by Donna Leon
‘But?’
‘But she wouldn’t give it to me. She said she knew what it was and that it wasn’t right for me to have it, or to have them.’
‘I see,’ Brunetti said. ‘Did Signora Sartori tell her?’
The old man gave himself a shake, the way Brunetti had seen dogs do. It started with his head and gradually enveloped his shoulders and part of his arms. Two more strands of hair broke free of his scalp and draped themselves across the lapel of his jacket. Brunetti did not know if he was trying to shake away Brunetti’s question or the answer it required. After he stopped moving, the old man still did not speak.
‘I suppose Signora Sartori must have told her,’ Brunetti said resignedly, as though he had just followed a very complicated train of thought, and this was the only place it could lead.
‘Told her what?’ the old man asked, but his voice was slowed by tiredness, not by suspicion.
‘About what you and Signora Sartori did,’ Brunetti answered.
As if suddenly aware of the disorder of his hair, Morandi raised a hand and delicately replaced the wanton strands, draping them one after the other across the pink dome of his head. He patted them into place, then kept his hand on them as if waiting for some signal that they had adhered to the surface.
He lowered his hand and said, not looking at Brunetti when he spoke, ‘She shouldn’t have told her. Maria, that is. But ever since she … since this happened to her, she hasn’t been careful about what she says, and she …’ He trailed off, patted his hair into place again, though it was not necessary, and looked across at Brunetti, as though he expected some response to what he had said. ‘She drifts,’ he finally said.
‘What do the doctors say?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Oh, doctors,’ Morandi answered angrily, waving his hand at some place behind him, as if the doctors were lined up there and, hearing him, should be embarrassed. ‘One of them said it was a small stroke, but another says it might be the beginning of Al … of something else.’ When Brunetti said nothing and the invisible doctors did not contest his remarks, Morandi went on. ‘It’s just old age. And worry.’
‘I’m sorry she’s worried,’ Brunetti said. ‘She deserves peace and quiet.’
Morandi smiled, bowed his head as at a compliment he did not deserve, and said, ‘Yes, she does. She’s the most wonderful woman in the world.’ Brunetti heard the real tremor in his voice. He waited, and Morandi added, ‘I’ve never known anyone like her.’
‘You must know her very well to be this devoted to her, Signore,’ Brunetti said.
Because Morandi had again lowered his head, Brunetti could see only his pink scalp and the dark strands of hair that transected it. But as he watched, the pink grew darker and Morandi said, ‘She’s everything.’
Brunetti let some time pass before he said, ‘You’re lucky.’
‘I know that,’ Morandi said, and again Brunetti heard the tremor.
‘How long have you known her?’
‘Since the sixteenth of July, nineteen fifty-nine.’
‘I was still a child,’ Brunetti said.
‘Well, I was a man by then,’ Morandi said, then added in a softer voice, ‘but not a very good one and not a very nice one.’
‘But then you met her?’ Brunetti encouraged him.
Morandi looked up then, and Brunetti saw that same smile, strangely childlike. ‘Yes.’ Then, as an afterthought, ‘At three-thirty in the afternoon.’
‘You’re lucky to remember the day so clearly,’ Brunetti said, surprised that he could no longer remember the date he met Paola. He knew the year, certainly, and remembered why he was in the library, the subject of the essay he had to write, so if he checked his university records for when he took that class, he could probably work out at least the month, but the date was gone. He would be embarrassed to ask Paola because, if she knew it off by heart, he’d feel a cad for not remembering it. But she might just as easily say he was a sentimental fool for wanting to remember something like that, which was probably true. Which made Morandi a sentimental fool, he supposed.
‘How did you meet her?’ Brunetti asked.
Morandi smiled at the question and at the memory. ‘I was working as a porter at the hospital and I had to go into a room to help lift one of the patients on to a stretcher so they could take him down for tests, and Maria was there already, helping the nurse.’ He looked at the wall to the left of Brunetti, perhaps seeing the hospital room. ‘But they were both very small women and couldn’t do it, so I asked them to get out of my way, and I lifted the man onto the stretcher, and when they thanked me, Maria smiled, and … well, I suppose …’ His voice trailed off but his smile remained.
‘I knew right then, you know,’ he said to Brunetti, man to man, though Brunetti thought more women than men would understand this, ‘that she was the one. And nothing in all these years has changed that.’
‘You’re a lucky man,’ Brunetti repeated, thinking that any man, or any woman, who spent decades wrapped in this feeling was a lucky person. Why, then, had they never married? He recalled the thuggish first impression Morandi had made and wondered if perhaps he had an inconvenient family lodged somewhere. Paola often referred to men who had a Mrs Rochester in the attic: did Morandi have one?
‘I think so,’ Morandi said, the key still in his hand.
‘How long has Signora Sartori been here?’ Brunetti asked, waving his hand to take in all that stood around them, as innocently as if copies of all of the payments for her care from the day she entered were not sitting on his desk to be checked at a glance.
‘Three years now,’ he said, a time that began, as Brunetti knew, with the deposit of the first of Turchetti’s cheques.
‘It’s a very good place. She’s very lucky to be here,’ Brunetti said. He would not allow himself to mention his mother’s experience, and so he said only, ‘I know that some of the other places in the city don’t take as good care as the sisters here do.’ When Morandi failed to answer, Brunetti said, ‘I’ve heard stories about the public places.’
‘We were very lucky,’ Morandi said earnestly, failing to take the bait, or avoiding it; Brunetti was not sure.
‘I’ve heard it’s very expensive,’ Brunetti said, using the voice of one citizen to another.
‘We had a little put by,’ Morandi said.
Brunetti leaned forward and took the key from Morandi’s hand. ‘Is this where they are?’ he asked, holding it up. When the old man did not answer, Brunetti slipped the key into the watch pocket of his trousers.
Morandi placed his right hand on his thigh, as if to cover the place where the key had been. Then he put the left on the other thigh. He looked at Brunetti, his face paler than it had been. ‘Did she tell you?’
Brunetti did not know if he meant Signora Sartori or Signora Altavilla, and so he answered, ‘It doesn’t matter who told me, does it, Signore? Just that I have the key and know what’s there.’
‘They don’t belong to anyone, you know,’ the old man insisted. ‘They’re all dead, all the people who wanted them.’
‘How did you get them?’
‘The old French woman had them in the house. Inside a hamper for the washing.’ He must have read the flash of concern on Brunetti’s face for he said, ‘No, they were in a plastic case on the bottom. They were safe.’
‘I see,’ Brunetti said. ‘But how did you get them?’ He used the plural form of ‘you’.
Morandi reacted to the word this time. ‘Maria didn’t know anything about them. She wouldn’t have liked it. Not at all. She wouldn’t have let me take them.’
‘Oh, I see, I see,’ Brunetti said, wondering how many more times he would have to say this same thing when, as now, what he heard was unlikely to be true? Morandi had had them in his possession for decades, and she had not known?
‘Cuccetti gave them to me. The same night we witnessed the paper.’ Brunetti noticed the man could not bring himself to call it a will. Then Morandi added, sounding angry, ‘I
made him do it.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I didn’t trust him,’ Morandi said with great force.
‘And the apartment?’ Brunetti asked, in lieu of pursuing the subject of Cuccetti’s honesty.
‘That was what he promised me at the beginning, when he asked me if we’d sign something. I didn’t trust him then, and I didn’t trust him later. I knew what he was like. He’d give me the apartment, then he’d find a way to take it back. Some legal way. After all, he was a lawyer,’ Morandi said in much the same way he would say that a bird was a vulture.
Brunetti, wise in the way of lawyers, nodded.
‘So I told him what I wanted.’
‘How did you know about them and what they were?’
‘The old woman used to talk to Maria, and she told her about them, about how much they were worth, and Maria told me.’ Then, before Brunetti could get the wrong opinion, he quickly added, ‘No, it’s not what you think. It was just something she told me, when she talked about work and the patients and the sort of things they told her.’ He looked away for a moment, as if embarrassed to find himself in the company of a man capable of thinking such a thing of Signora Sartori. ‘It was my idea, not hers. She didn’t know about it. And she’s never known I have them.’
Then, Brunetti found himself thinking unkindly, how did she know about the key?
‘What did Cuccetti say?’
‘What could he say?’ Morandi asked harshly. ‘The old woman wasn’t going to last very long.’ Then to explain things further, he said, ‘Anyone could see that, so I knew he had to hurry.’ Brunetti remained silent in the face of Morandi’s failure to realize what this said about himself.
‘I told him I wouldn’t sign anything until he gave them to me.’ As the old man told his story, Brunetti was reminded of why he had thought him a thug. His voice hardened, as did his eyes; his mouth grew tighter in the telling of the tale. Brunetti’s face was impassivity itself.
‘And then the old woman had some sort of crisis – I forget what it was. Breathing, something like that. And he panicked, Cuccetti, and he must have gone to her place and got them, and he brought them to the hospital and put them in her closet.’
‘Why would he do that?’ Brunetti asked.
Morandi answered immediately. ‘If anyone asked, he could say she asked him to bring them to her so she could look at them again.’ His nod showed how clever he judged this move on Cuccetti’s part to have been. ‘But she didn’t see them. She was gaga by then.’
Brunetti thought again of Dante’s lizards and of the way they repeatedly changed shape, returning ineluctably to the form of what they had once been.
‘So you signed it?’
‘Yes,’ Morandi said.
‘And was that really Signora Sartori’s signature?’
Morandi blushed again, far more strongly than at any time in the past. The fight went out of him; he actually seemed to deflate again. ‘Yes,’ he said and bowed his head to await the blow of Brunetti’s next question.
‘What did you tell her?’
Morandi started to speak but then burst into nervous coughing. He bowed his head over his knees and kept it there until the coughing fit ended, then pushed himself up and against the back of the sofa and closed his eyes. Brunetti would not let him go to sleep again, would poke him in the side before he’d allow that. The old man opened his eyes and said, ‘I told her that I’d watched the old woman write it. That Cuccetti and I had been there and she’d written it by herself.’
‘Who really wrote it?’ Brunetti asked.
Morandi shrugged. ‘I don’t know. It was on the table when I went into the room.’ He looked at Brunetti and said, making no attempt to disguise his eagerness, ‘So she could have written it, couldn’t she?’
Brunetti ignored this. ‘It could have been anyone who signed it?’ Brunetti demanded levelly. ‘But you and Signora Sartori witnessed her signature?’
Morandi nodded, then covered his eyes with his right hand, as if the sight of Brunetti’s knowledge was too much for him to bear. Brunetti glanced away for a moment, and when he looked back he saw that tears were seeping from beneath his fingers.
For some time the old man sat like that, then heaved himself to one side and pulled an enormous white handkerchief from his pocket. He wiped his eyes and blew his nose, folded the handkerchief carefully, and put it back in his pocket.
As if he had not heard Brunetti’s question, Morandi said, ‘The old woman died a few days later. Three. Four. Then Cuccetti submitted the will, and we were asked about it. I had to explain to Maria that she had to say we saw her sign it, or we’d all get in trouble.’
‘And she did?’
‘Yes. Then.’
‘But later?’
‘But later she began not to believe me.’
‘Was it because of the apartment?’
‘No, I told her my aunt left it to me. She lived in Torino and she died about then, so I told Maria that’s what happened.’
‘She believed you?’
‘Yes. Of course.’ Seeing Brunetti’s face, he said, voice almost pleading, ‘Please. You have to understand that Maria is an honest person. She couldn’t lie, even if she wanted to. And she doesn’t think other people can.’ He paused, considering, and then added, ‘And I never had. Not to her. Not until then. Because I wanted us to have a home we could be proud of and be together there.’
How convenient that desire made things for him, Brunetti found himself thinking.
‘What did you do with the drawings?’ Brunetti asked. He was tired of this, tired of having to consider everything Morandi said to determine which of the two men he had seen in him was speaking.
As if he had been expecting the question, Morandi said, with a vague gesture towards Brunetti’s pocket, as if they were there, ‘I put them in the bank.’
Brunetti stopped himself from smacking his palm against his forehead and shouting out, ‘Of course, of course.’ People like Morandi didn’t live in large apartments near San Marco, and no one expected poor people to have safe deposit boxes. But what else was that key if not the key to a safe deposit box?
‘When did she take the key?’
Morandi pulled his lips together in the manner of a schoolboy being reproved for some minor offence. ‘A week ago. Remember, that warm day?’ Brunetti did indeed remember: they’d had dinner on the terrace, but the warm spell had ended suddenly.
‘I went out into the campo to have a cigarette. I left my overcoat lying on the bed. She must have taken the key when I was outside. I didn’t notice it until I got home and opened the door, but it was too late to go back to the casa di cura then, and when I asked her about it the next day, she said she didn’t know what I was talking about.’
‘Did she know what the key was?’ Brunetti said.
Morandi shook his head. ‘I don’t know, I don’t know. I never thought she knew anything or understood what had happened. About the apartment. Or about the drawings.’ He gave Brunetti a long look and said, his confusion to be heard in every word, ‘But she must have, don’t you think?’ Brunetti did not answer, and Morandi asked, ‘To take the key? She must have known? All these years?’ There was a hint of desperation in his voice at the need to consider what this possibility did to his vision of and belief in the sainted Maria.
Brunetti found no words. People knew things they said and thought they did not know. Wives and husbands learned far more about the other person than they were ever meant to learn.
‘I have to have the key,’ Morandi blurted out. ‘I have to have it.’
‘Why?’ Brunetti asked, though he knew.
‘To pay the bills.’ The old man looked around the room, ran his palm across the velvet of the sofa. ‘You know what the public places are like: you’ve seen them. I can’t let her go there.’ At the thought, the tears began again, but this time Morandi was unconscious of them. ‘You wouldn’t put a dog there,’ he insisted.
Brunetti, who had not put hi
s mother there, said nothing.
‘I have to pay them. I can’t move her now, not from this into one of those places.’ He choked on a sob, as surprised by it as was Brunetti. Morandi struggled to his feet and walked to the door. ‘I can’t be inside,’ he said and headed for the elevator.
28
Brunetti had no choice but to follow him, though this time he took the stairs and arrived sooner than the elevator. Morandi’s face softened when he saw him there, and together they walked out into the early evening sun. The old man went back to the same bench, and within minutes the birds had altered their flight paths and were landing not far from his feet. They taxied up to him, but he had nothing to give them, nor did he appear to notice them.
Brunetti sat on the bench, leaving a space between them.
The old man reached into his pocket and pulled out cigarette papers and tobacco. Sloppily, spilling tobacco on to his trousers and shoes, he managed to roll a cigarette and get it lit. He took three deep puffs and sat back, ignoring the birds who, in their turn, ignored the tobacco that fell around them. They looked up at him, their indignant peeps making no impression on Morandi. He puffed again and again, until his head was encircled in a cloud and he went off into another fit of coughing. At the end of it, he tossed the cigarette from him in disgust and turned to Brunetti.
‘Maria doesn’t let me smoke in the house,’ he said, sounding almost proud of the fact.
‘For your health?’ Brunetti asked.
The old man turned to him, face washed clean of emotion at the idea. ‘Oh, I wish,’ he whispered and looked quickly away.
Morandi glanced around the entire campo, as if seeking someone who would care about whether he smoked or not. Turning his attention to Brunetti, he said, ‘You have to give me the key, Signore.’ He tried his best to sound reasonable but managed only to sound desperate. He looked earnest, tried a friendly smile, then let it fade away.
‘How many are left?’ Brunetti asked.
Morandi’s eyes narrowed, and he started to ask, ‘What do you …’ but gave up the attempt and stopped. He folded his hands, rammed them between his thighs, and leaned forward. He noticed the birds then; showing no fear, hopping closer, they began to peep up at the familiar face. He reached into his jacket and pulled out a few pinches of grain, which he let fall between his feet. The birds picked at them avidly.