if her father’s figure were still intact, but with everything that surfaced about him and with what he did to her, why would she be eager to find out more?”
Ivano thanked his father for his thoughtful help and went back to sleep. In the morning, he went to work as usual, his father’s words ringing in his ears: She has no one to love but you … Buy her a beautiful engagement ring … He urged himself to listen to those words, but deep inside he had this feeling that Caterina could see through him and sooner or later would understand. She already knew he had been a suspect. How long would it take her to put the facts together? Besides, he had faith in Caterina and the depth of her love.
“She’ll get over it,” he said, “if she truly loves me.”
By noon, he had made up his mind. He left the bakery and rushed to the palazzina, where he told Guglielmo he wished to see Miss Berilli at once. Guglielmo admitted him to the blue parlor and went looking for his mistress.
Caterina arrived shortly, wearing an elegant low-necked dress of white muslin.
“Ivano!” she exclaimed. “It so good to see you.” She approached him, her arms stretched towards him.
He took her hands in his. “Caterina, I must talk to you,” he said in a decisive voice. “I didn’t tell you the whole truth yesterday, when you asked me to help you find the man who wrote the threatening letters to your father. I came here today to correct that and ask for your forgiveness and understanding.”
She looked at Ivano quizzically, retracting her hands and stepping away from him. She spoke in a feeble voice, almost a whisper. “You didn’t tell me the truth? What is the truth, Ivano? I want to know.”
In the ten minutes that followed, he told her everything he had done. He explained how no one had believed him when he kept telling that she was alive. He told her about the threatening letters he had written with his left hand so as not to be recognized, about Clotilde Pereira, her black-magic tricks, and the meaning of the dead cat on the door.
“I did what I did,” he said, “because I was angry, frustrated, and desperate. I would have never done any of this had your parents behaved in a different way.” He caught his breath. “Now you know everything. There are no secrets between us anymore.”
Caterina, who had sat through Ivano’s confession in glacial silence, looked at him with mad eyes. “You!” she screamed with her finger pointed at his chest. “It was you! Liar! Murderer! You killed my father! And my mother! And all of us! Guglielmo! Guglielmo!”
When Guglielmo arrived, Caterina ordered him to take Ivano from the parlor and out of the house and to never, ever allow him on the premises again.
“I won’t tell the police what you did,” she told Ivano in the coldest tone of voice he had ever heard, “but from now on, you should forget I exist.”
“Caterina!” Ivano cried out as Guglielmo pushed him towards the door. “I did it for you, don’t you understand? Your father drove me crazy! It wasn’t my fault. It was his!”
Caterina shouted, “You killed a cat and hung it on our door! You’re sick! You’re horrible!”
“The cat was already dead!” Ivano shouted back as Guglielmo closed the door on him. “I didn’t kill it! It was bleeding when I found it! I would never hurt an animal! I wouldn’t hurt a fly! Caterina! Caterina!”
18
SHOCKED BY THE REALITY THAT the man she had loved and had been about to marry was also the man who had threatened her father, almost incapable of associating the man who had kissed her and caressed her and loved her so warmly with the hateful figure who had hung a dead cat on her door, shattered by the realization that she had lost everyone and everything she had ever cared for since the day she had been born, Caterina began a life in many aspects similar to the one she had lived in the convent of the Sorelle Addolorate. She entertained no visitors, she talked to no one. The only people she saw, her only companions, were Viola and Guglielmo, who acted like bastions between her and the outside world. Ivano made all sorts of attempts to breach the bastions, convinced that all he had to do for Caterina to forgive him was to meet with her again, talk