Poisonville by Massimo Carlotto

Giovanna, but now she’s dead, and the man who killed her was her lover. You tell me who I am.”
    “Lower your voice,” he warned. “You’re a Visentin, you’ll always be a Visentin. What matters now is getting you out of this mess with as little damage as possible.”
    “What about Giovanna? Don’t you care about finding her killer?”
    “More than anything else on earth,” he answered in a firm voice. “But we must take care to avoid being overwhelmed by the situation. Giovanna was cheating on you, her family’s unsavory past will come back to the surface. Everyone will be talking about us, and we have to go on living in this town.”
    I wrapped my arms around him. “I can’t take it, Papa.”
    “Buck up. I’m here, and I’ll never abandon you.”
    I walked with him to the front door of his law office, then I went back home. I was rummaging in my pocket for the keys when I heard the unmistakable sound of a bicycle rattling along under the porticoes. In our town, bicycles are one of the most common means of transportation, and you learn from the earliest age to recognize all the variations on the sounds they make. I turned around. It was Carla. She was heading straight toward me. The bicycle was brand-new, and made in China. It was a copy of an old Italian Bianchi: a girl’s bike, black with gold trim and old-fashioned rod brakes. The front wheel grazed the tips of my shoes.
    “Who killed Giovanna?” she demanded in a broken voice.
    Her cheeks were red from the cold, her eyes swollen with weeping. She was clearly upset, on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
    “Come inside.”
    “No. I want to know who killed her.”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Was it you?”
    “Don’t be ridiculous.”
    “Maybe she confessed that she had a lover and you couldn’t take it.”
    So that’s who the mysterious witness was who had told the police all about Giovanna’s lover. I should have guessed. Carla and Giovanna were lifelong friends.
    “Come inside, please. I need to know everything.”
    “I don’t trust you,” she hissed.
    I spread my arms in desolation. “Do you think I want to hurt you in some way? Don’t you understand that she was killed by her lover? Do you know who he was? What did Giovanna tell you about him?”
    She opened her purse and pulled out a rumpled pack of cigarettes. She took one out and clamped it between her lips. Giovanna had been a smoker too.
    I hadn’t smoked since I was at university and I couldn’t stand it when Giovanna smoked in the house or, worse, in the car. But I never said anything. I didn’t want to come off as the typical preachy ex-smoker, but most of all, I liked the smell and taste of the tobacco in her mouth when I kissed her. I would let my tongue wander over hers and then over her teeth and palate. I wondered if her lover liked that taste too. I felt a shiver run down my back. How many aspects of Giovanna had I shared with her killer?
    Carla lit the cigarette and sucked hungrily at the smoke. “She told me about her lover the other morning. We were at the seamstress’s shop, trying her wedding dress for the final fitting. She was a wreck; she told me that she had decided to confess everything to you.”
    “That’s all? She didn’t tell you anything else?”
    Carla stared at me for a long time. She was uncertain whether or not to trust me. She dropped her cigarette butt on the ground and crushed it out with the heel of her shoe.
    “She told me that she had become the slut of the man who had ruined her life. Those were her exact words.”
    I stood there, petrified. I mulled those words over in my mind, in search of a possible meaning. But I couldn’t figure one out. They were only terrifying. Giovanna must have been in a state of complete despair to describe herself with such contempt.
    “You don’t know anything else?”
    Carla mounted her bicycle. “What about you? How much do you know?”
    I watched as she pedaled away beneath the portico and then vanished