The Bastards of Pizzofalcone by Maurizio de Giovanni, Antony Shugaar Read Free Book Online Page A

happiness. There was something else. Maybe fear.
    Maybe it was a good thing that she had decided to sleep in that morning, Mayya thought to herself; sometimes a good long sleep can put your heart at rest, and help you to see things more optimistically.
    The young women moved through the darkness, noticing in passing that the windows and shutters, securely fastened, confirmed the fact that no one was up yet. She headed toward the kitchen: she’d make breakfast, a
caffe latte
and cookies. She wondered whether the notary was at home, and remembered that the man’s overcoat hadn’t been hanging on the rod in the front hall closet. Maybe he’d already gone out; or, more likely, he hadn’t returned home.
    She didn’t see much of him, the notary. She left in the afternoon, long before he came home from the office. She’d run into him once or twice in the morning, when she was coming in and he was heading out, and another couple of times on the eve of major holidays, when she’d been asked to work a few hours extra. He was a good-looking man, tall and distinguished, with a thick head of gray hair and a fit physique; but Mayya had never liked him. She’d felt his cold eyes evaluating her, sizing up her body the way a farmer might look at cows at the market. She knew that kind of man all too well; the wrong kind of man to live with her signora.
    While she was arranging the cookies on the tray and waiting for the coffee to be ready, she wondered to herself how such a badly mismatched couple could stay together for so many years, and without having children, either. Children bring a couple together, they constitute a topic of conversation that the parents never tire of. Children solidify the partnership between a husband and a wife, and when there’s nothing else, at least they have them. But the signora and the notary didn’t even have that.
    It was understandable, at that point, Mayya thought to herself, that people would look around for something else to keep their minds occupied. And their bodies, too, she supposed. The notary who was never at home, what with his work and his card games and his who knows what else, and the signora with her charity drives, her tea parties with her girlfriends, and her social clubs. And her collection of glass snow globes.
    The young woman shook her head as she poured out the coffee. Everyone has their obsessions. The signora collected those horrible glass spheres that, when you shook them, unleashed a fake blizzard over the landscapes and figures inside. She loved them so much, the signora did, that she wouldn’t even let Mayya dust them: she would do it herself, slipping on latex gloves and devoting an entire morning every week to the job. It was the only time that she seemed truly happy, surrounded by hundreds of little glass globes that seemed like so many soap bubbles.
    The signora’s collection was famous. Whenever her friends traveled, they’d be sure to bring back at least one item to add to it. Once a journalist even came, to take pictures of her surrounded by her snow globes, and the signora had proudly displayed the magazine with her photograph to Mayya. She’d even told her that someday, she was going to have an exhibition somewhere, and that she’d donate the proceeds to charity. Truth be told, Mayya thought it was ridiculous that anyone would pay money to see those objects, but people, she knew, did all sorts of strange things.
    Moving slowly with her tray through the partial darkness for fear of falling, she went into the signora’s bedroom; in the light that filtered through the shutters, she saw that the bed was still made and that there was no one in the bedroom.
    Strange. Very strange.
    If she’d had to leave suddenly for some reason, the signora would have called her: when she had any urgent news to communicate, the signora always used her phone; she always asked if she was bothering her. Why would she have