second to decide whether to fire at a figure on a video screen. In these moments you can only trust your training. Cecilia has no choice but to rely on the technology now in play beneath the surgical lights.
I ask if she knows the English painter, Muriel Barrett. She replies that you can hardly miss her.
“Muriel gave me a ride to the hospital, but then she felt squeamish and had to leave.” “Muriel? Squeamish?” Cecilia says skeptically. “She’s a war hammer.” “Battle-ax?”
“Why is she so upset about Giovanni? What is their relationship?” “
“The landlady saw him go up to Muriel’s apartment. And the police found his car, along with bloodstains on the sidewalk.” “But he was found in the tunnel on Via Salicotto.” “The idea was to make it look like a war between the contrade. You were right — Giovanni was attacked as a warning. The police think it was a mob hit, Cecilia. They wanted to send a special message. The question is, to whom?” Cecilia crosses her arms and her stare grows dark with suspicion.
“Ana, have you been talking to the provincial police?” “Some.”
“Stay out of it. You can’t understand Italy.” “I understand that you’re afraid—” “I’m afraid of
After the second surgery, to sew up his heart, Giovanni slipped into a coma. They put him on a ventilator with a tube down his throat, taped to a bandage around his head. His face was pale from loss of blood. When I touched his hand, his skin felt clammy and cold.
Despite assurances from the doctors, after forty-eight hours Giovanni still had not woken up. Waiting became a vigil. The priest came every day, along with Sofri, who arrived precisely at ten a.m. and left at noon, as well as the extended Nicosa family, a flock of solemn-faced members of the contrada, and employees of the coffee company, all ritually paying their respects.
Day one of Palio was two days away, on Friday, June 29, and visitors to the hospital talked compulsively about the uptick in retail sales, the full hotels, which horses looked fast, who had been chosen to bodyguard the jockeys, the health of the judges, and the direction of the wind. They spoke robustly, as if news of the outside world would distract the anguished parents. Not only would Giovanni not be alfiere, but also he might never walk again. They had not ruled out brain damage, and the doctors were saying he could still lose several toes from lack of blood to the leg. The prince was deathly ill and fighting for his life.
Around seven on the Thursday night before Palio, Nicosa, Cecilia, and I simultaneously get the urge for soda and chips, available from machines in the basement lounge. We are in the elevator when she says casually, without shifting her eyes from the lighted floor numbers, “When Giovanni is well enough, I will take him to El Salvador.” “I suppose it is a good enough place to recover,” Nicosa says.
“No, he will stay.”
“Stay?” asks her husband. “For how long?” “Until he is married,” she answers grimly.
The elevator doors open. You could smell linty hot exhaust from the giant clothes dryers turning towels. We follow Cecilia’s squared shoulders down a dim corridor. She is still wearing the white lab coat and heels. She opens the lock on a door with a security card.
“He will stay with my family, and he will be safe.” She turns on the lights. There are a few round tables and a microwave above an empty counter. Nicosa checks his cell, but there is no service in the basement.
“That will never happen,” he says, addressing the cigarette machine.
“Are you going to stop me?” “I don’t have to. He will never choose to leave Siena.” “He will have no choice. I’m taking him. That’s all.” “If you are trying to punish me by taking Giovanni away,” Nicosa says slowly, “there is no need. I blame myself for what happened. I should have kept a closer eye. Not let him stay out all hours with people we don’t know, like that boy he met on the Campo, the African punk who gave him his first joint — it was all downhill from there.” I recall Inspector Martini speculating that Giovanni most likely had tried drugs, and wondered how far down was “downhill.” “Does he still get high?” I ask.
“No,” Cecilia answers. “Not anymore.” “It’s in the past,” Nicosa says irritably. “Right now he is very sick. He needs our prayers.” “I’m wondering if Giovanni’s involvement with drugs has anything to do with the attack,” I said.
“Giovanni is not involved with drugs!” Nicosa says. “Did you not hear me? I said I take the blame. Sometimes I am not as good a father as I should be or want to be, but right now I am going upstairs to be with my son. Don’t even think about taking him to El Salvador,” he tells his wife. “Now or ever.” “Infuriating man,” Cecilia says when he’s left.
The basement lounge is like a bunker, soundproofed from activity in the hospital above. With no cell service, we have no way of knowing that at that moment, Giovanni’s condition has drastically changed. Instead, we slump in plastic chairs, mindlessly eating potato chips with packets of garlic mayonnaise Cecilia found in a drawer.
“I hid my pregnancy for seven months,” she is saying. “At the beginning, Nicoli didn’t know. We met in the aftermath of an earthquake on top of a civil war — everything was in confusion. You are young, you want to affirm life, you go to bed with a handsome stranger. We were madly in love, but we did not expect to be together again; it was too far-fetched. He went back to Italy. I studied for my medical degree. I felt the pregnancy was my responsibility. I was afraid to ask this man I hardly knew for help, so I went against everything and decided to have Giovanni on my own.” “Did your family support you?” Cecilia snorts. “My mother said she wanted to die. I ruined all her hopes that I would be a doctor, and she had sacrificed so much for my education. After the birth I was very unhappy and in a deep depression, but all I could do was struggle and manage to work and do good in school. My aunts had to talk to my mother and say, ‘You need to be stronger, and hold her, and don’t let her sink, because if you let her go, what’s going to happen to all these years of working so hard? Why give up now? For what people will say?’ How can I put this to you? In the Latin culture it is not even your choice to have an abortion, because the idea is that to have this baby will be your punishment. You did it, and that will be the consequences. Of course, the moment he was born, Giovanni became my mother’s joy.
“She urged me to contact Nicoli. I was terrified he would refuse to answer, but it was just the opposite. He cared more than I knew, and he was so proud to have a son. He was just starting out in the coffee business, but he did manage to send money. He insisted that we wait to get married in Italy, in the contrada, in the proper way. It took three years for him to make his way back to El Salvador. In the meantime I was a single mother.
“Giovanni was born before Christmas. In the New Year, when the next term started, I had to take this little tiny bundle to school. I fed him at midnight. I would come home so tired. I worked sometimes three days straight in the hospital. When he was older, I would come home half dead, and Giovanni would say, ‘Let’s go paint!’ and I would fall asleep on the table and Giovanni would say, ‘Mama, wake up, you’re not playing with me!’ and sometimes I would cry because I felt I was not giving my baby enough. It was a rough and hard time in my life. It was like everything was crumbling. The only thing I held on to was the belief that Nicoli was coming back.
“He didn’t see Giovanni until Giovanni was three. We left for Italy, and Nicoli and I were married immediately. Of course, I had to be baptized into Oca first, so Giovanni would be of Oca. I embraced everything my husband put before me. I learned to cook Italian food. I took care of Nicoli’s mother, even though my heart was breaking because I had left my own mother behind. It was known that Nicoli had other women, and I was supposed to accept that as a way of life. He once had a mistress who disappeared in a supermarket parking lot; probably she’s dead. It was a scandal. They said she was part of the mafias.” “Was she?” I ask.
“I did not hire a detective to find out,” Cecilia says sarcastically. “Nicoli apologized a thousand times, offered to do anything to make it right. There were so many nights we both just cried. Once you go through something like that, no matter how much you try, the marriage is never the same. At one point I was going to leave him, take my son back to El Salvador, but that would have been too hard on Giovanni. We break apart, we heal, we continue. Nicoli pays for my clinics and pulls the political strings necessary to get the permits and paperwork and all the rest of it. Without his influence, we could not be of service to our poorest patients.” “Is that what Nicoli meant about not being a good father? Was he talking about his influence with the mafias?” Cecilia shuts it down.
