Giorgio Scerbanenco - A Private Venus

He closed the book abruptly, got up, and put it back on the shelf. At that moment there was something he didn’t like in the house, any more than he liked the streak of grey in the dawn sky. He left the room, as if he already knew what it was that he didn’t like, even though he didn’t, and knocked at the door of the next room, Davide’s room.

No answer. He tried to turn the handle: the door was locked. All at once, he realised what had happened and pounded with his fist, three or four times. ‘Open up, or I’ll knock the door down.’

No sound, for a moment, he pounded again, more loudly, and as he pounded the key turned in the lock and the door opened. It was as he had feared. With his right hand Davide was holding a handkerchief over his left wrist, the handkerchief was already soaked with blood, it was trickling down. The most distressing way to die.

Duca didn’t say anything, just pushed Davide into the bathroom. There was a first aid case on the wall which, quite unusually, contained everything he needed. With his huge arm stretched over the wash basin, Davide let him do whatever he wanted. He had known what he was doing when he slit his wrist, had known what he was aiming for: the greatest loss of blood with the smallest cut. That made it easier for Duca to stitch and dress the wound, and less than half an hour later the would-be suicide was lying on his bed. The cuff of his shirt hid most of the bandage. He hadn’t said a word so far and, lying like that on the bed, still wasn’t saying anything.

Duca hadn’t said a word either. Not one. As soon as he had put him back on the bed he looked for the stash of whisky. It was child’s play: the only place a person as tall as Davide Auseri could hide a bottle was on top of the wardrobe; by standing on tiptoe he managed to reach that obvious hiding place and took down the bottle. He laughed nervously to himself: he wasn’t much shorter than Davide.

He started to drink from the bottle: one sip, then a breath, another longer sip, another breath, the third sip, enough now. He needed it, he was still frozen with terror, and even the whisky didn’t warm him up very much. He put the bottle back on top of the wardrobe, sat down on Davide’s bed and looked at him. His expression was normal, he hadn’t cried, he wasn’t pale, the skin of his face was dry. That was the terrible thing about it: he had decided quite calmly and lucidly that he wanted to die. At the age of twenty-two.

‘Don’t you ever think of other people?’ Duca asked. He looked at the window: the square of sky was milky with dawn. No answer. ‘No, I’m not talking about your father, the grief you’d have given your father if you’d died. I’m talking about other people, anyone, someone you might pass in the street. Me, for example. Suppose I hadn’t heard that noise just now: it was you going into the bathroom to get the scissors to slit your wrists. Suppose I’d been asleep, and when I woke up I’d found you, having already bled to death. Imagine my situation. I just got out of prison, only three days ago, I was sent there for an offence that some people called homicide, although with extenuating ideological circumstances. This morning they find me here, with a dead young man, after a night spent with women of easy virtue, the remains of our orgy still downstairs. You have no idea how imaginative the press can be, or how suspicious the police. They would have talked about drugs, and as a former doctor I’d have been accused of organising the whole sadistic party and providing heroin, cocaine, mescaline, marijuana: they might have found your suicide suspicious. “Someone cut his veins for him while he was in a drugged stupor”: there’s always a lawyer ready to make that kind of accusation in court. So I’d have immediately gone back inside, and would have been ruined forever. Now listen to me: it’s true that you barely know me, but I have a sister who’s twenty-two, with an illegitimate one-year-old daughter, and their lives depend entirely on me. If I work they eat, if I don’t they have to live on charity, as they did all the time I was in prison. If this stupid joke of yours of trying to die had succeeded, it would have been all over for me. I know you couldn’t have thought of these things, but I do, the reason I didn’t strangle you as soon as I saw you with your wrist cut was because I still have a lot of self-control.’

At last a word, just one, a brief one, bland and yet moving: ‘Sorry,’ and his eyes narrowed a little as he said it: Davide, too, had a lot of self-control.

‘Don’t do it again, Davide’-he had never before threatened a fellow man like this-’I can’t watch over you every instant and a person who wants to do himself in will manage it even with ten guards watching him. If you’re tired of life, wait till I’ve finished my job, in a month you’ll be drinking only mineral water, then I’ll go and you’ll be able to do whatever you like. But as long as I’m here with you,’ he grabbed the collar of his open shirt with one hand and, heavy as he was, lifted him until he was almost sitting up, and they were almost eye to eye, ‘as long as I’m here with you, you won’t do things like that, I’d stop you, but then I’d kill you myself, and I wouldn’t be gentle.’

However intelligent he was, the young man didn’t realise how much play-acting there was in this scene. Duca was exaggerating in order to give him a moral reason not to kill himself, he had given him a dramatic explanation of the way his suicide would have cruelly ruined a man, a man like him, even though he barely knew him. Sometimes, at the age of twenty-two, an appeal to your sense of morality actually works.

‘It won’t happen again,’ Davide said, narrowing his eyes even more: he must have been extremely unhappy, but he managed to hide it almost completely.

Duca stood up. He was still in his pants. ‘I’m going to get my cigarettes.’ He went back to his room and got dressed: the wonderful new shirt, the wonderful blue suit of ultralight material, the fantastic light blue tie, all given to him on coming out of prison by Lorenza or, more correctly, by Superintendent Carrua who had given her the money. His hair was only two millimetres high and didn’t need combing, but as he knotted his tie in front of the wardrobe mirror he realised that he needed a shave. He lit a cigarette and went back to Davide’s room.

It was still only dawn, daylight was a long time coming, but he didn’t need the light on any more and he switched it off. Davide was still there, monumental and unhappy, lying on a bed that was too short and too narrow for him, as if lying on a plank. Duca took a chair and moved it close to him. He kept smoking his cigarette, without offering him one.

‘I haven’t asked you why you tried to kill yourself, because you wouldn’t have told me.’ He didn’t wait for a reply, he knew there wouldn’t be one, he took a few more puffs of his cigarette, then said, ‘And I’m not going to ask you now, because you still wouldn’t tell me.’

In fact, he didn’t say anything at all. But Duca had understood. The question was not the drinking, the alcoholism, as Davide’s father the emperor thought. Parents always think their children are still at the lullaby stage. For a young man of that age to have such a clear-headed desire to die, the reason had to be a deep and serious one. Davide was a healthy young man, from every point of view, Mariolina and company had confirmed that, and for a healthy young man to consciously resolve on his own death, there must have been a painful wound to his ego. A simple event, however serious, wouldn’t have reduced him to this: even if he had killed someone, if he had set fire to an old lady or put a bomb in the basement of Milan Central Station, he wouldn’t have acted like this. Davide Auseri had been destroyed by something. Or by someone. That was what he had to discover. The drinking was a laughable matter.