‘How long have you been going?’ he’d said to Rosselli. ‘The Frazione?’ He’d asked more by way of distracting them both than with any clear intention of gathering information, but as he’d spoken it had struck him again as weird to find himself in close proximity to this man, this hero. All those followers, all those acolytes, but no one he could trust to come with him to identify his wife’s body.
It had to be her, didn’t it? It did. Rosselli had seemed to be sure, which Sandro supposed was a blessing. Not a man given to denial or self-delusion.
With reluctance Rosselli had shifted his gaze to Sandro from his contemplation of a pair on the corner of the Via dei Serragli and the Via Mazzetta, outside a bar, a man in a hat and shabby camel coat giving some folded notes to a drunk: more charity.
‘They’re good people, round here,’ he’d said. ‘It functions. We can function, at the level of the street, of the village, we can function informally, we can be generous, we can care for each other.’
‘We?’
The ghost of a smile had appeared on Rosselli’s face, mirrored on Sandra’s. ‘That’s the point, isn’t it?’ Rosselli had said. ‘The people of Santo Spirito? Of San Frediano, the Oltramo? We Florentines, we Italians, we members of the human race. You have to work outwards, from your own doorstep.’
Like when children wrote an address. Third floor, Via dei Macci, Florence, Italy, Europe, the World, the Universe.
‘It’s the same everywhere, isn’t it?’ Sandro had said. ‘Charity begins at home. Close to home, anyway.’
Rosselli had shifted his position, turned towards Sandro, and it was as if a spark had kindled inside him.
‘Yes, but you have to work outwards,’ he’d said, and his voice had been different, stronger, more certain. ‘We start with the roads. We start with people’s homes and livelihoods and the environment in which they bring up their children, we stand up against those who want to push the ordinary people aside in the pursuit of big business.’ He’d taken a breath, a practised speaker. ‘First home, then the quartiere, then the comune.’
‘Then parliament?’ Sandro had understood from the webpage that the Frazione’s primary intention was to have Rosselli in the comune, the city hall. To have him appointed as an assessore – a councillor – with responsibility for roads. It seemed a solid, unglamorous, honourable ambition, but in this country was anything straightforward? He’d thought then of their prime minister’s broad, jovial smile. No.
Rosselli had frowned. ‘I don’t look that far ahead,’ he’d said, and had shifted again, turned his head back to look out of the window. ‘In answer to your question, the Frazione was formed – officially formed – two years ago. Carlo Bastone and I decided it was necessary.’ Sandro had stolen a look at the man’s quarter-profile, the jaw set. ‘Of course, like all things, it becomes more complicated the bigger it gets. More people, more opinions, more debate. It’s healthy. It’s democracy.’
‘Right,’ Sandro had said, registering the grim note in the other man’s voice. ‘Did you think it would get so – big?’
‘No,’ Rosselli had said shortly, and Sandro had understood that the man had no personal ambition at all. Which left him vulnerable, in Sandro’s book, because all that went with it, pride and greed and worldly understanding – well, Sandro had thought uncomfortably, they weren’t pretty, but they were essential, weren’t they? He’d fallen silent then and Rosselli had volunteered no more, staring out of the window instead.
It took an hour and a half to get to the floral roundabouts that marked the outskirts of Viareggio: all the way Sandro had held his peace, not wanting to intrude on the other man’s silence, and all the way the questions built in his mind. If he were investigating this … There was something curious, though, about Rosselli’s silence; Sandro felt it not as an absence but as something that grew and multiplied, containing possibilities. He had the feeling that the man wanted to say something, but could not. Wanted to ask, but could not: strange for a man with a reputation for oratory, for persuasive speaking, for articulacy. Yet perhaps not strange at all. It was one thing to talk about world peace and roadbuilding and health-care facilities; quite another to talk about one’s grief with a stranger.
Strangers, though, were sometimes the only ones who’d do. As they negotiated the first roundabout, Rosselli asked the question Sandro had been asking himself.
‘Why here?’ he said with painful bafflement, looking at the first of the prim, stuccoed villas, the Art Deco apartment blocks, the shady avenues. ‘Why did she come here?’
Sandro cleared his throat. Interesting that the man hadn’t asked, Why?, full stop. ‘You don’t have any idea?’ he asked cautiously. ‘Not a place where you came on holiday?’ He thought of the odd beach photograph he’d seen on the pinboard: not Viareggio. There had been a rocky hillside in the backdrop, and Viareggio was as flat as a pancake.
Niccolò Rosselli shook his head. ‘My mother had a place on Elba,’ he said. ‘We went there, if we went anywhere. But—’ He frowned. ‘We’re not really holiday people.’ And realizing he’d used the present tense, let out the awful sound of one unused to emotion, a kind of muted groan. ‘Weren’t.’
‘Nor us,’ said Sandro hastily, because until this year it had been true. Not wanting, suddenly, to have anything in common with Rosselli, he willed the memory of Castiglioncello into his mind. Life is to be enjoyed, he told himself, surprised to find he believed it.
‘Anyway, my mother decided to sell it this summer,’ Rosselli said with weary bafflement. ‘She said we’d need the money for the child.’ He passed a hand over his forehead. ‘I told her we had enough money.’
Do you? Sandro wondered. And if so, where does it come from?
‘I mean,’ elaborated Rosselli, who seemed, even without turning his head to look at Sandro, to have understood what he was thinking, ‘I mean, we don’t need much. As I said. We live – we lived a quiet life.’
Sandro made a non-committal sound, but it occurred to him that a politician with that kind of following could not hope to lead a quiet life for much longer. ‘But no connections with this place?’ he asked.
‘I don’t think so,’ Rosselli said. They had come to a halt at some lights – at the end of the road the sea was just visible, a narrow band of deep blue – and at the uncertainty in Rosselli’s voice, Sandro turned to look at him.
‘I mean,’ said the man, and hunched over as if he were in pain, ‘I didn’t know everything about Flavia, that is clear. I just – I suppose I just assumed I did, because we have been together practically since we were children. But her family were poor, and she was orphaned young. They had no connection with Viareggio.’
‘Did she – did you do everything together?’ Sandro put the car into gear and moved off. The street opened up to the seafront abruptly, the windscreen filled with blue and light, the glitter of the waves, the stripes of the beach umbrellas on the combed sand below. Red and white, blue and white, green and white. What a place to come to die. Happy memories, or no memories at all?
Damn, he thought. What are we doing here? The police mortuary was nowhere near the sea. Running on autopilot, he had arrived at a seaside town and instinctively headed for the water. You’re not on bloody holiday, are you? he chided himself. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘We’ve got to turn around.’
Rosselli just looked at him in vague distress. ‘I don’t really know what you mean,’ he said, and his voice firmed into indignation. ‘Flavia was an independent, intelligent woman. She had her work. We weren’t married, you know, although my mother didn’t like that.’
Hauling on the wheel, Sandro gritted his teeth and said, ‘Well, yes, I suppose that’s what I meant. Social life, too? Independent in that way?’
‘We weren’t social creatures,’ said Rosselli. ‘Dinners and parties, you mean?’ He shook his head, took off his glasses again and polished them.
Sandro wondered if there was meaning in this gesture. A response to high emotion? A desire not to see, or
not to be seen? Sandro himself had never worn glasses; even now he didn’t need them, not even for reading. He couldn’t feel much satisfaction at the thought. What must it be like to be as shortsighted as Rosselli? To know that a thousand years ago, maybe two, he’d have been helpless, easy prey, an evolutionary dead end? Yet shortsighted genes persisted. As Sandro turned into the car park of the police morgue, this was the last-ditch digression he conjured up for himself, wondering whether there was indeed a connection, as in popular myth, between shortsightedness and intelligence.
Makes me dumb, was his dismal conclusion, with my twenty-twenty vision.
They pulled into the cramped parking area behind a series of low, ugly buildings with blinds at their windows, and stopped.
‘This is it,’ said Sandro, and for a moment they sat without moving, staring through the grimy windscreen, neither of them wanting to climb out and confront the end of Niccolò Rosselli’s private life.
Chapter Twelve
BADIANI’S WAS FULL TO bursting, another warm September dusk bringing in the customers. Back from their holidays and wanting to prolong the summer just another day or two, they were pressed four, five deep against the long glass cabinet filled with bright-coloured mounds of ice cream. Mango, fig, raspberry, chocolate – thirty flavours or more, along with the celebrated vanilla custard and cream Buontalenti for which the place was famous. Giuli hovered in the doorway, waiting for Enzo.
She hadn’t had the heart to say she wasn’t really in an ice-cream mood. One of the big advantages of a job on the roaring Via dei Mille, according to Enzo, was its proximity to Badiani and what he held to be the best ice cream in the city. There was something of the big kid about Enzo, only child of doting, hardworking parents, but it was also a serious matter, his ice-cream fetish.
‘I’ll bring a kilo or two back on Saturday,’ he’d said eagerly on the phone ‘For dessert. For Luisa and Sandro.’
She’d hardly dared say that Luisa couldn’t eat ice cream, it hurt her teeth. ‘And maybe some of their little cakes,’ she’d ventured, but her heart wasn’t in it, not after her lunch with Clelia Schmidt.
A restrained sort of scuffle broke out at the glass cabinet, following a bit of flagrant queue-jumping. An elderly woman – dressed, bizarrely, in a fur coat – was the culprit, and Giuli watched as she effortlessly defeated her rival for the attention of the unflappable gelataia, and marched away with a towering concoction – marrons glacés, chocolate and Buontalenti in a big sugar cone. Some people, she reflected, were born to win.
The woman strutted like a small, fur-clad bird, out on to the pavement and the roaring viale in the twilight, tucking in to her ice cream with unashamed pleasure. She’ll live for ever, that one, thought Giuli, and her thoughts returned, as they had all day, to poor dead Flavia Matteo.
It wasn’t even as if Giuli had known Flavia: she’d seen her around in the ten years or so she’d been a Santo Spirito resident herself, she’d exchanged a greeting with her on occasion. She was what you’d call distinctive, even if – and this gave Giuli pause, she hadn’t formulated the thought before – there was something about Flavia that was the opposite of the old woman smacking her lips in her fur coat and not caring who saw her. Flavia Matteo had not wanted to be distinctive, had not wanted to be beautiful, had played it down to the point of dowdiness. She had wanted to be invisible.
She’d worn a headscarf like a woman of her mother’s – or grandmother’s – generation, hiding the flaming hair. No make-up, the amber-coloured eyes indistinct in her freckled face – indistinct, that is, unless you got close, which Giuli had once or twice, when you could see the flecks of gold in them. At a metre or so’s distance she could look plain, even ugly. She could hide.
Why did a woman do that? Giuli, abused child and ex-hooker from the Via Senese, knew one or two reasons to refuse the male gaze in the street. Did they apply to Flavia? It seemed to her that this woman – more like a nun than anything else, she reflected – could not have anything in common with Giuli herself. So her diffidence wasn’t born out of shame, nor out of guilt or rejection, but perhaps modesty, or political principle, feminism and the like? Her mind simply set on higher things. Still, Giuli mused, and didn’t feel quite convinced. Felt her frustration rise that she had never known Flavia Matteo, and now it was too late.
‘Sweetheart!’ Enzo’s voice broke in on her thoughts, anxious and out of breath. ‘Sorry I’m late.’
Giuli refocused, and his broad features were there, filling her frame of vision, his arm was right around her and squeezing. Then she felt him stop, mid-squeeze. ‘You all right?’ Taking in her expression his face fell, and she felt guilty.
‘I’m fine.’ And stopped herself from sighing and spoiling it all. ‘There’s just – well, I’ll tell you later. Let’s get your ice cream.’
Enzo looked miserable. ‘No need. It was stupid of me. It’s been an awful day, awful news. I – I—’ He was examining her face earnestly, trying to make amends, trying to work her out, poor guy. And she understood: no one was more distraught than he was about Flavia Matteo. He was trying to soothe himself, all this kids’ stuff, ice cream and normality, and he was looking miserable because he suspected it wasn’t going to work, this time.
‘No,’ she said. ‘We’re here now.’ And shoving with gentle insistence, shoulder to shoulder at the long counter, she did feel better. A bit better.
On the street, they leaned against the shopfront and watched the evening traffic, eating in silence. Six o’clock, and the sun was already down. The air was still warm, but cooling, and Giuli experienced all at once that mixture of wistfulness and relief that comes with the end of summer. The end of those seemingly endless months of heat, the unbearable nights without sleep, of the long days of pleasurable boredom on the beach, skin warm and rough with sand and salt, the feeling of a body peeled and new after a week by the sea. The ice cream was delicious, and Giuli felt a moment’s sisterly feeling for the greedy, selfish old lady. Sometimes it was fine to enjoy something.
‘It’s pretty good,’ she said, lifting her tiny plastic spoon in tribute, and although Enzo smiled she could see that he was down, that the ice cream hadn’t quite done the trick. She didn’t know if she should tell him. But how could she not?
She eyed him as he ate with a slight frown of contemplation. He was wearing his work clothes, trousers and a short-sleeved shirt, plus a vest now that summer was almost past; his pristine nylon laptop bag at his feet on the pavement. Enzo was a magician of the laptop: she loved to watch him work on the computer, any computer, their workings as natural to him as breathing. Giuli might be more computer-savvy than Sandro, to whom the machine was a goad and a torment, but she still had regular moments of panic when she pressed the wrong button on the neat little laptop Enzo had bought her last Christmas, or it started making a weird noise. Enzo had grown to recognize her panic in the ether and would be there before she had made a sound, a hand on her forearm to calm her, his voice carefully explaining.
If only, she sometimes thought, there’d been teachers like him at school. If only there’d been someone like him when she’d hit fourteen and a very different sort of boy had come around. Of course she had him now, but now might be too late.
‘Clelia Schmidt told me something,’ she began carefully. His frown deepened; carefully he stuffed the paper napkin inside the remains of his cone, took Giuli’s paper cup and put them both in the swing bin outside the gelateria. He took her arm and they began to walk along the wide pavement, the traffic roaring and honking beside them. ‘The midwife,’ said Giuli, feeling herself unbend just a little at the feel of his arm in hers. ‘I had lunch with her. I wanted – well, she felt guilty about Flavia. I had to break it to her gently.’
*
‘I know it’s difficult for you to talk about this,’ she’d said as soon as the waitress was gone, trying to catch Clelia’s lowered gaze across the table. ‘I know it feels wrong, but—’
‘I shouldn’t have known about
it myself,’ Clelia had said quickly, interrupting her. ‘There’s confidentiality between – well, between certain specializations, unless it’s pertinent.’ She’d frowned then, as though something had only just occurred to her. ‘And it should have been – actually. I should have been told. Although …’
Giuli had grappled with her meaning. ‘Certain specializations?’ Then she’d understood. ‘Oh. You mean, the other clinics?’ Obvious. ‘Right,’ she’d said. ‘Like, the STD clinic, for example: you’d need to know if a pregnant woman had something that might be transmitted to the baby.’ Clelia lifted her face abruptly. It was white.
‘Flavia didn’t have an STD,’ she’d said, horrified. ‘I do that testing, if the woman’s pregnant. With permission, of course. She gave me permission.’
‘I see,’ Giuli, who did, had said. She knew about that stuff. But something had occurred to her. ‘She reacted – how? When it came up? The testing, asking for permission? What d’you check for?’
Clelia had frowned. ‘She – she was fine. Composed.’ The frown had deepened. ‘We test for syphilis routinely, HIV on request, other stuff on request. She had the test most people have, just the syphilis. Negative, obviously.’
‘Obviously,’ Giuli had said mildly. The waitress had come back then, with the two thick white bowls of pasta. Clelia had taken a gulp of the wine Giuli had ordered for her and stared down at the food until the waitress was gone. And then she had said it.
*
Now, in the humid dusk, Enzo took Giuli’s hand. They were walking to where he knew she’d have left her motorino, a spare helmet for him in her pillion box. He came in on the bus.
‘So what did she tell you?’ he asked, disengaging his arm when they reached the scooter and facing her.
Could she be sure? Could Clelia be sure? Giuli didn’t want to see the look on his face when she said it. She told herself, a disease would be worse, surely? If Flavia had a disease. And all Clelia had seen was Flavia going into a consulting room.
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