Free Day of the Dead by Maurizio de Giovanni, Antony Shugaar Page A

that was what worried her. Time was passing: she was past seventy and he was thirty-one years old, an age by which most men had already established a family and were raising their children. And he hadn’t even found a fiancée.
    Simple soul though she was, Rosa understood that there were emotions stirring in that tightly closed heart. She saw him night after night, looking across the way at a certain window, when he thought she was asleep in her bedroom; instead she got up and, on tiptoe, she’d peer through the crack in the door, which he purposely left ajar so he could listen to her snore.
    So why did he persist in this absurd loneliness? Even though she knew she was looking at him through the eyes of a loving nanny, she found him very handsome, sensitive, and good-hearted. And wealthy, too, though he was absolutely (and, to her eyes, culpably) disinterested in his estates. He had everything necessary to charm the best woman in the world.
    But the
signorino
, the young master, as she called him, behaved as if he’d taken a vow: no woman, no family.
    She believed it was her duty to perpetuate the Malomonte name. She considered it a crime to knowingly bring such an old and venerable family to an end. But what could she do?
    A few months earlier, she had noticed that under a certain loose tile in his bedroom, the
signorino
had hidden a book. Laboriously, because she knew only her numbers and capital letters, she’d copied the title. Then she’d gone to ask the hairdresser who’d attended parochial school for a couple of years and had learned to read from the nuns to confirm it for her. And in fact, the title was:
Il moderno segretario galante
. She’d asked around and had discovered that it was a collection of love letters, to be used as models.
    She didn’t know how to read, but she could put two and two together. In the window across the way, she knew that it was Enrica Colombo who sat embroidering, the eldest daughter of the owner of the hat shop on Via Toledo. And her
signorino
watched her embroider.
    She didn’t know whether he had actually made use of the book after buying it, but she certainly hoped he had: the girl seemed good-hearted and honest, and she came from a good family, as far as she knew. The hairdresser, who was a sort of living neighborhood newsletter, had maliciously told her all about how Enrica had spurned a potential fiancé whom her mother was encouraging, a rich and handsome young man: Rosa had heaved a sigh of relief, inwardly commenting that there was no one as handsome as her own
signorino
. What she couldn’t tell though was whether the hairdresser was a two-way street: that is to say, whether or not Enrica also had occasion to hang on the hairdresser’s words, whether she had learned of the interest expressed by Donna Rosa, Commissario Ricciardi’s old
tata
, in this affair of the heart.
    After pulling her shawl tight around her neck and opening her umbrella, Rosa ventured out into the rainy street, thinking that the damp weather was inflicting a decidedly harsh punishment on her aching bones. She needed to take action, she thought to herself. Fate does as it pleases, but sometimes it needs a little push. The girl was sitting across the street, reservedly, clearly waiting for him to make the first move, while he waited for his own shyness to melt away. It was slow to melt! In fact, it would probably never melt, and in the end the girl was bound to get sick of waiting and accept some other suitor. And they’d both live unhappily ever after, some fifteen feet apart, lacking the courage to ever speak to each other.
    But what could she do? she wondered as she zigzagged through the rain to the spice and grain shop to buy some chickpeas. How could she strike up a conversation with the young woman and explain to her that that blockhead of a
signorino
of hers loved her in silence, from a distance, but lacked the courage to live his life?
    As she was