Chapter - Luca Moretti
LUCA MORETTI
In the late afternoon I took Aurora for myself.
The nonna was already tired, and Aurora had woken from her nap in a bad mood, the way she got—all red, her fists clenched, angry at the world.
Just like her mother.
I put her in my lap, on the terrace, and she calmed down little by little, gripping my shirt with that tiny hand.
I sat there.
The Don of the Naples Camorra. The man who killed two men with his own hand in an attack, who executed the consigliere of forty years in the cellar of his house, who drove a three-hundred-year-old dagger into the man who called himself his father-in-law.
Sitting on a terrace in Capri, in summer, with a five-month-old baby asleep on his chest.
I thought I'd die alone. A Don dies young and dies alone—I'd seen it happen to my father, to my uncle, to men I respected. I didn't imagine anything on the other side of the fear. There was nothing on the other side.
Then she arrived.
The bomb Salvatore sent me as a gift. The daughter he sent to hate me and kill me in bed some night in November.
And she loved me.
It was his one miscalculation. And it was my salvation.
Aurora took a deep breath on my chest, over the Latin tattoo, and I looked at her—the black lashes, her mother's mouth, the hand closed on my shirt—and I thought:
I didn't build a fortress. I built this.
Valentina came and sat beside me, on the stone bench, her shoulder against mine.
Aurora between the two of us. Her hair still wet from the sea, the smell of salt and jasmine.
"She's asleep," I said.
"Finally." Valentina put her hand on Aurora's little head. "Bossy and bad-tempered, this child."
"Just like her mother."
"Shut up."
I laughed and kissed the top of her head.
We stayed there, the three of us, while the sun went down over the sea of Capri.
The nonna inside, with Francesca. Matteo cleaning the fish in the kitchen.
Raffaele would arrive from Naples on the last boat—he held the house down from there now, the part that still couldn't be let go, so we could be here, in the light.
Valentina rested her head on my shoulder. And across the bay, far off, blue in the late-afternoon light, Vesuvius.
Her whole life, she told me once, Vesuvius never answered anything. She asked, questioned, shouted—and the volcano stayed there, mute, on the other side of the water.
I looked at Vesuvius with my daughter on my chest and my wife on my shoulder.
And I understood why it never answered.
It never answered because the question was never for it. The answer had been here the whole time, waiting for us to arrive.
The sun finished going down and Aurora took a deep breath against my chest while Valentina closed her eyes on my shoulder.
And Vesuvius, across the bay, slept in peace on the water—the way it sleeps when it's spat out all the fire it had, and finally rested.
The End.