Free By My Hand by Maurizio de Giovanni, Antony Shugaar

year. Waking up to the calls of the strolling vendors, the noise rising from the streets, the songs. And the smells, the thousands of pots bubbling busily away, the thousands of frying pans sizzling, the pastry shops competing to present their masterpieces. Everyone had dreamed up a calling, a profession; every one of them was trying to eke out a living.
    Livia’s impression was one of generalized good cheer, but with a strain of sadness running through it. It was as if the citizens of that special place were constantly telling one another, It’s hard, terribly terribly hard. But we’ll make it all the same.
    Just the day before she’d spotted a strange individual from the window of the car, a man wearing a bicorne hat à la Napoléon Bonaparte, a long, loose coat, a thousand chains of all sizes as well as fake medals, and a brightly colored walking stick with bells on the end of it. He was walking along with an eccentric gait, hopping and leaping, followed by the usual procession of barefoot urchins. He was shouting something that Livia couldn’t make out.
    When she’d asked her driver just who that character might be, he’d replied with a wry laugh:
    â€œSigno’, that’s the Pazzariello. He’s a sort of walking newspaper, a town crier. He goes through every street in the quarter to announce that a new shop has just opened, or maybe that someone’s lost their dog and is looking for it, or that a young couple is finally getting married. He announces his news singing and dancing, and dressed the way you see him, so that he’s sure to attract attention.”
    Livia saw four women dressed in black emerge from a
basso
, one of the dark, dank street-level apartments of the poor; they listened attentively to what the Pazzariello had to say, burst out laughing, and went back inside. Over the door of the
basso
hung a black cloth. The driver didn’t miss his passenger’s observation.
    â€œAh, Signora, no one can resist the Pazzariello; even if they’re holding a wake for the dead, they come out and listen to what he has to say.”
    Livia was falling in love with that city a little more with every day that passed. It was the city where, a little at a time, she’d rediscovered her will to live.
    She still received very long phone calls, during which her Roman girlfriends tried to persuade her to return to the capital. When she had she left, four months ago now, she’d told them that she was just going to spend a few days at the seaside; and then she’d never gone back.
    These days the idea of the social life she’d led for years in Rome was intolerable to her: false smiles, backbiting, gossip. An endless footrace to earn the favor of the newly powerful, a performance that was alien to her very nature. Precisely because of her indifference to that game, and her basic sincerity, she had become a close friend of Il Duce’s rebellious daughter, a young woman who concealed her great emotional fragility behind an exterior of apparent aggressivity and masculine ways.
    She was always delighted to receive Edda’s phone calls, but not even she had been able to change Livia’s mind: she had no intention of moving back to Rome. And since it amused Livia to watch everyone she knew rack their brains to figure out the real reason the Italian capital had lost its most enchanting dinner guest, the life and soul of Roman social life, she was careful to keep it to herself.
    Making its way through the armies of strolling vendors and beggars, blasting its horn, Livia’s car pulled into the courtyard of police headquarters. The guard at the door saluted deferentially, and the woman nodded. By now she was a habitual guest.
    Without signaling to her chauffeur that she wished to get out of the car, she started counting under her breath. When she got to eight, Garzo appeared, panting, having burst through the main door that led to the offices without even an