THE EVIL THAT MEN DO
PART 2
By the time I made it up to the top floor, blisters were forming on both of my hands and my right leg was throbbing from all the times I’d jammed the corner of the suitcase into my shin. Benjamin Messenger sat in the tiny breakfast nook drinking a hot café Americano. It was a speciality of the house, signore Rabizzi would tell her guests. There were cookies on the plate in front of him and something told me they were the treat she’d promised me over the intercom.
“Would you care for a hot cocoa, Lorenzo?”
“Grazie,” I smiled. “Mille grazie.”
“Did you put the suitcase in signore Messenger’s room?”
“Si, signora.”
“Grazie.”
“Then I suppose I owe you seven lira?” he said, putting his coffee cup down.
“It was the agreed upon price,” I said, trying to sound professional.
“Well, I wouldn’t say it was agreed on as much as it was settled on,” he smiled, pulling a billfold out of his inside jacket pocket.
“I have other services to offer.”
“Other services? And you’re offering them to me? For a fee, of course?”
“Naturally.”
“And what services do you have to offer?”
“This is Rome, signore! We’re mere steps away from the Vatican and St. Peter’s! There are more than two thousand years of history here in the city for you to explore.”
“Two thousand years? You don’t say?”
“I just did,” I said, somewhat offended. It felt as if he was mocking me, but I could see no reason why. I’d not yet learned the subtleties of the English language and was quick to take offence.
“He’s teasing you, Lorenzo. Signore Messenger is a guest violinist with the Accademia Filarmonica Romano.”
“You play the violin?”
“Yes.”
“Have you been playing very long time?”
“It’s something most people play for a lifetime, and even after all that time, a part of them says they can do better.”
“Can you?”
“I suppose,” he said, almost looking wistful.
For a moment, I thought I saw something in his eyes—a look, perhaps a longing—and I thought he may have remembered an event, and the memory of it triggered something before he snapped out of whatever reverie he’d lost himself to; he looked up at signora Rabizzi.
“The war,” he said softly. “Sometimes I get flashes of memories. I either see someone, or someone says something, and it reminds me of someone I knew. I’ve learned to control it for the most part…it’s just that…sometimes.”
“I understand. We’ve all been through the same wringer at one time or another, and I doubt if there’s a single person who came through it unchanged.”
“It definitely changed me.”
“I like to think it’s changed us for the better—that we’ve learned from our mistakes—but that’s what they said about the First World War, isn’t it? They called that one The War To End All Wars.”
“Until the next one, my father used to say. He was in the Great War. He was a sapper.”
“What’s a sapper?” I asked.
“Sappers used to tunnel under enemy lines, dig a hole big enough to load it full of explosives…and then blow it up.”
“That doesn’t sound so bad.”
“No, not until the tunnel falls on top of you and you’re choking on the dirt, and you can’t breathe, and it’s pressing down on you, crushing you, before someone digs you out. He was buried alive three times, and each time he was the sole survivor.”
“Enough of that,” signora Rabizzi said with a note of finality. “Lorenzo, here, sit down and drink your cocoa,” she said, putting the cup on the table in front of me. I pulled the chair out and sat down.
“How long have you been playing the violin?” I asked.
“I started when I was six. So, forty years.”
“Forty years! That’s a long time.”
“How old are you?”
“Thirteen.”
“Thirteen,” he said slowly, as if he was playing the age over in his mind—reliving it even. “When I was thirteen, I was accepted into the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain. It doesn’t seem like it was all that long ago.”
“And what were you doing when you were thirteen?” I asked signora Rabizzi.
“I was living in the North, in Livorno.”
“You lived in Livorno? I didn’t know that,” I said.
“I told you, there’s much I haven’t told you about myself.”
“Like what?” I asked.
“Like what? Like…my father was a baker. One of the fondest memories I have is waking up to the smell of fresh baked bread every morning. But life in Italy was no picnic with the Fascists”—she pretended to spit as she said the word—“Mussolini’s Blackshirts were always watching you, and always threatening to beat you if you didn’t do as they wanted. If you spoke out against them, they’d come to your home and beat you. Life back then was not as it is now. Girls like your mother, your aunt, myself, we were expected to get married and have children.”
“But you have no children,” I pointed out.
“I had a child. A son. Matteo. He died in the war. He would have been twenty this past October.”
“When did you start painting?”
“Painting? I’ve always painted. My father encouraged it. He wasn’t like other men—other fathers.”
“What do you mean?”
“He said we lived in a city of great art and artists. If I wanted to learn about art, all I had to do was ask. He wanted so much more for me. But he was unwilling to bow down to the Fascists, and one day, the OVRA came to the door.”
“What was the OVRA?”
“Mussolini’s Blackshirts. They were militants. The secret police you call them now. The Italian Gestapo for lack of a better term. They strong-armed the citizens into voting the Fascists into power. They’d beat you with clubs—beat you to within an inch of your life if you didn’t do what they wanted.”
“And they beat your father?”
“So, there you have it. That was my life when I was thirteen. Not so much different from your mother’s, I would think.”
“What happened then?”
“Then? Why, the war,” she said matter of factly.
“You have to know when to stop asking questions,” Benjamin Messenger said softly.
The day I discovered the spy-hole in the broom closet, it was quite by accident. That the spy-hole had been cut there intentionally, I have no doubt. A small, circular knot had been cut out of the panelling inviting a clear view of signora Rabizzi s’s bedroom; the plug fit snug in the hole with a long screw screwed into the back of it, tied with a string nailed to a nearby stud. I’d been in the closet a hundred times before, but when signora Rabizzi sent me to the closet to fetch the mop and bucket that day, I caught my shirt on the screw and pulled the plug out of the wall. A single beam of light caught my attention and I turned to look, thinking I may have accidentally put a hole through the wall with the mop handle. With the closet door still open, I could see the plug swinging on its string like the pendulum of an Old World clock.
And then I saw the hole.
I pressed my eye to the hole and had a clear view of Signora Rabizzi’s bedroom. The bed—an ornate, wrought iron, wonder—sat on an elevated landing with a large steamer trunk at the foot of it. The bed itself was neat, with half a dozen cushions placed against the pillows, a large down-filled duvet, and a bedskirt brushing the polished wooden floor. There was an old wooden wardrobe to the right of the bed, a second dresser lining the opposite wall, and two nightstands on either side of the bed. On the wall above the head of the bed was a fresco that appeared old and faded, the image looking as if it was a simple grove. One step down, on a level that put me eye to eye with a large floor to ceiling mirror, was her easel and sketch pad; the open page was a self portrait; she was naked
It was no wonder she always kept the door to her room locked.
The walls were decorated with pencil sketches and watercolours of several of the city’s more famous sights. I counted a dozen various bridges in Rome, the Dome of St. Peter’s, the Castel Sant’Angelo, the Trevi Fountain, and the Spanish Steps. It felt, looking into her room, like I was looking into her past. There was a large photograph of a young man in a Blackshirt uniform, and another of her as a young bride.
Over the course of the next year I’d often slip into the broom closet, closing the door behind me where I sat on a small bench made of studs and scraps of wood the previous caretaker had obviously made for himself. I’d wile away the afternoons—watching, waiting—sensing that sooner or later she’d take her clothes off and sit for another self portrait. It would be several months before my patience was finally rewarded. When that day finally came, I found myself entranced at the sight of her naked body writhing on the bed as she masturbated.