Death in Sardinia by Marco Vichi Page B

Whenever he left that place he felt reborn, and he wondered why everyone in town went and did something so sad every Sunday. At age fifteen he finally rebelled, and in the end his parents stopped taking him there. The only time he ever went back inside the church was for funerals. The last time was three years before moving to Florence, when his grandmother, Maria Serena, passed away. Back then the priest was Don Beniamino, a fat tub of lard who always smelled of grilled pork and wine. His homilies were unending, and his funeral orations even longer. He had a shrill voice and always said things that made one feel anxious. Then one day Don Beniamino did something he shouldn’t have done: he started secretly selling the land traditionally attached to the church of Bonarcado. When somebody found out, the rumour spread in barely half an hour. Everyone in town took to the streets, even women and children. That land belonged to Bonarcado, and must never be touched. They all went to the church to get the priest, and then tied him to his donkey with a sign around his neck, l’ainu asub‘e sa bestia : ‘the ass riding his beast’. Then they whipped the poor animal and sent the priest down the road to Paulilatino, following behind and shouting at him never to come back. And that was the last they ever saw of Don Beniamino.
    Piras was forcing himself to keep up an almost normal pace, but the road to Santu Lussurgiu was all uphill and the effort was tiring him out. Every so often he would stop to catch his breath. It was shortly before sunset. He wanted to get as far as Morgiu’s stable, and so he sped up. Many years before he was born, something had happened along this road. One morning at dawn, in early summer, a stranger was found sprawled out in the dirt like a wretch, eyes open to the heavens, killed by a blast from a sawn-off shotgun that had ripped through his neck. He must have been over seventy years old and had almost no teeth. When they lifted him off the ground his head came detached from his body and rolled down the road. Nobody ever found out who he was or who had killed him. The priest held a mass for him, and then he was buried. A blank tombstone was laid over his grave. People talked about the affair for a long time afterwards, and a few years later the legend of a headless man, combing the countryside in search of his killer, began to spread. Mothers often used that story to make their children behave.
    ‘If you don’t go to bed at once, the headless man will come and take you away.’ Piras’s own mother had said that to him many times, and little by little the story had worked its way into his brain, rather like the sharp point of a nail. For years he had gone to sleep every night thinking that one day he would become a policeman and solve the mystery of that old man’s murder. By now, of course, he understood that the headless ghost who roamed the countryside would never find rest.
    Bordelli parked under the plane trees on Viale Pieraccini and slowly began to climb the stairs that led to the forensic medicine laboratory. When he got to the top, he stopped for a moment to look at the sky. He wished it were white and full of snow.
    He wanted his skin to feel the dry cold of certain winters he’d experienced as a child. But these clouds were dark and promised only rain.
    He went into the building. Even in the corridor one smelled the sickly-sweet, acrid odour typical of such places. Pushing open the door to the lab, he saw his friend, the pathologist, standing in the middle of the room staring at the wall. In his hand he had a test tube half filled with dark liquid, but wasn’t paying any attention to it.
    ‘Diotivede, what’s wrong?’
    The doctor shook his head and went and set the test tube down near the microscope.
    ‘I’m retiring in three years. I just found out today,’ he said drily.
    ‘You can’t do this to me.’
    ‘One life is not enough. You barely manage to understand two scraps of