by Donna Leon
She swung her feet around and put them on the floor. ‘Hungry?’
Brunetti couldn’t answer; he didn’t know. Davide Cavanella had come home with him, filling his thoughts, driving out all else. ‘I want to ask you something.’
‘What about?’
‘Noise,’ he said. ‘That is, sound.’
‘What about it?’
‘I wonder what it’s like to be deaf.’
She gave him a long look but said nothing.
‘How do they learn?’ he asked.
‘Learn what?’
He waved his hand in the air. ‘Everything. How to eat or sit in a chair.’
‘I suppose they learn it the same way Raffi and Chiara did.’
‘Which was?’ he asked, not because he didn’t remember but because he didn’t know if Paola would have the same memories.
‘By watching us do it, I’d say, though with eating we had to guide their hands with the spoon, and then the fork.’
‘And sitting?’ he asked, having given no conscious thought to the choice of actions.
‘They sat in highchairs to eat at first because we put them there, and then when they were big enough to climb on to chairs, they copied what they saw us doing.’ After a moment’s thought, she added, ‘And I suppose they figured out that sitting’s more comfortable than standing.’
‘You get hungry, so you put food in your mouth,’ Brunetti said. ‘You don’t want to stand or sit on the floor, so you sit in a chair. They’re practical solutions to real problems.’ He paused, but Paola said nothing. ‘Why would they brush their teeth? Even if they saw us do it, it wouldn’t make sense to a kid. They don’t see it as a problem.’
‘We told them it was good for them, I suppose,’ she said, less interested now.
‘That’s just it,’ Brunetti said.
‘Just what?’
‘We told them. How do you tell a deaf child?’
Before she could answer, he said, ‘I spoke to his mother’s doctor. He told me she never had him helped.’
‘Helped how?’ she asked, her whole face alert.
‘I don’t know. He didn’t say. He told me she never told anyone there was anything wrong with him.’ Even as he said it, Brunetti was struck by how terrible that phrase sounded. ‘So he grew up without any special training.’ And then, ‘The doctor couldn’t hide his anger when he told me.’
He saw understanding cross her face and leave her features dull with shock. He saw her begin to understand the consequences. ‘But people could see there was something wrong with him,’ she said. Then, an instant later, ‘We did.’
‘We thought we did,’ Brunetti countered.
Paola moved back on the sofa, accepting with the motion that there would be no thinking about lunch until this was settled. ‘What is it we didn’t understand? Tell me.’
‘You remember when we first saw him, don’t you? What was it, fifteen years? More?’ Paola nodded. ‘I remember how the woman in the dry cleaner’s – with him standing right there, less than a metre from her – told us he was both deaf and retarded. He might as well have been a piece of furniture.’ He recalled that there had been no malice in her voice.
He saw that Paola recalled the incident as well as he. ‘I remember cringing at it,’ she said. ‘“Deaf and retarded”. Sweet Jesus, just like that.’ He watched her call up the memory of that scene. ‘He didn’t react, did he? She could have been talking about the weather for all he understood.’
She rested her head against the back of the sofa and closed her eyes for a minute. Keeping them closed, she asked, ‘What are you trying to tell me?’
‘I’m not sure,’ Brunetti admitted and then, after a long pause, said, ‘There are some drawings he did on the wall of the doctor’s waiting room. They were extraordinary, unlike anything I’ve ever seen.’
Paola opened her eyes and smiled. ‘That doesn’t tell me very much, does it?’
Brunetti acknowledged this with a grin and said, ‘They were landscapes created out of hundreds of horizontal lines drawn very close together. Only millimetres apart. Palazzo Soranzo, the Lido, a cityscape. Absolutely accurate, only you don’t see it until you’re just at the right distance from it. Otherwise, it’s just lines.’ Realizing how little justice he was doing to the drawings, he stopped.
‘And so?’ Paola asked.
‘So maybe that’s what the doctor was talking about. He couldn’t control his anger.’
‘At what?’
‘Maybe he thought that she was ignoring his handicap and that this was making it worse for him, and that he wasn’t retarded, only deaf.’
‘Is that possible?’ Paola asked.
Brunetti latched his hands together than stared at them. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know that much about psychology and how brains develop. But if no one taught him sign, or to read lips, then . . .’
‘Then he’d become the way he was?’ she asked.
‘Possibly. I don’t know.’
‘But the drawings?’
He unlatched his hands and ran his fingers through his hair. ‘I don’t know.’
It took Paola a while to answer, and when she did, her uncertainty was audible. ‘He never gave a sign that he understood much of what happened. Or had any interest in things.’ When Brunetti did not contradict her, she said, ‘So I don’t know why we would have questioned what we were told.’ Then, with every evidence that she was reluctant to show how strong her case was, she added, ‘And there was the way he looked, Guido, and the way he walked.’ Before he could object, she said, ‘I know it’s terrible to say these things, but he looked as if there was something wrong with him.’
Working to keep his voice level, Brunetti said, ‘We believed what we were told about him and never thought to ask why he was like that.’
Paola leaned aside and placed her hand on his thigh. ‘I don’t mean to sound heartless, Guido, but I don’t think anyone would, especially if a person who knew him said he was deaf and retarded.’
‘He learned how to take things home for people, to go with them to their houses,’ Brunetti insisted. ‘He had to learn that. Someone had to teach him. Think how difficult that would be if he was both deaf and retarded. We didn’t have to teach the kids how to eat or sit: they wanted to. It’s been a long time, but I think we had to persuade the kids to brush their teeth and teach them how to do it and then keep at them until they did it on their own. And that’s like carrying a parcel to someone’s home. It’s not something you want to do or do instinctively. You have to be taught. Or trained.’
Paola remained silent, staring at the paintings on the far wall. ‘When are you going to tell me why we’re talking about this?’
He let his eyes follow hers and studied the paintings: a portrait of a distant ancestor on her mother’s side, a not very pretty woman with a beautiful smile; and an unframed wooden panel with the portrait of a man in a naval uniform holding a brown speckled bird that Brunetti had bought with his first pay cheque, decades ago.
‘If he – Davide – was both deaf and retarded, and if his mother never got him any help, then how was he taught to do the things he knew how to do?’ Brunetti asked, right back at the beginning and thinking of those drawings.
Paola leaned her head back again. Brunetti wondered if he had exhausted her intellectual curiosity or her patience. The man had died an accidental death: there was no question of that. Paola’s response forced Brunetti to realize that he could not, even to himself, explain what so disturbed him. This man had passed through life without having left a trace of himself save in the memories of the few people who had seen him: Brunetti couldn’t even say they had known him. He thought of that conundrum posed in his first class in logic: if a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it fall, does it make a noise?
Is a human life defined by contacts with other people? If, as Brunetti believed, people lived on only in the minds of the people who knew them and remembered them, then Davide Cavanella’s existence had indeed b
een a miserable one, and it would cease with his mother’s death.
He looked at the portraits again. It had always bothered him that no one knew who the woman was, whether she was an aunt removed by many generations or the mother of someone who had married into the family. The portrait had been in the attic of Palazzo Falier, and Paola had taken it to her room when she was an adolescent but had failed to find anyone in the family who had even the vaguest idea of who the woman might be; nor was there any record of the painting.
Brunetti had also failed with the man he thought of as his naval commander. Even though he wore a uniform jacket, Brunetti had never so much as managed to identify the man’s nationality. The bird had finally been identified by an ornithologist friend of Paola’s, who told them it was a South American Ruff, whatever that was.
He got to his feet, realizing now how hungry he was and willing to scavenge lunch from whatever he found in the refrigerator.
Hearing him, Paola opened her eyes. ‘Is it because we all failed him?’ she asked. ‘Is that what’s bothering you?’
‘Probably,’ Brunetti answered. ‘And now he’s dead and there’ll be no making up for it.’
Finally, Brunetti tried to shrug it off by asking, ‘You think it’s still warm enough to eat on the terrace?’
She turned and looked out the windows, studying the angle of the sun: it seemed that things were dry enough. ‘Only if we hurry,’ she said.
‘Good. I’ll take the plates out.’
Paola got to her feet, and Brunetti noticed, for the first time, that she used one hand to push herself upright. She passed him and went towards the kitchen, stopped at the door and said, without turning to him, ‘It’s good that it bothers you, Guido.’ She went to see what was in the refrigerator.
20
When Brunetti returned to the Questura, the guard at the door told him that Dottor Patta wanted to see him in his office. This reminded Brunetti that he had, for the last three days, ignored his superior’s request that he attend to the problem in San Barnaba. How trivial it had sounded when Patta told him about it, and how much more trivial it sounded now.
This fact, however, in no way affected Brunetti’s determination: like any good actor, once he stepped on stage, he never broke role. Well, he told himself, seldom broke role.
Signorina Elettra was not at her desk, so Brunetti faced the meeting with no advance information. He knocked and obeyed Patta’s shouted ‘Avanti.’
Even though he had resolved the matter with no effort whatsoever, Brunetti pasted a look composed of equal parts of contrition and industry upon his face as he entered. He had taken only two steps into the room before Patta got to his feet and came around his desk towards him. The Vice-Questore’s hand was raised, but instead of shaking Brunetti’s, Patta placed his hand on Brunetti’s upper arm, as if to guide him to a chair. Brunetti set himself adrift in this current of apparent goodwill and allowed himself to be tugged towards his mooring point.
When Brunetti was safely docked, Patta went back to his own berth and smiled across the desk at his subordinate. ‘I’m glad you found time to come,’ Patta said. Brunetti activated his sensors and swept Patta’s tone for sarcasm. Finding none, he adjusted the settings and searched for irony, but there was none of that, either.
‘When Garzanti told me you wanted to see me, Dottore, I came right up.’ Brunetti smiled, suggesting that the message was the thing he had most been waiting for in these recent days.
‘I wanted to talk to you about that situation I asked you to look into,’ Patta said with a smile as broad as it was insincere.
‘Ah, yes,’ Brunetti said, replacing his expression with one of industry and concern. ‘I’ve been very busy.’ Then, with apparent reluctance, he was forced to add, ‘It wasn’t easy, Vice-Questore.’
Patta’s smile faded and his tanned face lightened a shade. He opened his mouth to speak, closed it and swallowed, licked his lips, and settled for putting the smile back in place.
Until he saw Patta’s unease, Brunetti had been prepared to tell him he had, by Herculean efforts, resolved the problems facing the mayor’s son. But now he began to calculate how he could get two for one and see that the Lieutenant neither took possession of Signorina Elettra’s office nor prevented Foa from being seconded to the Guardia Costiera.
‘That is, Dottore,’ Brunetti went on, ‘I finally managed to speak to the man in charge of the patrol for that area.’
Patta was all attention.
Brunetti put on his easiest smile. ‘Thank God he’s a cousin of Foa’s,’ he began, then, seeing the flash of confusion in Patta’s eyes, he said, ‘Well, it was Foa who took me over there in the launch, and – as I said – the man in charge of that area is his cousin, so he went in with me and introduced me.’ Brunetti paused to give careful thought to something that must just have occurred to him and said, ‘I’m sure that helped.’
As if that were an irrelevant detail, he went on. ‘When I mentioned the shop to him, he told me that the men on patrol had noticed the way the tables were spreading out and had spoken to the owner about it. But so far there had been no written report.’
‘And the pilot? Foa? Was he there, too?’
‘I asked him to stay, sir. I thought it would make it easier if he was there.’ Then, with relaxed, man-to-man candour, Brunetti added, ‘You know how clannish we Venetians can be.’
Patta gave this the consideration it deserved and finally asked, ‘What happened?’
Here, Brunetti looked away from Patta, as though embarrassed by his own remarks about Venetians or perhaps about what he was to say next. But he said it, anyway, ‘He asked me, sir, why he should help us by ignoring this – that is, help the police – when we’re the people . . .’ He paused and then said, ‘This is what he told me sir.’ At Patta’s nod, he went on. ‘When we refused to help one of our own.’
‘I don’t understand what you’re saying, Brunetti. Or trying to say.’
‘Well, sir, I was there with Foa, and this man is his cousin.’
‘How aren’t we helping him?’ Patta asked, making no attempt to disguise his exasperation.
‘It’s about the request from the Guardia Costiera, sir,’ Brunetti said.
After a moment, the lights came on in Patta’s eyes. Off, then on. Brunetti didn’t mind in the least; it might be good to let Patta see just how clannish these Venetians are.
‘What else do you want?’ Patta asked in a level voice.
With equal lack of emphasis, Brunetti answered, ‘Lieutenant Scarpa might be persuaded to remain in his own office.’
Brunetti had to admire the fortitude with which his superior received this request. He did not grimace, nor did he blink. ‘I see,’ Patta said. He looked down at the surface of his desk for a while, then across at Brunetti, and asked, ‘And there will be no more trouble in Campo San Barnaba?’
‘None, sir. And the tables can stay where they are.’
Again, his superior consulted the surface of his desk before meeting his eyes. ‘I’ll speak to the Lieutenant,’ he said. Then, ‘You can go now, Commissario.’
Brunetti got to his feet, nodded to his superior, and left the office.
Upstairs, Brunetti opened the online pages of Il Fatto Quotidiano, a newspaper which often delighted him by its manifest distrust of every political party, every politician, and every religious leader. And there he found it, a story announcing that the officers of the Guardia di Finanza had yesterday arrived at the City Hall of Venice and entered the office charged with the awarding of contracts and financial contributions to encourage start-up businesses and shops. Acting on an order from the magistrates in Mestre, they had carried away files, records, and computers. The newspaper reported that someone close to the investigation said that there had been reports of
the involvement of certain politicians in the awarding
of these grants and contracts to relatives and friends.
After he finished reading the story, Brunetti allowed himself
a smile and addressed the computer directly. ‘If the mayor calls, please tell him I’m busy speaking to the magistrates in Mestre,’ he said aloud in the imitation of Patta’s voice which, over the years, he had honed to something approaching perfection.
‘Certainly, Vice-Questore. It’s a message I’d be delighted to give him,’ Signorina Elettra’s voice responded, but when he looked towards the door he had forgotten to close, he saw not her, but Commissario Claudia Griffoni.
‘You manage the Venetian cadence very well, Claudia,’ he said. ‘The nuances of his Sicilian accent have proven too much for me.’
Griffoni smiled and said something to him that, though it was virtually incomprehensible, with only a few words peeping out enough for him to grasp, was an exact imitation of Patta’s voice speaking in his native dialect and thus far more accurate than his own imitation had been. She came across the room and sat in the chair in front of his desk. ‘He says he’s from Palermo, but his accent is pure San Giuseppe Jato,’ she said, with the same disapproval a lord would use should his butler attempt to play polo. As ever, she spoke in an Italian the purity of which he envied.
In the years she had worked at the Questura he had learned very little about her private life or background, but he had no doubt that she came from what his maternal grandmother had always referred to as gente per bene, with its strong suggestion that the people so defined were not only well intentioned but wealthy. Beyond this, she was intelligent and cooperative, and the few times they had worked together, he had been impressed by her seriousness and lack of interest in becoming the hero of the investigation, a weakness to which some of his other colleagues were prone. She was also possessed of physical courage, a quality Brunetti admired.
‘You know anything about the investigation?’ he
asked.
‘You mean the mayor and the Guardia di Finanza?’
‘Yes.’