Donna Leon - A Question of Belief

Paola glanced up from her antipasto. ‘No, I wouldn’t have gone crazy, but I would have sent you to a work camp for the rest of the summer.’

‘How are we supposed to get out of the financial crisis if no one spends any money?’ Chiara demanded, sure proof that she had spent a day in the company of a student at Italy’s best business school.

‘By working hard and paying our taxes,’ Raffi said, thus putting an end to any lingering doubts Brunetti might have had that his son’s flirtation with Marxism was at an end.

‘Would that it were that easy,’ Paola said.

‘What do you mean?’ asked Raffi.

‘To work hard, you have to have a job,’ Paola said, looking across the table at him and smiling. ‘Right?’ Raffi nodded. ‘And to pay taxes, you also have to have a job. Or run a business.’

‘Of course,’ Raffi said. ‘Any idiot knows that.’

‘And how does a person find a job?’ Before Raffi could answer, Paola forged ahead. ‘Without knowing someone or having a father who’s a lawyer or a notary who can give him a job as soon as he finishes his studies?’ Again, before her son could answer, she said, ‘Think about the older brothers and sisters of your friends in school. How many of them have found decent jobs? They’ve got all sorts of elegant degrees in I don’t know what sort of elegant subjects, and they sit at home and live off their parents.’ And before her son could accuse her of insensitivity, she added, ‘Not necessarily because they want to but because there are no jobs for them. If they’re lucky, they get some sort of temporary work, but as soon as their contract is up, they’re let go, and someone else is hired for six months.’

Good Lord, Brunetti thought, who sounded like the Marxist now? ‘So how are they to get jobs and pay their taxes?’ he inquired mildly.

Paola started to speak but apparently decided to abandon the topic. ‘I think it’s ready,’ she said. It was: Paola had seared off the skins of the peppers, leaving behind a sweetness and consistency reminiscent of the figs. The family, soothed by the pleasures of lunch, spent the rest of the meal in peaceful discussion of how to spend their time in the mountains.

After lunch, Brunetti sat on the sofa and leafed through Il Gazzettino , but even the lightness of its every word and phrase could not lift the vague uneasiness created by Paola’s obvious change of subject. Retreat was not a tactic to which she was much given.

She came in with coffee, handed him his cup, and sat in an easy chair across from him. She put her feet on the low table and took a sip. ‘If I ever say again, any time in my life, how nice it is to live on the top floor, under the roof, would you please stuff me in the oven and keep me there until I come to my senses?’

‘We could get air conditioning,’ he said, to provoke her.

‘And have Chiara move out?’ she asked. ‘She’s toxic on the subject. One of her friends’ fathers had it put in, and Chiara refuses to go to her house any more.’

‘You think we’ve created a fanatic?’ Brunetti asked.

Paola finished her coffee and set the cup and saucer on the table. After some time, she said, ‘If she’s got to be a fanatic, I’d rather it be the ecology than anything else.’

‘But don’t you think her response is a bit excessive?’ Brunetti asked.

Paola shrugged. ‘It is now, this year, in this historical period. But ten years from now, twenty, she might be proven right, and we’ll look back at the excess of our lives and see it as criminal.’ She closed her eyes and let her head fall against the back of the chair.

‘And then people will call her a prophet and not a fanatic?’

‘Who knows?’ Paola said, eyes closed. ‘They’re often the same thing.’

‘Why’d you change the subject?’ he asked.

‘About jobs and taxes?’ she asked.

He studied her face. She was more than twenty years older than when he had first met her, and yet he could see no difference. Blonde hair that had a will of its own, a nose that was perhaps too large for this era of female beauty, the cheekbones that had drawn his first kisses. He grunted by way of answer.

‘I didn’t want to talk about taxes,’ she said at last.

‘Why?’

‘Because I think we’re crazy to continue to pay them, and if I could, I’d stop.’

‘Is this excessive rhetoric?’ long experience prompted him to ask.

She opened her eyes and smiled across at him. ‘Probably. But I was surprised to realize a few days ago that some of the things the Lega says — those same things that had me wild with anger a decade ago — they’re beginning to make sense to me.’

‘We become our parents,’ Brunetti said, repeating something his mother had often said. ‘What things?’

‘That our tax money goes South and is never seen again. That the North works hard and pays its taxes and gets very little in return for it. That the Vatican tells us to be generous to immigrants but doesn’t take any in.’

‘You going to start talking about building a wall between the North and the South?’ he asked.

She let out a snort of laughter. ‘Of course not. I simply didn’t want to talk like this in front of the kids.’

‘You think they don’t know?’

‘Of course they know,’ she said. ‘But they know only from what we do or what their friends’ parents do.’

‘For example?’

‘That when we eat in a restaurant where the owner is a friend, we don’t get a ricevuta fiscale , so no tax is paid.’

Brunetti was always, and uncontrollably, defensive about any suggestion of frugality on his part and quickly jumped to his own defence. ‘I don’t do it to make them charge less. You know that.’

‘That’s just my point, Guido. That at least would make sense because it would save you money. But you do it out of principle, not greed, so that this disgusting government of ours won’t get at least that little bit of money to give to their friends or put in their own pockets.’

He nodded. That was exactly the point.

‘And that’s why I don’t want to talk about taxes in front of them. If they’re going to end up feeling that way about the government, then they have to discover it themselves: they shouldn’t learn it from us.’

‘Even if it is, as you say, a “disgusting” government?’

‘It’s not as bad as some,’ she temporized after a moment’s reflection.

‘I’m not sure that’s the most eloquent defence of our government I’ve ever heard,’ he said.

‘I’m not trying to defend it,’ she said angrily. ‘It’s disgusting, but at least it’s disgusting in a non-violent way. If that makes a difference.’

After some reflection, Brunetti said, ‘I suppose it does.’ He pushed himself to his feet, walked around the table and bent to kiss her and said he’d be back at the usual time for dinner.

On his way back to the Questura, again taking the vaporetto to avoid the sun, Brunetti considered what he and Paola had said to one another and what Paola had not said to the children at lunch. How many times had he heard people use the phrase, ‘ Governo Ladro ’? And how many times had he agreed in silence that the government was a thief? But in the last few years, as though some previous sense of restraint or shame had been overcome, there had been less attempt on the part of their rulers to pretend that they were anything less than what they were. One of his previous superiors, the Minister of Justice, had been accused of collusion with the Mafia, but all it had taken was a change of government for that story to have drifted out of the newspapers and, for all he knew, out of the halls of justice.

Brunetti was, by disposition and then by training, a listener: people sensed that first in him and in his company spoke easily and often entirely without reserve. In the last year, what he heard more and more in the voices of people — sometimes a woman standing next to him on the vaporetto or a man in a bar — was a mounting sense of disgust at the way they were ruled and at the people who ruled them. It didn’t matter if the people who spoke to him had voted for or against the politicians they reviled: they’d be happy to lock them all up in the local church and set it ablaze.