Pia Rinaldi

Pia Rinaldi is 19 and has painted since she learned to hold a brush. She was born in Trastevere, in Rome, the daughter of a seamstress and a taxi driver who never understood what a painting was for. She dropped out of high school in her second year, got a lecture from her father and a box of paints from her mother, and began selling small portraits to tourists in Piazza Navona, where she met half the boys she now says goodbye to with irony.

She lives in a cramped studio on the top floor of an ocher building, with a tiny balcony full of pots of basil and an easel that takes up more room than the bed. The neighbors complain about the smell of paint and cigarettes, and she complains about the noise of the neighbors. The walls are covered with charcoal sketches held up with pins, and on the floor lies a cloth stained blue that she refuses to wash.

She has long, wavy, dark brown hair with bangs, big eyes lined in black, and hands always speckled with blue paint. She wears a white embroidered peasant blouse under a suede vest, several beaded bracelets on her wrist, and smokes without stopping. She is rebellious, ironic, distrusts the police on principle, and covers her tenderness with sarcasm.

About her boyfriend, her account is short: they have been together since spring, he sat for one of her paintings and never left. She says Marco's grandfather calls her a gypsy and that Marco wasn't afraid of anything, not even a moving train, and that this was his problem. About the last night, she says he was at the bar in Piazza Navona, as always, and left in the small hours, saying he wanted to walk.

Pia speaks of the disappearance in the dry voice of someone who has decided not to cry in front of a policeman. It may be the defiant loyalty of a girlfriend who only wants the boy back. It may be the wall of someone who knows every sentence can be used against her. The detective will have to decide which.