“You have to watch!” Her voice almost broke. “Look at his face!”
He was at the point of flinging the cell phone across the library, but then he looked down.
“No sign of Apollonio,” he said, with difficulty. “Michele put the phone down. All you can see is a bit of the sofa.”
“Apollonio comes into the frame in a minute.”
Now Tano was speaking again. When one of the bystanders made a stupid remark, the visitor lost his temper. “Get out of here! All of you, except you two.” By that he must have meant Tano and Michele.
Soon after that, a door slammed.
Rosa walked behind the armchair where Alessandro was sitting and leaned over his shoulder. For the first time since he had started watching the video, she too looked at the display.
“Press Pause,” she said. “Wait…now!”
Alessandro stopped the film. A blurred red and yellow patch of color, a figure, a face, all extremely indistinct. It could be anyone.
Rosa hurried in front of the chair and sat on its arm, next to Alessandro. “Let me have it.”
She took the cell phone from his hand and pressed PAUSE and PLAY three or four times in quick succession. Finally the picture, while still blurred, was clear enough for Apollonio’s features to be made out.
She gave the phone back to Alessandro, jumped up, stood in front of him, wrapped her arms around her upper body, and rocked back and forth nervously on the balls of her feet.
He held the display closer to his eyes, then farther away. She could tell that he still had no idea who the man in the video was.
“You don’t recognize him,” she murmured, disappointed.
“Maybe the picture isn’t clear enough.”
The photo album that she had looked at and opened before he arrived was lying on a table. Breathlessly, she brought it over and put it on his lap. She pressed her forefinger down hard on a photo stuck into it.
“Is that the same man?”
The anxious lines on Alessandro’s forehead deepened. The shadows around his eyes grew darker. “Looks like it.”
“Apollonio,” she said. Her astonishment and disbelief were back.
“Rosa,” asked Alessandro, hesitantly, “who on earth is this?”
Her mouth was dry; her tongue stuck to the roof. All the same, she managed to get the words out, quietly, in the faltering voice of a stranger.
“That man,” she said, “is my father.”
AN EXPERIMENT
MINUTES LATER, THEY STILL hadn’t said a word.
Rosa was sitting on Alessandro’s lap in the armchair, with her head on his shoulder. In the silence of the library, his heartbeat was the only sound she heard. The artery in his throat throbbed against her cheek. The rhythm seemed to pass through her whole body, filling it from head to toe. As if he were keeping her alive with his own heart, while hers felt dead.
After a while she raised her eyes and looked at him.
“You do see it, don’t you?”
“Yes,” he said gently. “Of course.”
“I mean, really?”
“He looks just like the man in your photo.”
She moved apart from him and stood up, walked two or three steps away, and then turned abruptly again. “He doesn’t just look like him, Alessandro. That man in the video is my father.”
He too got to his feet. The next moment he was beside her, intending to hold her. But Rosa raised both hands to ward him off and shook her head without facing him. “The man who gave Tano instructions to rape me was…” She broke off, lowered her arms, and stood there helpless for a second. “Oh, shit,” she whispered.
He made another attempt to take her in his arms, and this time she let him. She just stood there, and he gave her as much time as she needed.
Suddenly she moved away from him, rubbed her eyes, and straightened up. “There,” she said.
“There?”
“That’s enough. Collapse over. Good-bye tearful, self-pitying Rosa. The old Rosa is back, all fixed up, house-trained, neuroticized, guaranteed dry-eyed.”
He raised one eyebrow. “Neuroticized?”
“If the word doesn’t exist yet, then it’s mine.”
“No one else will want it.”
“I do. I like my neuroses. I like them to have their own adjective.”
He sighed. “What are you going to do?”
“Step one: Look back at what’s happened to date.”
Alessandro, anxious, said nothing. He seemed to be waiting for a shock, a fit of hysterics. But she was keeping herself under control. She thought she was the very image of a perfectly poised young woman.
“So my father gets a phone call after my grandmother’s death,” she began. “A man called Apollonio has come to see Trevini,