Winter Swallows

ALSO BY MAURIZIO DE GIOVANNI
 IN THE COMMISSARIO RICCIARDI SERIES
 
 I Will Have Vengeance: The Winter of Commissario Ricciardi
 
 Blood Curse: The Springtime of Commissario Ricciardi
 
 Everyone in Their Place: The Summer of Commissario Ricciardi
 
 The Day of the Dead: The Autumn of Commissario Ricciardi
 
 By My Hand: The Christmas of Commissario Ricciardi
 
 Viper: No Resurrection for Commissario Ricciardi
 
 The Bottom of Your Heart: Inferno for Commissario Ricciardi
 
 Glass Souls: Moths for Commissario Ricciardi
 
 Nameless Serenade: Nocturne for Commissario Ricciardi
 
 
 
 IN THE BASTARDS OF PIZZOFALCONE SERIES
 
 The Bastards of Pizzofalcone
 
 Darkness for the Bastards of Pizzofalcone
 
 Cold for the Bastards of Pizzofalcone
 
 Puppies for the Bastards of Pizzofalcone
 
 Bread for the Bastards of Pizzofalcone
 
 
 The Crocodile
 WINTER SWALLOWS
 To Concetta and Maria Rosaria. To their smile, behind the clouds
 THE END
 I’m sorry, Brigadie’. I’m so very sorry. But it’s worth the trouble to try to explain it to you, because maybe it’s not my fault, when we come right down to it. Or really, not entirely my fault. Even though it was my finger that pulled the trigger.
 The blame, if you ask me, ought to be put on dreams. Dreams are such stinkers, Brigadie’. They’re devious and treacherous, dreams are. They’ll convince you that reality, deep down, isn’t entirely real, that you can change it, that you can improve on it. Dreams create something in your head that tricks you and defrauds you, because afterwards, without them, you can’t bring yourself to go on living.
 Dreams, you know, Brigadie’, aren’t always the same. It depends on the time of year. When the difference between the world that spins around you and the one that you have in your head grows larger, when the abyss that separates them grows deeper and gives rise to subtle, insidious melancholy, impossible to get out of your head, that’s when you become sad, and then sadder. That’s when you find yourself behaving like a fool.
 When you reach the depths of despair.
 And of all the times of year, this is the worst. Because Christmas, with its sweetness and joy, with its candles and bagpipers and season’s greetings, is over now, and it won’t be coming back, and you look around and suddenly see the smoking ruins of everything you’d hoped for and the fog envelops and conceals what truly awaits us. These are the days of shattered dreams.
 New Year’s is an awful thing, Brigadie’. Just awful.
 Objectively speaking, it’s just another ordinary day in the middle of this winter, and this time it’s a Saturday, too, not even the end of the weekend, so that afterwards you still have Sunday to collect your thoughts.
 But for whatever reason we’ve all agreed that it’s New Year’s, the one day of the year when you have to reckon up a balance, add up the pluses and minuses, draw a nice straight line to separate the old, unsuccessful dreams from the new ones. New Year’s. What a con game.
 As if you could really be reborn. As if everything that we are, everything that we’ve built, was no longer worth anything and now we must—or at least now we ought to—venture off on who knows what hazardous undertaking, just because we’ve pulled a sheet off the calendar representing a day, a month, a year. As if that really changed anything.
 You know, Brigadie’, dreams are what we live on. Our own dreams and the dreams of others.
 If you saw what I see every night, three times a night, in the eyes of those who look at us, you’d understand that it’s dreams that keep life going. And that if dreams are a way of running away from reality, and madness is living in another reality, then we’re all crazy, Brigadie’. Every last one of us. Stark raving mad.
 In the midst of the music, through the smoke and the gleam of the glasses, I can see people’s eyes. I can see their eyes as they lean closer to understand the lines that we recite and sing, as they’re captivated and swept away by the characters, tinged with joy or rage, as they turn damp-eyed with emotion, as they pause, raptly, at the sight of the chorus girls’ bare legs.
 People’s eyes, as they fill up with dreams. 
 What do you think, Brigadie’? That’s what people are looking for when they come to the theater. They don’t just want to spend an evening, take their wife or girlfriend out to get a breath of air or fill their bellies with cheap wine. They want to dream. They want a reality that’s different from their everyday lives, for a couple of hours, including intermission. If you stop to think about it, it’s cheap at the price, isn’t it? Just a few lire for two hours of dreams.
 But the problem is that we have dreams too. All the illusions that we scatter over the audience from the stage, three times a night, infect the actors and actresses too, the musicians and chorus girls. Impossible to be immune. Any more than it is for doctors who treat typhus or cholera. There’s always a risk of contagion.
 And when that happens, then one of us, one of the cast with a smile stamped on their face under the greasepaint, shedding fake tears, with a dramatic quaver in their voice, wearing a threadbare stage tailcoat or a top hat or fishnet stockings—one of us starts to dream. And when that happens, there’s bound to be trouble. Big, big trouble.
 Because our dreams are born of dreams.
 In order to do this job well, you have to believe in it, even if you’re a two-bit musician, even if you’re nothing but a dancer in the chorus line or a green, apprentice actor, and that goes double if you’re the starring actor or the leading lady. By sheer dint of