Two Stories
by Diego Lama
Editorial Note:
Diego Lama was born in Naples and is an architect. The two stories published here are translated by Rose Facchini.
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The Children
It had been raining for hours. During the ceremony, a flash of lightning illuminated the altar where there stood a terracotta statue of our beautiful Lord Jesus Christ, created by an unknown artist in 1884. My wife and I came out of the Church of the Holy Virgin of the Rock, making the sign of the cross. I opened an old umbrella, and we started walking home, shielding ourselves from the rain as best we could.
Midway, we heard a thunderclap louder than the others.
No, it wasn’t thunder.
The mountain above our village -- Montebruno di Sotto -- began to tremble, then slid down into the valley, sweeping away the fields and the outermost houses.
My wife stopped to watch the landslide, then lowered her umbrella.
“The children, the children!” she shouted in the rain. “The children.”
“The children!” I shouted.
I started running home, heedless of the rain and river of mud that had swallowed the road. My wife tried to keep up with me, but when she reached the embankment near the gate, she stopped. A black waterfall was crashing down onto the property, carrying away trees and soil. It felt like we had reached not the end of the village, but the end of the world.
I stopped. I was afraid.
“The children, the children!” I heard my wife shouting from behind. “The children.”
“The children!” I shouted, and without thinking any longer, I rushed towards our house.
I couldn’t open the front door with the mud pouring in, so I squeezed through the kitchen window. The black water, now up to my knees, had already flooded the house, including the living room.
“The children, the children!” my wife shouted from outside. “The children.”
“The children!” I shouted and rushed to the back of the living room.
The water had nearly risen to my hips. Around me, I heard slight creaks; it was as if the landslide were pushing the walls of the house, trying to drag them away with everything else.
The children.
I finally reached the viridescent wall of the living room where I found the statuette in the niche still intact. The parish priest had given it to us at our wedding—a work by the master Perdegalli (there is a collection of his work in Rome and in the Eur District, as well as two solo exhibits in Montebruno di Sotto, one at the Giovanni Pascoli Middle School and one at the parish). The statuette depicted two children playing ball: her hair painted gold, his enameled black.
“The children, the children!” my wife shouted again from outside. “The children.”
“The children!” I shouted, grabbing the statuette and struggling through the living room as the water reached my chest.
I made it to the window and let the torrent of rain sweep me outside. I clung to the fence and, immersed in water up to my neck, held the statuette above me until I reached the boundary wall while the waterfall grew increasingly furious. My wife, who had taken refuge on the high side of the embankment, held her arms out to me. I handed her the children, then—exhausted—climbed up beside her. In the rain.
Just in time. The landslide struck the house, which crumbled like a pile of old stones stacked without mortar. It was then swept away by a deluge of rubble, a cascade of black mud.
“The children, the children!” my wife shouted. “The children.”
“The children!” I shouted, thinking of Luigi and Isotta sleeping upstairs.
When they were found three days later, in the fields of Moggioli, beyond the old village, they were jet-black, and not just from the mud. They looked like two dry, broken branches.
“The children, the children,” my wife whispered for some time. “The children.”
“The children.”
END
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The Business Partner
Ugo and Aldo were business partners who couldn’t stand each other anymore. They were too similar in the way they worked, thought, dreamed, planned, imagined, deduced, speculated, conned, loved, et cetera. So, after months of preparation, Ugo decided to kill Aldo.
He used coffee to do it.
At work, they made coffee in a pod machine with a refillable tank (Ugo had the same one at home). On Friday night, before leaving the deserted office building, Ugo put a good dose of cyanide in the coffee machine’s little tank. He knew no one would come in over the weekend except his partner Aldo, who had the habit of working even on Saturday mornings.
So, Ugo concocted a perfect alibi for the two days and nights starting from that Friday evening. Then, on Monday morning, he took the (not poisoned) coffee machine from his house, put it in the trunk, and hurried to work. When he arrived, even before the secretary did, he found Aldo dead, poisoned in his office.
On the table was a paper cup with residue of coffee mixed with cyanide.
Ugo swapped the coffee machine with the one he brought from home and called the police.
Then he took the poisoned one and left. As he was putting it in the trunk of his car, he imagined what the police would think after conducting the investigation: once they found the residue of cyanide-laced coffee in both Aldo’s body and the cup, they couldn’t possibly determine where it had come from because the coffee machine from the office had been replaced with the untainted one from his house. The police would then reconstruct what time the crime was committed (probably Saturday morning, they’d conclude) and would most certainly paint a false picture—that Aldo’s coffee had been poisoned by someone he himself had let in.
While waiting for the officers, Ugo got a glass of cold water from the cooler near the coffee machine and drank.
When the police arrived and found Ugo dead (also poisoned), it took them quite some time to understand the dynamics of the two murders. Only when they found the (poisoned) coffee machine in Ugo’s trunk and the (not poisoned) little water tank in Aldo’s trunk did they begin to formulate some hypotheses regarding the complex homicidal strategies of the two business partners. As usual, they had had the same idea.
END
