minutes left," the guard behind Alida said.
"I tried in every way. You want me to say it again? I didn’t kill a man, I killed a monster."
"A monster, indeed, and what kind of monster?" Alida asked, feeling the room shrink around her.
"A hideous creature, a beast, a wolf!" Manuel hissed through clenched teeth. His eyes darted from side to side, stopping on those of Alida. They were terrified and bewildered. She hadn’t been wrong, they were the same eyes she had seen in the dream.
"You know, don’t you?" Manuel spoke in a voice so low that Alida had to read his lips to understand what he said.
"What should I know?"
"The truth."
"The truth is that my husband is dead and there were your fingerprints on the rifle. I guess that's enough."
If to save me I show myself for what I really am, they would lock me up as well. At first to examine me as the scientific breakthrough of the century, then to make me go around the world as a freak.
"You his wife, weren’t you?"
"We have been married for ten years."
"Then you’re lying. You don’t want to say what he was because they would lock you up too. Not here, but in a psychiatric hospital."
"For doing what?"
"Because you are covering him and because for your silence they are about to give me thirty years."
"You will be given them if you deserve them. Justice..."
"What Justice? Do you think that justice works?"
Manuel laughed softly. Alida felt like a fool. She thought exactly the same about justice. Manuel persisted with a question that almost threw her off the chair: "Can you live with a burden like that on your conscience?"
Come on Alida, answer. Can you?
If she could live with their monstrosity, it did not mean that she would be able to bear the burden of not having saved an innocent man from a conviction he hadn’t deserved.
"Are you sharing a cell with other prisoners?" she asked, wriggling out of the grip of her thoughts.
"Why do you change subject?"
"I asked you a question."
"We're four right now. Two sexual deviants, judging by how they look at me, and a neurotic drug dealer. They were out of single cells."
"You must have them send you in solitary confinement," Alida said, not caring what would happen when the inspector would hear the recording.
"What?"
"You must at all costs make them change your cell."
"Why? You can’t suggest such a thing and pretend you said nothing."
"You let it hurt you, right?"
"Who?"
"The creature."
"It managed to scratch my chest. Had its claws been slightly longer, it would have torn it apart."
"And doctors still don’t understand why the cuts won’t close, and they burn terribly, right? Especially at night."
Manuel’s eyelids blinked twice, violently, as if to recover from a bad hit.
"Who are you?" he asked softly.
"Five minutes!" the officer thundered.
"I want to help you, but you must listen. Make up a fight, assault, anything against the rules, anything as long as you change cell, hoping it’s empty when they put you in it."
Or those who are with you will end up in pieces under the blows of your claws, and I bet the guards won’t think twice before ridding you with bullets.
"I'm sorry," Alida said, looking deep into Manuel’s eyes.
She rose from her seat and the cop did the same.
"Help me," Manuel said again. "Do something to get me out of here."
Alida turned her back and felt faint. She could feel his pain and anguish.
Manuel yanked the handcuffs that bound him to the table, large veins swelled on his neck.
"You must talk! You must save me," he shouted. "Do you understand? Your husband was a monster, but nothing compared to you if you don’t do anything to..."
Manuel's plea was cut short by the heavy door that the guard closed after escorting Alida out of the hall.
The inspector had not moved from where she had left him. Alida pulled the bug out from under her dress and handed it to him as if she could not wait to get rid of it.
Brembati's face twitched in an unusual way, and the expression that ensued reminded Alida of her father when, at six years, hitting the desk with the roller blades she should never have used at home, she had dropped the model of a ship on which he had worked for months.
Anger, confusion, disbelief.
At first she did not understand, then the words of the agent explained: "Inspector, I think I forgot to turn it on..."
Brembati said nothing. In his place spoke the vein that began to pulse on his forehead, and Alida understood that disciplinary measures would be taken as soon as she left the prison.
Suddenly she understood why the man looked twenty years older than his age.
She felt like smiling, but repressed it.
June 17 – 15:48
Someone called her and Alida turned promptly. She had just left Rebibbia and was going towards Via Majetti, where she had parked. The day had grown sultry, air clinging to her skin like an unpleasant film.
"Riccardo?" she asked in wonder.
Usually she did not like to meet old friends, she was always under the impression that she was behaving unnaturally, but Riccardo...
Riccardo is different.
The man who had once been a beautiful child and an even more beautiful young man approached Alida with a smile.
"I was behind you when you spoke to the guard at the entrance, didn’t you notice?"
"I didn’t see you, I can’t believe it, what are you doing in a place like this?" Alida asked, looking in the large clear eyes of her dearest companion at the orphanage.
His were the first lips she had brushed.
Riccardo Reati looked away. "Let's say that the only jobs I was able to find lately are those for which, after a while, you end up with a policeman knocking at your door."
"What do you mean?"
"They have released me today," he said hastily. Only then Alida noticed the cardboard box clutched under his arm.
"Personal effects" Riccardo explained, slightly embarrassed. "All that a man can need in three years in a place like this, as you called it, is in here."
"Three years?"
"Remaining sentence. I served six."
"For what?"
"Complicity in robbery."
"How is that? You made up a team to rob a store?"
The laughter of Riccardo hadn’t changed, it was just louder and more powerful.
"No, it’s better to stay away from robbery, it’s like heroin. If one goes fine you never stop, and it’s easier to end up with a hole in your head than in jail."
Alida noted with pleasant curiosity that his facial expressions were the same as when he was a child. His eyes still darted from side to side, awake and feverish, and he had not lost the habit, when he was listening, to bite his lower lip with his incisors, that age and cigarettes had only made less brilliant.
"And you, why are you here?" Riccardo asked.
Alida opted for a half-truth: "Visiting a friend I had not seen for some time."
"You have to know someone quite high if you have been given permission to come today. Tuesday is not a visiting day."
Alida felt the gaze of Riccardo become heavy and fared well improvising: "I worked as a social worker and sometimes I am rewarded with favours. It’s the least they can do considering how few they paid me. Where are you going now?" she asked, trying to understand if he had believed her.
"At an old aunt with whom I lived for many years. She thinks I have been abroad," Riccardo said, sporting a sad smile.
"Raffaella?"
"You remember her?" Riccardo was surprised. In fact he couldn’t know that the only thing Alida remembered about that woman was the hatred she felt for her.
Raffaella, back then a skinny spinster, not yet forty years old, with a womb as dry
as the Sahara, had taken Riccardo from the orphanage when her sister had sent her a letter saying that, before covering her tracks, she had left a son – of whose existence nobody knew – in foster care at the Children of Jesus Institute. Raffaella had thought that God had answered her prayers and, rubbing her barren womb with the gentleness with which you’d touch the neck of a child, had left the house enjoying the moment when she would be back holding the hand of his nephew.
"Of course I remember. She was the wicked witch taking you away from me to a shack in the middle of a lot of rotten trees, so I would not see you ever again," Alida said, reliving in front of her eyes the day in which Raffaella had disappeared through the heavy iron gate of the orphanage, separating her from little Riccardo and his lips that she wanted to kiss again and again and again...
"I must say that you were close. The house where we lived the first years is pretty close to what you had imagined. You always had a horror-writer imagination!"
"That became even more disturbing with age."
"Then I shall refrain from guessing what you’re thinking."
During the silence that followed, neither of them felt that need to lower their gaze which often occurs when the words are inevitably lacking. Alida was certain that, with another man, that silence would have made her uneasy. With Riccardo it did not happen, because she recognized on his face the features of a child who had suffered as much as her.
And who still suffered like her.
"If you want I can give you a ride" she offered, jingling her car keys.
Riccardo pondered the offer, curling his upper lip.
"Thanks, but I’d like to walk. Why don’t you give me your number instead? I'd give you mine too if I had one."
Alida marked with a pen the number of her mobile phone on a side of Riccardo’s box.
"Call me anytime!"
"If I still remember how to use a phone."
Alida burst out laughing.