Caterina swirling in his mind. He saw her walking the caruggi with Lavinia, entering the oven room and falling into his arms, flying in the sky like an angel, and lying in a coffin dressed in a tunic of white silk, with her eyes closed and her diaphanous hands laid gently on her chest. Time and again he reviewed the evidence of Caterina being alive versus the evidence of her being dead, but whenever he came to one conclusion, he was unable to keep to it longer than a moment because the other hypothesis became overwhelmingly true to his eyes. As the night progressed, however, his faith in his ability to find Caterina began to vacillate and his mind leaned increasingly towards thoughts of death. By morning, he had surrendered to the idea that Caterina had died. With that thought clear in his head, he ran to the palazzina.
“You killed her, Giuseppe Berilli!” he shouted under the south windows. “You killed my bride! I’ll kill you before I die!”
Shortly, the police arrived. Ivano was arrested and spent the night in jail. It was one of the few truthful details in the story Giuseppe had told Antonio Sobrero. When Ivano returned home the following morning, he opened his father’s wine cellar and drank till his head was so clouded by alcohol he could no longer see past the tip of his nose. Then he fell asleep on the cellar floor, waking at dawn in a thick daze. Heavy with despair, he prepared to attend Caterina’s funeral.
He arrived at the cathedral early and stood outside, amidst the crowd and the flowers, waiting for the casket to arrive. It came a half-hour later, carried by six men in black uniforms and followed by the weeping family members. It was shiny white, and a wreath of red and pink flowers lay on it like a crown. To Ivano, it looked surreal. He watched the casket approach the cathedral, cutting through the multitude of people in mourning: friends of the family, acquaintances, and common people who had never seen Caterina alive but had come to her funeral moved by the tragedy that had hit one of the prominent families of their town. In a corner of the piazza, still as a statue, stood Lavinia. When Ivano approached her, she looked at him with vitreous eyes. Then they hugged and erupted into sobs. He had no heart to stay through the ceremony. As soon as the casket disappeared past the church doors, he walked home, where he locked himself in his bedroom for three consecutive days and three consecutive nights. Lavinia, overwhelmed by a pain too strong and powerful to bear, left town at the end of the funeral without sharing with anyone her destination.
At the onset of the fourth day, Ivano emerged from his bedroom. Calmly, he told his father he intended to leave his job at the bakery for good. “Forget you have a son,” he said in a hoarse voice Corrado had difficulty recognizing. “You won’t see me again after today.”
A dismayed Corrado begged his son to stay, but Ivano remained adamant in his decision to leave. From that day on he spent his time drinking and wandering about town, frequenting the portside brothels and underworld and sleeping in the street or at times in filthy shelters. Before one month had passed, he was involved in gambling, burglary, and counterfeiting, and when he was on break from those occupations, he squatted on the sidewalks or in the alleys behind the fish restaurants along with garbage and leftovers. Indifferent to his own cleanliness and appearance, he stopped cutting his hair and grew a disheveled beard the color of rat fur and the consistency of straw. Day after day he wore the same set of clothes and developed a foul odor that made him one with the homeless and the beggars that inhabited the waterfront streets. At some point he was inducted into a street gang, a cohort of small criminals who terrorized the local merchants with break-ins and assaults and exacted from them monthly payoffs in exchange for protection and peace of mind. Ivano became their most feared collector, mostly because of his repugnant physical appearance, which scared everyone at first sight. Once in a while, when the police presence in the caruggi increased, he and the rest of the gang left the neighborhood. No one, not even his fellow criminals, knew where Ivano hid on those occasions, and no one, out of concern