The Night of the Moths Read online

  “Ask him to dinner.”

  “To dinner?”

  “Usually that’s what you do with old friends.”

  “And what do you know about old friends?”

  “It’s what I would do.”

  “Then we’ll invite him to dinner. Maybe your father already has.”

  They arrive at school. Betti signs the excuse in the notebook. Chiara opens the car door. She’s about to step out, but stops.

  “Mom.”

  “Sweetheart.”

  “I’m sorry about the thing with Grandma.”

  “All right, but promise me one thing.”

  “I won’t go again.”

  “That’s not what I was going to say.”

  “What then?”

  “That if you feel like going back again, next time you’ll tell me.”

  “I promise.”

  A kiss. Chiara gets out. She feels her mother’s eyes on her. Betti watches her walk away, tears still in her eyes. Chiara thinks she can hear her thoughts. Her mother is always moved by how much she has grown. Who knows if it was like that with Margherita. When her sister was born, Betti was very young, just two years older than she is now. Sometimes Chiara thinks about that, and it feels a little strange. Chiara is reminded of that old song that Betti sings to her all the time, the one by that vocalist with the very deep voice who sings those songs that are hard to understand and sometimes even a little dull. There’s one that is really beautiful, about Mary, the mother of Jesus. “Girls one day, then mothers forever.” And Chiara realizes that she is finally old enough to understand what it means, and why her mother likes it so much.

  Chiara turns and sees her mother there, in the car, watching her and waving at her, smiling. She knows she has already forgiven her for everything and imagines her eyes must certainly be teary again, even if she can’t tell from here.

  Enrico stops the car on the gravel drive and gets out. The house is still partially covered by climbing ivy. Trees, big pots of flowers. The plants haven’t been cared for, and there are fallen leaves on the ground. As Carmen told him, the house is not currently rented. The porch, the coffee table with the wicker sofas. Those are different, but they’re still in the same place. Enrico approaches, tries to peek inside the house, but the shutters are all closed. He follows the walkway around the house to the other side, where the garden and the round pool are. The pool is empty.

  As soon as he opens the door, he’s assailed by a musty, stale odor. The furniture is draped in white sheets. He opens the windows to air things out, light filling the room.

  The sofas are different: they were once white, but are now covered in a dark-gray fabric. The TV is an HD flat screen, a distant relative of the old cathode model, which used to stand proudly in the middle of the living room.

  The bookcase. Enrico remembers that the books only filled two shelves. Now, all four shelves are full. He moves closer. Checks the titles. He doesn’t recognize the ones that occupy the two new shelves. He takes one out, a John Grisham thriller that he hasn’t read. He opens it and finds an inscription on the first page: “Eleonora and Alfredo, July 2008.”

  He opens some others. More signatures, more dates. These were books left by renters of the house. Novels read during vacations. Maybe the first tenants left one and the others followed along, thinking it was a household tradition.

  At the top, on the left, he recognizes Exercises in Style by Raymond Queneau. Alice used to pick it up, open it to a random page, and read whatever she found. She liked the idea that a story could be told in so many different ways.

  And in an instant the coal-gray sofa turns white again. The light coming through the windows assumes the intensity of the summer sun. The smell is now the scent of jasmine blossoms that a slight breath of wind carries with it from the garden. Alice is lying there in her bright beach dress, her bare feet propped up on the arm of the couch. She’s holding the book.

  “Maybe I don’t even feel like going to the beach. It will be packed with people today.”

  “That’s what happens in August,” Enrico says.

  “Let’s take a trip.”

  “A trip? Now? Where would you like to go?”

  “To Biarritz.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s a place, in Aquitaine, in the South of France. At one time it was a village of fishermen and whales.”

  “I don’t see you fishing for whales.”

  “It takes thirteen hours, more or less, to get there. I think it’s the closest place to the ocean from where we are right now. Just think: we’ll leave, put on some music, and before dawn we’ll be at the ocean.”

  “And what will we do there?”

  “Isn’t it enough just being at the ocean?”

  “It seems senseless to me . . .”

  A sound. And it all vanishes. The sofa is gray again. Enrico glances at the window. He walks over to it. Something is moving in the bushes, near the gate. A black jacket, possibly. There is someone out there who doesn’t want to be seen.

  Enrico rushes to the door, opens it. He looks in that direction, but doesn’t see anything. He runs to the gate. He passes the car and checks to see that the bags haven’t been stolen. A quick look, but everything seems to be there. The gate was left open. He hears the thud of a car door closing, an engine starting up, and tires screeching like in a detective film. He doesn’t see anything. When he gets to the street, he hears a noise in the distance, but the car has already turned the corner. He leans against the gate to catch his breath.

  Who was that?

  Enrico notices the damaged bush. Snapped branches. The intruder came through there. He makes out a faint path, follows it until he ends up behind a tree. From where he now stands, the front door, his car, and, through the open window, even the inside of the house can easily be seen. He looks around, searching for an explanation or, at best, a clue. But he doesn’t find anything. For now he has to settle for the certainty that someone broke into his garden and probably stopped to spy on him.

  “You have to report it to the police.” Giulia’s voice is agitated, and Enrico realizes right away that he should have kept it to himself. That’s one of those things you always realize too late, when it should have been obvious. But Giulia’s umpteenth phone call had come unexpectedly, while Enrico was still out of breath, and his mind was not yet focused enough to find a solution to the dilemma of black olives in the octopus soup.

  “Forget it,” he says, regaining control. “My experience with the police around here hasn’t been pleasant.”

  “Yes, but he could be dangerous. Maybe he’s a thief, the kind who empties out second homes. Maybe he was casing the place to come back at night.”

  “What do you know about thieves casing houses?”

  “I’ve heard about it.”

  “Where?”

  “The other day, at the gym. Some girl on the treadmill was talking about it.”

  “Okay, Giulia, anyhow, the thief saw that this house was occupied and left.”

  “I’m worried.”

  “You caught me unprepared. If you had called me ten minutes later, when I’d cooled down, I wouldn’t have even told you about it.”

  “I was wrong to call you?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “And are there other things that, with a cool head, you haven’t told me?”

  “Oh God, Giulia, what kind of things?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “There’s nothing. You have to understand that coming back here is having a strange effect on me.”

  “You should have come home and gone back there Monday. Couldn’t they have sent you the documents by e-mail? They must have Internet there, don’t they?”

  “Everything’s fine, try to calm down. And forget the olives: I wouldn’t put them in the baby octopus soup, because not everybody likes them.”

  “There’s a thief spying on you. I don’t give a damn about olives in the octopus soup. I’m calling everybody.
I’ll postpone the party and come join you.”

  “Don’t call anybody. Have the party, you’ll have a good time.”

  “Okay, but you’ll tell me everything, right? Even with a cool head.”

  “Of course, Giulia. Everything. Don’t worry.”

  “You won’t leave out the tiniest detail.”

  “I won’t leave out the tiniest detail, I promise.”

  “Don’t bullshit me. I don’t like it that you’re there alone and you know it.”

  “I remembered it smaller, you know?” Enrico changes the subject.

  “The house?”

  “Yeah, everything. It’s strange, isn’t it? Usually it should be the opposite.”

  “Usually.”

  “Anyway, I don’t think you would like it.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Too much vegetation, too many trees, and too many bugs.”

  “I would have loved to have seen it, though.” Giulia always drops that hint of resentment with a nonchalance that reminds Enrico of an attacking midfielder who, while looking the other way, kicks the ball with his heel and sends it to the exact spot he intended.

  “Yes, but . . .” he tries to respond.

  “Sorry, I have an incoming call. It’s Erika. It must be about the apericena.”

  “Okay, say hello for me.”

  “If you want, I can put her on hold and we can keep talking about the house . . .”

  “No, no problem, go ahead and take it.”

  “Muaaa, then.”

  “Muaaa.”

  They hang up and Enrico goes back to removing the sheets from the furniture. He opens the rest of the windows. In the kitchen, the bedrooms, the study. Alice’s image is everywhere. He feels her beside him. Part of that world that he is slowly bringing back to life. Those memories, like books arranged in a second row, behind other books, are all still there. And everything seems to fall back in place, naturally.

  Enrico enters his old room. Many things have disappeared. The agency removed them, because it received a clear directive to rent the house. He runs his hand lightly over the desk. Opens the closet. The figurines of the Roma players are gone. The Blade Runner poster is gone.

  A sound, again.

  This time, it’s a car, crawling up the gravel drive. Enrico goes to the window. A gray station wagon comes to a stop behind his car.

  A man gets out.

  Maurizio.

  Seven

  The Half-Wit’s name was Mario Giannetti. He was a short, hefty guy. He had incredible strength and a worm-eaten brain, rotten, in fact. He always wore a light-blue cap to protect his bald head from the sun. My father had hired him as a bricklayer and had put him up in a little cabin in the woods, a kind of shed for tools and equipment. I don’t know what charitable instinct made him do it. He said the guy was someone from our town. And, in fact, the Half-Wit’s coffee and Montenegro were always covered at the bar. There was always someone there willing to play a game of cards with him, although for him the object of the game seemed to be to slam the cards on the table as hard as possible. He wasn’t a violent person, but all that strength and a brain that didn’t work right had always unsettled me. Even before I discovered his perversions.

  In the end, the obligatory stop at the supermarket—to do the grocery shopping that no one else could be bothered to do—had at least given me the chance to be alone for a while and think about how to handle the matter. After spending some time, more than necessary, among the shelves and freezer cases to calm down, I loaded the shopping bags into the Panda and headed back home, nibbling from a bag of Fonzies as I drove.

  I looked around as I stepped out of the car. The Half-Wit was nowhere to be seen.

  In the house, I set the bags down on the kitchen counter and began putting the groceries away. When I finished, I checked the time: it was already past ten. Enrico might be awake. I called him.

  “Are you up?” I said as soon as he answered.

  “More or less.”

  “Your voice doesn’t sound like someone who was working.”

  “Show a little mercy.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Croissant and cappuccio ready when I get there?”

  “That stuff is against the law at this hour.”

  “Okay. I’ll pull myself together. We’ll take a walk, then have a drink with the others before going to the beach?” he suggested.

  “The beach? God, it will be so hot . . . Maybe toward evening.”

  “So we’ll stay at my place then, my parents aren’t here.”

  “But didn’t you bring along some work?”

  “I also brought a supply of DVDs. We’ll settle in here, air-conditioning, beer, and chips. It’s your day off.”

  “That’s right, mine.”

  “I can’t just leave you by yourself.”

  “A gentleman like you . . .”

  “I even have The Great Gatsby.”

  “You really thought of everything.”

  “I’ll come by in about an hour.”

  “In an hour, I might change my mind.”

  “Forty minutes.”

  “If you’re not here in half an hour, I’m leaving you.”

  The owner of the studio where Enrico worked was an architect friend of his mother’s, so it wasn’t quite the tough internship he liked to talk about so much. He didn’t do it to put on airs, he just had no idea what the world was like for other people. It was as if for him things would never change, as if things would stay that perfect forever. And I know I should have told him sooner about the thing I’d been carrying inside me, give him time to understand, but I couldn’t bear the idea of shattering that bright, perfect world of his. It wasn’t laziness that made him take everything for granted: his horizon really ended in that picture of us on the couch, watching television and eating potato chips. And not because he was naïve, mind you, but because the world he belonged to, that beautiful world in which your employer is a friend of your mother’s who showers you with money without expecting anything in return, in which at any moment you can drop everything and retreat to the vacation house with the swimming pool and garden to enjoy evenings with friends, in which you can take off for a week in Paris because you want to see places that will inspire you (I swear, he did that) for a project that perhaps they might assign you in the future. That world, in short, makes you feel so secure that in the end you’re apt to forget that it is not the world in which everyone else lives.

  “Where’s my ACE?”

  The fridge door opened, the sound of things I’d just arranged being moved around any old way. It was my brother, Alessandro, who my father always said was strong and handsome like a Greek hero. It was okay when Sandro was still a child, but as time passed, the Greek hero thing (who, technically, was Macedonian) began to be embarrassing even for him, though he seriously believed it.

  That morning, just back from the gym, he assumed as always that someone had bought him his orange-carrot juice. Which, out of spite, I had not.

  “So where is it?”

  “I don’t know. Did you buy it?” I asked.

  “Didn’t you go and do the shopping?”

  “For the restaurant, not for you.”

  He closed the fridge door. Black close-fitting T-shirt to show off his deltoids and biceps. Bleached hair and soul patch.

  “Come on, Ali, you know I always drink it.”

  “And you never buy it.”

  “In a funk, little sister?”

  “A little.”

  “Where does it hurt?”

  “Where it always does.”

  “Let’s see if I can help.”

  He lifted me off the ground and started tickling me. He’d been doing it since we were kids, to make me laugh. It was as if seeing me laugh reassured him, even when it was just an involuntary reflex. Then he took the cigarettes, lit one, looked around, and offered me the pack.

  “Why is the Half-Wit always hanging around?” I asked without taking
a cigarette.

  “Where should he be?”

  “Why here?”

  “Because he’s loony, because no one else would have him. He’s from our town after all. It’s a humanitarian thing, in a way. Why?”

  “I don’t like him.”

  “I think he’s enchanting.”

  “Idiot.”

  “Just your type.”

  “Don’t say that, okay?”

  “You two have a secret thing going on?”

  “I told you to stop.”

  “What’s your problem today?”

  “I don’t like that guy, get it? He upsets me. He scares me.”

  “Did he do something to you?”

  “He watches me.”

  “So let him watch, girls like to be looked at.”

  “You’re a moron, Sandro. You don’t understand a thing.”

  “Then explain it to me.”

  “He was watching me with his dick in his hand, now do you get it?”

  “Seriously? Shit.”

  “You finally got it.”

  Sandro took a deep drag on his cigarette. He stared at me for a moment, and I had the distinct feeling that he was thinking about what would happen if our father were to find out about it. He tapped the ashes into the sink as if to shake the thought from his mind.

  “What a piece of shit,” he said.

  “Yeah, but don’t tell anyone, okay?”

  “I’ll take care of it. Don’t you worry.”

  “Fine, but don’t blow your top. Don’t hurt him. Otherwise, all hell will break loose and I don’t want that. I’m ashamed, all right?”

  “Okay, okay. I told you not to worry.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I’ll tell him to keep away.”

  “Will you really do that?”

  “Sure, but my throat is too dry to speak, you know. I don’t have my ACE juice.”

  “Don’t be a jerk. Will you talk to him today?”

  “I’ll go over right away, okay?”

  “Thanks.”

  “Shit, that bastard jerked off in front of my baby sister. I can’t believe it,” he muttered, heading out the door toward the building site.

  Eight

  Enrico follows Maurizio with his eyes as he gets out of the car and walks up to the door. He’s carrying a big box and a paper bag. He rings the bell and checks his watch. Enrico comes downstairs. He turns the doorknob. Ten years disappear in the time it takes to open the door. There he is, Maurizio, his old friend, standing in front of him. He’s put on some weight and lost a little hair, but he has the well-kept appearance of a devoted fitness club member.