going to give him any help, he murmured: “Giorgia. Call her Giorgia.”
He turned and took to his heels without a word of farewell.
VIII
As he strode along at a brisk pace, Giorgio Pisanelli acknowledged the greetings of almost all the people he passed with a smile or a nod of the head. He’d been born in that quarter of the city, and even during those periods of his life when work had taken him elsewhere, he’d always found the time to come back, to stroll through those streets and alleyways—the vicoli—to say hello to old friends and make new friends while he was at it. After all, he thought to himself, a quarter is a small city. Certainly, it wasn’t the way it had been in the old days anymore, not like back when being born in a neighborhood amounted to a form of citizenship, but it was still possible to feel at home as you walked the streets and sidewalks that had watched you grow from a child to a youth, and finally an adult.
What’s more, Pizzofalcone was one big story, or really, a thousand different stories. According to tradition, the whole city originated there, it was the cradle it had all grown out of. A low hill that was the burial place of a mermaid, and had then expanded in concentric circles, pushing out toward the volcano and the surrounding highlands like a spreading oil stain.
The quarter replicated in miniature the various souls of the metropolis: the flaccid and verminous belly of the impenetrable labyrinth of the vicoli, with their dark and illicit pursuits; the ancient sense of family, the acrid flavor of rivalries; the main commercial thoroughfare, lined with shops though in ever-dwindling numbers, and the office-working middle class, felled to its knees by the economic crisis; the handsome stock exchange and surrounding businesses, where money reigned supreme and dirty business and other crimes and murders were validated with a signature at the bottom of a contract; the wealthy, triumphant waterfront esplanade, inhabited by an inbred, now anemic aristocracy with triple surnames that, behind shut windows, lived out its days in boredom, watching the passing chapters of an utterly false life.
Yes, Pizzofalcone was the perfect metaphor for the city writ large, Pisanelli thought to himself. And he and his colleagues waited downstream on the banks of this river of emotions and grief, ready to net and reel in its rottenmost fruits.
So there was nothing strange about the preponderance of depression spreading through the populace. Nothing strange about loneliness proliferating and ghosts infesting streets and piazzas. The ghosts, however, were still alive, even though you had to squint to see them, sharpening your gaze and tuning into sounds that verged on the imperceptible. And there, in the wrinkles of the silences in which they were drowning, and the boxes of psychopharmaceuticals in which they sought solace, those ghosts still clutched desperately to life.
Pisanelli knew the door through which the living turned into ghosts. He’d stepped up to the threshold of that door when his Carmen had died, leaving him bereft and alone in the darkness of a life that he no longer wanted. He’d experienced what it meant to wake up at dawn and stare at the ceiling, trying to come up with any good reason for getting out of bed, washing up, getting dressed. He was all too aware how slender the boundary line could be between no longer wanting to live and actually wanting to die: a line that marked the territory of suicide.
Those who put an end to their own lives were desperate to an all-encompassing extent, and therefore they took on a very particular kind of energy, a crazed determination to take themselves out of the world, to stop being part of it. The depressives—living phantoms—were different. They were in the grip of a current they couldn’t control; they let themselves be swept downstream, but they weren’t trying to leave.
This distinction was fundamental to Pisanelli, in fact, it was the reason that led him, too, to do his best to keep from throwing in the towel. Because precisely on the basis of that observation, an excessively numerous series of suicides that had transpired in the quarter over the past fifteen years, filed away as such by the authorities and quickly shunted to the cold cases archive, just didn’t add up in his view. Those dead people hadn’t wanted to die, he felt certain of it: they were depressed, lonely, and abandoned, but not the victims of any final and ultimate despair. They lacked the necessary strength, the required courage to kill themselves. The deputy captain was certain of it: those deaths had been murders. And he—none other than he, who had gazed into the abyss from which there is no return—was going to track down the perpetrator. It was just a matter of time.
Once he came to the place he was heading, he stopped to catch his breath. The old machine, he thought, was starting to shut down. It was clear that his guest was demanding more attention.
He referred to the cancer that was battening off his prostate as his “guest.” The diagnosis dated back a year, and he hadn’t followed it up with any further tests, doctors’ examinations, or analyses. He’d thought it over with a clear mind and he had concluded that any open acknowledgment of the disease would have no other effect than to put him on premature retirement, and by now all he had left to his name was the work he did and a mission to accomplish: he had to find out who was working so hard to send his living ghosts into the afterlife. Anyway, there was nothing that could be done about the guest: certain diseases have no cure, and what’s more, all he really wanted now was to join his wife, and in a hurry—sooner rather than later. His son was all grown up and had a job far away; it would only spare him the embarrassing Sunday phone call that for some time now represented their only contact. His colleagues liked him, but they treated him like an elderly eccentric, a latter-day Don Quixote who was jousting with obscure windmills.
People will barely miss me, isn’t that right, Carmen? And we’ll be able to see each other again, in a beautiful new world free of evil, where we’ll be together for all eternity.
As he was walking into that cool and sweet-smelling space, Pisanelli thought he’d heard the voice of Leonardo, his closest friend, the only one who knew about his “guest.” You’re not in charge of your life, you know, Pisane’, Leonardo constantly told him. You know that your life isn’t yours to do with as you please? You need to take care of yourself, then it will be up to Whom It May Concern to decide how long you have to live and where to send you afterward. The deputy captain, as always, would let a smile play over his face and, as always, when he thought about Leonardo, he’d gently shake his head. That tiny prancing monk with his kind eyes was the very personification of the munaciello, including the pranks and the impertinence, but his faith, crystal-clear, simple, and indestructible, was a fine thing to behold, even if he couldn’t entirely subscribe to it: it was on the foundation of Leonardo’s certainty that he based his own hope of seeing Carmen again, now free of the suffering that had haunted the last months of her life.
He stopped to let his eyes grow accustomed to the sudden dim shadows, and then he headed toward the sacristy. The sound of something in Don Salvatore’s voice, over the phone, had worried him. He’d known the parish priest of the church of Santa Maria degli Angeli for more than thirty years now. He was hardly the type to talk irresponsibly, or to exaggerate the gravity of things happening around him. That quarter would have rejected like a foreign body any priest with an over-apprehensive personality. Father Salvatore was a well-balanced, serene individual, and even now that he was an old man, he certainly knew how to instill tranquility in those who found themselves in dire straits. To hear him sounding upset and worried constituted an unwelcome novelty.
The priest was seated at his desk, and sitting across from him was a young man dressed in a priest’s cassock, someone Pisanelli had never seen before. Don Salvatore got to his feet with some evident discomfort and walked to greet him.
“Ah, Giorgio, there you are. Thanks for coming in. Forgive me for the urgent call, but I really needed to talk to you.”
Pisanelli affectionately shook hands with the priest.
“Hello, Father. You worried me, the sound of your voice when you called me . . . And we saw each other just Sunday, didn’t we? What’s going on?”
Don Salvatore introduced the young priest.
“This is Don Vito. The church curia sends him here every so often to give me a hand, because I’m old and decrepit and just can’t