Poisonville Read Online Free PDF

you. You know how often I’ve prayed for you? Your curse is that you are only children. Families as important as yours cannot be entrusted to a single heir; that’s tempting fate. I told your parents time and again, but they refused to listen.”
    He walked back toward me, gave me a kiss on the forehead, and sketched a benediction with his fingers. Then he left without saying goodbye.
    The subject of children was a tough one for Giovanna, too. I had always assumed she wanted children. But during our pre-marriage counseling, she had told Don Ante, the Croatian priest, that she did not want to become a mother at that point in her life.
    “I’m only thirty,” she had told him. “If I become a mother now, it would mean giving up my career.”
    The parish priest had done his best to change her mind. I said nothing. I was certain that once we were married she would see things differently.
    We told Don Ante that we were refraining from full sexual relations, and he pretended to believe us. Then he had launched into a tirade against contraceptives. It was obvious that he came from a backward religious culture, and that he had not yet grasped how things worked in the Northeast. His church was always crowded on Sunday and the offerings were sufficient to provide him with a more-than-adequate living, but the faithful, on certain matters, simply used their own common sense. Giovanna took the pill.
    Something distracted me from this line of thought. It was the silence. A silence so intense that I found myself listening to it, experiencing it. I found Giovanna in that silence, and I understood that between the two of us, there could only be the silence of absence. A wave of despair suddenly washed over me. I thought about death. I thought of my own death as a way out. I thought that not a word of what Don Piero had told me made any sense. The grief became physical, a pressure on my chest, making it hard to catch my breath. And still I felt a need to suffer more and more. It seemed to me that my despair was too little in the face of the enormity of the loss of Giovanna. These thoughts came to me in a procession of apparent lucidity. In reality, that silence was deafening, I was plunging into a maelstrom of confusion. Giovanna was dead. She was really, really dead. I would accompany her body to the cemetery. A coffin, a loculus, a marble slab, the letters in gilt metal: first name, last name, date of birth, date of death. And silence, a vast ocean of silence.
     
    The chiming of the church tower clock told me that it was already eleven o’clock, and I was still seated in the same position. My bladder was about to burst, but the idea of going to the bathroom struck me as intolerable just then. Someone rang the doorbell twice. “Papa,” I thought to myself. Instead, it was Inspector Mele. His face was lined with weariness and tension.
    “I have to take you in to the Carabinieri barracks. The prosecutor has a couple of questions to ask you.”
    “At this time of night?”
    He nodded with an imperceptible movement of his head. “Your father has already been informed.”
    I hurried into the bathroom. As I was emptying my bladder, I thought about how odd this summons was; I persuaded myself that it must have been the result of an excess of zeal because of the involvement of a Visentin. I followed in my own car behind the vehicle of the Carabinieri all the way to the barracks, a squat building protected by high walls and gates, video cameras, and bulletproof glass. In the late seventies, a terrorist group had planted a bomb, and since then it had been converted into a small fortress.
    In Mele’s office, the prosecutor, Zan, was seated behind the desk. He was a tall thin man. He was dressed like an American university professor, at least the ones we see in the movies. Tweed jackets with patches on the elbows, loose trousers over the skinny, age-wizened hips, an anonymous tie knotted around the collar of a flannel shirt.
    He stood up,