The Night of the Moths Read online

  “It’s not just a few bucks,” she hears her mother, Elizabeth, whom everyone calls Betti, say. “And besides, it doesn’t matter, we don’t have it. And I won’t go back to her at this point. I won’t go asking her for money.”

  “Fine then, we’ll miss a chance, no problem. After all, what the hell do you care.”

  “Don’t be an asshole.”

  “Look, the investment was for you, for the girls, for all of us. Fuck. It’s an important deal, how can you not . . .”

  “Please stop.”

  Silence. Chiara pictures the scene in the Germano kitchen. Her mother is in her bathrobe, kneeling on a chair, bending over the table. With a teaspoon, she is stirring raw sugar into her cup of organic green tea. Her hair is gathered at her neck, and she’s watching the water take on an amber hue as the tea leaves packed into the filter release their essence. Her father is standing. He’s wearing a blue or gray suit and a pale-blue or yellow tie that brings out his tanning salon bronze, coffee cup in hand, a pack of Marlboros and an orange or green Bic lighter resting near the sink. The scent of aftershave. Hair cropped short, the little that’s left of it. Red-framed glasses that make him look attractive. He checks the clock. He checks his cell phone and slips it into his pocket. He gulps down the coffee. He picks up his heavy jacket, puts it on, and zips it up to the neck. He walks to the door. He stops. Hesitates. He tilts his head slightly to hear what his wife is doing. She hasn’t moved, her gaze motionless, focused on her cup of tea. Maybe he should say something to her. His mouth tightens, as he tries to think of what he could say. But he can’t think of anything so he picks up his keys and leaves.

  The sound of the door slamming is her signal. Chiara gets out of bed. She puts on her terry cloth socks. She goes into the bathroom. She sits on the toilet seat and sets the iPhone on the little bench in front of her. A vibration. She reads the message.

  What a drag, Kia!!! Sorry about the shitty situation. Hang in there, later I’ll tell you something.

  She gets up, flushes the toilet. Now her mother knows she’s about to come down to the kitchen and she’ll wipe away the tears so Chiara won’t have to ask her anything. She looks at herself in the mirror. Long, disheveled hair. Cold water on her face. A deep breath. She goes down to the kitchen. Her mother stands up as soon as she sees her and goes over to give her a kiss on the forehead.

  “Good morning, sweetheart.”

  “Morning, Mom.”

  “Cheer up, it’s Friday.” She smiles, but abruptly jerks around. She picks up her cup of steaming organic green tea from the table, turns her back, and covers her face with the sleeve of her bathrobe. Then she turns back. “Should we see a movie tomorrow?”

  “No, Mom, I’m going out tomorrow night.”

  “Going out? With whom?”

  “You know who.” Chiara opens the cabinet door to get the cereal and fills a bowl.

  “No, I don’t know.”

  “With Gibo, Mom.” She takes the milk out of the fridge.

  “Doesn’t that sound like the name of a monkey? Gibo.”

  “It’s not his fault that they named him Giovanbattista.”

  “Could be, but I don’t know which is worse.”

  “Why don’t you like him?” She pours the milk into her cereal bowl.

  “Because he’s twenty-one and you’re sixteen.”

  “And because he’s an auto body repairman.”

  “Don’t be silly . . .”

  “Oh sure.”

  “Naturally I don’t find him stimulating enough company for you.”

  “He’s nice.”

  “Sweetie, if only being nice were enough.”

  “Anyway, he’s better than my friends. He’s more fun.”

  “That word. ‘Fun.’ I’m not all that crazy about it, you know?”

  “Why? Don’t you want me to have fun?”

  “It sounds like something I don’t like when my daughter says it.”

  “You don’t like people to have a good time.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because it’s not as if anyone has much fun in this house.”

  Chiara sits down at the table and starts spooning up the cereal.

  “And that’s my fault, you think?” Betti asks.

  “It’s not my fault.”

  “There are three of us.”

  “He’d love to have fun.”

  “Oh, perfect.”

  “It’s true.”

  “Right, it’s true. It’s all the harpy’s fault.”

  “It’s called a ballbuster, Mom.”

  The slap lands hard on the back of her head. The spoon falls out of her hand and ends up in the bowl, splashing the milk. Chiara remains still. She lifts her hair out of the bowl, then straightens up slowly. She stares at her mother.

  “Chiara, why do you treat me this way? At one time we used to get along.”

  “Look what you did.” She shakes the milk-soaked cereal out of her hair.

  “Go get dressed or you’ll be late.”

  “Now I have to take a shower. Clearly I’m going to be late.”

  “All right, hurry up and I’ll take you.”

  Chiara gets up without another word. She feels like screaming. Letting her rage explode and hit her mother with the force of a cyclone. But there’s Saturday night out with Gibo and his friends at stake. She runs up the stairs. Goes into the bathroom, undresses. She drops everything on the floor and gets into the shower. It will take tons of time to dry her hair. She smooths the body wash on her shoulders, breasts, belly. When she reaches between her legs, she lingers. She stops. She touches herself lightly. A shiver rises up. Gibo’s hand was there the other night. At first a little too rough, but then more gently. She’d liked it. She’d like him to do it again.

  Touch her like that forever.

  “Chia, get a move on.” Her mother’s voice comes from the hall.

  Chiara rinses off. Turns off the water. Slips on the robe.

  As she’s drying her hair, she thinks that she should cut it. With it long that way, it’s too little-girlish.

  “How are you doing?” Her again, peeping through the door. She’s smiling. She must be over her snit.

  “Go away, or I’ll be late.”

  “I’ll write you a note. Where’s your notebook?”

  “Never mind.”

  “Sure, come on, we’ll take our time and get you there for second period.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Should we have breakfast at the bar? Croissants with jam and a cappuccino?”

  Chiara checks the clock. She’ll never make it on time by bus. “Okay,” she surrenders. “But I want my croissant with pastry cream.”

  “You know what they use to make that yellow stuff?”

  “Mom . . .”

  “Okay, I’ll wait for you downstairs.”

  “Good idea.”

  “But the notebook, where is it?”

  “I’ll bring it to you.”

  “Is there something I shouldn’t see in that notebook?”

  “I’ll bring it to you. I have to look through my stuff for it.”

  “Deal.” She’s about to close the door.

  “Mom.”

  “What is it?”

  “If I see that you’ve snooped through my things, I’ll be pissed.”

  “Sweetie, ‘I’ll get angry’ more or less expresses the same idea. Save expressions like that for Gibo.”

  She closes the door.

  Chiara grabs the iPhone and taps out a message.

  shitty day, the ballbuster made me late 2 bus and is driving me. tell me in class ok?

  In a few seconds the balloon appears.

  bummer Kia :( :( :(

  Four

  Enrico is early, by at least an hour. It’s stopped raining, but by the color of the sky, you can tell it’s only a respite.

  Having left the Aurelia, he took the route that cuts through the town, toward the coast road that runs along the shore. He drove
slowly, keeping the engine’s rpms to a minimum, as though entering his past on tiptoe. He looked around, seeing houses that were familiar, finding them changed, reading the passage of time like on the face of someone you come across after many years. He noted a few passersby, trying to remember if he knew them.

  He left the car in a parking lot that now has blue stripes and a parking meter. He took the ticket and read the name of the town printed on it, as if to confirm that he was really back there. After ten years. He covered the distance that separated him from the real-estate agency as though sleepwalking, hoping to find it open. But time around here has a different tempo, and the office was still closed. He turned back. He felt something like a sense of vertigo at finding himself in the midst of those houses, so close to the piazza and to the Centrale.

  He thought of returning to the car and driving around.

  He glanced toward the Centrale, commanding his nerves to relax.

  Then he finds himself at the counter.

  There’s a girl reading the newspaper. She’s wearing a black apron. The bar’s decor hasn’t changed all that much, and the effect of being back in time knocks the breath out of him.

  “Morning,” the girl says.

  “Good morning,” Enrico replies. “Can I get a coffee, please?”

  At that moment the door to the storeroom opens and Carletto, the Centrale’s manager, enters.

  “Pop, where are the tramezzini?” the girl asks.

  Carletto has put on weight. His hair is grayer, his eyes redder. He seems wearier.

  “Get them from the kitchen. I’ll handle things here,” he says.

  Enrico follows his movements. He’s surprised to know those gestures by heart, somewhat like rediscovering them. Carletto nods, pursing his lips as if about to kiss the espresso machine as he pumps the coffee into the cup, which he then sets in a saucer on the counter, adding a chocolate and presenting it with a “voilà.”

  He always says that when he serves the coffee, and that’s when you notice the subtle hint of wine on his breath, already so early in the day.

  But Enrico does not immediately pick up the coffee. Carletto notices his hesitation. He looks more closely at him. Enrico sees that he is trying to remember who he is.

  “No! Enrico?”

  “Ciao, Carletto.”

  “It can’t be . . .” A hearty handshake. “What the hell happened to you?”

  Enrico tries to say something as he pours the packet of sugar and turns the spoon in the coffee cup. He can’t come up with anything, just a sigh that becomes a tight smile, a cry for help.

  “How many years has it been?” Carletto asks him.

  “Ten.”

  “Ten years already, mamma mia. Around here everything seems the same, just a little quieter. There are fewer people. Remember those evenings, when I had to kick you all out and send you home because you were always here? Mother of God . . . How I miss those times. There were a helluva lot of them. Remember Malarima? That old man came down every night threatening to call the carabinieri. What fits he had! But what about you? What are you up to? Where did you end up? What are you doing here?”

  “I came to sell the house.”

  “Ah, so you’re not coming back.”

  “No, I’m not coming back.”

  Carletto nods. “Drink your coffee, go on.”

  He turns away and arranges a few bottles. Then he goes back to the kitchen.

  Enrico takes the cup and brings it to a table. He scans a few headlines in the Gazzetta. There’s the page about Roma training for Sunday’s game. On the wall is that Daffy Duck clock. It’s another thing he hadn’t remembered, but now it’s as if it had always been there, in his memory, buried underneath some other items like so many objects stored higgledy-piggledy in a trunk. And he wonders how many times he must have looked at that clock, how many hours he spent waiting. How many minutes he watched slip through those hands, in this bar, with his friends, on one of those many summer days waiting to go to the beach, or having returned from the beach, waiting to decide what to do later that night, or after supper, waiting to get everyone together, until in the end he remains there shooting the breeze rather than doing anything else, and sooner or later someone else shows up, but it’s never the one he was waiting for. And as the hands of the clock inch along, robbing seconds from his day, he realizes that everything that is left around him, all of it, every face, every object, every sound, every gesture, every smell, even a breath that reeks of wine early in the morning, is ultimately nothing more than another piece of the same memory, of that face, of her gestures, of her voice, of all the time he spent with her.

  Alice.

  From the kitchen there is only silence. A telling silence: someone is no doubt whispering, surely saying that the guy out there was her boyfriend. The one she should have been with when she was killed. For sure he’s saying that the guy never got over it, that he never came back here, and that now he wants to leave it behind for good. And maybe it’s better that way. Because that memory is stuck to him and he drags it along like a shadow that people can’t help noticing.

  Enrico drinks his coffee. Totti plays starter. He carries the cup to the counter. He searches for change in his pocket. He has a two-euro coin. He glances at the kitchen door. Places the coin next to the cup. Before leaving he checks the time on Daffy Duck’s hands. He opens the door, the little bell tinkles, nobody comes out, the shadow follows him.

  Take care, Carletto.

  Out on the street it’s cold. It’s raining again. There’s the smell of salt in the air that the wind picks up on the shore and carries to town.

  “Enrico . . .”

  He turns. Carletto is at the door to the bar.

  “Remember? The first of the season is always on the house,” he says, handing back the two-euro coin.

  “It’s still a long time until the season.”

  “It means you’ll come back and have another coffee.”

  The barista says good-bye and goes back inside; shutting the door behind him, he immediately resumes his usual activities. His daughter sets the tramezzini sandwiches out on the counter and goes back to leafing through the newspaper.

  Seen from outside, a bar is not all that different from an aquarium.

  Beta Realty is across the street. Enrico spots a young woman running with a newspaper held over her head. She gets to the office, drops her keys on the ground, picks them up, and opens the door.

  Five

  My last day was August 8. It started out as a radiant morning. A brilliant sun. Midsummer. I would leave that month. The plan was to go and live with Enrico, though maybe everything was about to change with him.

  After high school ended, my father, Giancarlo, had asked me to stay because he needed me. My family ran a restaurant. An isolated place, along the provincial road to Carrubo. A renovated old farmhouse. We lived upstairs. Home and business combined. But since things were going well, my father had decided to expand and had started constructing another building that would serve as a hotel. Then he would entrust the new operation to my brother, Sandro, and would give me a hand to do what I wanted. That’s what he said, but in reality, what I wanted had never sat well with him.

  As it was, he didn’t like the fact that I was studying. He didn’t like the idea that I wanted to leave. He didn’t like Enrico, who wanted to take me to Rome with him. Right now, it was about getting the hotel built, but afterward he would want me to stay to help get the business started, and after that he would say he needed me for a little while longer. At least until the day I decided to stay, having found someone local, gotten pregnant, or something like that. That was their creed. But unlike them I recited a poem by Bukowski every morning: “I am not like other people. / I’d die on their picnic grounds . . .”

  Amen.

  It was a Tuesday. We were closed today. I had a date with Enrico. He was to arrive that same day from Rome, a little late into the summer, which had happened more and more often since he’d started w
orking at the studio. We’d been together for several years. Sometimes it seemed like we had always been together.

  At the beginning, many summers ago, I was head over heels. He was here with his family. All the girls had a crush on him because of those big blue eyes. One day, I was at the beach with my girlfriends, and he came over, told me about a beach party, asked if I wanted to go with him. I knew my brother was going, because that’s all he’d talked about for a week, so I figured that maybe I could manage to go too. I said yes. No sooner had he gone than my friends started carrying on, laughing, cheering, teasing me, enough to make you want to bury your head. Anyway, that’s how it started.

  Enrico came back every summer so we could be together. In the winter he came whenever he could. Sometimes he told his parents that he needed some peace and quiet to prepare for an exam, and then he’d come back for a while and we would spend time together. They were fantastic days, at his house. We listened to music, smoked weed. He told me that he was going to buy an old tower nearby, where we could escape, shutting out the rest of the world. In my father’s and my brother’s eyes, he was just a typical Roman city boy who came here to find a girl for the summer and have some fun. For them anyone who wasn’t born in our town was only good for his money, to pay for his meal and leave a tip. But they were wrong. Enrico was a nice person. And I bet he still is, even though he never did go back and buy that old tower.

  Anyway, that day he was supposed to come and pick me up in his yellow Beetle. But my father, who apparently was determined to get in the way, called me on my cell phone and told me to come down, he had something I needed to do for him.

  “The shopping, Alice. Sandro is at the gym and I need a few things. I have to stay in the kitchen and make the sauces.”

  “We’re closed today. I’m going into town.”

  “After you do the shopping.”

  “But Sandro went to the gym.”

  “The shopping list is in the kitchen.”

  It pissed me off whenever that happened. And it happened a lot. Sandro is at the gym, Sandro is tired because he got home late, Sandro doesn’t feel too well (maybe because Sandro came home plastered, but what do you expect, he should have a little fun with his friends now and then . . .). Anyway, Alice, what else do you have to do?