by Donna Leon
‘Marie Antoinette?’ he asked.
Paola had the grace to laugh. She opened her eyes and looked at him. ‘I suppose so. He wanted me to see how ordinary people lived and worked.’
‘And did you see that?’
‘Well,’ Paola hesitated, ‘the artichokes pretty much took care of themselves and grew on their own.’
‘So what did you do?’
‘Oh, I went swimming and lay on the sofa and read.’
‘And then?’
‘And then it was time to go back to school.’ She put her hand to her forehead as if she had just remembered something. ‘That was more than thirty years ago.’ She shook her head as though to clear it. ‘Good grief, it sounds so long ago.’
‘Have you been there since then?’
‘Once. I went out for a week the summer after my third year at university.’
‘To do what?’ he asked.
She turned her head and looked at him. ‘Something like what you want to do: look at the water and not have any noise around me.’
‘Did it help?’
She looked at him for a long time before she answered. ‘Not as much as meeting you in the library at the university a few months later did.’
‘Ah,’ was all Brunetti allowed himself to say.
After they both, no doubt for different reasons, allowed Brunetti’s ‘Ah’ to fade to nothingness, they returned to the question of Zia Costanza’s place. The villa, Paola explained, was one of the oldest on the island, built in the eighteenth century by Zia Costanza’s branch of the Falier family as a refuge from the dreadful heat and pestilent air of summertime Venice. The flood of 1966, however, showed there was no refuge from the water, which rose to the second floor, destroying everything but the walls and roof. Zia Costanza, proving that she could master the art of losing, jettisoned what was ruined, cleaned what had survived, and waited until springtime to begin to dry the place out. The restoration took two years, left the exterior intact, and turned the interior into the comfortable house where the young Paola was meant to learn about life in the country. Since then, it had been offered to members of the extended family for use during the summer.
‘Is anyone staying there now?’ Brunetti asked.
‘No, only the custodian. He’s been there for years, although he wasn’t there when I went out as a kid, but I met him only once. He seemed formidable, but I’ve been told he’s absolutely reliable. He lives in the gardener’s house at the back of the property with his daughter and her family.’
‘Your Zia Costanza must be in her nineties by now,’ Brunetti recalled.
Paola laughed. ‘That branch of the family is indestructible. She’s ninety-six and lives in Treviso with her son, Emilio, who’s in his seventies. He tells me she goes out for a walk every day, alone. She carries a cane, but she says it’s only to hit away any dogs that come too close to her.’
‘They take care of the villa, even though no one lives there?’
‘That’s what Emilio told me. Davide’s been there for twenty years or so.’ Then, before he could speak, she said, ‘Emilio calls me every summer to ask if I’d like to use it. He says he hates it to sit empty all the time.’
‘You think he’s serious?’ Brunetti asked, always uncomfortable about being indebted to her family in any way.
‘I read books, not minds, Guido. I can’t say he’s begged me to go, but he’s asked if I’d like to go out with you and the kids more times than I can remember. And each time I say we’re busy, he says he’s going to ask me again. And he does.’
‘It sounds like he wants us all to go.’
Paola closed her eyes and returned her head to the back of the sofa for long enough to take a deep sigh, then leaned forward and said, ‘I suppose it wouldn’t help if I recited the words of the wedding ceremony to you?’
‘About being united as one heart and one spirit?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Yes.’
‘If I remember correctly, there was nothing in the ceremony about the husband’s being able to go and spend time in a house that’s offered to his wife,’ Brunetti said. The subject had always so troubled him that he could speak of it only in jest.
‘Guido,’ she began in the voice he identified as the one she used to address his social insecurities. ‘We also have a legal contract – even if we forget for a moment the poetic words in the ceremony – to joint property. To joint everything. So please stop fretting about accepting Emilio’s offer.’ She looked at her watch and, changing the subject, asked, ‘I think we’d have a better chance of survival if we ate on the terrace, don’t you?’
The children were eating with their grandparents, making it easier for Paola to decide it was too hot to cook, so their meal was an insalata caprese with olive oil they’d brought home from Tuscany in the autumn. Brunetti grumbled that it was impossible to find decent bread in the city any more, while Paola poked aimlessly at the leaves of basilico she’d picked from the pot on the terrace. Finally she set down her fork, saying, ‘I’ve never known this to happen, but it’s too hot to eat.’ She looked across at his plate, where the slices of mozzarella di bufala lay sweating in shallow pools of oil.
Then, more decisively, she asked, ‘Do you want me to call Emilio?’ When he failed to answer, she said, ‘You don’t have to listen.’ She pushed her chair back and went inside the apartment, leaving Brunetti to his grumbling and his unwanted lunch.
After a few moments, Brunetti heard her voice from the open window of her study. He stacked the plates and took them to the kitchen, left them on the counter and went back to their bedroom to retrieve his copy of Pliny’s Natural History, a book he had been wanting to read for ages.
He was just coming to the end of the fawning dedication to the Emperor Vespasian, embarrassed that a writer he so admired could be such a lickspittle, when Paola came back into the living room and sat opposite him. ‘Everything’s arranged,’ she said. ‘Emilio will call Davide and tell him you’ll be there either tomorrow or Thursday and will stay for a few weeks. He said everything you’ll need is in the house. Davide’s daughter will put fresh sheets on the bed and see that there’s enough food in the kitchen.’ Brunetti, who thought that what he would most need in the kitchen was Paola, refrained from saying it for fear that she would howl at hearing such a thing.
‘What are you going to do?’
‘Stay here in my home, with our children, and go about the business of my life.’
‘And that is?’
‘Reading the books I put off all year for the summer, preparing my classes for next term, listening to my children and talking to them, feeding them, visiting my parents, reading.’ She smiled, as if at the simplicity of the list.
‘Couldn’t you do all that on Sant’Erasmo?’
‘Most of it, I suppose, though that would require that we persuade the kids to come.’
‘You think they wouldn’t want to?’ Brunetti asked. Considering what he knew about Sant’Erasmo, he realized the kids would be isolated at the end of an island where they knew no one, with two choices for entertainment: swimming or rowing. And stuck in a house with only the company of their parents. Before Paola could reply, therefore, he said, ‘Maybe it’s better I go there alone.’
Without waiting for her answer, he returned his attention to Pliny, held up the book and read aloud to her what Pliny had written to the Emperor:
‘I am well aware, that, placed as you are in the highest station, and gifted with the most splendid eloquence and the most accomplished mind, even those who come to pay their respects to you, do it with a kind of veneration.’
He looked up from the page to see her response and saw her, standing at the door, mouth agape, and so he moved to a previous paragraph.
‘Nor has the extent of your prosperity produced any change in you, except that it has given you the power of doing good to the utmost of your wishes. And whilst all these circumstances increase the veneration which other persons feel for you, with respect to myself, they
have made me so bold, as to wish to become more familiar.’
This time, he looked at her and raised his eyebrows in inquiry, having decided to spare her the cringing servility of Pliny’s next line: ‘What a fertility of genius do you possess.’
When she had recovered from her surprise, Paola asked, ‘Is this the preface to your letter to Patta, asking for time off?’
5
The next morning, Brunetti was careful to arrive at the Questura at nine. When he entered her office, Signorina Elettra stared at him in astonishment. Before he could try to explain, she said, ‘Pucetti said you were in the hospital. That you’d had problems with your heart.’ She raised a hand towards him, and he wondered if she was going to ask if she could put it into the wound in his side to be sure he was still alive. Instead, she pulled it back and waved at the telephone, saying, ‘I’ve called them at least four times, but each time I get a different answer: that you’re in Cardiologia, Gerontologia, or that there’s no record of you, or that you were there but you’d been sent home.’
‘The last one is right,’ he said evenly, hoping to calm her with his tone.
‘Pucetti said you were taken there in an ambulance,’ she insisted, as if his being sent home could weigh nothing in the face of this.
‘Yes, I was,’ Brunetti conceded. ‘But it was all a mistake.’ Slowly, then, with some repetitions and going-backs, Brunetti told her the story, minimizing Pucetti’s contribution and making it sound as though it had been his fault to misinterpret the young man’s behaviour and thus exaggerate his own response, with the unhappy result that he had landed in the hospital and caused the staff unnecessary concern about the consequences to his heart.
‘We work in a profession that has consequences for the heart,’ was Signorina Elettra’s deadpan reply; then she asked, ‘What happens now?’
‘I’m going to take the weeks of medical leave the doctor gave me,’ Brunetti said, aware that each time he said it he was more fully persuaded that it was the right – even the necessary – thing to do.
‘And do what?’ she inquired.
‘Nothing. Read. Go to bed early. Get some exercise.’ He’d added this last when he remembered that Paola had said there might be a boat at the house on Sant’Erasmo. Two weeks of rowing was nothing, he knew, but perhaps it would begin to get him back into shape. Even as he thought this, Brunetti knew he would not persist in any routine of rowing once he left the island, but it made him feel better to tell himself that he wanted to.
‘Is there anything really wrong with you?’ Signorina Elettra asked.
‘I hope not,’ was Brunetti’s cheerful reply. Before he could explain the details of the doctor’s findings, he heard footsteps approaching the door, and when he turned he saw their superior, Vice-Questore Giuseppe Patta.
If rude good health and masculine vitality could be combined and somehow transformed into a sellable product, the Vice-Questore’s photo would be on the packet. The whites of his eyes made the irises shine a deeper brown; his hair was boyishly thick and just turning white at the temples, apparently having decided to eschew the telltale ageing displayed by grey. His teeth were obviously his own and glowingly white; his walk was a combination of easy glide and irrepressible bounce. Brunetti knew from Signorina Elettra that Patta was only three years from retirement; no one, seeing him, would believe it.
In the time it took Patta to cross the room and reach Signorina Elettra’s desk, Brunetti had managed to hunch himself over and sink his head lower on his neck in the very likeness of ill health. Patta, in his ineffable way, displaying the tact and discretion that had for years endeared him to his colleagues, seeing Brunetti, stopped dead and demanded, ‘What’s wrong with you now?’
‘My doctor thinks it’s my heart, Signore,’ came the response from a newly timid Brunetti.
‘You look terrible. He’s probably right. What are you going to do?’
Brunetti sighed, as though the thought of having to respond to any of this was too taxing for him. ‘He’s told me to rest completely for two weeks, Vice-Questore,’ he said, agreeing to Patta’s change of the doctor’s sex to one that would not lead Patta instantly to suspect a plot of some sort, or at least professional incompetence. Brunetti permitted himself to take out his handkerchief and wipe at his brow, then stuffed it back in his pocket. ‘He thinks I should get out of the city.’
‘And go where?’ Patta demanded.
‘Sant’Erasmo, Signore.’
‘Where’s that?’ Patta asked, although he had been working in Venice for decades. The severity of his voice suggested he thought this was all a hoax and that Brunetti was going off to Cortina for fresh air and lounging around a hotel pool.
‘Out there, sir,’ Brunetti said, waving a hand in the general direction of the east.
‘How long did you say?’
‘Two weeks, Signore.’
‘Good. That’s enough to set anyone straight,’ Patta declared and turned towards his office, leaving Signorina Elettra to see to Brunetti, now no doubt reclassified in Patta’s mind from troublemaker to malingering troublemaker.
When their superior was gone, Brunetti returned to his normal height and stature, and Signorina Elettra asked, ‘Sant’Erasmo?’
‘Yes. There’s a place where I can stay.’
‘You’re going alone?’ she asked. ‘What about your family?’
‘They’ll stay here,’ he said, nothing more.
His voice must have warned her, for she asked no more personal questions, only when he was going and how it would be possible to get in touch with him. Just in case. He didn’t have a phone number for Davide, nor, for that fact, a surname. ‘I’m taking my phone with me.’ Should it happen that she could not reach him, he added, she could always call Paola: she’d know where he was.
She started to ask something, stopped, then asked, ‘You’re as well as ever?’
Brunetti resisted the impulse to pat her arm, fearing that the gesture would seem condescending. ‘I’m fine, Signorina. It was all a confused mess, but I’m going to take advantage of it and try to …’ words fled him for a moment, then he retrieved the right one … ‘decompress.’ He smiled as he said this, and she smiled in return, no doubt relieved that her concern had not passed over some border of deportment or rank.
He quickly turned to business and explained that, for the moment, any documents concerning the investigation into what Avvocato Ruggieri had or had not given to the girl at the party should be handed over to Commissario Griffoni.
Seeing the change in Signorina Elettra’s expression, he inquired, ‘Yes, Signorina?’
Her smile was modest, almost self-effacing. ‘Pucetti spoke to me yesterday about the interview with Avvocato Ruggieri. I took the liberty of having a look at him.’
‘And learned?’
‘That he lives with the daughter of Sandro Bettinardi,’ she said, naming a powerful member of Parliament. She gave him a few moments to consider the wisdom of pursuing a case against the companion of this man’s daughter and then added, ‘She’s seven months pregnant.’
After leaving her office, Brunetti wondered if he should go up to his own to take a look around for anything he might need in the next weeks: reports from an ongoing investigation, his pistol, a light raincoat he’d left in the closet sometime in the spring? But no, he’d leave all thought of work behind. What did a man of determination and muscle need with police reports, with a pistol, with a raincoat, for heaven’s sake? If he got wet, then he’d be wet; if imperilled by some unknown terror from the sea, he’d beat it back with his single oar and then return to his bachelor home and cook the fish he’d caught that morning, eat it with a glass of local wine, then sit in the dimming light with a small glass of grappa while he listened to the chatter of marsh birds as they prepared themselves for sleep, and then go and do the same himself, the dreamless sleep that comes of sunlight, simplicity, and long hours rowing under the sun.
That night he packed, determined to make everything fit
into a small wheeled suitcase, the one he used when they went away for a weekend or he travelled on police business for a few days. He packed a pair of tennis shoes that had soles good for rowing, a pair of leather sandals, and decided he’d wear an old pair of brown leather loafers he’d had re-soled and heeled more times than he could remember. Four T-shirts; uncertain whether there would be a washing machine in the house and embarrassed to ask Paola, he threw in two more. Underwear, two white cotton shirts and then a third, a button-down Brooks Brothers Oxford cloth he’d bought in New York and that had now matured to the perfect softness. An old beige cotton jacket he could no longer remember buying, a worn cashmere sweater he’d refused for years to part with, bathing trunks, a pair of light blue jeans, and a pair of navy blue Bermudas he’d bought but never worn. He paused as he picked up his razor, uncertain about putting it into the leather case Paola had given him for his fortieth birthday. Did rustic men shave every day? he asked himself. Paola’s voice somehow channelled itself into the room, saying, ‘Yes, they do,’ and he put in the razor. Toothbrush, comb, toothpaste, and that was that.
Now the hard part. Presumably, he’d have no guests; not unless Paola decided to come out and visit, with or without the kids. He would be by himself for two weeks, in a house that might or might not possess books. It would be light until after nine, when he’d eat, then go to bed. But the mornings: he’d be free to make coffee and go back to bed to read, what bliss. And if it rained? Faced with this prospect, Brunetti’s sense of heroism diminished, allowing him to admit he’d probably prefer days alone, undisturbed, with a book, to days spent rowing a boat aimlessly around the laguna in the rain.
He went into the bedroom, where his books were kept, exiled here a decade ago by the encroachment of Paola’s books on the shelves of her study, where space had once been promised to his. He stood and stared at their spines for five minutes, running his eyes across them, counting the days he’d be on the island. How long since he’d read the Odyssey? His hand reached towards it but came back empty: his memory was too clear; besides, his days would provide enough travel on the wine-dark sea. He went and took the Pliny from the sofa, came back, and placed it on the foot of the bed. Then Herodotus, a new translation which he’d had for three years and not once opened. He returned to studying the books, and when his eyes fell upon Suetonius, whom he had not read for ages, he took him and tossed him on the pile: what would be better than gossip for a rainy day?