In the violet shadows of evening, the chirping of crickets sounded low, like a litany. But there was one spot, down in the middle of the grassy hollow where the cypresses stood tall in a ring against the sky, where the sound echoed so intensely that it became almost a racket. There, beneath the bluish boughs, visitors to the old cemetery quickened their pace, for no grave had been laid in that place and no bench invited anyone to contemplative rest. Yet anyone who had stopped to listen more carefully, instead of covering their ears with a grimace of annoyance, would have recognized voices that had nothing to do with the little black orthopterans.
“Make up your mind, you senile old fool. It’s already dark!” croaked a small, shadowy figure curled up on the grass.
“Be patient, Number One. Certain decisions shouldn’t be made in a hurry. One must look, consider, weigh things up…” someone else murmured in a bored tone.
“Weigh things up? Consider? Think about it, Number Two: when has this scoundrel ever made an objective assessment?”
“What would you do, then? Let’s hear it,” a third voice cut in, as cold as a frozen lake.
Number One sprang to her feet. In the lingering light, a wrinkled, slightly asymmetrical face appeared above an old, stooped body. “Me? Why the hell are you asking me? I’m supposed to keep my mouth shut! Each of us should mind her own duties—you’re always telling me that.”
“It doesn’t seem to do much good, since you keep interfering with my work.”
“You’re the one, you ugly witch, who interferes with mine! I do things properly, and you ruin everything!”
Number Three, to whom these angry words were addressed, raised a sparse eyebrow. “Shall we settle it with a game?”
“Fine by me. But don’t cheat, or I’ll never speak to you again.”
Number Two, who had given up trying to settle the quarrel, hugged the frayed basket lying nearby on the grass and watched her sisters’ lips so that she could better grasp what they were saying. “I’ll be the referee,” she whispered when she realized what was about to happen. The sluggishness of her movements, however, made it perfectly clear that she had no desire to do so.
The crickets’ song grew even more insistent. By now it was almost deafening, but the old women did not seem bothered by it. With exasperating slowness, Number Three rummaged through a pocket of her filthy apron and pulled out a small white die, which she held out to her sister with a smirk. “Who wants to start?” she asked.
“First, the stakes,” Number One grumbled.
“First, the reasons for the stakes,” Number Two sing-songed.
“All right,” Number One replied, baring the only three teeth she had left. “Just look at how it all began. His mother didn’t want him, and neither did his father: they had no idea how they were going to provide for him. That little black-haired brat should never have been born in the first place.”
“That’s entirely your fault. You agree, don’t you?” said Number Three.
“If you weren’t so stingy with the gold and silk…” Number Two added under her breath, almost apologizing for the correction.
“Hemp is more plentiful and costs less,” Number One pronounced. “Anyway, that’s not what I meant to talk about. I wanted to remind you that, despite the adverse circumstances, he grew up intelligent and strong, full of the will to live.”
“That’s true,” Number Two conceded.
“You have a strange notion of strength,” Number Three snickered, but she had to break off as a fit of irritable coughing shook her whole body. Once she had recovered, she wiped the saliva dribbling from her mouth with her sleeve. “He was always hungry,” she continued. “His scrawny, lame cat was in better shape than he was. And that was your doing, Number Two.”
“That’s true,” she agreed.
“That’s true, that’s true, that’s true,” Number One mocked, punching her on the bald head.
“And besides,” Number Three continued, ignoring her sisters’ grunts, “he did grow up, yes, but into a petty criminal. How many shopkeepers did he steal from while pretending to enter their shops to beg for charity?”
“He was hungry!”
“As though that justified everything! He stole out of necessity, all right, but why fall in with drug dealers a few years later? He certainly wasn’t using the money he made to feed himself or his family.”
“His parents deserved nothing: their minds so clouded by alcohol that they barely remembered they even had a son. What path could possibly have opened before an ignorant, needy boy who hadn’t even completed compulsory schooling and had never had a penny to his name?”
“That’s true,” Number Two repeated.
Number Three was undeterred. “He didn’t have many opportunities, I’ll grant you that. But at twenty-five he was lucky enough to meet that little blonde actress, so elegant and pretty, who fell madly in love with him. All he had to do was accept her help: he could have cleaned up his act and led a decent life.”
“Yes… Wag his tail whenever she called, lie down when she was annoyed, lick her face whenever she reminded him how much he owed her. You call that decent, living like a dog on a chain? That woman wasn’t in love with him. She was in love with the generosity and selflessness she liked to flaunt in front of her friends whenever they reproached her for her strange romantic choices.”
“Freedom is important, yes, but so is honesty,” Number Three observed. “If he didn’t want to commit himself to her, why didn’t he leave her villa as naked as he had entered it? After leading her on and roughing her up, he saw fit to take with him every gift she had showered upon him.”
“A gift is a gift: you don’t give it back. He shoved her, yes, but she was about to smash the crystal vase from the sitting room over his head. Defending yourself isn’t a crime; it’s a right.”
At last, the crickets had fallen silent. Night had descended. A clear summer night, flooded with the sweetish scent of the flowers adorning the gravestones. But it was too dark to make out the numbers on the faces of the die. Number One blew gently, and a faint bluish flame sprang to life in the middle of the circle of cypresses.
“When the woman’s bodyguard chased after him, though, he could have saved himself by returning what he had taken. Why risk being charged with theft? And why try to kill that poor man, who was only doing his job?”
“He didn’t try to kill him. It was an accident. What was the poor boy supposed to do? That ‘poor man,’ as you call him, is a brute with a past far more questionable than his: he’s killed before, and you know it. He was pointing a gun at him, there was a struggle, and the gun went off. That’s all.”
“Well then, sisters,” Number Two concluded, breaking her silence and taking a small spindle from the basket. “Who will that bullet hit?”
“Even, the brute. Better still, no one,” said Number One.
“Odd, the boy,” Number Three countered.
Number Two began turning the spindle in her hands, unwinding a thick hempen thread whose end she handed to Number One. Number Three tossed the white die into the air. It traced a spiral brighter than the trail of a firefly before dropping back onto the grass a few paces away. All three leaned forward to see the result.
“Four: he’s safe!” Number One cried triumphantly. “The game is over. You’ll honor the bargain?”
“Of course,” Number Three replied, pulling a large pair of scissors from her pocket and snipping the thread in a single lightning-fast motion.
Number Two yawned and put the spindle away.
“Fuck you,” Number One muttered.
High above, in the clear night sky, the stars glittered.
