Valse Triste

by Marcello Fois

Genres: Literary Fiction; International Crime & Mystery; Police Procedurals

Synopsis

When Michelangelo, a young autistic child, goes missing, Commissario Sergio Striggio is put in charge of the investigation. Searches turn up nothing, but there is an interesting connection with the mother's past: when she was a child, her twin brother also went missing, never to be found.

However, Striggio is finding it difficult to concentrate on the case. He is waiting for his father, Pietro, to come and stay. The idea of the visit is torturing him. He fears having to reveal that he is gay - most of all he fears that his partner, Leo, will reveal his sexuality to his father. Pietro, however, has other matters on his mind: he has news of a devastating diagnosis to share with his son.

And when his life with Leo unexpectedly collides with his investigation into Michelangelo's disappearance, it seems that in the complicated web of the small town of Bolzano, the truth behind the mystery cannot hide for long.

Valse Triste is one of those rare novels in which the quality of the writing is matched by the pace of the narrative. Fois' language is precise and poetic, and the reader is kept guessing by twist after twist.

Release date: February 18, 2021

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 304

Sample

. . . First of all

When they told Gaia her father was dead, she had been living for several days with the Ludovisis. The court had decided they were to be her new family.

It certainly couldn’t be said that his death had nothing to do with her. He was her father after all, and the man who had harmed her brother Lilo.

Years later, when she was a grown woman, she would read somewhere that Oreste Bomoll had died claiming he was innocent. More accurately, the words “had died” should have read “had killed himself” – which might seem a linguistic subtlety but was, in every respect, the expression of something altogether different. At least in Gaia’s eyes. Yet she knew perfectly well, however things had turned out, what she had seen. And when the police had questioned her, she had hidden nothing, just as her aunt – the one person who cared about her and Lilo – had told her to do.

* * *

It happened one autumn afternoon. The family to whom she had been entrusted lived far away from where she was born. From the windows of her new home she could see rocky cliffs and a strip of pure white sky. The Ludovisis were good people and had welcomed her with all possible affection, while she had responded only with a kind of passive inertia, just letting herself be comforted, fed, clothed, combed and everything else. In other words, she had let them do all that a family would do for their own children. So when they told her that afternoon that her father was dead, she received the news as though it was one more piece of unfinished business that had finally found its place: Lilo, her twin brother, had vanished; her aunt had gone; and now her father was dead.

Signora Ludovisi hadn’t dared to give her a hug, though she felt a hug might have been fitting. And Gaia kept such a distance as to make any contact difficult.

But that evening, in the bedroom set aside just for her, she showed Nicolò, the Ludovisis’ son, how people hugged.

* * *

“Your father died. Three months ago, while you were at the care centre,” Signora Ludovisi explained, with a tinge of regret that she hadn’t managed to find a less direct way of saying it.

* * *

A few minutes earlier they’d been talking about how the really cold weather was on its way, that it would snow, that they’d need to wrap up warm to go out and that the hot chocolate season would soon be here. And then, suddenly: “Gaia, there’s something I ought to tell you,” with a change of tone resembling those unexpected passages of clouds that turn a sunny morning into a smoke-grey afternoon. “Shall we sit down for a moment?” Signora Ludovisi suggested, moving ahead to the sofa and patting the place beside her. Gaia had come to join her, but instead of sitting where she had indicated, had taken the armchair in front. “Your father died. Three months ago, while you were at the care centre,” Signora Ludovisi explained. “They wanted to wait until you had a foster family before telling you. Now you have us.” She went to make a gesture as if to stroke her, but realised the child was too far away and the gesture would seem awkward, so she gave up.

Gaia looked at her, then looked around. She could hear Nicolò playing football with friends in the yard. She saw that the sliver of sky over the mountain ridges had turned cobalt blue. “That hot chocolate, I’d really like one now,” she said.

1

Several millennia ago Gaia was called Chthonia and lived underground. She was an albino and just as unmanageable as a troglodyte – as far as we can imagine one – who has never seen the light of day. It was Zeus who pulled her from the hole in which she lived. Why the god of gods had decided to do so remains a mystery. For she was no beauty. Instead she was as fat and white as one of those larvae that Australian aborigines find so tasty, half-blind with it and possessed of a terrible nature. But Zeus enjoyed challenges. And of all of them, this was by far the most difficult. First he had to find her, for she was hiding in the most inaccessible ravines or in deep tunnels, and then to try over and over again to get her out, thrusting his hand edgeways through the earth’s crust as though through jelly, and stirring it about not knowing what or who he had caught hold of. It took some two hundred human years – ten minutes for the gods – and several failures before he managed it. Eventually, and after persistent attempts, Zeus felt Chthonia’s soft body in his hand and, overjoyed, he was careful not to close his fist to avoid smothering her in the grip of his red-hot fingers.

Dragged from the depths, Chthonia looked about her. What she now saw she neither liked nor disliked. Inside the god’s hand she had lost her whiteness and become dark and sullen. But she had probably always been sullen, even when living in the bowels of the earth, and, as it happened, Zeus didn’t seem to find her dark looks too bad. But there was much to be done, so he would start off like Rex Harrison in “My Fair Lady” when he makes the still unrefined Audrey Hepburn repeat and repeat “the rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain”.

That dissolute god of gods had a certain passion for impossible tasks. He had made love in the form of a swan, in the form of a shower of gold, of a stallion, of a white bull and once, in order to seduce Alcmene, he had had to turn himself into her husband Amphitryon. He had an excellent track record of refusing to believe there was anything he couldn’t do. A characteristic he has since passed on to billions of humans.

Once pulled from her earthly womb, however, Chthonia lost her whiteness and gained her sight. What she saw was a tangle of solid, liquid and gas. The celestial vault, as far as she was concerned, was not sufficiently reliable to reassure her, all the more since it exposed the terrestrial world to winds of every kind.

In that great hand of Zeus lay Jessica Lange in the clutches of King Kong, looking about her ever more suspiciously and certainly not resigned to her fate, for she was planning to return to safety as soon as she could, to where there were no winds and where the vaults were of rock, not air. To her safe haven where the animals were blind and the surface storms were no more than crystalline streams filtered by layers and layers of earth and rock. But she hadn’t counted on the persistence of the one who had dragged her into the open. Nor had she counted on the charms, those positively subterranean charms, of the external world. First of all the smell, since it wasn’t exactly fragrant where she came from down below. Though the cave was marvellously safe, it had a putrid smell of guano and salt, something which Chthonia realised only now that she sniffed the wondrously pleasing smells that came from the open sky. Today, with the wind in the right direction, she would have smelled the recycling centre on via Lungo Isarco Destro. And Zeus gave a satisfied nod that this creature, in which he had invested a few minutes of his time – centuries to a human – was proving remarkably gifted and quick to learn.

Immediately after the smell came the temperature which, long before it became a human obsession, gave a sense of being a part of things: the skin thickens through coldness, and grows thinner and perspires in the heat. In Zeus’ grip, Chthonia had sweated and now, exposed to the air, she shivered and had goose pimples. In the depths from which she’d been snatched there was no hot and cold but just one single, constant and predictable temperature.

Next came the tears of salt water springing from the eyes. Chthonia didn’t know what strange phenomenon made her lose that water, which seemed from the sea, nor did she know what to do when she felt it flowing down her cheeks. The Thunderer spoke to reassure her and named each thing: smell, temperature, tears. He looked the creature in the eye and told her that, like all animate and inanimate things on the surface, she too needed a name, and that name would be Gaia. Then, like the giant in “Jack and the Beanstalk”, using his hand like an immense tipper truck, he carefully laid her on the ground and made her walk. And so, after the hard living rock she had always felt beneath her feet, she discovered the marvellous softness of meadows together with the softness of her earthly name so different from the harshness of her underground existence. Chthonia, now Gaia, looked around her, lost yet excited and, speaking now to Zeus for the first time, said she really couldn’t understand how anyone could be so unhappy and happy in the same moment. It takes time but you’ll understand, thought Zeus, who never spoke directly but communicated instead by thinking, pondering, musing and without opening his mouth, giving answers that everyone could hear just the same.

Exactly as was happening to Nicolò Ludovisi as he sat, silently, with his family – his wife Gaia and their son Michelangelo – at table seven in the Antica Trattoria Olimpo at Sanzeno.

* * *

“‘A few thousand years’ how many?” Gaia asked her son, more surprised than amused.

“Four or five,” Michelangelo replied, after he had done a quick calculation. “If we reckon the Mycenaean civilisation can be dated to around 1600 BC . . .”

“But you’re sure you’re only eleven years old?” Gaia asked her son. “You do see what I mean?” she added, turning to Nicolò, who was sitting opposite. In her voice and expression, there was a mixture of sincerity and falsehood, as if, contrary to the impression she wanted to give, she was in fact pleased with that young genius. “I think you ought to be enjoying your childhood, that’s all,” she said, turning to her son. “Nicolò, you tell him too . . .”

But Nicolò seemed distracted by the ugly prints hanging on the wall behind Gaia. Picturing Zeus and his transformations they doubtless had something to do with the name of the restaurant: in the first there he is in the form of a galloping stallion trapping Dia; in the second he’s a magnificent swan lusting after Leda; in the third a crowned bull carrying Europa on his back; in the fourth liquefied gold trickling down Danaë’s thighs; while in the fifth a bearded man stands in front of a bed on which a semi-clad woman is lying and, positioned close by, is a herm that looks exactly the same as the standing man . . .

“Nicolò?” Gaia said. “Are you still with us?”

Nicolò nodded. “That one’s impossible to understand,” he said, pointing to the last of the five prints.

“That’s Amphitryon,” Michelangelo explained immediately, just as he would have done at school in defiance of his classmates, who hated him because he knew it all.

Some months before, at the start of the school year, Gaia had been called in by the teacher, who had suggested Asperger’s. Gaia had always thought this, but felt she had to make people think otherwise.

“Ah,” Nicolò said blankly.

“That’s enough now,” Gaia said after a while.

“Enough of what?” her husband asked, placing his hands flat down on the table as though he needed to make contact with something solid.

“You haven’t said a word all evening.” At this point her mask slipped, since, despite her relaxed conversation, it was clear she hadn’t lost sight of him for one second. With what Nicolò called her third eye, through which she exercised her obsessive control over everything.

Nicolò wished he could have confessed to her all that had upset him that afternoon.

“Is it something to do with work?” Gaia insisted. Now at last she was being open with him. Nicolò shook his head. “So what is it?” And she waited with an odd expression on her lips, like when grown-ups blow kisses at children. “Words fail me,” she said in defeat, after pausing in vain for some sign of life from her husband.

Some people think that words are omens. Instead they are keys that unlock the doors of darkened rooms. Of rooms kept locked for years, of rooms that have been forgotten. Perhaps it is the fate of men and women on this earth to live in houses with locked rooms concealing both hidden treasures and also, all too conveniently, unmentionable secrets.

This brief exchange left Michelangelo silent for a long while. Gaia noticed and gave him a look of surprise.

“Amphitryon,” he said, as though stirred again by that gaze. “Zeus pretended to be Alcmene’s husband, that’s Amphitryon. So she’s unfaithful to her husband without realising it.”

Now, just for a few moments, Gaia felt things had returned to their natural order. “And what’s that strange animal you see lower down there? she asked without any real interest, pointing to an area of the print close to the caption. Then, without waiting for an answer, she turned back to her husband: “For God’s sake, what’s wrong?” she insisted.

“It’s the Teumessian fox,” said Michelangelo. “An animal that’s impossible to catch.”

“Nicolò.” There was now a promise in her disconsolate tone.

“Amphitryon thinks he can get Cephalus to catch it but in fact it’s Zeus, who then pretends to be him – Amphitryon – and seduces his wife,” Michelangelo said to himself.

“She probably didn’t even notice the difference.” This was the first comment of any kind that Nicolò had made on the subject.

Gaia puckered her face, as she did every time she wanted to give a quick rundown of what had happened so far . . .

* * *

The meal had been tense. Michelangelo had talked obsessively about everything until Nicolò, who was looking at some point of the room in front of him, had suddenly waved his hand, as if to strike him but without actually doing so. “You really can’t keep quiet!” he had hissed in a tone far more frightening than any physical blow, at which Michelangelo had stopped still, staring with that typical wide-eyed look of highly imaginative children.

In other circumstances, Gaia might have reacted angrily to her husband’s gesture towards their child, but not this time. Or rather, she seemed about to react but then held back, with the look of someone resigned once and for all to taking a different route and not ending up in the usual blind alley.

Nicolò sensed the abrupt change, though without understanding what it meant. The solemn silence in which they headed for the car park, once the bill was paid, gave him the illusion of having manoeuvred into a position of advantage.

So much so that, standing at the car, he felt confident enough to offer some prospect of continuing.

“We’ll talk about it at home,” he said.

Gaia looked sceptical. “I’ll drive,” she said, holding her hand out for the car keys.

* * *

In the car they limited themselves to feeding their mutual anxieties, stretching silences to breaking point or sullying them with any old remark.

They drove for some twenty minutes towards Bolzano without speaking and with Michelangelo seemingly asleep in the middle of the back seat. “Will Baffo die?” he said, as if from nowhere. “The vet said he’ll die.”

“No-one’s going to die! Cristina said nothing of the sort.” Gaia used the vet’s first name since they had been to junior school together. Then, at secondary school, their paths had separated.

Nicolò pulled a pack of cigarettes from his jacket pocket, took one out and put it in his mouth.

“You know you’re not meant to smoke in the car. We agreed, didn’t we?” Gaia said, as if the only way she could speak to her husband was by attacking him. These were moments when she found it hard to be civil. She leaned towards the windscreen, which was beginning to mist up, gripping the steering wheel as though it were him and to stop herself punching that bastard next to her. Bolzano was now less than ten kilometres away. “It was you who agreed,” he snapped. “Anyway, I haven’t lit up, have I?” And he looked at her as though everything between them depended on the fact that he could light his fucking cigarette at any moment he wished, or keep it in his mouth, unlit, like a promise, or a threat.

“You shit,” she muttered, though not quite to herself, as he pretended to take a long draw on his unlit cigarette.

“Aren’t I worth at least an answer?” One thing could be said about Gaia: she didn’t give up easily.

“At home,” he hissed, with an immediacy that unsettled the atmosphere.

“Are you two quarrelling?” Michelangelo asked, just as the argument seemed to have ended. He had learned that it was the heavy silences between his parents that were the real quarrel. “Shouldn’t you get a divorce?” he asked.

Nicolò gave a shrug of irritation. “What do you know about such things? Weren’t you asleep?” he said bluntly.

Gaia changed gear into the bend so that the SUV wouldn’t lose speed. Driving helped her pretend she could ignore the tension thick enough to be cut with a knife. “No-one’s getting a divorce here,” she insisted, catching Michelangelo’s eye in the rear-view mirror and adopting an inflated and reassuring tone. “You haven’t fastened your seat belt,” she observed without looking round.

“Got eyes in the back of your head, have you?” said Nicolò.

“That’s right, didn’t you know? I’m a mum with rear-view eyesight. Belt yourself, Michelangelo.”

“What is ‘belt yourself’ supposed to mean?” asked Nicolò, without managing to look any more cheerful, however hard he tried.

“It’s an expression,” answered Michelangelo.

“Which doesn’t exist,” said Nicolò. Gaia kept her eyes fixed on the beam of the headlights in the darkness. “You’re making expressions up again,” he remarked with a hint of a smile.

His comment annoyed her, or rather it was that tone of his that annoyed her even more. She had known it for years, his way of putting other people down. That subtle way of highlighting what he thought were other people’s faults. Once during an argument he had promised to list all those things that she did and shouldn’t do and making up expressions was one of them. Yet Gaia continued to say that language is important, that words are important. And now, here she is, inventing expressions, and not even very effectively. “Make sure you’ve fastened your seat belt correctly,” said Gaia in the end, enunciating each single word as though she were swallowing it. “I need to go,” she added.

“You need to go where?” Nicolò asked.

“What sort of question is that?” Gaia could no longer hide a trace of anger – a remnant of her previous annoyance.

Nicolò sensed he had been wrong-footed, but it took him only a moment to recover: “And yours, what sort of question is that?”

“Calm yourself!” she retorted.

“Are you quarrelling now?” Michelangelo asked.

“Fuck!” Nicolò muttered.

“I heard that,” his son declared. “You used a swear word.”

“Clever,” Nicolò sneered. If only the earth would open beneath us, he thought, closing his eyes. Open up right now and swallow us. And swallow this whole fucking place. “Don’t you have your video game?” he asked instead.

“Mamma doesn’t like me to use it in the car, and not at mealtimes either. I need to go too.”

“We’ll be home soon,” Nicolò cut in abruptly.

“I didn’t like your attitude in the restaurant, not one little bit,” Gaia continued, pulling into a lay-by to make it clear she hadn’t given up in any way.

“Gaia, you don’t like anything that doesn’t fit with your ideas,” he said, provoking her without making it obvious: it was enough to roll the unlit cigarette between his lips. “What are you doing now?”

“I’m stopping. We both need to go.” Gaia gripped the steering wheel even tighter until her knuckles turned white. “So you reckon lately I’ve never been right?”

“Mamma . . .” Michelangelo tried to intervene.

“What is it?” she shouted, exasperated.

“I need to go, a lot.”

“All right.” Gaia braked suddenly.

Without waiting for his son, Nicolò threw open the car door and got out. He went into the undergrowth and lit his cigarette as a matter of urgency. Then he heard a rustling noise as Michelangelo and Gaia headed in among the rhododendrons. In the moonless darkness that icy-cold and serrated landscape seemed fixed in a glassy equilibrium. Everyone was saying how there had been little snow so far but that plenty was on its way. You can tell it from the sky, they said, with its unmistakeable tone of dense grey. The headlamps left on nearby cast a cone of light over a pervious expanse, an asphalt strip of black tulle bordered with smoothed wedges of dwarf spruce trees. Nicolò set off back to the car thinking how he hadn’t even needed to pretend: that this was the most important cigarette of the day.

Just at that moment the fox appeared.

Two to three metres away, as if it had materialised from that milky fog, just waiting there for him to notice it. He saw it as soon as he looked up from the cigarette that he had just stubbed out. The darkness echoed with the calls of night birds. He could recognise them one by one: scops owl, screech owl, snowy owl, tawny owl, eagle owl . . . And the gnashing jaws of deer rhythmically stripping bark from the trees . . . and the furtive footsteps of smugglers and refugees . . .

This is what the fox said. This is what it revealed.

And it revealed also a crevasse opening up suddenly out of nowhere as far as Nicolò’s feet, so exact and real that he was forced to jump back so as not to fall in. The headlamps of the car flickered and went out; the light suddenly dropped; and from nowhere he heard the voice of Gaia calling . . .

2

“Leo?”

“I’m here.”

“Here, where?” Sergio asked, stretching his neck over the edge of the bed.

“On the floor,” the other replied. “My back,” he mumbled.

Sergio joined him. “How many times have I told you to get it checked out?”

Leo closed his eyes. “It’s going now. I need to stretch out like this. It’s going, it’s going . . .” he assured him with a wince.

“Turn over,” Sergio said, holding him on one side.

“Ahh!” Leo groaned.

“Turn over, I said!” But without waiting for him to move, he pulled him over to lie stomach down, with his back exposed.

Ignoring Leo’s groans he pressed his thumbs into the middle of his magnificently curved spine. “Why are you so fucking beautiful?” he asked as he massaged him firmly.

“You’re hurting,” Leo said, though without much conviction. The light skimmed over him with pictorial mastery, as happens to certain bodies particularly blessed by nature.

“Relax,” Sergio ordered, but with the same identical lack of conviction. Leo let his head sink between his crossed arms. “Is that better?” Sergio asked, with the voice of one who knew what he was doing.

Between them, in fact, that tone served the particular purpose of endorsing their difference in age. Seven and a half years. This, for Sergio, was a sensitive subject, as it had now also become for Leo.

“There, that tone of voice,” Leo said, with his face kept from the floor only by his forearms.

Sergio suddenly stopped and sat up. “What tone of voice?” he asked, immediately regretting having asked it.

“Yours. Leave it alone, I’ve more experience, move away, little boy . . . and so on,” Leo joked, without shifting from his position of penitent novice. It was as if he were speaking from another world, for his words were directed straight into the floor, giving them a strange resonance.

“I wasn’t using any particular tone,” Sergio said, trying not to seem defensive. Leo’s back was something close to perfection: precise, compact, designed at every point to enthuse the light. “Why the hell do you have to be so beautiful? You realise it’s a problem?” The back in question sprang into restrained laughter. “Anyone could see that,” Sergio insisted, massaging Leo’s sides and hips once again. “Anyone,” he continued, with a hint of rebuke tinged with passion. “But not you. With this back of yours, for example, you go about without giving it a second thought.”

“I can’t see any alternative,” said Leo, and with a sigh he made it clear that Sergio was resolving his back problem most effectively.

“The solution would be not to love you at all,” Sergio remarked.

Leo sprang up, kneeling with his back to him, almost banging Sergio’s nose with the back of his head. “Don’t say that, not even in fun,” he replied to the wall in front of him. He was reluctant to turn round, not knowing what expression he might find if he chose to look him in the face. “Never again. Never again,” he repeated, as though the idea expressed just once was not sufficiently clear. Then he stood up.

Sergio gripped his knees to prevent him from going any further. “Never again,” he assured him. “Sorry.”

“You know what I’m like! You know what I think, no?” Leo asked from above.

* * *

Sergio was well aware he was referring to an argument of a few years back. When both were still living in Bologna and they had only just met, one rainy evening, in the bar where Leo was working part-time. Sergio was drinking with a group of colleagues and Leo, on the other side of the bar, had done all he could to attract his attention. He h. . .