Giorgio Scerbanenco - A Private Venus

‘And now that you’re rested, let’s go.’ He stood up and threw the cigarette end out of the window, which was still milky with dawn, neither more nor less than before, as if the dawn had come to a halt. Even stranger, there was no dawn chorus. It was just as silent as it had been in the middle of the night. ‘This isn’t the right place for you or for me. Let’s go straight away. I’ll pack your bag for you: for a couple of days it’s best that you use your left arm as little as possible. I don’t think you’re sleepy. Neither am I.’

Getting the necessary indications from Davide, he found a beautiful soft suitcase, dark blue, obviously, and put in it everything they would need. Then, with toilet paper he scrupulously cleaned the bloodstains that led from the room all the way to the bathroom-to support Lorenza and his niece he would have to do this and more-and when everything was ready he said, ‘Now you can get up. I may have missed a few bloodstains, so before leaving, wake the maid, the butler, whoever you like, and tell them you’re going, then even if they discover the bloodstains I missed they won’t think there’s been a murder and we ran away.’

Davide obeyed him promptly and gloomily, he woke the butler who had appeared in his nightshirt the previous night, had him take the case out to the car and sat down quietly next to Duca at the wheel, knowing already that he wouldn’t be the one to drive.

So they descended from the soft hills of the Brianza into the Milanese plain and near Monza they found somewhere open: obviously it didn’t have any drinkable whisky, it wasn’t so much a bar, more a kind of shed, but Michelangelo’s David was starting to turn pale and need refuelling. Duca ordered two grappas. Davide drank his straight down, so Duca passed him his own glass.

‘The treatment starts now,’ he said. ‘Whenever I think you really need a drink, I’ll give you one. Otherwise not a drop, and I’ll stop you any way I can.’

Davide drank the second glass, too, they were so small, so measly, so reminiscent of an earlier time, a world of rosepetal cordials and shoes with heeltaps, that Duca said, ‘Have another one: that’s an order.’ He got back behind the wheel and after a while looked at Davide: his pallor had gone, his breathing had got back to normal. It wasn’t the derisory loss of blood that had made him sick, obviously. It was the cobra he had inside him, which was eating him up.

‘If you tell me what happened to you, and let me help you, it’ll be much better for you,’ Duca said. He wasn’t expecting any reply. And he didn’t get one.

Even in Milan, the sun rises every now and again. It had risen that morning, there was a reddish glow on the top floors of the buildings, people were already panting with the heat. He parked the Giulietta in the Piazza Leonardo da Vinci. ‘Let’s go and see my sister. She should be awake, the baby has her first feed at six.’

The mammoth fifteenth-century door, in marked contrast to the modesty of the building, was closed, but he didn’t even look at the door, he whistled and Lorenza appeared at the window on the first floor with her child in her arms.

‘I didn’t think I’d heard right, I wasn’t expecting you at this hour,’ Lorenza said, throwing him down the keys.

‘This is a friend of mine, make us some coffee.’ He led Davide up the short flight of stairs. ‘The apartment is old and small, and has a double supply of cockroaches, they come in from the street and also the courtyard. We won’t be here long, though.’

Lorenza was on the landing, with the child in her arms. She was in dark pyjamas and her shoulder-length hair was gathered into a ponytail by a common elastic band.

Duca took the child in his arms and made the introductions, by pure chance Sara wasn’t soaking wet. ‘Has she already done it or is she about to?’ he asked Lorenza.

‘She’s done it, I only just changed her.’ Lorenza’s dark eyes were looking at him happily, she even looked happily at Davide. It was her way of looking at life: even when she came to see him in prison she looked at him like that, she talked to him like that, in that happy voice: ‘The lawyer says everything’s going to be fine.’

‘Then I’ll hold her, and come with you to the kitchen while you make the coffee.’ He turned to Davide, who was sitting motionless on a rickety chair. ‘Excuse me, Davide, I’ll be right back.’ In the kitchen, he walked up and down with Sara in his arms: she was a quiet child, as long as she was in someone’s arms, otherwise she screamed as if her throat was being cut.

‘My cigarettes are in the right-hand pocket of my jacket.’

Lorenza took them out, lit one, and put it between his lips.

‘In the left-hand pocket I have a cheque and some money. Take all the money and leave me the cheque.’

As she took all the notes from his jacket pocket, Lorenza turned pensive. She put them in a drawer in the kitchen table and lit the gas under the already prepared coffee maker. ‘What is this, Duca?’

‘It’s an advance for my job.’ He blew the smoke in the opposite direction from the child. ‘It’s a job I’m able to do, don’t worry, Carrua found it for me. I may not be able to come and see you for a while, that’s why I came today.’ And also to give her the money: on the baby’s high chair there was a roll, a sign that Lorenza had not been able to buy the Plasmon biscuits she usually got.

‘But what is it you have to do?’ Lorenza had become more fearful about things since Duca had been in prison, since their dad had died, since she had found herself alone and the doctor had told her one day that in his opinion she was pregnant. Fear made her large, beautiful mouth narrow a little.

Without going into too much detail, he explained what he was supposed to do with the young man who was in the other room, and they went back in there with the coffee and found him where they had left him. Duca kept the child in his arms for the rest of the visit, it was a risk because if Sara decided to pass water it could well ruin his new suit, his only suit, but Sara’s little hand around his neck and the other hand feeling for his nose, her laughing blue eyes, her stammering of a few syllables, were worth it: it was a calculated risk. In the meantime he was watching Davide, but there wasn’t much to see. The lack of alcohol made him even more alien to this everyday world. He had even stopped answering questions, except with a smile or a nod of the head, and he was also a little pale: he would need refuelling again before he lapsed into another depressive state.

‘We’re going.’ He gave Sara back to his sister, completely dry.

‘When will you be back?’ Lorenza asked.

‘Hard to say. I’ll phone you.’ In the car he said to Davide, ‘Hold on a while longer. We’re going to the barber now, then we’ll go to a good bar near here.’ Davide smiled, and gave a little nod of gratitude. At the barber’s Duca had a shave, too. They sat next to each other, and in the mirror he saw Davide half close his eyes every now and again: if he fell asleep it would be a blessing.

He fell asleep.

‘Psst.’ Duca spoke under his breath to the barber. ‘We’ve been driving all night, he’s tired and not feeling very well. Let him sleep, at least until it gets busy.’

‘It won’t get busy today.’ The barber was an understanding man, a man who’d seen everything: he left Davide with lather on half his face and lit a cigarette.

Duca had his own hair cut by the barber’s assistant, a young man from Como who, unlike the barber, had seen nothing and had never predicted, among the many events that might occur in the world, the possibility of a man falling asleep at the barber’s, although, he said in a low voice, he himself had once fallen asleep in a café in Como, which was so unlike him that he would remember it for the rest of his life.