The restaurant was a small affair, in a characterless small mall, one room, a few tables, and the kitchen in the back. The cook was his mother’s distant cousin, Maria; she was also the owner. They were all from the same little village; they go back generations – always farmers. Maria was tan, and that was a change from her appearance in Northern Italy – with so many cloudy sunless days she always seemed pale to him. She asked him to come, she needed help, and she trusted him. She paid for his ticket, she had money. Her husband was a well-off man; she got a nice sum when he died. She picked him up in Miami, at the airport, a year ago now. He has killed twice since then; the first killing was shortly after his arrival, the second was quite recent. And in Italy too, that’s where it all started, of course. Maria was eighteen years older than him, no children, she came to America two years ago, shortly after her husband’s death – you can imagine the nasty tongues back in the village. She spoke relatively good English, a rarity in Italy, and then there was that ad for a restaurant for sale. It was a local paper, from the town nearby, a former resident, has been in America for a long time, and he was tired; wanted out. Shrewd she was, she got a real good bargain, and she made him stay as part of the deal, a smooth transition she wanted. Once he left, she didn’t really know where to, she needed help, someone I know, someone I can trust, why not Marco? And he came, no questions asked.

Did he always like her?

The humidity that day a year back when he arrived, struck him most. It was as if the world stuck to you, slimy and sweaty. She kissed him a short kiss on the lips; he thought the kiss meant more than a relative’s kiss, he pretended not to notice. They took the interstate back to Margate, a multilane road, and all around, it seemed to him that nature has died, replaced by cement, iron, and fumes. She rented a nice small house near the restaurant in Margate – in the town of Coconut Creek. He noted shortly after arrival, that in America towns blend into one another, not like back home where miles and miles of countryside separate them.

There were large trees all around the house granting it shade; he liked that. In the back she had a small pool, with a small green patch of grass that sloped gently into a small lake. He liked that. Aquatic birds would fly and rest by the pool, and some made the area between the house and the lake their permanent home. She had a nice size bedroom ready for him, with his own bathroom. She also had a modern TV set in the room, with hundreds of channels. He watched them until late at night – after they closed the restaurant and went back home.

She drove the small distance from home to the restaurant every day; it bothered him, but he never said a word – he would have liked to walk there instead. It would be about 4:30 in the afternoon when they would get there, getting everything ready; they opened at 5:00 pm. They would take long weekends off, closed on Sunday, reopening on Tuesday. They were never really very busy, just steady. Maria didn’t seem to mind. Sundays he would wake up about midday. Saturday night was their busiest day; they were there until very late. By then Maria was awake, she usually was sitting by the pool, shaded by the trees, reading. She was wearing a somewhat transparent nightgown; it seemed soft and inviting.

She would prepare a nice breakfast for him, all ready when he woke up; she would smile at him briefly, and then go back to her newspaper – they never said much to each other. He would eat alone. First he would prepare his espresso, and only after sipping it, in a few short gulps, would he eat his breakfast. After a while he would join her outside – still the two of them hadn’t spoken – and he would go for a short swim. Only then she would put her paper down and talk to him. Every Sunday she would say almost the same thing, with small variations, but he didn’t mind it.

“What would you like to do today?” she would ask, and he would shrug his shoulders, and say, “It really doesn’t matter, whatever you would like to do.” And he meant it; he liked it when she made the plans for them.

But still he had found the time to kill, twice since he came, and she knew nothing of it.

They would usually not leave home until early afternoon and drive her car – he did not want one. It was a red American car, a convertible, a two-seater. She would avoid the main roads, take side-roads, and drive aimlessly. Then when the sun would begin to set, she would stop at the first restaurant she saw. She liked to stop in the ones that were not busy; she searched silence.

They would order from the menu, something light, and only then they would engage in a sort of a talk. It usually went along these lines:

“I enjoy these afternoon rides,” she would say, and he would look at her and not say much – just nod.

“Have we been in this restaurant before?”

“I think so,” he would say. 

“I can’t remember, eventually they all blend together.”

And he said, “Yes just like towns, just like people.”

She looked at him inquisitively when he said that, but she never asked him what he meant. Then the food would come and they would eat in silence. Not much more said after that; nothing meaningful, that is.

It usually was dark when they returned home. She would park the car in her garage, and they would both walk in. Afterwards they would watch some TV together, never the news, then she would say goodnight and retire to her bedroom. It usually wouldn’t be much after 9:00 pm that she would leave him; she always seemed tired. He on the other hand was not tired at all.

It was on one of these Sunday nights that he first killed in America.

***

Sometimes he would try and remember his parents, not his father – he instinctively did not like him. There were no bad memories that he could remember, no abuse, but he lacked from most of the pictures – and that has to mean something, he thought. His mother’s name was Luisa, he always thought of her as beautiful and warm. But he realized that he really did not have any such memories of her – in the pictures she was always hugging him, with a broad smile, but never kissing him – just a coincidence probably, he thought.

And then there was the matter of their death.

As he did not own a car, he was completely dependent on Maria if he wanted to go somewhere in particular – not that anything really interested him. It was not due to lack of intelligence; on the contrary, he was very intelligent – he plainly and simply wasn’t interested in anything. He felt numbness inside him, as if he was under anesthesia, as if he was a spectator of his own life – sometimes he thought it didn’t really belong to him.

Then about the second month into his stay he began taking the buses. His sleep was not good; he would wake up early, before sunrise and take the first bus. Mainly low-income workers would ride the bus with him. Maria paid him weekly, a nice salary; he used to save most of it, kept it under his mattress. He trusted Maria, and no one else ever came into the house. He would take the bus to no particular place. As there were not many people onboard he knew that it won’t take long before the driver, and the regular passengers would recognize him. He picked at random a station in downtown Fort Lauderdale, where he always disembarked along a road close to the ocean. He did not want them to think he was riding the bus aimlessly. He spoke good English, picked it up in school, and afterwards in his studies in university – his bachelor’s was in English. He did have quite a heavy accent, and it disturbed him, he wanted to blend in, to disappear into the American anonymous multitude.

He would always manage to return home by midday. He took different bus routes on the way back, buses that would drop him off a mile or two away from home – he knew that in the early morning bus he took, he would be remembered, but later in the day when the buses were full, people were less likely to remember him. He always tried taking different ones each day, and the most crowded – especially the ones where you stood packed like sardines – anonymity, not to be remembered, not to be noticed. When and if the bus would get empty, he would promptly disembark and walk home. Was he thinking already then about killing? Probably not, as a matter of fact his killings were not planned in advance at all – they just happened. He was a loner – always was – and he didn’t want to be remembered or noticed, he found it more comfortable that way.

Maria used to ask him where he went to, but she quickly gave up, as he always answered: I was just walking around. She did not find it odd, if that’s what he liked, that was fine by her – nevertheless she couldn’t help feeling a certain pinch inside as to the vagueness of his answer. It was a sensation of slight discomfort, but mainly, it was disappointment with herself, because she wanted him closer to her; she wanted to know him; she wanted for him to know her more, to ask more questions, but he never did, he always remained shut.

She and his mother were very distant relatives, but they were not related; there was no blood relationship.

***

She knew he was looking at her, she felt he was attracted, but he never made any moves. And why didn’t she, what was stopping her, was it that she found him strange – now that he was living underneath her roof? But wasn’t she herself different in so many ways from the ordinary people? A woman alone in a foreign country – and she was a pretty woman.

She remembered when his parents died, Marco moved in with his grandparents. Moving in is a misstatement, as his parents and grandparents lived in the same house, but on different floors. It must have been hard for him going down the steps from his grandparents to his deceased parents’ apartment. He had to, that was the only way out – a little boy passing by and through the empty rooms, where he used to live with them. The place remained empty like this all these years.

On occasions he would find his grandmother crying in what used to be his home. From a very young age he understood why, but never said a thing. He himself did not cry, although he felt the pain, and still does after all these long years – pain he conceals and tries to avoid. Why was his grandmother crying, was it only because of their death, or was there something more? Always hushed conversations around him, even when he was an adult, concealing the facts.

He made his own research from newspapers kept in the local library, from the time of their death. Nothing, no police investigation, no scandalous headlines, a small notice of their death: Luisa and Roberto Bianchi, dead after a car accident – it was December, the roads were icy, it wasn’t unusual – they slid off the road, hit a tree straight on – his mother dead on impact, his father died in the hospital. Why was grandma crying so often? Did she suspect something? He definitely did, and as time went by it became more and more haunting to him. He had dreams about that, he saw them hitting the tree, he saw his mother’s terrified eyes.

He killed only men.

He did not ask his grandparents anything in particular about that day. Only once, when he was twelve years old, he asked his grandmother where was he when they died – it was about eight p.m. when the accident happened. She said he was at home, his parents had a meeting to attend – he sometimes would wake up at night remembering shouting at the kitchen – his father’s loud voice – he thought he remembered that he used to bury himself deep underneath the covers – he thought he remembered being very afraid. Were these real memories, was this around the time of the accident? – he thought his mother was afraid of his father – he always felt all of it had to do with money.

I am dead I have always been dead, he thought often, as if he too died in the car with them.

Maria, in Italy, she never talked to him about it, and here, in America – I should ask her, he thought, but will she answer, and if she said it was just an accident, will I believe her? And maybe she doesn’t know anything – but I should talk to her. It seemed that as time went by he was losing more and more his ability to communicate. He always liked being alone, spending hours in his room, playing with his soldiers – then as he got older: books, and books – he couldn’t stop reading.

He never had a real girlfriend – shyness stifled him. His sexual encounters started later on, in university, with call girls. He found people who used the term prostitutes humiliating in their regard. He respected them, he enjoyed their simplicity – and they liked him. He would meet them in their apartments, in the big city – he loved the big city, its trams and buses and wide streets, and old buildings – lots of gray color, and then in between, green parks, where he would sit for hours on sunny days on a bench, and watch the day go by.

His first killing was just a few days before leaving to America – he was still perplexed about it when he arrived in Miami.

NOW, OVER TO YOU…

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