Donna Leon - Drawing Conclusions

The old man had to be helped up the stairs. Brunetti disguised this fact by saying he was curious about the view a top floor apartment in this area would have of the Campanile and the Basilica and asked Signor Morandi if he would show it to him. Brunetti, his grip under the old man’s arm secure, paused on every landing, inventing an old knee injury that slowed him down. They arrived at the top, Morandi pleased to have had less trouble than a much younger man, and Brunetti pleased that the old man had been protected from acknowledging his own infirmities.

Morandi opened the door and stepped back to let his guest enter first. Knowing that this old man had been living alone in the apartment for three years, Brunetti had prepared himself to find disorder, if not worse, but nothing could have prepared him for what he found. The late afternoon sun flowed down the corridor from a room at the end. The light glistened up from the high-polished cotto Veneziano . It looked like the original surface, rarely seen in the higher floors of palazzi and today all but impossible to imitate and difficult to repair. Though the ceiling was not particularly high, the entrance hall was large, and the corridor was unusually broad.

‘You can see the Basilica from this room,’ Morandi said, starting down the corridor and leaving Brunetti to follow. There was no furniture against the walls, and there were no doors to the rooms on either side. Brunetti glanced into one room and saw that it was entirely empty, though the windows glistened and the floor gleamed up at him. After a moment, Brunetti realized how very cold it was, how the cold seeped up from the floor and through the walls.

In the last room, the view was, indeed, splendid, but there was so little furniture – a table and two chairs – that it had the feel of a house that was no longer lived in and was open only for inspection by prospective buyers. Off in the distance the domes bubbled up, their crosses poking the tiny balls that topped them at the sky, and beyond them Brunetti saw the back of the wings of the angel that looked out over the bacino . Behind him, Morandi said, ‘Maria used to stand there for hours, looking at it. It made her happy to see this. In the beginning.’ He came and stood next to Brunetti, and together they looked at the signs of the power of God and the power of the state, and Brunetti was struck by the majesty those things had once had, and had no longer.

‘Signor Morandi,’ he said, speaking in the formal ‘ Lei ’ and making no grammatical concession to the things the old man had told him, ‘were you telling me the truth when you said that, about wanting to lead a better life?’

‘Oh, yes,’ he answered instantly, sounding just like Brunetti’s children, years ago, doing their drills for catechism class.

‘No more lies?’ Brunetti asked.

‘No.’

Brunetti thought of those mind-twisters they had been given when they were in school. There was one about getting a hen and a fox and a cabbage across a river, and one about nine pearls on a scale, and one about the man who always lied. He had vague memories of the puzzles, but the answers had all fled. If Morandi always lied, then he would have to lie about not lying, wouldn’t he?

‘Would you swear on the heart of Maria Sartori that all you did was put your hands on Signora Altavilla’s shoulders and that you did not hurt her in any way?’

Beside him, the old man stood quietly. Then, like someone beginning their t’ai chi exercise, he let his arms go limp beside him, then raised his hands slowly, hands cupped towards the earth, to shoulder height. But instead of pulling them back to prepare to push against an invisible force, Morandi rested them on some invisibility in front of him. And then Brunetti watched his fingers tighten, and Morandi saw that Brunetti saw the motion.

The old man lowered his hands and said, ‘That’s all I did. But I didn’t hurt her.’

‘What was she wearing? And where were you?’

Morandi closed his eyes, this time putting his memory through the same routine. ‘We were in the hallway. Just in front of the door. I told you that. She never let me into the apartment, well, not more than a few steps from the door.’ He paused and lowered his head. ‘I don’t know what she was wearing: a shirt, I think. It was yellow, whatever it was.’

Brunetti cast his own memory back to the dead woman on the floor of the living room of the house. Heavy blue sweater and the bright yellow shirt below. ‘Only that?’ he asked.

‘Yes. I remember thinking that she should have been wearing something warmer. It was a cool night.’

As if seeing the emptiness for the first time, Brunetti looked around the room and asked, ‘Where is the rest of the furniture?’

‘Oh, I’ve had to sell that, too. There’s a badante who goes in to Maria every afternoon for three hours: to wash her and brush her hair and see that her clothes are clean.’ Before Brunetti could ask, he said, ‘And that’s expensive because the casa di cura won’t let them help unless they’re legal, and that makes it twice as expensive, with the taxes.’

The wind had started to whip things up in the Piazza, and the tips of the flags on the other side of the Basilica flashed into sight now and again, waving at them. ‘What will you do, Signor Morandi?’

‘Oh, I’ll sell everything here, little by little, and just hope it lasts long enough to pay them for as long as she lasts.’

‘Have her doctors given you a time?’

Morandi shrugged, no anger now at the ‘doctors’. He limited himself to saying ‘pancreas’, as if that would clarify things for Brunetti. It did.

‘And then?’

‘Oh, I haven’t thought about that,’ he said, and Brunetti believed him. ‘I just have to be here as long as she is, don’t I?’

Unable to answer that question, Brunetti asked, ‘What about this?’ waving his hand to take in the apartment that had belonged to Cuccetti’s wife and had passed to Morandi, after which both Cuccetti and his wife had died. ‘You could sell it.’

Morandi could not hide his surprise. ‘But if Maria could come home, even for a few days, before…?’ The old man glanced at Brunetti, smiling. He pointed with his chin towards the windswept panorama beyond the window. ‘She’d want to see that, so…’

‘It must be worth a great deal,’ Brunetti said.

‘Oh, I don’t care about that,’ Morandi said, speaking of it as though it were an old pair of shoes or a stack of newspapers neatly tied up for the garbage man. ‘Maria has no relatives, and all I have is a nephew, but he went to Argentina fifty years ago and I never heard from him.’ He paused, thinking; Brunetti said nothing. ‘So I suppose the state will take it. Or the city. I don’t care. It doesn’t matter.’ He looked around the room, up at the beamed ceiling, then returned to his study of the view: the flags had grown more agitated, and Brunetti thought he could hear the rising wind.

Finally the old man said, ‘I never liked this place, you know. I never felt it was mine. I worked like a dog to pay the rent on the old place, the one in Castello, so it was really mine. Ours. But this one came too easily; it’s like I found it, or I stole it from someone. All it ever brought me was bad luck, so it will be a good thing if someone else takes it.’

‘Where do you live?’ Brunetti asked, well aware of how silly a question that was to ask while standing in a person’s home.

But Morandi had no difficulty in understanding him. ‘I spend most of my time in the kitchen. It’s the only room I heat. And my bedroom, but all I do is sleep there.’ He turned away, as if to lead Brunetti to that part of the house. Brunetti let him take a few steps, and while the old man’s back was turned, he took the key out of his pocket and set it on the table beneath the window.