Giorgio Faletti - I Kill

Hanneke, her stepmother, who certainly did not live by the rules she set, had walked in suddenly without knocking. Helena had hidden the note under her blanket a little too quickly.

‘Give it to me.’ Her stepmother had come over to the bed and held out her hand.

‘But I…’

Hanneke raised her eyebrows, a cold stare directed at her stepdaughter. Helena’s cheeks had turned red.

‘Helena Parker, I just gave you an order.’

She had pulled out the note and given it to her. Hanneke had read it without the slightest change of expression. Then she had folded it and put it in the pocket of her sweater set. ‘All right, I think this should remain our little secret. We wouldn’t want to cause your father any grief.’

That had been her only remark. Helena had felt an enormous sense of relief and did not realize that the woman was lying, simply because she enjoyed manipulating people’s emotions.

She had seen Andrés the next day. They were alone in the stables where Helena went every day to care for Mister Marlin, her horse. The boy was either there by chance or because he had managed to find an excuse, knowing that she would come by. He had approached her with his face bright red with excitement and confusion. Helena had never noticed the freckles on his cheeks before.

‘Did you read my note?’

It was the first time they had spoken.

‘Yes, I did.’

‘What did you think?’

She hadn’t known what to answer.

‘It… it was lovely.’

Suddenly, plucking up his courage, Andrés had bent over and kissed her cheek.

Helena had turned around and felt like dying. Her father was standing there, framed by the stable door, watching them.

He had come down on the boy in a fury and slapped him so violently that his mouth and nose started to bleed. Then, he had lifted him up off the ground and hurled him like a twig against Mister Marlin’s stall. The horse had backed off with a whinny of fright. Andrés’s nose was dripping blood on to his shirt. Parker had grabbed him by the collar and pulled him up.

‘Come with me, you little bastard.’

He had dragged Andrés to the house and thrown him at Bryan Jeffereau’s feet like an empty sack. His father had stood there with his mouth open and a pair of gardening clippers in his hand.

‘Take your sex maniac son and leave my house immediately. And be grateful that you’re getting away so easily without being charged with attempted rape.’

There was no answer to Nathan Parker’s fury and Jeffereau knew him too well to try. In silence, he had taken his son, his men and his equipment and left for good. Helena never saw Andrés Jeffereau again.

Nathan Parker’s attentions to her had started not long afterwards.

Helena crossed the bedroom that looked out on to the balcony. The bed was cut in two by a ray of light and she noticed that the half bathed in sunlight was the side that Frank had slept on. Frank – the only person in the world to whom she had had the courage to confess her shame.

She left the room and went downstairs.

The happy memory of those few moments spent with Frank were not enough to erase her other memories, long past but still vivid enough to wound her as if it had all happened yesterday.

The world was full of Nathan Parkers. Helena knew it. And she was equally sure that the world was full of women like her, poor frightened girls who cried tears of humiliation and disgust on sheets covered with blood and the very semen that had conceived them.

Her hatred knew no bounds. Hatred of her father and of herself for not being able to rebel when she still could have. Now she had Stuart, the son she loved as much as she hated her father. The son she once would have paid any price to have lost and whom she now refused to lose at any price. But who was he? As hard as she tried, she could find no alibi for her weakness in the face of her father’s violence.

She sometimes wondered if the same sick love that existed in the mind of Nathan Parker also existed like a cancer in her own. Did she continue to submit to the torture because she was his daughter, with the same blood and the same perversion running through her veins? She had asked herself that question time and time again. Strangely enough, there was only one thing that kept her from going insane: the knowledge that she had never found pleasure in what she had been forced to endure, only pain and self-disgust.

Hanneke must have suspected something but Helena never knew for sure. What had happened afterwards was probably just the result of the fire she kept hidden beneath her glacial, formal exterior, a fire that no one had ever noticed, perhaps not even Hanneke herself. In a banal, undramatic manner, simply leaving a letter that Helena had only learned of years later, Hanneke had run off with the family’s riding master, abandoning her husband and daughters. She had taken with her a very large amount of money, the icing on the cake.

The only thing that Nathan Parker had cared about in the whole affair was the discretion with which it was handled. Hanneke had probably been some kind of high-class whore, but she wasn’t stupid. If she had publicly humiliated her husband, the consequences would have been devastating. The man would have followed her to the ends of the earth to get his revenge.

The letter, which Helena had never read, had probably offered an exchange for what the woman knew or suspected about her husband’s behaviour with his daughter. Her freedom and silence in exchange for the very same freedom and silence. The pact had been tacitly accepted. Meanwhile, lawyers for both sides had arranged a hasty divorce to set things straight.

And, as they say, no one was hurt.

Certainly not Nathan Parker, whose lack of interest in his wife had become absolute, like his power over Helena. Certainly not Hanneke, who could now enjoy her money and riding masters wherever she felt like it.

Helena and Arianna, hostages of fate, had been left to pay the consequences of mistakes they had not made. As soon as she was of age, Arianna had left home. After roaming around for a while, she had ended up living in Boston. Her fights with her father had escalated as she grew older. On the one hand, Helena was terrified that the same thing would happen to Arianna that had happened to her. Sometimes she examined Arianna’s face when their father spoke to her, to see whether or not the fear appeared in her eyes. On the other hand, and she cursed herself for the thought, she prayed that it would happen so that she would no longer hear her father’s step as he approached her bedroom in the middle of the night, or feel his hand raising the sheets and the weight of his body in her bed, or…

She closed her eyes and shuddered. Now that she knew Frank and understood what two people could really share when they were intimate, she was even more horrified and disgusted by what she had experienced in those years. Frank was the second man she had ever slept with, and the first with whom she had ever made love.

The ground floor of the house was flooded with light. Somewhere, in that city, Frank was living in the same light and feeling the same emptiness. Helena walked down the hallway leading to the garden doors, passing in front of the room in which the telephones were locked. She stopped at the doorway where she and Frank had exchanged a long look on the night that Ryan had been arrested. That was when she had understood. Had it been the same for him? There had been no trace of emotion in his eyes but her woman’s intuition said that everything between them had started right then.

More than anything else, she wanted him there so she could ask him.

She pulled a mobile phone from her pocket. Frank had brought it to her the second night they had spent together, when he had had to rush off to tell Céline that her husband was dead. She reflected a moment on the enormity of the situation that had required her to hide the phone, something the entire world considered an everyday object.