‘We’re going.’ He gave Sara back to his sister, completely dry.
‘When will you be back?’ Lorenza asked.
‘Hard to say. I’ll phone you.’ In the car he said to Davide, ‘Hold on a while longer. We’re going to the barber now, then we’ll go to a good bar near here.’ Davide smiled, and gave a little nod of gratitude. At the barber’s Duca had a shave, too. They sat next to each other, and in the mirror he saw Davide half close his eyes every now and again: if he fell asleep it would be a blessing.
He fell asleep.
‘Psst.’ Duca spoke under his breath to the barber. ‘We’ve been driving all night, he’s tired and not feeling very well. Let him sleep, at least until it gets busy.’
‘It won’t get busy today.’ The barber was an understanding man, a man who’d seen everything: he left Davide with lather on half his face and lit a cigarette.
Duca had his own hair cut by the barber’s assistant, a young man from Como who, unlike the barber, had seen nothing and had never predicted, among the many events that might occur in the world, the possibility of a man falling asleep at the barber’s, although, he said in a low voice, he himself had once fallen asleep in a café in Como, which was so unlike him that he would remember it for the rest of his life.
With his hair cut and his beard shaved, he started talking to the old barber, looking every now and again at his watch and every now and again at Davide: every minute that passed was a minute less to drink alcohol and a minute more to get reorganised. Perhaps he would sleep until midday, but at 10:15 an old customer came in, a noisy Milanese, the very kind who finds so much success on television, a thin bony man, vaguely hateful for his vulgarity and his wine-red face, who yelled out a Fascist slogan as he entered.
So Davide woke up, realised that he had been asleep, and on the cheek that was free of lather Duca could see the red mark, but the old barber knew his job, he was ready, he finished shaving him and they left.
‘Sorry I took you there,’ Duca said, ‘your usual hairdresser’s may be a more pleasant place.’ He got no answer. He pulled up outside a bar in the Via Plinio. ‘This is the best bar in the area. Order whatever you like.’
He didn’t look at Davide as he drank a double whisky, but only said, ‘Drink slowly, I’m not in any hurry.’
The sleep and the whisky had revived Davide a little. Back in the car, he said, ‘I must be quite a burden to you.’
‘A bit,’ Duca said, driving. ‘But I like you.’ Reaching the Piazza Cavour, he turned into the Via Fatebenefratelli, and parked in the Via dei Giardini. ‘Wait for me here. I have to go to Police Headquarters. I’ll leave the car keys, but remember what I told you this morning: don’t do anything stupid as long as I’m with you. If you’re not here when I get back, I’ll come looking for you, and I hope for your sake I find you already dead, because I don’t rate your chances if I find you alive. And don’t start drinking again.’
Davide nodded his head several times, without smiling. He would be there when Duca got back: he was an honest young man.
As Duca entered Headquarters, the memory of his father hit him like a punch, and a black veil fell over him. Whenever, as a boy, he had come in with his father through that door, crossed that courtyard, climbed those stairs, walked through that corridor and, in the little room, not much more than a cubbyhole, that his father called an office, his father raised his left arm when he could, in other words, not very much after the stab wound he’d got in Sicily, and pointed to the chair, as if it actually was a chair rather than a little bench with a plank as a back and said to him, ‘Sit there and study,’ he would place on his knees the schoolbook that his father had told him to bring, and start to read and reread, and when he needed to write, his father would lend him a corner of his own little table, which passed, however improbably, as a desk. In that way, in that place, he had studied many aspects of infinitesimal calculus, chemistry, and even projective geometry.
But this morning he walked along a different corridor, a more silent, deserted one, there was only one officer outside the door of Carrua’s office. A new officer who, before letting him in, wanted a lot of explanation and looked as if he might want to search him. In the end, Carrua himself came out, shouting.
‘You let in all kinds of nuisances I don’t want to see and when a friend of mine comes you keep them outside.’ Carrua may never have spoken normally, he either shouted or kept silent. ‘How did it go with Auseri?’ he screamed at Duca as soon as they were inside the office.
He told him how it had gone and thanked him for finding him the job. ‘It’s quite an unusual job, but I like it, even though it’s not very clear-cut.’
‘What’s not very clear-cut about it?’
‘I find it hard to believe it’s all about a young man who drinks. There must be something else.’
‘What kind of thing?’
‘I don’t know. The kind that might also be of interest to the police.’
Silence. Superintendent Luigi Carrua was looking at him. He was an old friend of his father’s, Duca must have been five or six years old the first time he had looked at him, and since then they had met on thousands of occasions and Carrua had looked at him thousands of times, but he still couldn’t get used to that look: when Carrua looked at you, you felt naked. He was short, not fat, weighed down by thirty years of police work, even though grey his hair was long and neatly back-combed, without a receding hairline, and he looked more like a bank official than a police officer. Except when he stared into your eyes. ‘If you take after your father,’ he said in an unusually low voice, ‘then maybe there is something. Your father was never wrong.’ He raised his voice again. ‘But you’re a doctor, not a policeman. The Auseris would never have anything to do with the police.’ The telephone rang, he picked it up and listened, then shouted again, ‘All right, let them do the post-mortem again, I’m not the bloody sawbones.’ He turned back to Duca and shrugged. ‘They still say Superintendent Carrùa. That was another one. They’ve known me for ten years and every day I tell them: Càrrua, please, with the stress on the first a, not Carrùa with the stress on the u, but it never works: Carrùa is what they have in their heads and Carrùa is what they say.’
He smiled. The man’s one weakness was the correct pronunciation of his name: it was his secret wound and one that seemed likely never to heal, because people instinctively said Carrùa and it never even occurred to them that they should be pronouncing it Càrrua. He became serious again, he seemed upset.
No, Duca didn’t like the job. ‘If, while looking after this young man, I end up discovering something not entirely above board, what should I do? Engineer Auseri is your friend.’
The shout this time was more forceful. ‘You won’t discover anything because there’s nothing to discover about Auseri. We were at school together, we did our military service together, we’re growing old together in this filthy world, he has a son who’s a bit backward, but who won’t even step off the pavement if the light isn’t green. Auseri’s son drinks because he’s backward, that’s all. But you, being the intelligent man you are, will teach him to prefer lemon juice.’
Then Duca laid it out for him clearly, because what was the point in life of being the son of a policeman, or the protégé of a highly placed official in Headquarters, if the wheels got jammed and you were crushed anyway? They had got jammed with Signora Maldrigati, and he didn’t want to be crushed again. ‘Listen to me. Maybe I won’t discover anything, which will be better for me, but if I discover the slightest thing, I’ll come here and bring it to you on a silver platter and resign from this job. I don’t want to have anything to do with people or things that are outside the law. That’s not an excessive demand, is it?’
Instead of the shouting he was expecting, silence. For a long time. Then Carrua stood up abruptly and at last screamed, ‘You must have a reason to think there’s something there that’s outside the law.’
‘I didn’t want to tell you, because maybe it isn’t
a reason,’ he replied loud and clear, ‘but last night your friend’s son tried to kill himself by slitting his wrists. I found him just in time. He’s outside right now, alive and well, waiting for me. But a young man that age doesn’t try to die if there isn’t some underlying cause.’
‘And didn’t he tell you why?’
‘No, just as for the past year he hasn’t told his father why he drinks like that, without any friends or acquaintances driving him to it. And the more I asked him, the less he would tell me.’
‘A lot of people kill themselves for no reason.’
‘Davide Auseri isn’t a young girl who’s been seduced. He may be young, but he’s a man. And he isn’t backward, as you think, or as his father thinks. If he wants to die he has a serious reason, and serious reasons, for a man, always have something to do with the law. I’ve already had enough dealings with the law. Which is why I’ve come here to tell you that, if there’s something not right about this, I’m dropping everything.’
No shouting. Carrua sat down again. ‘You’re right.’ He had grown sad. He had done everything he could to help Duca, to protect him, to avoid him being put on trial and going to prison. There had been nothing he could do: the wheels had got jammed. ‘I don’t think you’ll find anything, but if you do, come and tell me straight away and I’ll find you another job.’ Before opening the door, he gave him a hug. ‘Try to hold on. Another year or two, and they’ll let you back on the register, everything will be the way it was before, you’re still young.’
He let Carrua believe that was what he was hoping for, even though he knew that hope was a kind of secret vice that nobody ever managed to rid themselves of completely. ‘Thank you for everything you’ve done for Lorenza,’ he said, hugging him tight.
When he came out into the Via Fatebenefratelli, into the damp sunlight that was as hot as shaving cream from a luxury hairdresser, it struck him that if he didn’t find Davide and the Giulietta in the Via dei Giardini, then he had really messed up. But he had had to take the risk: otherwise he would never have known whether he could trust the young man, or what he was made of.
Davide was in his place, walking up and down next to the Giulietta in the incipient shade given by the trees at that hour. Duca saw him from the back, tall, monumental, and felt sorry for him. Whatever the reason, he must be very unhappy. ‘Thank you,’ he said to him, getting behind the wheel. ‘Let’s just drop by the bank, and then I’m sorry if I take you somewhere a little sad, but I’m going to see my father’s grave.’
At the bank, which was his father’s bank, they cashed the cheque he had been given by Engineer Auseri, which was for quite a large amount. They cashed it without any problem, even though they knew he had been in prison and even though his father, with his small savings account, had never done much to boost the institution’s profits.
‘After we’ve been to Musocco, we’ll stop for a drink,’ he told him encouragingly. For the first week he couldn’t reduce to less than a third the dose of alcohol Davide was used to drinking, for psychological reasons if for nothing else: he wanted him to stay a normal man, not become a thirsty man who thought of nothing but whisky.
Country graveyards, surrounded by greenery and tall cypresses, are not supposed to be depressing, unlike a large cemetery in a big city which can be quite chilling. But he hadn’t yet seen his father’s grave, he hadn’t even attended the funeral, and now he had in his pocket the sheet of paper Lorenza had given him, on which the numbers of the section and the grave were written, and together with Davide he entered that sad, oceanic expanse which was even more lugubrious in the sun. Of course, the grave was at the far end, and they had to do quite a bit of walking, Duca holding the carnations he had bought at the front gate.
Here was the section, more walking, and here was the grave, much the same as all the others in the row, the extinguished candle in the dark glass, the bed of little flowers scorched by the heat, the spartan inscription, Pietro Lamberti, date of birth and death, and that was it. He laid the carnations, loose, on the flower bed, without any attempt at arranging them artistically. From his photograph, his father looked out stiffly at the world in front of him, and Duca stood stiffly looking at the photograph.
‘This is my father,’ he said, as if introducing him, ‘a police officer, from Emilia Romagna, just like me, but he wasn’t typical of the region, he didn’t like revolution or revolutionaries, he liked the law, he liked rules. He was absolutely determined to sort out all those who transgressed the law or broke the rules. He was a kind of Javert. He managed to get himself sent to Sicily because he thought he could do something radical to combat the Mafia. For a while the Mafia took no interest in him, they had no time to waste on an ordinary cop, but my father went too far: he managed to get something out of three or four of those peasants who’ve seen everything and know everything, but always say they know nothing. I don’t know what methods he used, maybe he had to bend the rules a little, but in his small way he managed to break through the wall of silence. His superiors promoted him, and the Mafia sent a young man to deal with him: it was a suicide mission, because my father was a very good shot and the attempt didn’t succeed, my father shot him dead but not before being stabbed in his left shoulder, his left arm was almost paralysed and he was transferred here to Milan, to a desk job.’ He wasn’t looking at Davide, he didn’t care very much if he was listening or not, he was talking like this as if praying—isn’t summing up a man’s life a kind of prayer?—but he sensed that Davide was listening, more than that, he had never listened the way he was listening right now.
‘Maybe it was because he didn’t want the same thing to happen to me that he was against the idea of my becoming a policeman like him, he wanted me to graduate as a doctor, and I did. Nobody will ever know how he managed on a police clerk’s salary, and a widower to boot, because my mother died when I was a boy, but the day I graduated he was in bed, suffering with his heart, and when I had my exams, he had his heart attack. Then I did my military service, and by the time I got back, he’d somehow, stuck there in his office in the Via Fatebenefratelli, already found me a place in a clinic, Professor Arquate’s clinic. Maybe I’d have worked my way up, and he’d have lived happily to the age of ninety, but I met Signora Maldrigati. She’s the old lady I killed with an injection of ircodine. My father didn’t even know the word euthanasia, for him it was worse than if I’d gone mad, or rather, he must have thought I had gone mad, and maybe he forgave me because of that, but he realised the consequences of what I had done: I wouldn’t be a doctor any more, I’d always have a stain on my record, and that killed him.’ His father continued to look at him stiffly from the photograph even when he fell silent, and even if he had heard his words, he still didn’t understand why his son had killed, he would never understand it, for all eternity, his look in the photograph said that clearly.
Davide’s voice came to him suddenly, in that great heat and sadness, Duca hadn’t expected him to be the first to speak. ‘I’d like to visit a grave, too.’
Duca nodded, continuing to look at his father.
‘But I don’t know where it is. It must be here, but I don’t know where.’
‘There must be an office somewhere,’ he said to Davide. He looked at him, only his face was shiny with sweat. ‘Just give them the name of the person and they’ll tell you the section and the number of the grave.’
Davide’s voice remained even. ‘It’s the woman I killed last year. Her name was Alberta Radelli.’
5
On that stretch of avenue that goes from the Arco della Pace to the Castello Sforzesco, even just after ten in the morning, the sides of the road are lined with alluring female figures, wearing scanty but tight-fitting clothes in summer, who know how to operate in a large metropolis where there are no provincial limits to timetables or conventional divisions between night and day, and at any hour of the day, from midnight to midnight, a citizen can slow down in his car, hail one or other of these ladies, and ask for their co
-operation.
A blue Giulietta appeared that morning on the right-hand side of the arch and slowed down, and a woman of forty dressed like a teenage Beatles fan stepped down into the road almost as if to bar the way, but the Giulietta swerved and accelerated, not because Davide Auseri had seen the kind lady and hadn’t seen fit to accept what she was offering, but simply because, just as he was about to realise his plan, something inside him almost always drove him to flee. Further on, from behind a tree, a genuine teenager, at any rate a girl no more than twenty, waved him down, as if she had an appointment to present the papers for her marriage. She was blonde, she looked like a gangster’s moll in a Hollywood film, or better still, like one of those little girls who, at carnival time, dress up as eighteenth-century ladies for the neighbourhood dance, painted, powdered and completely unaware of the historical aspect of their costumes, concerned only with the fact that they’ll be able to eat a lot of sweet things and play a lot of games during the day. But Davide Auseri swerved away from the blonde, too, as if afraid, even though what he most wanted was to stop. It was almost always like this at first, he was afraid; later, if the girl had managed to get in the car, he wasn’t.
But that morning none of the willing ladies standing in the avenue managed to intercept the Giulietta: the fear was stronger, and Davide headed towards the centre, and drove for a long time, feeling quite sad, through the Foro Bonaparte, the Via Dante, the Via Orefici, the Piazza del Duomo, the Corso Vittorio, San Babila, the Corso di Porta Venezia, having no other plan, beyond that failed one, then returned to the Via Palestro, reached the Piazza Cavour and decided to go to the Alemagna in the Via Manzoni to eat something. One instinct having failed him, the instinct for food had returned even more strongly.
A Private Venus Page 5