They got back in the car. Davide drove in silence, not very fast, and at the first station he left the autostrada, drove the long way round through secondary roads and came back to the entrance to the autostrada, but on the other side, the lane that led back to Milan.
‘No, no,’ she began to moan. ‘I don’t want to go back to Milan, take me away, take me away.’ Her childlike whining was completely unexpected in a woman like her, it was a sign of hysteria, he thought.
‘I’ll talk to my father tonight, maybe I can convince him and tomorrow we’ll leave.’ He was lying, the way a doctor lies to a seriously ill patient.
‘No, if you leave me we’ll never see each other again, take me away now.’ She started moaning even more loudly as soon as he got in the lane to Milan.
‘Calm down, I can’t now, don’t do that.’
‘No, take me away immediately, otherwise I’ll have to kill myself.’ She was rigid, distant, hidden behind her hair, yet imploring.
‘Please try and calm down, when we get to Milan we’ll talk some more.’ But now he was afraid, a woman having a crisis would make any man afraid, all he wanted now was to hold on until he could get rid of her without making a scene, but at any moment she might start screaming, struggling, forcing him to stop in the middle of the autostrada, the traffic police would arrive: hell and damnation, you spend five minutes with a woman, and after it you find yourself smashed to bits, as if you’d fallen from the last floor of the Pirelli skyscraper. The woman had seemed so calm, and now this was happening.
‘Turn back, darling, take me away.’ It was the same continuous lament, the obsessive lament of a little girl asking for ice cream, mummy ice cream, mummy ice cream, mummy ice cream, mummy ice cream.
He decided not to answer her any more.
‘Take me away, for pity’s sake, or I’ll kill myself … Get out here, get out here, at this service station, turn back, take me away, for pity’s sake … Take me away, darling, if only you knew, if only you knew you’d take me away immediately.’
Davide tried not to listen to her, if he listened to her he would yield, if only to make her stop. He tried to distract himself, but there were not many things to concentrate on in the landscape, unless you were a lover of pylons. In the rear-view mirror he could still see that beautiful Mercedes 230, somewhere between coffee and bronze in colour, maybe he was wrong, but he had the feeling he had seen it behind them on the outward journey, too: he liked his Giulietta very much, but he’d have liked a Mercedes sports car like that one even more.
‘No, no, no, I don’t want to go back to Milan.’
He could talk to Signor Brambilla, who was in charge of the family finances, ask if he could get him a Mercedes like that without his father seeing the accounts and going crazy. They had almost reached the end of the autostrada.
‘No, no, no, no, no, I’m going mad, turn back.’ She took her handkerchief from her purse as he pulled up at the exit toll gate, and while he was paying, the ticket collector looked inside and saw her wiping her eyes: she looked ridiculous with her big sunglasses pulled forward and her hair covering her forehead. Davide heard a click, something must have fallen from the handbag, but the frenzy of that scene, the ticket collector’s impassive, mocking look—“He took the girl for a ride, and on the way back she’s causing trouble”—was too much for him.
‘No, no, no, turn back, no, no, no, take me away.’
He braked abruptly, throwing everything to the right, almost into the fields. Around them, against a sky red with sunset, the buildings of Metanopoli burned dully, and that no, no, no, no was shredding his nerves, for the second time in his life—the first had been as a soldier when he had hit the fellow in the next bunk—he raised his voice and roared, ‘That’s enough, get out, I can’t stand it any more!’
Her moaning faded abruptly, like a radio when you take the plug out. Because of her large round sunglasses he could not see her eyes, but her half-open mouth told him how scared she was. For a moment she sat there, frozen, her mouth frozen, then she opened the door and got out, clumsy with terror, as if she thought he would hit her if she didn’t get out, and no sooner was she out of the car than Davide closed the door behind her and drove off. He angrily overtook the Mercedes 230, which was now going at forty kilometres an hour: cars are always better than anything, better than any woman, you can drive a car twenty days in a row, but after only twenty minutes a woman becomes impossible.
He felt safe only when he got to the garage near his house, and slowly descended the ramp into the basement, which had become a science-fiction-like grand hotel for cars, with young men in aerodynamic costumes from Cape Kennedy and Marine caps, talking in broad Milanese phrases, all of which immediately re-established a more familiar climate.
He was a naturally tidy young man and before handing over the car always looked inside. So he immediately saw the handkerchief and that strange, tiny object, which was what he had heard falling from the girl’s handbag as she dried her eyes. He put everything in his pocket, feeling embarrassed, because one of the Marines was waiting.
‘Good evening, Signor Auseri.’
‘Good evening.’
He crossed the Piazza Cavour, which was shady in the placid sunset. From the zoo came a vague smell of lions overheating. He went into the Galleria Cavour and stopped at the Milanese Bar, even here he was the only customer, surrounded by sweets, chocolates, pasta, bottles, and after the chilled beer the heat of his nervous anger faded inside him in a flash, and the thought came to him: ‘And now she’s killing herself.’
He left the bar, crossed the Piazza Cavour to the Via dell’Annunciata, and went up to his apartment. ‘No, she isn’t killing herself, she’ll get over it.’
In the apartment there was nobody but the maid: his father was in Rome, he spent more time in Rome than he did here.
He had a shower, and as the water crashed over him, he tried to calm down, and began to mutter. ‘Women are mad, they really do kill themselves.’
He got dressed and went into the smaller reception room, part dining room, part library and part passage leading to the main living room of the apartment. ‘But even if she does kill herself, what’s that got to do with me?’
He had dinner at home, with the TV on: things were going badly in Vietnam, an American parachutist almost shot at him from the screen. ‘I could at least have brought her back to the centre of town. Throwing her out like that in the middle of the fields in Metanopoli must have made her even more desperate.’ On the screen now, a man was expounding all sides of the question in the matter of air pollution in winter, due to large factories and home heating: in the middle of summer, with the temperature at thirty-six degrees, the subject wasn’t of much interest to him. What interested him much more, for a few moments, was the cone-shaped head of the new maid, a middle-aged lady who had asked him vaguely, with a vague smile on her face, for permission to sit down on the sofa and watch television, and now he was looking at her, her cone-shaped head covering a third of the screen, in the stuffy solitude of that apartment that no TV programme would ever break, perhaps nothing ever would, not even if they held a masked ball. ‘If she kills herself and someone saw me with her, they’ll summon me to Police Headquarters.’
He felt icily unhappy: he was always a little that way, on those evenings watching television with the maid, because in the morning he had to go to Montecatini, but that evening he was even more unhappy than usual. What if he went back to Metanopoli to have a look? He glanced at his watch, as if he could be so stupid: oh, yes, of course, the woman would still be there waiting for him, imagine that, and even if she was still there, worse still, she would start again, ‘Take me away.’ That was when he started to feel really bad.
All night, and all next day at the office, he felt bad. He read the Corriere headline by headline, but there was no news of any girl who had killed herself. There was nothing in La Notte or Il Lombardo either. In the evening the refined maid with the cone-shaped head was off, and he
went and ate a couple of rolls in the Milanese Bar. Between one roll and another he crossed the street: the last edition of La Notte must be out by now. There were slim pickings these days for the afternoon papers: they couldn’t always put the heatwave or the Chinese atomic bomb on the front page, so journalists, with ulcers or without, tried to make a big thing out of local news—the husband who had hit his wife with an iron and then thrown it out of the window, the couple caught committing obscene acts in a public place (the Idroscalo, even supposing you could do anything different at the Idroscalo anyway)—and that was how Davide saw all he had feared on the front page of one of the newspapers, a headline over five columns, GIRL SLASHES WRISTS IN METANOPOLI, which gave the news a touch of geographical drama, as if the fact that someone could slash their wrists in Metanopoli was a pointer to future trends, a sign of the times: these days you don’t slash your wrists, boringly, in your own home, or in old places and cities with old names, Pavia, Livorno, Udine, today you slash your wrists in the new centres of oil and heavy industry, a slave, even in this last act of will or desperation, to the ruthless onward march of progress.
With the newspaper in his hand Davide crossed the street again and ate his second roll in the Milanese Bar, surrounded by a half a dozen people having a drink before going to the Cavour cinema to see a film whose female protagonist, judging at least from the photographs on display, was certainly a very interesting case of mammary elephantiasis.
The reporter had made everything really dramatic, describing how the grass in the field where the girl had been found with her wrists slashed had turned blue: as far as he was concerned the green of the grass combined with the red of the blood gave blue. The cyclist Antonio Marangoni, who wasn’t a racer, but simply a seventy-seven-year-old, an early riser who was on his way from his farmhouse to Metanopoli by bicycle, had discovered the girl, now dead, and raised the alarm. Next to the girl had been found a flat handbag, almost like a large man’s wallet, and inside it a letter for her sister. The contents of the letter were not revealed, but the reporter had heard from sources at Police Headquarters that it was the usual request by someone killing themselves to those remaining behind to forgive them. In brackets was a note indicating that the item continued on page 2.
Davide went home to drink some whisky and read the continuation on page 2. He read it several times, and each time he finished reading he got up and poured himself a whisky, taking the bottle from a cabinet that must have been a shoe cupboard in the nineteenth century.
She had said she would kill herself and she had killed herself. She had not even waited until the following day, she had cut her wrists as soon as he had thrown her out of the car, she had hidden in a bush, next to Antonio Marangoni’s farmhouse, like a dying animal, and there she had finished dying, because she had already made her mind up, and had already written the letter begging her sister for forgiveness: she’d had it in her bag when she was with him by the river, the same bag where she had then put the money he had given her.
But she didn’t want to die, she had to but she didn’t want to, she had moaned all the way back, no, no, no, she didn’t want to, and if he had taken her away, if they had gone far away, as she had kept asking him, she wouldn’t have killed herself, she would still be alive. Night and day he remembered her large round sunglasses, and her imploring voice, the moaning, the whining. He had killed her, he kept thinking that as he leafed through the bright files in the bright folders on his desk at Montecatini, and gradually he discovered that by drinking a certain amount of whisky, any whisky, that feeling that he had a murderer inside him, the way a small gift box given at a wedding can contain a cyanide capsule, grew weaker. After even more whisky, it disappeared altogether.
6
As soon as Duca realised from Davide Auseri’s story that the young man hadn’t killed anyone, the desire to punch him made him grit his teeth as if he had an unbearable itch. Damned psychopaths, asthenics, schizophrenics! Then the young man’s face, turned soft with anguish, like mayonnaise coming loose from a jar, aroused his pity.
‘Let’s go back to my sister’s.’ They had been sitting for almost an hour in the car, parked outside the Musocco cemetery and, what with the surroundings and the senseless story Davide had told him in a senseless monologue, he felt the need for a change of scenery. He didn’t have many places to go with this would-be madman: not his apartment in the Via dell’Annunciata, no, the great Engineer Auseri might turn up at any moment, nor could they go back to the villa in the Brianza, maybe to a hotel, but later: for now he preferred to take him to his sister’s. He telephoned her, from a bar, unexpected visitors are never welcome, while Davide drank freely at the counter. Let him drink.
‘I’m coming back with my friend, the one you met before. You’ll have to be patient, you’re going to have to help me, can you get my room ready for him?’
‘Has something happened?’
‘No, nothing, just a crisis of imbecility.’
On the way there, he stopped at a pharmacy, bought a little tube of the most basic sleeping pills, and once they got to Lorenza’s apartment he made Davide lie down on the bed and gave him a pill and, like a babysitter with a child, sat there watching him until he fell asleep, which happened almost immediately, because after his confession the neurotic giant was exhausted and fell into what was more a state of collapse than sleep.
Then he put Sara to bed, too—in his arms the little rascal fell asleep immediately—and when he and Lorenza were alone in the kitchen, which was shady although not cool, he told her that he almost felt like crying.
‘If it was just a matter of weaning him off alcohol, it’d be an easy job, but the man has a guilt complex about a murder, he’s been drowning his sorrows in whisky for a year without telling anybody. The idea that he killed a girl has been simmering inside him, and even Freud would take years to get it out of his head. As soon as he’s alone he’ll try to cut his wrists, the same method the girl used, and in the end he’ll succeed.’
‘You can tell his father, he can put him in a clinic, and you can look for an easier job.’
‘Yes, I could do that. He’s in a clinic, one month, two, six, whatever you like, and when he gets out he slits his wrists.’ He finished eating the thick slice of cooked ham which Lorenza had made him for lunch. ‘And then I’ll be the one who’s haunted by the thought that if I’d stayed with him I could have saved him. We’re too sensitive. In other words we’re ridiculously divided into two distinct categories, those with hearts of stone and the sensitive. One man can kill his own family, wife, mother, and children, then in prison calmly ask for a subscription to a puzzle magazine so that he can do the crosswords, while another man has to be admitted to the psychiatric ward because he left the window open and his little cat climbed up on the windowsill and fell from the fifth floor: he thinks he killed his cat, so he goes mad.’
At about seven in the evening Davide Auseri woke up, soaked in sweat: he had all the characteristics of an old maid affected by hypothyroidism, even the nervous sweats. Duca made him take a cold bath, staying with him in the bathroom because he didn’t feel confident leaving him alone, while Lorenza ironed Davide’s suit and shirt and forced him to eat half a roast chicken that she had gone to buy from the nearby butcher. Duca twice filled his glass with red wine, then asked him to come into his study. There had been no conversation: it was as if Davide had closed his front door and had stopped receiving visitors. Duca would make him receive him, by force if need be.
‘Sit down there,’ he said. This was the study his father had made for him to use as a surgery: the display case with the medical samples was still there from three years earlier, the couch covered with plastic that looked like leather, the screen in front and in a corner by the window which looked out on the Piazza Leonardo da Vinci, the glass table with the penholder and the long drawer with the little cards in it, maybe more than a hundred—his filing cabinet. His father had imagined it would soon be full of the names of all the sick men, wom
en, and children who turned to him to be cured. What an imagination! He lowered the Anglepoise and lit a cigarette.
‘I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I haven’t even tried to tell you that you didn’t kill anyone, and that you’re not to blame for that girl’s death.’ He stood up and went in search of something to use as an ashtray, came back with a little glass bowl, and sat down again. ‘And I’m not going to try now. If you want to think of yourself as a murderer, go ahead. There are people who think they’re Hitler, and you’re suffering from the same disease. I’m telling you that right now, before I hand you back to your father, because I can help a young man who drinks a little, but I can’t do anything for someone who’s mentally ill.’
He hadn’t expected it but at that first knock, the door opened immediately. ‘If I’d taken her with me she wouldn’t have killed herself, it isn’t a mental illness, it wouldn’t have taken any effort, on the contrary, I’d have liked it, I could have taken her away with me, I wouldn’t even have had to say anything to my father, I could have phoned Signor Brambilla and asked him to tell my father that I was taking a short holiday, my father didn’t even care all that much whether or not I worked for Montecatini, it was only to give me something to do, I’d only have had to take her with me for a few days, until the crisis had passed.’ He was panting as he spoke, but it wasn’t because of the heat: the idea of being considered mentally ill, and by a doctor to boot, had shaken him.
‘Oh, no, Signor Auseri,’ Duca interrupted him, ‘it’s pointless for you to try and drag me into this discussion,’ his tone was cool and mocking, ‘in the treatises on psychiatry there are famous examples of absurd dialectic. I have no desire to have it demonstrated by you that you killed that girl. By the same reasoning, the gas company is responsible for all the people who gas themselves to death, and if you were the director of the company, you’d start drinking whisky and wanting to die. So forget it, the more you persist with this idea, the more you demonstrate how serious your case is.’ That must have touched a sore point, because he saw Davide raise his fist, as if about to pound on the table, but he didn’t, he simply held it like that, in mid-air.
A Private Venus Page 7