Giorgio Scerbanenco - A Private Venus

No shouting. Carrua sat down again. ‘You’re right.’ He had grown sad. He had done everything he could to help Duca, to protect him, to avoid him being put on trial and going to prison. There had been nothing he could do: the wheels had got jammed. ‘I don’t think you’ll find anything, but if you do, come and tell me straight away and I’ll find you another job.’ Before opening the door, he gave him a hug. ‘Try to hold on. Another year or two, and they’ll let you back on the register, everything will be the way it was before, you’re still young.’

He let Carrua believe that was what he was hoping for, even though he knew that hope was a kind of secret vice that nobody ever managed to rid themselves of completely. ‘Thank you for everything you’ve done for Lorenza,’ he said, hugging him tight.

When he came out into the Via Fatebenefratelli, into the damp sunlight that was as hot as shaving cream from a luxury hairdresser, it struck him that if he didn’t find Davide and the Giulietta in the Via dei Giardini, then he had really messed up. But he had had to take the risk: otherwise he would never have known whether he could trust the young man, or what he was made of.

Davide was in his place, walking up and down next to the Giulietta in the incipient shade given by the trees at that hour. Duca saw him from the back, tall, monumental, and felt sorry for him. Whatever the reason, he must be very unhappy. ‘Thank you,’ he said to him, getting behind the wheel. ‘Let’s just drop by the bank, and then I’m sorry if I take you somewhere a little sad, but I’m going to see my father’s grave.’

At the bank, which was his father’s bank, they cashed the cheque he had been given by Engineer Auseri, which was for quite a large amount. They cashed it without any problem, even though they knew he had been in prison and even though his father, with his small savings account, had never done much to boost the institution’s profits.

‘After we’ve been to Musocco, we’ll stop for a drink,’ he told him encouragingly. For the first week he couldn’t reduce to less than a third the dose of alcohol Davide was used to drinking, for psychological reasons if for nothing else: he wanted him to stay a normal man, not become a thirsty man who thought of nothing but whisky.

Country graveyards, surrounded by greenery and tall cypresses, are not supposed to be depressing, unlike a large cemetery in a big city which can be quite chilling. But he hadn’t yet seen his father’s grave, he hadn’t even attended the funeral, and now he had in his pocket the sheet of paper Lorenza had given him, on which the numbers of the section and the grave were written, and together with Davide he entered that sad, oceanic expanse which was even more lugubrious in the sun. Of course, the grave was at the far end, and they had to do quite a bit of walking, Duca holding the carnations he had bought at the front gate.

Here was the section, more walking, and here was the grave, much the same as all the others in the row, the extinguished candle in the dark glass, the bed of little flowers scorched by the heat, the spartan inscription, Pietro Lamberti, date of birth and death, and that was it. He laid the carnations, loose, on the flower bed, without any attempt at arranging them artistically. From his photograph, his father looked out stiffly at the world in front of him, and Duca stood stiffly looking at the photograph.

‘This is my father,’ he said, as if introducing him, ‘a police officer, from Emilia Romagna, just like me, but he wasn’t typical of the region, he didn’t like revolution or revolutionaries, he liked the law, he liked rules. He was absolutely determined to sort out all those who transgressed the law or broke the rules. He was a kind of Javert. He managed to get himself sent to Sicily because he thought he could do something radical to combat the Mafia. For a while the Mafia took no interest in him, they had no time to waste on an ordinary cop, but my father went too far: he managed to get something out of three or four of those peasants who’ve seen everything and know everything, but always say they know nothing. I don’t know what methods he used, maybe he had to bend the rules a little, but in his small way he managed to break through the wall of silence. His superiors promoted him, and the Mafia sent a young man to deal with him: it was a suicide mission, because my father was a very good shot and the attempt didn’t succeed, my father shot him dead but not before being stabbed in his left shoulder, his left arm was almost paralysed and he was transferred here to Milan, to a desk job.’ He wasn’t looking at Davide, he didn’t care very much if he was listening or not, he was talking like this as if praying-isn’t summing up a man’s life a kind of prayer? — but he sensed that Davide was listening, more than that, he had never listened the way he was listening right now.

‘Maybe it was because he didn’t want the same thing to happen to me that he was against the idea of my becoming a policeman like him, he wanted me to graduate as a doctor, and I did. Nobody will ever know how he managed on a police clerk’s salary, and a widower to boot, because my mother died when I was a boy, but the day I graduated he was in bed, suffering with his heart, and when I had my exams, he had his heart attack. Then I did my military service, and by the time I got back, he’d somehow, stuck there in his office in the Via Fatebenefratelli, already found me a place in a clinic, Professor Arquate’s clinic. Maybe I’d have worked my way up, and he’d have lived happily to the age of ninety, but I met Signora Maldrigati. She’s the old lady I killed with an injection of ircodine. My father didn’t even know the word euthanasia, for him it was worse than if I’d gone mad, or rather, he must have thought I had gone mad, and maybe he forgave me because of that, but he realised the consequences of what I had done: I wouldn’t be a doctor any more, I’d always have a stain on my record, and that killed him.’ His father continued to look at him stiffly from the photograph even when he fell silent, and even if he had heard his words, he still didn’t understand why his son had killed, he would never understand it, for all eternity, his look in the photograph said that clearly.

Davide’s voice came to him suddenly, in that great heat and sadness, Duca hadn’t expected him to be the first to speak. ‘I’d like to visit a grave, too.’

Duca nodded, continuing to look at his father.

‘But I don’t know where it is. It must be here, but I don’t know where.’

‘There must be an office somewhere,’ he said to Davide. He looked at him, only his face was shiny with sweat. ‘Just give them the name of the person and they’ll tell you the section and the number of the grave.’

Davide’s voice remained even. ‘It’s the woman I killed last year. Her name was Alberta Radelli.’

On that stretch of avenue that goes from the Arco della Pace to the Castello Sforzesco, even just after ten in the morning, the sides of the road are lined with alluring female figures, wearing scanty but tight-fitting clothes in summer, who know how to operate in a large metropolis where there are no provincial limits to timetables or conventional divisions between night and day, and at any hour of the day, from midnight to midnight, a citizen can slow down in his car, hail one or other of these ladies, and ask for their co-operation.

A blue Giulietta appeared that morning on the right-hand side of the arch and slowed down, and a woman of forty dressed like a teenage Beatles fan stepped down into the road almost as if to bar the way, but the Giulietta swerved and accelerated, not because Davide Auseri had seen the kind lady and hadn’t seen fit to accept what she was offering, but simply because, just as he was about to realise his plan, something inside him almost always drove him to flee. Further on, from behind a tree, a genuine teenager, at any rate a girl no more than twenty, waved him down, as if she had an appointment to present the papers for her marriage. She was blonde, she looked like a gangster’s moll in a Hollywood film, or better still, like one of those little girls who, at carnival time, dress up as eighteenth-century ladies for the neighbourhood dance, painted, powdered and completely unaware of the historical aspect of their costumes, concerned only with the fact that they’ll be able to eat a lot of sweet things and play a lot of games during the day. But Davide Auseri swerved away from the blonde, too, as if afraid, even though what he most wanted was to stop. It was almost always like this at first, he was afraid; later, if the girl had managed to get in the car, he wasn’t.