A Private Venus

by Giorgio Scerbanenco

  It wasn’t easy to explain what they were looking for and he didn’t even try, because he himself wasn’t sure exactly what they were looking for, maybe the truth, if he didn’t find the very idea of the truth laughable. What is the truth? Does it even exist?

  ‘All right, you don’t know anything about this,’ he said, putting the photo back in the leather briefcase, ‘but maybe you can tell us something else that could help us. Your sister must have had friends, acquaintances. Did you ever see any friend of your sister’s? Did your sister ever talk to you about anyone?’

  The trembling ceased gradually, resignedly, because it’s useless to tremble or cry, what’s the point of it? ‘She always said she was going to see some friend or other, but I can’t remember all of them and anyway she only ever mentioned first names.’

  He made her tell him what she remembered, and Mascaranti wrote everything down. The friend she remembered most was the schoolteacher. ‘She hadn’t graduated yet, but Alberta called her the schoolteacher. She came here to the house, once, to pick her up.’

  He was interrogating: having been interrogated so many times by the prosecuting attorney at the trial, and also in prison, he was now the one asking the questions, and it was an interesting experience. ‘So you don’t remember the name, is that right, you only knew her as the schoolteacher?’

  No, she said, she remembered the name, Livia Ussaro: she must have written it down in the little address book.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, ‘could I see this address book?’

  She went into the hall, took it from the hook from which it was hanging next to the telephone and brought it in to him. Without looking at it, he put it in the briefcase together with the photograph. ‘I’ll bring it back in a few days.’ Livia Ussaro didn’t sound a very likely name, it might be a pseudonym: start looking for a woman called Livia Ussaro and you probably wouldn’t find anything. And he was getting tired of Mascaranti holding that little notebook that vanished inside his big hands, that little Biro, and the fact that he was writing everything down.

  ‘Do you remember any other friends?’

  ‘She mentioned so many. She’d say, I’m going to see Maurilia, or else somebody would phone and say, this is Luisa, is Alberta there?’

  Was she winding him round her little finger, or was it innocence in a pure state, a precipitate of innocence, obtainable only in a laboratory?

  ‘I was also thinking of men friends,’ he said, patient but already irritable.

  ‘No, never men.’

  Mascaranti ran his Biro through his hair: he wasn’t trying to write on his head, but the woman had said ‘never men’ quite seriously, straight out, it had come from her heart, she wasn’t trying to deceive anyone.

  ‘The photograph I showed you suggests your sister may have had a number of male acquaintances. Whatever it was she did, she’s dead now, and there’s no point in your trying to cover it up, we’ll find out in the end anyway. Men must have phoned your sister, maybe lots of them, and some may have given their names. Please tell me the truth.’

  ‘No man ever phoned her,’ she said immediately, and she seemed genuinely sorry that she couldn’t help him.

  She wasn’t lying. ‘It’s possible,’ Mascaranti said. ‘Maybe she didn’t let them phone here because she didn’t want to make her sister suspicious.’

  While they were about it, they committed another violation of her rights as a citizen and did a quick search of the apartment.

  ‘Your sister must have left some personal objects here. We’d like to see them.’

  Unaware that the constitution gave her the right to refuse, she took them to the one bedroom in the apartment. There were two small beds like the cots of four-year-old children who sleep with teddy bears clutched to their chests, and indeed, on the light wooden headboards, bears, dogs, butterflies, and snails with long horns had been painted. ‘She slept here with me, I left her clothes in the wardrobe, and everything else she had is in that suitcase on top of the wardrobe.’

  Mascaranti pulled down the suitcase, opened it, and was about to start writing down everything it contained, but Duca stopped him. ‘Leave it, there’s nothing here.’ There were a large number of bras, knickers and suspenders, some hair clips, a hairdryer, a novel by Moravia, a fountain pen, and an opened packet of cigarettes: Alpha, rather a strong brand for a young woman.

  ‘We’ve finished.’ No, not everything was nasty. Alberta’s unfortunate sister may have been weak and foolish, but she didn’t know anything, she hadn’t been part of anything that wasn’t above board. But in the hall, before they left, he still asked, ‘Did you ever figure out why your sister killed herself?’

  She said no with the same expression on her face, and finally her eyes grew moist. ‘I don’t know, it was terrible when they called me to the morgue, I hoped it wasn’t her. The evening before she’d talked about the two of us going on holiday together, she said she wanted to go a long way away, somewhere abroad. She was cheerful, and I told her off, I said we didn’t have enough money to go abroad, the landlord had asked for the latest instalment, it was fifty thousand lire, but she wanted to go on holiday, as far away as possible, she said.’

  So that was why, that day, she had told Davide, alongside the gentle river, that she needed fifty thousand lire, and he had given it to her: it was for the expenses, the caretaker, the lift that didn’t work, the heating, which her sister had to pay. But why she had killed herself, if she had killed herself; nobody knew, the sister even less than anyone else. He was pleased, at least there was something here that wasn’t nasty. He tried as best he could to apologise for his cruelty. ‘I’m sorry, signorina, if we disturbed you at night, but you work all day and we couldn’t come at any other time,’ but his attempt at kindness had a disastrous effect: Alessandra Radelli started sobbing and as they began descending the staircase they heard her sobs until the door closed.

  Downstairs, they got in the Giulietta, and Davide was still at the wheel, the unofficial driver of an unofficial police commando, and having crossed the city they got out at the Hotel Cavour, their headquarters, as they did every evening.

  ‘A bottle of dry Frascati, not chilled,’ he ordered as soon as they were in the two connecting rooms. They took off their jackets, apart from Davide, and loosened their ties, even Davide. They were in the second phase of the treatment: change of poison. Davide could drink all the wine he wanted, even a wine that had an imaginary similarity in taste to whisky, but never again a single drop of whisky, or any other strong liquor. For two days, Davide had been holding out quite well, only his silence was tending to get worse.

  Mascaranti was a bureaucrat, he needed to write a report of the work they had done during the day, and a plan of what they would do the following day.

  ‘The sister’s a dead end,’ he said. ‘She didn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know.’

  ‘Good,’ Duca said. He liked the Frascati the way it was now, almost warm, maybe more than Davide did. ‘For now, let’s concentrate on the address book,’ he took it from the briefcase and handed it over to Mascaranti. ‘Phone all those numbers and if anyone replies who had anything to do with Alberta Radelli or knew her, make a note of it and we’ll go and see them. Apart from this one,’ he took back the book and opened it at the letter U, made a note of the number and the address: Livia Ussaro. Ussaro like hussar. A nice pseudonym: maybe she even wore a jacket with gold braid. ‘Go and rest, we’ll start again tomorrow morning.’ He gave him back the book. ‘Remember we have to give it back as soon as possible.’

  It wasn’t yet ten, but the silence in the two rooms was total, the penultimate noise had been that of Mascaranti closing the door as he went out, and the last noise that of the Frascati gurgling into the glass as Davide poured it. Now there was nothing, Davide certainly wouldn’t say a word, and Duca didn’t like silence. He went and opened the two windows: it might let in the heat, but also a bit of traffic noise from the Piazza Cavour.

  ‘Do you like playin
g the policeman?’ Apart from the general silence, there was also Davide’s silence, which ended up arousing the bizarre suspicion that he was alive only in appearance, that he continued to move, eat and drink, but as if by inertial force, being already dead.

  He didn’t smile, and he needed time to respond. ‘But I’m not doing anything.’

  ‘You’re driving the car, you’re following us in our investigations, you’re doing errands. In the police, a driver is an important person.’ It was no use, he didn’t react, he didn’t accept either conversation or jokes: for all his goodwill, the Frascati didn’t sustain him like whisky. Duca continued speaking, as if he was alone: ‘I really like playing the policeman. My father didn’t like the idea of me following in his footsteps, but he was wrong.’ Of course, he couldn’t be a policeman even now, less now than ever. Especially in a case like this one. Carrua had been quite clear about this: ‘If you find something that isn’t right, don’t be afraid to come out with it, but do it discreetly, for two reasons, one is that you can’t be involved officially, otherwise we’ll all be in trouble, the other is that as soon as the press find out we’re taking an interest in the case, they’ll manufacture another Montesi affair. It has all the elements, at least in the wild imagination of some journalists. If it is a Montesi affair, if really big names are involved, if there’s something rotten behind all this, then don’t be afraid, as I said, but before making a fuss about it we need proof, otherwise the papers will have a field day, and it’s all over. Discretion, that’s the order of the day.’

  Discretion. In other words, like looking for something in the dark. Alberta Radelli’s sister he had been able to tackle officially: we’re police, answer our questions. But with the others, he had to be careful: on what pretext, for example, could the police question this Livia Ussaro, a whole year after Alberta’s death, without being indiscreet, without risking kicking up a fuss? He looked for a pretext, but couldn’t find one that was sufficiently intelligent, and he didn’t like stupid pretexts.

  But his desire to see Livia Ussaro was growing in him minute by minute, exacerbated by the aristocratic solitude of these hotel rooms, where you have everything you need to be comfortable, all the refinements you almost never get in your own home, and all that’s missing is what you find in even the poorest home, something you can’t define and which may not even exist, but everybody feels it as if it did exist. In a hotel room you move in a different way from the way you do in your own home, you look at things in a different way, maybe you even think in a different way. And so he made up his mind: these evenings at the hotel, with Davide there but not really there thanks to the decreasing supply of alcohol, weighed heavily on him. ‘At least we can have a nice talk over the phone,’ he thought, or predicted, as if he could see into the future.

  He got up and went and sat down on the bed, next to the bedside table, where the telephone was, and asked the switchboard operator to get him the number of Livia Ussaro, then put down the receiver and waited. He saw Davide’s sad, anxious profile, and on the table the bottle of Frascati on a large silver tray, aesthetically wrapped in a fine napkin. It was actually quite late to be telephoning a private number, a person he didn’t even know, and after a year Livia Ussaro might have moved, or died, or emigrated to Australia: things go so quickly these days, oh, yes.

  ‘Could I speak to Livia please?’ he said as soon as he heard a middle-aged woman’s voice.

  ‘Who shall I say is calling?’

  ‘Duca,’ he said, simply. Among friends that was how people spoke on the phone.

  ‘Duca?’ the woman said.

  ‘That’s right, Duca.’ Silence. The woman had moved away from the phone, she hadn’t sounded very convinced by his name: Duca, as in duke. She wasn’t the only one, at school he had even got into punch-ups with his wittier classmates: ‘So what’s your big brother, then, a Grand Duke or an Archduke?’ The reply was always: ‘He’s this’—in other words, a kick in the kneecap or on the shin. His father had taught him that.

  ‘Hello?’ It must be her, the voice was low but quite girlish.

  ‘Livia?’

  ‘Yes, this is she, but I’m sorry, I don’t remember …’

  It was her, she still existed, really existed. His desire to talk to Livia Ussaro was about to be satisfied. ‘I’m the one who should apologise. You couldn’t remember me because we’ve never met.’

  ‘Please, could you tell me your name again?’ There was such coolness and yet such energy in her voice.

  ‘Of course, but it wouldn’t mean anything to you. I wanted to talk to you about someone we both know.’

  ‘Either tell me your name, or I’ll hang up.’

  What a world of obsessive bureaucrats, from Mascaranti, who wrote everything down, to this woman who needed to hear the four or five syllables commonly defined as a name, any name: he could easily tell her his name was Orazio Coclite and what difference would it make? ‘My name is Duca Lamberti, though you don’t know me. But we both knew someone in particular.’

  She didn’t let him finish this time either. ‘Wait, I’ve heard that name before. Oh, yes, of course, you’re one of my idols! I was very innocent in those days, I used to have a lot of idols, I don’t have many left, but you’re one, except that my memory …’

  He looked at the tip of his shoes, the shoes, with his feet inside, were real entities, and he had to convince himself that he was really talking to a woman who was telling him that he was her idol. In what sense? For what reason?

  ‘… Three years ago, in the courtroom I shouted, “No, no, no, no!” when the judge read out the sentence, they dragged me outside and held me in a room for two hours, asking me who I was and who I wasn’t, and I kept saying: “It’s shameful, shameful, shameful, they shouldn’t have sentenced him to prison,” and they’d answer, “Signorina, keep quiet, otherwise we’ll put you inside for causing a breach of the peace,” and I cried all the way home. I’d attended the whole trial, I’d told everybody they had to acquit you, that you weren’t guilty of anything, that in fact they ought to give you a prize, I’d quarrelled with people in the corridor outside the courtroom.’

  Of course, she was talking too much, but her warm, low tone of voice didn’t have the same irritating effect on him as the shrill chatter of many women. And besides, she was saying things he would never have expected, things he could never have imagined anyone saying to him, not even his father or his sister had ever said anything like that. He was an idol. He had a fan. Probably the only one.

  ‘And now I didn’t even remember your name! I really feel ashamed, you can’t imagine all the arguments I’ve had about euthanasia, everyone’s against it, they have their principles, the principle of respect for life, the principle of putting on evening dress to go to La Scala.’

  ‘I’m very grateful, Livia.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I don’t usually talk so much, only when I’m speaking to someone intelligent, so I’m happy I can talk to you—but I’m sure there must be a reason you phoned me.’

  ‘Yes, I wanted to talk to you about someone you used to know: Alberta Radelli.’ A sudden silence, at the other end. ‘Not right away, obviously. One of these days, whenever you like.’ The silence continued, but she was still there, he could sense her presence, although he couldn’t even hear her breathing. ‘It’s very important to me, and you could be a great help.’

  And finally her voice, so low, so warm, and at the same time, not bureaucratic, but something similar, professorial, yes, that was the word. ‘There are a lot of subjects I don’t like talking about, and Alberta is the one I like least. And like all the things I don’t like, I want to do them immediately.’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘Immediately.’

  ‘Where can we meet?’

  ‘Here in the Via Plinio. There’s a bar right near my apartment. I’m sure I’ll recognise you: at the trial I looked at you for hours on end. How soon can you get here?’

  ‘In ten minutes.’

  Li
fe is a well of marvels, there’s everything in it: rags, diamonds, cut-throats, and Livia Ussaro. He put down the receiver, feeling slightly dazed, as if he had drunk too much Frascati, and in fact he now poured himself half a glass, he looked at Davide, who wasn’t alive even though he appeared to be living, and had a moment of weakness.

  ‘I have to go out now, but I’ll be back soon. I know you’re not feeling too good about the wine, I’ll have them send up a bottle of whisky, to help you stand the solitude and the darkness.’ He really felt quite sorry. ‘Act like a man, Davide: the less you drink the better it’ll be.’ This concession was a mistake, from both a medical and a psychological point of view. But even this time he had to risk it, above all he didn’t want Davide to drink on the sly during his absence. If he wanted to drink, he was free to do so, he had Duca’s permission.

  He went out. Now he would see what Livia Ussaro looked like. He couldn’t imagine her somehow, his only idea was that she must be quite tall.

  2

  She was indeed tall. She stood waiting for him at the door of the bar and he was impressed by the fact that, as soon as he got out of the Giulietta, she came towards him, with that warmth in her walk and in her eyes, as if she was greeting an old and dear friend. Until ten minutes ago, he hadn’t even known he had a friend like her in the world, let alone so near.

  ‘We can talk quietly here, it’s the only bar in the area without a TV or a jukebox, so there are almost no customers in the evening.’

  Her hair was brown, or rather black, a definite, natural black. It was cut quite short, a bit shorter than the hair of men who wear it long, but a little less short than the men who have it a normal length and go to the barber once every two weeks. A woman with short hair: he liked long hair, but he had to admit it looked good on her.