Patience of the Spider

He didn’t feel like eating any more. A wave of black melancholy had come over him, conceding him only a glass of wine and a bit of giuggiulena bread. He tore off a piece, put it in his mouth, and with the index finger of his right hand began searching about for giuggiulena seeds that had fallen from the crust. He pressed them against the tablecloth with his fingertip until they stuck, then brought his finger to his mouth.

The joy of eating bread with giuggiulena lay primarily in this ritual.

Flush against the veranda’s right-hand wall—on the outside, that is—was a wild shrub that over time had grown in width and height to the point where it now came up to the level of someone sitting on the bench.

Livia had told him many times that they needed to uproot it, but this had become a difficult proposition. By now the shrub’s roots must have grown as thick and long as a tree’s.

Montalbano didn’t know why, but he suddenly had the urge to cut it down. He needed only turn his head a little to the right for the whole bush to enter his field of vision. The wild plant was reviving. Here and there amidst its yellow scrub a few green buds were beginning to emerge. Near the top, between two small branches, a silvery spiderweb sparkled in the sunlight. Montalbano was certain it hadn’t been there the day before, because Livia would have noticed and, with her fear of spiders, would have destroyed it with the broom. It must have been made during the night.

The inspector stood up and leaned over the railing to get a closer look at it.

Spellbound, the inspector counted some thirty threads in concentric circles that decreased in diameter as they approached the center. The distance between threads was the same throughout, except in the middle, where it greatly increased. The circu-lar weave, moreover, was held together by a regular sequence of radial threads that emanated from the center and stretched to the outermost circle of the web.

Montalbano guessed that there were about twenty radial threads of uniform distance from one another. The center of the web was made up of the points of convergence of all the threads, which were held together by a thread different from the rest and spiral in shape.

How patient that spider must have been!

It certainly must have encountered some difficulties. A gust of wind shredding the weave, an animal that happened to pass and move a branch . . . But no matter, the spider had carried on its nocturnal labor, determined to bring its web to completion, whatever the cost, obstinate, deaf and blind to all other stimuli.

But where was the spider? Try as he might, the inspector couldn’t see it. Had it already left, abandoning everything?

Had it been eaten by some other animal? Or was it lurking hidden under some yellow leaf, looking keenly around, with its eight eyes like a diadem, its eight legs ready to spring?

All at once, the web began ever so delicately to vibrate, to quiver. Not from any sudden breath of wind, for the nearest leaves, even the flimsiest, remained still. No, it was an artificial movement, created intentionally. And by what, if not the spider itself? Apparently the invisible arachnid wanted the web to be taken for something else—a veil of frost, a wisp of steam—and was moving the threads with its legs. It was a trap.

Montalbano turned back towards the table, picked up a tiny piece of bread, broke it up into even smaller crumbs, and threw them at the web. Too light, they scattered in the air, but one did get caught in the very middle of the web, right on the spiral thread, and stayed there for only a split second. It was there one moment and gone the next. Darting out like a flash from the upper part of the web—which remained hidden under some leaves—a grey dot had enveloped the breadcrumb and vanished. But more than actually witness this movement, the inspector had sensed it. The swiftness with which the grey dot had moved was astonishing. He decided he wanted a better look at the spider’s reaction. He took another crumb, rolled it into a tiny little ball slightly bigger than the last one, and hurled it right into the center of the web, which shook all over. The grey dot pounced again, arrived at the center, covered the bread with its body, but did not return to its hiding place. It held still, perfectly visible, in the middle of its admirable structure of airy geometries. To Montalbano it seemed as if the spider was looking at him, gloating in triumph.

Then, in nightmarishly slow succession, as in an endless cinematic fadeout and fade-in, the spider’s tiny head began to change color and form, going from grey to pink, its fuzz turning to hair, the eight eyes merging into two, until it looked like a minute human face, smiling with satisfaction at the booty it held tightly between its legs.

Montalbano shuddered in horror. Was he living a nightmare? Had he drunk too much wine without realizing it? All at once he remembered a passage in Ovid he’d studied at school, the one about Arachne the weaver, turned into a spider by Athena . . . Could time have started running backwards, all the way back to the dark night of myth? He felt dizzy, head spinning. Luckily that monstrous vision didn’t last long, for the image began at once to blur and reverse the transforma-tion. Yet before the spider turned back into a spider, before it vanished again amidst the leaves, Montalbano had enough time to recognize the face. And, no, it wasn’t Arachne’s. He was sure of that.

He sat down on the bench, his legs giving out from under him. He had to drink a whole glass of wine to regain a little strength.

He realized that it must also have been late one night—on one of many nights of anguish, torment, and rage— that the other spider, too, the one whose face he’d just glimpsed, had decided to weave a gigantic web.

And with patience, tenacity, and determination, never once turning back, that spider had woven its web to completion. It was a marvel of geometry, a masterpiece of logic.

Yet it was impossible for that web not to contain at least one mistake, however minuscule, one tiny, barely visible im-perfection.

He got up, went inside, and started looking for a magnifying glass that he knew he had somewhere. Ever since Sherlock Holmes, no detective is a true detective if he doesn’t have a magnifying glass within reach.

He opened every last drawer in the house, made a mess of the place—coming across a letter he’d received from a friend six months before and never opened, he opened it, read it, learned that his friend Gaspano had become a grandfather (Shit! But weren’t he and Gaspano the same age?)—searched some more, then decided there was no point in continuing. He could only conclude, apparently, that he was not a true detective. Elementary, my dear Watson. He went back out on the veranda, leaned on the railing, and bent all the way forward until his nose was almost at the center of the spiderweb. Then he recoiled a little, suddenly scared that the lightning-fast spider might bite his nose, mistaking it for prey. He studied the web carefully, to the point that his eyes began to water. No, the web appeared geometrically perfect, but in reality it wasn’t. There were at least three or four points where the distance between one strand and the next was irregular, and there was even one spot where two threads zigzagged for very brief stretches.