The grappa was cheap and fiery and welcome. He downed a good measure in one and saw the glass refilled in an instant.
‘You’re the cop,’ the man said.
‘Carabiniere. There’s a difference.’
‘Not to us,’ Piero chuckled, and the men around him laughed too.
Someone asked the question Fratelli knew he’d hear for days to come. Was that it? Could they look to a world getting better? Cleaner? Safer? Or were they simply fools enjoying the eye of the storm? Trapped in a welcome lull before the maelstrom returned, determined to sweep away everything and turn the world back to how it was before the dreams of men had changed its face?
He thought before answering. Considered his own inner feelings. That instinct Chiara used to call his ‘stupid third eye’. Stupid because it was so unreliable, seeing what wasn’t there sometimes, missing the obvious on occasion. But hitting the spot too. That happened, and it was why he listened to it a little.
‘I think the storm is over,’ Fratelli answered. ‘And now… or rather tomorrow, in the daylight… we must look at what it’s left behind.’
‘Go home,’ Piero ordered. ‘You’re no use to anyone except your own.’
Fratelli wondered if the café owner, giving away his precious food and drink, had any idea how welcome those words were.
‘I’d like some pizza,’ he said. ‘Just a margherita. And a bottle of Chianti.’
He placed some notes on the counter.
‘I’m paying,’ he added. ‘I’m a carabiniere. I don’t eat for free.’
The men around him laughed and one said, ‘First cop I ever heard say that…’
‘Not a cop,’ Fratelli replied. And thought to himself: I’m not sure what I am. Who I am, even. Except when I’m at home. With her. When Chiara’s love defines me, makes a place in her heart where I can live in peace and happiness.
Piero shrugged, took his money and came back a few minutes later with a bottle of red wine and a cardboard box with a plain pizza, just tomato and mozzarella. Fratelli stumbled outside and headed west. He needed to be away from people for a while. With his wife, the two of them shivering over food and cheap Chianti.
The area around Santa Maria del Carmine must have been lower lying than the rest of the quarter. The mud seemed deeper, stickier, more foul. There were lights on in the church as he trudged past. Fratelli found himself wondering what kind of damage the waters had wrought there. He admired the place, at least the Brancacci Chapel, with its beautiful figures on the walls: the story of Saint Peter, the historic depictions of Adam and Eve, before and after the Fall. Fratelli was not much fond of the awkward fig leaves painted on the orders of some prudish judgemental member of the Medici who didn’t appreciate art, only power. The rest he loved with the detachment only an atheist could feel.
‘Worry for yourself, Pino,’ he murmured as he turned the corner into his own narrow street. ‘You’ve done enough for one long day.’
The whitewashed walls of the houses carried a tidemark a good two metres high. Debris lay scattered among the ooze that spread almost knee-deep from pavement to pavement as if the level of the city itself had somehow risen with the flood. Now that he was in the place he’d called home for as long as he could remember, Fratelli found the catastrophe took on a personal aspect. Staggering through the mire, looking at these familiar houses, the cars and scooters and rubbish bins moved by the force of the inundation, the way the small and intimate landscape he knew so well had changed, he saw in his own bright imagination what must have happened, perhaps not long after daylight, when the mass of flood water came to occupy the rest of the centro storico on the other side of the Arno.
It was a moving, potent bore of icy sludge and rain, a surging wave at its head, racing in from the river carrying everything before it. Doors were off their hinges everywhere, cars lay upturned and useless, stuck in the greasy slime. The air smelled of water and sewage and fuel oil. A dry and bitter wind was starting to howl in from the north.
He saw his front door and Fratelli’s heart quickened. There were no lights on upstairs. His instant fear was foolish. There were hardly any lights on anywhere. But a few places had flickering candles and oil lamps. And Chiara was so careful, so organized. She always kept a supply for when the electricity was out, knew how to get to them, place them carefully in saucers so she could navigate the narrow landing and reach the street if need be.
Fratelli’s pace increased even though his freezing feet kept sticking in the dirt and clay.
Four doors away he called ‘Chiara!’ and didn’t know why.
His cry echoed off the walls, with their tidemark higher than most men, then rose to the white, uncaring moon.
‘Chiara! Where are you?’
Something caught him as he lurched forward, the pizza and the bottle in his hands. The edge of the pavement, hidden from view. An object dislodged by the force of the flood. He’d never know. He went down, face first, hands flailing. Piero’s precious cardboard box was forced into the shitty brown filth where it took the weight of his fall and broke into pieces. The bottle of Chianti disappeared into the mire. But Fratelli’s mind was racing with grim notions and so he barely noticed.
Hauling himself from the grasping mire, he stumbled to his feet, lurched on. Three doors, two…
He stopped, breathless, by his house. The black wooden door was half off its hinges, torn from the frame as if by a sledgehammer, but still blocking the view from the street. This seemed odd. He pushed at it with his shoulder and the wooden slab fell forward with a loud slap.
Fratelli stopped and stared into the pool of darkness that was the hallway of his home, turning the beam of his torch around, horrified by what he saw. The tide of mud had burst through the narrow entrance and now lay deep over the floor, up to the third or fourth step of the stone staircase.
They’re all like that around here.
His heart beat like an overworked drum. He called her name again, heard his voice bounce around the narrow dark entrance hall, then race up the landing to the first floor where they lived, where she’d kissed him that morning, something in her mind that made her beg him, ‘Don’t go. Let me call Marrone. Say you’re sick.’
But I’m the one who dreams those dreams, not you.
Pino Fratelli did his best to recover his breathing, then switched the torch beam ahead of him and took two uncertain steps forward, found himself stumbling over the washing basket, trapped in the quagmire at the foot of the stairs.
Something caught his eye. A naked, muddy foot emerging from the mess that had travelled up the steps. The beam moved on. It found a familiar shape, one that broke his heart. Crying, half stumbling, he fell up the stone stairs, slipped to his knees, the torch trembling in his hands.
They’d visited Pompeii on honeymoon. She’d wept over the figures crouching there in the ancient ruins, caught by the cloud of volcanic dust that had trapped them, turned living men, women and children into statues, frozen in their death throes. And here was Chiara, much the same. Face and torso out of the muck, the rest of her caked in it, still wearing her dressing gown, head back at an awkward, unnatural angle. Her legs were forced apart, her thighs, mud reaching beyond the knee, bare and pale in the torchlight. He wiped his eyes then, with his right hand, moved the dressing gown across to cover her.
His fingers brushed her skin and then he took her hand in his. Cold, and so long gone. While he was carrying pensioners in Ognissanti, struggling to get food and drink to strangers on the other side of the river, his wife had died here.
How?
There were no words in his head — none he could recognize, anyway. No notion of what to do or say. Only reality: his beloved Chiara, broken on the stairs, taken from him, from everyone who loved her.