One of the short stories featured in the collection, Postcards from Piumazzo, available in ebook format:
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Enjoy
The Making of the Potato Killer
“He walked out one day, he said “to buy cigarettes” and he never came back.” The woman said this without emotions, with the knife in hand, peeling potatoes on the balcony. From her tone it was difficult to understand whether she was sorry or not. The absence of her husband was a cold, distant fact, almost like something she saw in a TV show.
She peeled the last potato in the bowl and stood up. The student followed her inside. She went into the kitchen and put the coffee maker on the stove.
“What did you say you were studying?”
“Anthropology and social behaviour.” The student felt uncomfortable, all of a sudden. When you put it that way, it seemed a project made to discover the lost savage tribes in the rainforest and to study their customs, and not a simple trip from Rome to Piumazzo: in the same country, the same language, and yet it seemed very distant, strange people, very suspicious, it took hours to find the right house. He did good to make this appointment beforehand. No one would have volunteered for the project just like that, by seeing him arrive.
“How do you take your coffee Sugar? Two? Ok, there you go.”
The TV was on but the volume was down. The student was hoping to see photo albums, to hear and record childhood memories, historical events, even a recipe from the grandmother would do, anything typical of the region, as the woman did mention she and her family had been here for generations. He kept his nose to his notebook and he didn’t realize that the woman has brought in the coffee. And he couldn’t imagine what was about to happen, not in his wildest dreams. He was very naïve for an anthropologist.
The woman touched his hand. He looked at her: she had taken off her apron, she had fresh lipstick applied to her lips and she was looking at him, suggestively. She was old enough to be his mother, and the wrinkles on her neck were filling him with disgust. The woman, unbuttoning a few buttons on her blouse, started talking about an old film, about a Graduate, Mrs. Robinson, Dustin Hoffman. It was a total put off. Getting away from the house took some time, but eventually he was out of there and out of Piumazzo for good.
*
Ten years later the news spread in the Italian media about a serial killer , who raped women living alone, and after strangling them, he left a potato next to the corpse.
Eventually, the woman from Piumazzo remembered the incident and made the connection, but she remained silent because of the shame.
She went to confess her sins with the priest in the church, she thought she’d done enough. And he had told her that she’d been forgiven.
