Giorgio Scerbanenco - A Private Venus

‘Let’s go back to my sister’s.’ They had been sitting for almost an hour in the car, parked outside the Musocco cemetery and, what with the surroundings and the senseless story Davide had told him in a senseless monologue, he felt the need for a change of scenery. He didn’t have many places to go with this would-be madman: not his apartment in the Via dell’Annunciata, no, the great Engineer Auseri might turn up at any moment, nor could they go back to the villa in the Brianza, maybe to a hotel, but later: for now he preferred to take him to his sister’s. He telephoned her, from a bar, unexpected visitors are never welcome, while Davide drank freely at the counter. Let him drink.

‘I’m coming back with my friend, the one you met before. You’ll have to be patient, you’re going to have to help me, can you get my room ready for him?’

‘Has something happened?’

‘No, nothing, just a crisis of imbecility.’

On the way there, he stopped at a pharmacy, bought a little tube of the most basic sleeping pills, and once they got to Lorenza’s apartment he made Davide lie down on the bed and gave him a pill and, like a babysitter with a child, sat there watching him until he fell asleep, which happened almost immediately, because after his confession the neurotic giant was exhausted and fell into what was more a state of collapse than sleep.

Then he put Sara to bed, too-in his arms the little rascal fell asleep immediately-and when he and Lorenza were alone in the kitchen, which was shady although not cool, he told her that he almost felt like crying.

‘If it was just a matter of weaning him off alcohol, it’d be an easy job, but the man has a guilt complex about a murder, he’s been drowning his sorrows in whisky for a year without telling anybody. The idea that he killed a girl has been simmering inside him, and even Freud would take years to get it out of his head. As soon as he’s alone he’ll try to cut his wrists, the same method the girl used, and in the end he’ll succeed.’

‘You can tell his father, he can put him in a clinic, and you can look for an easier job.’

‘Yes, I could do that. He’s in a clinic, one month, two, six, whatever you like, and when he gets out he slits his wrists.’ He finished eating the thick slice of cooked ham which Lorenza had made him for lunch. ‘And then I’ll be the one who’s haunted by the thought that if I’d stayed with him I could have saved him. We’re too sensitive. In other words we’re ridiculously divided into two distinct categories, those with hearts of stone and the sensitive. One man can kill his own family, wife, mother, and children, then in prison calmly ask for a subscription to a puzzle magazine so that he can do the crosswords, while another man has to be admitted to the psychiatric ward because he left the window open and his little cat climbed up on the windowsill and fell from the fifth floor: he thinks he killed his cat, so he goes mad.’

At about seven in the evening Davide Auseri woke up, soaked in sweat: he had all the characteristics of an old maid affected by hypothyroidism, even the nervous sweats. Duca made him take a cold bath, staying with him in the bathroom because he didn’t feel confident leaving him alone, while Lorenza ironed Davide’s suit and shirt and forced him to eat half a roast chicken that she had gone to buy from the nearby butcher. Duca twice filled his glass with red wine, then asked him to come into his study. There had been no conversation: it was as if Davide had closed his front door and had stopped receiving visitors. Duca would make him receive him, by force if need be.

‘Sit down there,’ he said. This was the study his father had made for him to use as a surgery: the display case with the medical samples was still there from three years earlier, the couch covered with plastic that looked like leather, the screen in front and in a corner by the window which looked out on the Piazza Leonardo da Vinci, the glass table with the penholder and the long drawer with the little cards in it, maybe more than a hundred-his filing cabinet. His father had imagined it would soon be full of the names of all the sick men, women, and children who turned to him to be cured. What an imagination! He lowered the Anglepoise and lit a cigarette.

‘I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I haven’t even tried to tell you that you didn’t kill anyone, and that you’re not to blame for that girl’s death.’ He stood up and went in search of something to use as an ashtray, came back with a little glass bowl, and sat down again. ‘And I’m not going to try now. If you want to think of yourself as a murderer, go ahead. There are people who think they’re Hitler, and you’re suffering from the same disease. I’m telling you that right now, before I hand you back to your father, because I can help a young man who drinks a little, but I can’t do anything for someone who’s mentally ill.’

He hadn’t expected it but at that first knock, the door opened immediately. ‘If I’d taken her with me she wouldn’t have killed herself, it isn’t a mental illness, it wouldn’t have taken any effort, on the contrary, I’d have liked it, I could have taken her away with me, I wouldn’t even have had to say anything to my father, I could have phoned Signor Brambilla and asked him to tell my father that I was taking a short holiday, my father didn’t even care all that much whether or not I worked for Montecatini, it was only to give me something to do, I’d only have had to take her with me for a few days, until the crisis had passed.’ He was panting as he spoke, but it wasn’t because of the heat: the idea of being considered mentally ill, and by a doctor to boot, had shaken him.

‘Oh, no, Signor Auseri,’ Duca interrupted him, ‘it’s pointless for you to try and drag me into this discussion,’ his tone was cool and mocking, ‘in the treatises on psychiatry there are famous examples of absurd dialectic. I have no desire to have it demonstrated by you that you killed that girl. By the same reasoning, the gas company is responsible for all the people who gas themselves to death, and if you were the director of the company, you’d start drinking whisky and wanting to die. So forget it, the more you persist with this idea, the more you demonstrate how serious your case is.’ That must have touched a sore point, because he saw Davide raise his fist, as if about to pound on the table, but he didn’t, he simply held it like that, in mid-air.

‘But if I had taken her with me …’ He was almost crying.

‘Enough!’ Duca now pounded on the desk with his hand. ‘A normal person doesn’t bother with ifs. But you’re not normal. Here’s more proof: for a year, your father did everything he could to find out why you’d started drinking like that, why you were behaving so strangely, he nearly broke your jaw with a poker, so why didn’t you ever tell him the truth? What were you afraid of?’

The reply came, unexpected and limpid. ‘Because he wouldn’t have understood.’

He was right, Engineer Auseri wouldn’t have understood: depth psychology isn’t something emperors wish to engage with. Of course he didn’t tell him he was right. ‘Okay. In that case why did you tell me the truth? You’ve known me less than twenty-four hours, and I never even asked you.’ He already knew why but he wanted to see if Davide was capable of explaining it.

‘I hadn’t been back to the Via dei Giardini for almost a year,’ he said, looking down at the floor, ‘and this morning you took me there, you parked your car almost at the same spot where I had parked it a year ago, and you left me there while you went into Police Headquarters … And then you took me to the cemetery, you talked to me about your father, I saw all those graves …’