The Lost Girls of Rome by Donato Carrisi Read Free Book Online

optical illusion. He quickly took his eyes away. It wasn’t the view of the monster that had disturbed him. It was the fact that he couldn’t stand mirrors, because he still didn’t recognise himself. ‘What will happen to me if I fail?’
    ‘So that’s it: you’re worried about yourself.’
    ‘I don’t know who I am any more, Clemente.’
    ‘You’ll find out soon, my friend.’ He handed him the case file. ‘We trust you. But from now on, you’re on your own.’
    8:56 p.m.
    The third lesson that Sandra Vega had learned is that houses and apartments have a smell. It belongs to those who live in them, and it’s always different and unique. When the occupants leave, the smell vanishes. That was why every time Sandra got back to her apartment on the Navigli, she immediately looked for David’s smell.
    Aftershave and aniseed-flavoured cigarettes.
    She knew that one day she would come home, sniff the air and not smell it. Once the smell had gone, David really wouldn’t be there any more.
    That thought made her despair. And she tried to be out as much as possible. In order not to contaminate the apartment with her presence, not to fill it with her own smell.
    At first, she had hated the cheap supermarket aftershave David insisted on buying. It seemed to her aggressive and all-pervading. In the three years they had lived together, she had tried many times to find him a replacement. Every birthday, Christmas or anniversary, in addition to the official gift there was a new scent. He would use it for a week, then put it away together with the others on a shelf in the bathroom. Each time he would attempt to justify himself with the words: ‘Sorry, Ginger, but it’s just not me.’ The way he would wink as he said this was intensely irritating.
    Sandra could never have imagined that a time would come when she would buy twenty bottles of that aftershave and sprinkle it around the apartment. She had bought so many out of the senseless fear that one day they would take it off the market. And she had even purchased those terrible aniseed-flavoured cigarettes. She would leave them, alight, in ashtrays around the rooms. But the alchemy hadn’t worked. It was David’s physical presence that had linked those smells indissolubly. It was his skin, his breath, his mood that made that union special.
    After a long day’s work, Sandra closed the apartment door behind her and waited a few seconds, motionless in the darkness. Then, at last, her husband’s smell came to greet her.
    She put the bags down on the armchair in the hall: she would have to clean the equipment, but for now she was putting everything off. She would see to it after dinner. In the meantime she ran herself a hot bath and lay in the water until her fingers became wrinkled. She put on a blue T-shirt and opened a bottle of wine. It was her way of escaping. She couldn’t bear to switch on the television any more, and she didn’t have the concentration necessary to read a book. So she spent her evenings on the sofa, with a bottle of Negroamaro in her hands and her vision gradually blurring.
    She was only twenty-nine, and found it hard to think of herself as a widow.
    The second lesson Sandra Vega had learned was that, like people, houses and apartments die.
    Since David had died, she had never felt his presence in objects. Perhaps because most of the things here belonged to her.
    Her husband had been a freelance photojournalist, and he had travelled the world in his work. Before meeting her he had never needed a home, making do with hotel rooms and other temporary accommodation. He had told her that in Bosnia once he had slept in a graveyard, inside a walled niche.
    Everything that David owned was packed into two large green canvas bags. There was his wardrobe: some things for summer, others for winter, because he never knew where he might be sent for a story. There was the dented laptop that he never let out of his sight, and there were utensils of every kind: