The Night of the Moths Read online

  ALSO BY RICCARDO BRUNI

  The Lion and the Rose

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2015 by Riccardo Bruni

  Translation copyright © 2017 by Anne Milano Appel

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Previously published as La notte delle falene by Amazon Publishing in Italy in 2015. Translated from Italian by Anne Milano Appel. First published in English by AmazonCrossing in 2017.

  Published by AmazonCrossing, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and AmazonCrossing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781542049757

  ISBN-10: 154204975X

  Cover design by M. S. Corley

  CONTENTS

  PART ONE IT’S THE FAULT OF THE ONE WHO DIES

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  PART TWO WALKING THROUGH THE WOODS

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  PART THREE MR. TOBY

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  PART FOUR AT THE END OF THE NIGHT

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

  PART ONE

  IT’S THE FAULT OF THE ONE WHO DIES

  One

  They say strange things about moths. About how they sometimes enter houses. Superstitions, popular beliefs. But there are few people left, these days, who are familiar with them. So no one thought much about all those moths dancing in the woods on the night the body was found.

  It looked like a scene from one of those TV detective shows. People out in the street in their undershirts and slippers, kept at a distance by men in uniform. The flashing blue lights reflected on their faces. Ambulance, firefighters, carabinieri, local police. Everything proceeded slowly. There was no hurry. By that time.

  There was the scent of wet grass that you can smell just before dawn. Pine resin. Leaves. Flashlight beams bouncing among the trees. And everyone seemed bent on finding a way to edge nearer to the corpse. It’s strange how we feel the need to connect with death. Look at it up close, so we can almost touch it. Like the way we slow down when we see an accident on the road. We pass nearby to try to see as much as possible, even though we know we won’t like what we see. And yet we can’t help it. We can’t look away.

  Once, when I was still a child, I saw a body on the beach. It was some guy, I think he was a German tourist vacationing in the area. He’d fallen ill while taking a swim. He was enormous. A friend of mine who worked in the restaurant where the man usually went to eat told me that on that particular day the German had downed a plate of spaghetti with clams, some nice fried calamari, and a liter of chilled white. They said he’d suffered a seizure in the water. He’d asked for it. Clearly.

  I was at the beach with my grandmother. The body washed up not far from our umbrella. They’d draped a white sheet over it. Nevertheless, people who had come all that way to enjoy their vacation continued soaking up the sun as if nothing had happened. I remember overhearing a man under a nearby umbrella counting up how much a day’s vacation cost him, including a three-bedroom apartment rental. He was persuading his wife to stay at the beach, so they wouldn’t be wasting their money. And strange as it was to see children swimming and making sand tracks for their marbles right there in front of the body, along with all those people who went on sunbathing beside it, what was really the most surreal was to witness those who purposely trekked from other parts of the beach just to see it. They approached from opposite sides of the bathhouse. Some even came from as far away as the free beach, where word had already spread. They sauntered over in the bright sunlight, taking their children with them too.

  Maybe it makes us feel more alive. Because, at that moment, you might say to yourself, “Damn, it really happens in a flash,” but then you realize that it was someone else’s moment and you experience a wave of relief. Which is the same reason why someone returning from a funeral will crack a few jokes, feel the need to smile, to make love, to be with others and talk a little, to play with the kids. Because once you’ve gotten so close to death that you can almost smell it, it’s nice to feel alive.

  So that night the people who had heard the sirens shriek by had left their houses and found themselves on the street with neighbors, friends, and others who were familiar, since in a town of less than a thousand inhabitants (that’s in winter, they all said; in summer the population is much greater), everyone knows one another to some degree.

  “They found a dead body,” people said.

  And, as they said it, they felt chills run up and down their spines. Because death is something dark, a black hole that arouses great fear even when it only brushes you.

  “If I heard right, it’s a boy,” they said.

  A drowsy child in someone’s arms would rather have stayed home and slept. And, if they’d been going to take a stroll through the nighttime street market or have a beer at the Centrale, maybe they would have left him at home. But when you hear that someone has died, it’s almost as if the ghost were still hovering around, and no one wants to leave the children alone, or even the dogs for that matter, who had mistaken the unexpected outing for their morning walk and were peeing full blast.

  “I heard it’s a girl from around here,” others said.

  And then there’s a long-suspended moment. No sound, like a photograph. Enrico’s profile outlined by the beam of his VW Beetle’s round headlights. Maurizio and Betti entering the woods, approaching, being stopped by a policeman. My brother, sitting next to me, his jeans muddied with damp soil. When this long moment passes, in which nothing seems to stir, like a snapshot left teetering on the brink of an abyss, a whole lot of things will happen. Terrible words will be spoken. Because another person was killed, not far from here. And soon other lives will be swallowed up by the secrets that this night will bring with it.

  Because you can’t escape secrets. You think you can have secrets, that you can keep them, but in the end they possess you.

  “Do they know who she is?” they asked.

  And to think that it was such a lovely night, such an important summer. I was twenty-five years old. I had recently graduated, without ever attending a class, and in the fall I was to leave that house, that town, that life made up of things always decided by others, never by me.

  That evening I had been to a party with Enrico. A few years older than me, he worked in a prominent architectural studio in Rome. He wanted me to go away with him, at the end of the summer. There had been a time in our relationship when I was sure that things would go exactly that way. But that night I had to tell him something t
hat could change everything.

  “It’s Giancarlo’s daughter,” they said.

  They always said that. And until I went away, I would never be anything else. That’s how it is in small towns where everyone knows everyone else. I, on the other hand, liked losing myself in a crowd, walking among strangers. Just try it in a town where if they see you taking a walk by yourself, they assume you’re a bit odd. Some will surely say that’s the reason why things went the way they did. Because I was odd. Because people need to console themselves when faced with death. They need to persuade themselves that there is always a reason. Like there was for the German who had eaten too much before going for a swim. People need to convince themselves that, somehow or other, it’s always the fault of the one who dies.

  “It’s Alice,” they said.

  That’s me, Alice.

  Two

  “But did you have to go on Friday?”

  Giulia’s voice coming through the earbuds has been asking him that since he left. Enrico had anticipated her reaction, as predictable as the signs streaming by on the sides of the road he’s driving along, leaving Rome behind.

  “This way it won’t interfere with work at the studio,” he tells her.

  “Yes, but this way it interferes with our Friday night.”

  “I couldn’t put it off. By tomorrow, I’ll be back to the Remeres problem.”

  “That guy again?”

  “He’s not just some guy. It’s an important job.”

  “And you’re spending Saturday on it?”

  “I had to console myself somehow, since I can’t come to your apericena for the girls.”

  Sky and pavement are the same color. A fine rain triggers the automatic windshield wipers at regular intervals. Enrico is driving with his left arm outstretched, hand on the wheel, and the other leaning on the armrest, fingers touching the gearshift. He left early that morning. Giulia would have liked to come with him, but she could not postpone preparations for the apericena, a strictly girls-only-or-at-most-a-few-gay-friends cocktail party to say good-bye to the old apartment. It is the social event of the first transition to fall. In fact, Enrico deliberately chose this day, when she would not be able to come, to return to the town. He had not been back there for ten years. Since that thing happened. Too long to predict what effect it would have on him. Better to go alone.

  “Remeres . . . I’ve never heard of anyone by that name,” she says.

  Giulia had called him not long after he had left. Enrico had the earbuds ready, cable inserted in the old Nokia. She seems tense. In part because deciding whether to put black olives in the baby octopus soup to be served in the rustic-chic microbowls is a decision that cannot be taken lightly on this of all Friday mornings, and in part because everything that concerns Enrico’s past makes her feel excluded, a feeling that she is not used to, and finally because, since she’s known him, he has never deviated from the ring road when driving.

  He’d told her what happened, long ago. It’s not the first thing you tell a person when you go out together, he’d explained. They were sitting in a Mexican cantina having a drink. Enrico had told her everything, while staring at a bowl of guacamole on the table in front of him. It was a little like saying, “You know Twin Peaks? I was Laura Palmer’s boyfriend.” And that was more or less the effect the story had had on her. To wash it down she’d needed the help of a couple of margaritas.

  “He’s a strange character, Remeres . . .” he says to her as he drives along, looking around.

  “And how’s the car?”

  “Fantastic, it’s very comfortable and you can’t even hear the engine.”

  “And the onboard computer?”

  “I don’t know how it works.”

  “Didn’t you read the manual?”

  “I shouldn’t have to read it. You had them put this thing in. I just wanted a car radio.”

  “A car radio? How quaint!”

  He’s never liked driving. And since he stopped going to the town on his vacations, he’s no longer had a good reason to leave Rome. But at that time, Civitavecchia was like a transition point. His world began where the autostrada ended. Every time he left Rome behind and exited at the tollgate, entering the Aurelia, he began to feel different. An enjoyable holiday feeling, the kind that upon returning is transformed into that sweet nostalgia in which every summer’s end remains captive. But the ongoing construction work for the new highway has changed the landscape, the way time changes people. Too bad.

  “Do you think you’ll see your old friends again?” Giulia asks.

  “I don’t know, maybe I’ll run into someone. Maurizio for sure.”

  “Maurizio is the one from the agency?”

  “Yeah, that’s him.”

  Enrico feels that strange taste in his mouth that his old friend’s name leaves. Talking about him to Giulia is like talking about a character you’ve seen in a TV series.

  He changes his grip on the steering wheel, resting his left arm on the windowsill and running his other hand through his windblown hair.

  “I would have liked to meet him. Maybe sometime you can take me there, to the shore.”

  “We’re selling the house, Giulia. Usually when you do something like that, it’s because you don’t feel like going back.”

  “If you had a Facebook profile, you could keep in touch.”

  “Forget Facebook.”

  “But aren’t you curious to know what they do? How they’ve turned out?”

  “I find it hideous.”

  “You’re such a bore.”

  “Did I tell you about the time a guy stopped me in the supermarket and I couldn’t figure out who he was?”

  “Yes, lots of times.”

  “I was convinced he was a friend of my father’s. When he started asking me about my high school classmates, I thought he was the father of one of them.”

  “Instead he was your desk mate.”

  “Not exactly, he sat a few rows up, but yes, he was a classmate of mine. When I realized it, I felt twenty years older, I spent a shitty evening and decided that I’ll tell the next person who stops and asks me, ‘Is it you . . . Enrico?’ that he’s mistaken. Can you do that on Facebook?”

  Approaching the border with Tuscany, the Aurelia is reduced to two lanes, like a secondary road. And it’s at that moment that Enrico begins to recognize the scenery rushing past him. The Maremma countryside is the first breath of his past to come flooding back. And Enrico is surprised to feel a pleasurable sensation, similar to back then. It is not the effect he had feared. And he barely has time to realize it before catching sight of something in that landscape that punches him right in the gut.

  “God, how tedious you’ll be when you’re an old man,” Giulia says.

  Enrico sees an emergency turnout to the right. He slows down, puts his blinker on, and pulls off the road. He searches for the hand brake on the new car, a station wagon loaded with accessories that reminds him of a huge coffin on wheels, but that Giulia liked so much. There is no hand brake. But, as he is about to tell Giulia, he remembers that the parking brake in that car is a button next to the steering wheel. He wonders if it will work. He presses it and the button lights up.

  “The parking brake, Giulia, when the little light comes on, it’s set, right?”

  “You press the button, the little light comes on, and you can get out.”

  “The usual lever wasn’t good enough.”

  “Are you already there?”

  “No, I wanted to stop and look at something.”

  “It’s raining.”

  “It’s almost stopped here.” That’s not true.

  Enrico turns toward the back seat and grabs his jacket.

  “What do you want to look at?” Giulia asks.

  Before getting out he lurches back and forth to see if the parking brake, engaged by a luminous button, really works. The car holds. He drapes his jacket over his head as a shield against the fine drizzle and steps out.

  “A to
wer.”

  There it is, at the top of a hill. From here you can barely make out its profile. Farther on there’s a dirt road that leads there.

  “A tower?”

  “Yeah, an old ruined tower.”

  “Sounds spooky.”

  “In college I did a paper on this tower, a small project to turn it into an apartment.”

  He was really going to buy it. There was actually a time when that project seemed destined to come to fruition.

  “An apartment in a ruined tower?” Giulia’s voice now seems more distant.

  “One room on each floor.”

  “I can’t picture you there.”

  Enrico remains standing, looking at the tower.

  He smiles.

  Three

  This morning she seems worse than usual . . . help, someone get me out of here!!!

  Chiara sends the message on WhatsApp. She checks the time on the iPhone display. Still five minutes before the alarm clock is set to go off, but she won’t need it this morning either. This morning once again her parents’ voices, down below in the kitchen, were enough.

  She turns over and burrows under the covers. She doesn’t feel like barging in on them. She’ll go down in five minutes, when her father is out of the house and her mother is there alone, staring at a cup of organic tea.

  She’s a sad woman. A sadness that is contagious.

  “The bank refused me, until I recover, they won’t give me any more,” her father Maurizio is saying. He’s talking about money. He’d like to do something, an important investment, according to him. “It’s a golden opportunity that we’re missing because of a few bucks.”

  Chiara looks around. The laptop with the “ANONYMOUS” sticker is closed beside the bed, but the LED is flashing and the fan is on because it’s downloading the video of Heath Ledger as the Joker. The poster of Into the Wild is hanging behind the door. Every time she sees it, she thinks she wouldn’t mind dropping everything to run off with Christopher McCandless, follow him to Alaska, save his life or die with him.

  Clothes are scattered on the floor and on Margherita’s bed—who maybe, in the end, did the right thing by going off to Coldplay’s city. She hasn’t heard from her sister for days; before, they always used to talk. There’s that photo of them together: it’s still there, propped against a stack of books piled precariously beside the desk.