomo Campobasso, the hairdresser. “You saw nothing. I, I saw everything. There were only two of them. Both disguised as harlequins. There were no machine guns. One of them had a pistol, which he held to the back of Signor Lippi’s head. He was forced into the trunk of a dark blue sedan, driven by a blond woman whose roots were in urgent need of attention…”

“The both of you are talking out of your bottoms,” interrupted Manilia Pietrapertosa, the doll-sized woman who had run the lemon stall for the past sixty years. “They took him away in a helicopter.”

“A hot-air balloon,” shouted Fausto Pazzi.

“Gorilla suits. They were wearing gorilla suits,” screamed Bernadetta Sorbolito.

“Helicopters. Harlequins. Gorillas. How many of those do you see round here?” asked Crispino Mongillo, trying to restore a note of sanity. But I had already walked away.

While I was still fixing up the notices, fifty-three people, including two sets of identical twins, three nuns, a violinist, four blind men, seventeen German tourists, and a woman with a bushy beard and matching dog, all claimed to have found Pierino. Zookeepers and pet store proprietors would need to beware.

Without meaning to, I found myself in the Via di Campo Marzio, where Alberto’s mother lived in an apartment above the ecclesiastical outfitters, upstairs from his sister, Nunziata, and her children, currently numbering six.What strong genes were at work in that family. All of them short, fat, and upset-tingly alike.

I offered up heartfelt thanks to the Virgin that I had managed to avoid what would have been an immaculate concep-tion, and tiptoed past Nunziata’s apartment. I could not face meeting her or her brood. Within, there were the sounds of mayhem: wailing and screaming, ripping cloth, shattering glass, brawling, singing, laughter, and caterwauling.

By contrast, upstairs was eerily quiet. Seeing Alberto’s mother sitting there, still as a photograph of herself, with her hands folded in her lap, made me confront the reality of his disappearance for the first time. It could have been him sitting there with the white lace cap on his head and the heavy crystal earrings distorting the holes in her lobes.

The smell in the room was of her old age and rancor, decay mixed with something unpleasant but unspecific. That smell too Alberto shared in some measure.

There were lace doilies on every surface, and a great many items of basketwork, woven by the inmates of the San Cataldo
manicomio
. On the occasional table was a carton of miniature carrots made out of
pasta reale
. I remembered them from the first visit I made to the apartment, three years ago, when Signora Lippi urged Alberto not to marry me. Photographs of him, and Nunziata, and the grandchildren at various stages in their development stared at me from all around.

She recognized me, I knew. In the fragment of a second as I opened the door, her eyes, Alberto’s eyes, were turned upon me. But now she was pretending not to know who I was.

“How are you, Signora Lippi?” I asked her, kissing her on both chubby cheeks. Her flesh was cold and hard like wax.

I had never been able to call her anything less formal than Signora Lippi.

“Signora Lippi, prepare yourself,” I continued, although she had not acknowledged me. “I have some bad news. The worst possible news, in fact, about Alberto.” She didn’t say anything, although I knew she was weighing my words.There was nothing wrong with her hearing. She had been known to eavesdrop on her neighbors at the far end of the street.

“He has been taken. Seized. Disappeared.” Her eyes didn’t even flicker.

“Yes,” I continued, “on Saturday, before he was due to appear at Berenice’s. The police have little hope of his being found alive.”

I garbled on, filling in the details, although she did nothing to encourage me. It was always this way. Around her I was seized by the urge to fill in all the spaces, not to leave any gaps for unpleasantness to fester.

Finally I ran out of things to say, like a clockwork toy run down. For a moment or two there was a vacuum. Then her thick lips twitched. Was she about to speak? I put all my strength into my ears. What would she say?

“Peas. Fresh peas.”

“Peas?”

Then she relapsed into silence. When it became obvious there was nothing more to say, I left the apartment. I never wanted to see any of the Lippi clan again.

I
jumped on a passing bus. I didn’t especially care where it was going. The driver stared at me as though he recognized me from somewhere, but I couldn’t place him. It was crowded, and I was squashed between overheated bodies. I wriggled along to escape the hot breath on the back of my neck, but then felt someone rubbing against my buttocks. I glared around me looking for the per-petrator, but it could have been any one of a number of people. One man nursing a crate of tomatoes kept winking, but I think he just had a bad case of conjunctivitis.

I got off at the next stop, making a mental note to myself never to travel by bus again. I stepped down outside a branch of the Banca di Roma and thought I may as well withdraw the reward money I was offering for Pierino’s return.

“The short, fat man is on the run,” said a man two ahead in the line to nobody in particular. “The short fat man is on the run,” he repeated loudly.