The Golden Egg

by Donna Leon

  ‘To keep other people – your mother, perhaps – from finding out.’

  This time she shook her head, as if he had told her something too ridiculous to believe but was afraid of hurting his feelings if she laughed.

  ‘Finding out what?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Brunetti said honestly. With this family, no possibility could be excluded. Then, not admitting to himself that he was irritated by her air of knowing something he did not, he said, ‘I know your mother learned about her pregnancy.’

  She turned away, but it was only to open a cabinet behind her and lift down a glass, then another one. She turned on the water in the sink and filled them both, placed one in front of him and drank half of her own. She kept her glass in her hands; Brunetti pulled his closer to him but did not drink.

  ‘Tell me your name again, please. I’m afraid I wasn’t myself the last time you were here.’

  ‘Brunetti,’ he said, relieved to learn that she remembered the other visit.

  ‘And the name of your rather excitable colleague?’ she asked.

  ‘Griffoni.’

  ‘Ah. Yes.’ And then, ‘Signor Brunetti, I think you and I have some of the same information. But it means different things to us.’ She sipped at her water.

  When Brunetti judged that she was not going to say anything else, he said, ‘The payments to her, from your account. If they are not blackmail, what are they?’

  ‘Just what you said, money for his upkeep. Enough to let the two of them live.’

  ‘And the use of the house they were living in?’

  ‘The same. The attempt on the part of a very decent man to see that his son did not live in misery.’

  ‘You mean your father?’

  ‘Ludovico Lembo, formerly Fadalti.’

  Her tone told him. ‘Who is or who is not your father?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘Who is not my father, nor my sister Lavinia’s father, but was the father of his companion’s daughter Ludovica and of Davide, Ana Cavanella’s son.’

  ‘You say that very lightly, Signora,’ Brunetti risked observing.

  ‘You’re sadly mistaken, Signor Brunetti,’ she said. ‘I say it with more pain than you will ever be able to understand.’ Another sip of water. ‘But we were raised in a very hard school, my sister and I, and we are not much given to lamentation or complaint.’

  ‘Raised by whom?’

  ‘By my mother and her cousin.’

  ‘Sister Maria Rosaria Lembo-Malfa?’ Brunetti inquired, unable to stop himself from showing off.

  ‘Exactly. She and my mother. Cousins united in their service and devotion to Christ. Except . . .’

  ‘Except what, Signora?’

  ‘Except that my mother’s devotion was perhaps not characterized by the same purity as was her cousin’s.’

  Brunetti was suddenly tired of her and her posturing and her speaking in allusion and riddles. He almost preferred her drunken excesses. ‘Could you speak more clearly, Signora? It would save us both time and effort.’

  He saw her surprise, but then her amusement. ‘How refreshing, to be spoken to directly. I thank you for it, Signore. I’ve seen very little of it in my life.’

  He believed her. ‘Then tell me, but don’t tell it slant.’

  ‘My mother did not like my father, and my father did not like my mother. That is, the man I’ve spent my life calling my father did not like my mother, and my mother did not like the man I’ve spent my life calling my father.’

  ‘But he married her?’

  ‘He married her because she was pregnant and asked him to marry her.’

  ‘Pregnant by him or some other man?’

  ‘Good heavens: a man like my father would never have had sex before marriage – not with the woman he hoped to marry. It was not done: not if you’re an upstart engineer and the girl is the daughter of your boss, and the company is one of the biggest in the country.’

  ‘So he married her to get the business?’

  ‘My father was a businessman before he was anything else. He loved it, loved making things work and loved making money from that.’

  ‘You automatically call him your father,’ Brunetti pointed out.

  ‘I loved him. He was a good man and very kind to the two of us. I’ve never met our real father – at least not knowingly – and so he was the man I loved as my father. Lavinia, too.’

  ‘She wasn’t his daughter, either?’

  ‘Haven’t I just said that?’ she asked and turned to fill her glass.

  ‘Of course, of course,’ Brunetti assured her when she was again facing him.

  ‘But were they never . . .’ he didn’t know how to say it, not while speaking to a lady. ‘Were they never really husband and wife?’

  ‘I have no idea of that, and I don’t want to know,’ she said heatedly, speaking quickly, the faster to have it said. ‘They always had separate rooms and separate lives. And my mother went off to see her cousin in the convent every month, didn’t she?’ she asked, leaving Brunetti to make of that whatever he pleased.

  ‘And then Ana Cavanella came into the palazzo,’ he said.

  ‘Indeed. She was our age. That is, near to our age. I’m sure the psychiatrists would have a wonderful time with that: talking about his hidden lusts for us. None of which either of us ever detected.’

  ‘How did she behave?’

  ‘I don’t know. That is, I don’t remember. I was at an age when I found life difficult and revolting.’ Then, with a shrug, she added, ‘I suppose I still do to a certain degree,’ and Brunetti realized he was beginning to like her.

  ‘Does your sister remember?’

  ‘She was at school. In Ireland. With the sisters.’

  ‘I see,’ Brunetti said, though he didn’t.

  ‘And then Ana became pregnant?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes. And my mother went wild. I’d never seen her like that.’

  ‘Jealousy?’

  She laughed. ‘Hardly. She raged on about the insult to her honour, to her family.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Ana left.’

  ‘And the house and the payments?’

  ‘My father bought the house in my name. I was nineteen then, and he asked me if I’d do it for him: allow for the usufrutto and allow the payments to go in my name. I signed the papers: he was a good man.’

  Brunetti picked up the glass and drank some of the water. He could not reconcile this conservatively dressed and clearly spoken woman with the raving wreck they had met the day before. He had a growing suspicion that this woman had outwitted them, and the victim of deceit had been Griffoni.

  ‘Why did you think I was here to arrest you, Signora?’

  ‘Because of what I did to Ana Cavanella.’

  ‘You mean hitting her?’

  ‘Is that what she says?’ she asked, unable to hide her surprise.

  ‘No. Would you tell me what happened?’

  ‘She came here two days ago, and I let her in. I didn’t recognize her: forty years is a long time. She had to tell me who she was. That’s when I let her in.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘She told me that her son was dead. And I told her I knew that.

  ‘She came because she’d received a letter from my lawyer, telling her that the death of her son Davide changed the nature of our existing fiscal relationship. She came to ask me what that meant.’

  ‘Did you explain it to her?’

  With something close to irritation, Lucrezia said, ‘I don’t know why lawyers can’t say things clearly. Just tell her there would be no more money. And she’d have to leave the house.’ She looked across at Brunetti. ‘I tried to explain it to her, but I don’t think she understood. Or didn’t want to. I told her my obligation was to Davide, not to her.’

  Curious as he was at her use of the word, ‘obligation’, Brunetti said nothing.

  ‘She got angry and said the family couldn’t lie about him any more, or about her.’ She followed that wit
h a puff of incredulity and went on. ‘I told her she was nothing to me and told her to leave, but she said Davide was my half-brother and was entitled to a third of my father’s estate.’

  She made a shivering motion. ‘She’d read something about the law that was passed last year, and she said there was proof.’

  ‘Proof of what?’

  ‘That my father – that is, my mother’s husband – was also Davide’s father. And then when I told her there could be no proof, she said something about what she called DNU. I didn’t understand at first what she was talking about, and then she said it was the proof in the body, in the blood, that people were related.’

  ‘DNA,’ Brunetti whispered and breathed a silent prayer to be delivered from the hands of the ignorant.

  ‘Yes. DNA. God knows where she got the information. She didn’t understand anything, but she kept talking about the DNU test and that it would prove he was Davide’s father. I told her to go ahead and try to prove it.’

  ‘Did you tell her anything else?’

  ‘No. She wouldn’t stop talking, and then she was shouting. We were still standing at the door. I opened it and told her to get out: we’d been talking in the courtyard all this time. I didn’t want her in the house. She kept shouting that she deserved to be helped, and I told her all she deserved was to be put away in jail or an institution.’ Lucrezia’s emotions overcame her, and she stopped, breathing heavily.

  ‘I raised my hand to her. It frightened her. I grabbed her shoulders, shoved her out into the calle and slammed the door in her face before she could come back in. Then I went into the house.’ She smiled then, speaking to Brunetti as though he were an old friend. ‘I have to confess I’ve never enjoyed anything so much in my life.’

  ‘In her face?’

  ‘I meant it figuratively,’ she said. ‘She stood out there, howling like a hyena. It must have been ten minutes. But then it stopped. She went away.’

  She finished her glass of water and placed it behind her on the counter.

  ‘What did you mean about her belonging in prison or in an institution?’

  In that same, easy voice, still speaking to a friend, she said, ‘For what she did to Davide.’

  ‘What did she do?’

  Her eyes widened. ‘You mean you don’t know? I thought everyone in the neighbourhood knew.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, Signora.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Really.’

  ‘About the room?’

  ‘What room?’

  ‘Oh my God,’ she said, honestly stricken. ‘I swear by my father’s memory I thought you knew, that you’d found out from the people in the neighbourhood.’

  ‘I don’t know anything, Signora,’ Brunetti said, feeling the profound truth of this.

  She leaned forward and put her palms flat on the table, thumbs barely touching, and she looked at them as she spoke. It took her a long time to find the energy to continue speaking. ‘When my father told her she had to leave our home, she refused, and when he said he’d make sure she and the baby were taken care of, all she said was that she’d take care of the baby.’ She stopped, and swallowed twice. Then she pulled out a chair and sat, facing him.

  ‘We didn’t know what she meant. At first she went and lived in the house, but then she disappeared. Later, she came back to live with her mother. And she got some sort of job, but I think that was only to keep her out of the house.’

  ‘And the mother?’

  ‘She helped her.’

  ‘With what?’

  Her hands gave the only indication, beyond her voice, of her emotions. The fingers contracted into fists, and the veins on the back of her hands stood out.

  ‘They didn’t talk.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘They didn’t talk to the baby. To the boy. He was there. Maybe she even had him there and no one ever knew.

  He lived in a room, and they fed him and cleaned him – I suppose. But they didn’t talk to him. That’s what she meant when she said she’d take care of the baby.’

  She looked up then. ‘Don’t think she’s crazy, Signore. She’s not. She’s bad. They both were.’

  ‘How long did this go on?’

  ‘Years, a decade or more. Then the old woman left or died or disappeared. I don’t know. I was busy making a ruin of my own life: I had no time to pay attention to hers. Theirs.’

  ‘How did you learn all of this?’

  ‘Signora Ghezzi. But not until years later.’ Brunetti fabricated a confused shake of his head. ‘My mother’s maid. She had friends in that neighbourhood, and she heard the talk. Nothing certain, only rumours. No one wanted to get involved. No one had the courage to interfere in what she was doing. No one trusted the police.’

  She pushed herself to her feet, then sat down again. ‘And one day the old woman was gone and the boy was there, her son, her disabled and retarded son. She told people he had been raised by relatives in the country; even then no one dared to ask questions.’

  ‘And you kept paying?’

  ‘My father did. Through my account. When he died, I kept paying. I’d promised him that.’

  ‘Did he know about the boy?’

  ‘What she did to him?’

  Unable to say the word, Brunetti nodded.

  ‘No one ever had the courage. He had moved to the Giudecca by then.’ She paused and gazed into the middle distance. ‘He might have killed her if he had known. Davide was his only son, you know.’

  She met his gaze. ‘If you do the research, you’ll find out that’s what happens. If you don’t talk to them, that is. They’re like animals. Like Davide.’

  Then she rose to her feet, saying, ‘I think that’s enough, don’t you?’

  He did. He left.

  28

  Brunetti let himself out, being especially careful to close the door to the apartment very quietly, descend the steps with the silence of a wraith, cross the courtyard and emerge into the calle with thief-like care. It was still raining, but he did not notice until he was back at the Accademia, when he bought another umbrella from another Tamil.

  Since his shoes were soaked through, he decided to walk. Plod, more like, but he thought of it as walking. Not talked to, not spoken to, no language, no contact, no words, no communication, no meaning, no sense to anything, no words to think in, no names for things. Nothing more terrible. No way to sort it all out; no way to distinguish between the sound of a dog and the words of a lullaby; ‘yes’ sounding the same as ‘no’, and both words the same as ‘upside down’.

  He stopped at the door to their building. His pocket was sodden, the keys colder than he had ever known them to be. Tonight there were three hundred steps to the apartment. He closed the umbrella and dropped it outside the door, let himself in, kicked off his shoes, and bent to put them out on the landing. There were sounds from the kitchen: words, phrases: ‘he’s such a good . . .’ ‘she never says what . . .’, ‘five more minutes’. They all meant something, those snatches. Those words created the possibility for larger categories or for larger, more encompassing ideas. Praise, criticism, time.

  He went into the bathroom and shed his clothing, socks first, draping them all, sodden and dark, on the edge of the bathtub. He wanted to take a shower, but resisted the desire and merely wiped at his hair with a towel, draping that next to his shirt. He put on his terrycloth robe and went down the hall to their room. He found an old pair of woollen slacks he had refused for years to allow Paola to throw away. He took comfort from their familiar, shapeless softness. He pulled on a T-shirt and an old green cashmere sweater he had saved time and time again from her discarding impulses. He pulled on socks and slipped his feet into leather slippers.

  He went down the corridor and into the kitchen. At his entrance, Chiara said, ‘Your hair’s a mess, Papà. Come over here and let me fix it for you.’ She hopped to her feet and Brunetti sat in her chair, amazed at the way ‘fix’ was just right for this sentenc
e, even though hair couldn’t be fixed, probably because it couldn’t be broken, but when hair was a mess, it could be set right again by being fixed, just as though it were broken, and wasn’t that an amazingly flexible thing to do with words?

  Chiara spread her fingers and ran them through his still-wet hair, brushing at it repeatedly until she had it looking more or less the way it was supposed to look. When he didn’t say anything, she snaked her way around his shoulders and pulled her face close to his. ‘What’s the matter, cat got your tongue?’ she asked in English.

  How remarkable that it happened in different languages, too, and that phrases could have two meanings. Obviously, there was no cat biting his tongue, but it was a wonderful metaphor for a motionless tongue. Like Davide’s.

  ‘Just thinking,’ he said and smiled round at them all.

  ‘What about?’ Paola asked. Raffi was interested, but he was more interested in his risotto.

  ‘About a joke my mother told me when I was a kid. I wouldn’t eat carrots one night, and she told me that carrots were good for my eyes.’

  Chiara slapped her hands over her ears, knowing what was coming. Paola sighed; Raffi ate.

  ‘When I asked her how she knew that, she asked me if . . .’ and he paused to give them time to join in the chorus, as they did every time he told this story . . . ‘I’d ever seen a rabbit wearing glasses.’ Sure enough, they all joined in with his mother’s question, her mother-in-law’s question, their grandmother’s question, and Brunetti was left marvelling that his mother could have all those different names.

  He ate the rest of the dinner, though he didn’t know what it was he was eating. He drank a glass of wine, left the second one unfinished, drunk with the words that crossed the table, their different meanings, the fact that they indicated time: future and past; that they indicated whether something had been done or was still to do; that they expressed people’s feelings: anger was not a blow, regret was not tears. At one point, Paola expressed a wish and used the subjunctive, and Brunetti felt himself close to tears at the beauty of the intellectual complexity of it: she could speak about what was not, could invent an alternative reality.