Donna Leon - The Golden Egg

‘You get hungry, so you put food in your mouth,’ Brunetti said. ‘You don’t want to stand or sit on the floor, so you sit in a chair. They’re practical solutions to real problems.’ He paused, but Paola said nothing. ‘Why would they brush their teeth? Even if they saw us do it, it wouldn’t make sense to a kid. They don’t see it as a problem.’

‘We told them it was good for them, I suppose,’ she said, less interested now.

‘That’s just it,’ Brunetti said.

‘Just what?’

‘We told them. How do you tell a deaf child?’

Before she could answer, he said, ‘I spoke to his mother’s doctor. He told me she never had him helped.’

‘Helped how?’ she asked, her whole face alert.

‘I don’t know. He didn’t say. He told me she never told anyone there was anything wrong with him.’ Even as he said it, Brunetti was struck by how terrible that phrase sounded. ‘So he grew up without any special training.’ And then, ‘The doctor couldn’t hide his anger when he told me.’

He saw understanding cross her face and leave her features dull with shock. He saw her begin to understand the consequences. ‘But people could see there was something wrong with him,’ she said. Then, an instant later, ‘We did.’

‘We thought we did,’ Brunetti countered.

Paola moved back on the sofa, accepting with the motion that there would be no thinking about lunch until this was settled. ‘What is it we didn’t understand? Tell me.’

‘You remember when we first saw him, don’t you? What was it, fifteen years? More?’ Paola nodded. ‘I remember how the woman in the dry cleaner’s – with him standing right there, less than a metre from her – told us he was both deaf and retarded. He might as well have been a piece of furniture.’ He recalled that there had been no malice in her voice.

He saw that Paola recalled the incident as well as he. ‘I remember cringing at it,’ she said. ‘“Deaf and retarded”. Sweet Jesus, just like that.’ He watched her call up the memory of that scene. ‘He didn’t react, did he? She could have been talking about the weather for all he understood.’

She rested her head against the back of the sofa and closed her eyes for a minute. Keeping them closed, she asked, ‘What are you trying to tell me?’

‘I’m not sure,’ Brunetti admitted and then, after a long pause, said, ‘There are some drawings he did on the wall of the doctor’s waiting room. They were extraordinary, unlike anything I’ve ever seen.’

Paola opened her eyes and smiled. ‘That doesn’t tell me very much, does it?’

Brunetti acknowledged this with a grin and said, ‘They were landscapes created out of hundreds of horizontal lines drawn very close together. Only millimetres apart. Palazzo Soranzo, the Lido, a cityscape. Absolutely accurate, only you don’t see it until you’re just at the right distance from it. Otherwise, it’s just lines.’ Realizing how little justice he was doing to the drawings, he stopped.

‘And so?’ Paola asked.

‘So maybe that’s what the doctor was talking about. He couldn’t control his anger.’

‘At what?’

‘Maybe he thought that she was ignoring his handicap and that this was making it worse for him, and that he wasn’t retarded, only deaf.’

‘Is that possible?’ Paola asked.

Brunetti latched his hands together than stared at them. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know that much about psychology and how brains develop. But if no one taught him sign, or to read lips, then . . .’

‘Then he’d become the way he was?’ she asked.

‘Possibly. I don’t know.’

‘But the drawings?’

He unlatched his hands and ran his fingers through his hair. ‘I don’t know.’

It took Paola a while to answer, and when she did, her uncertainty was audible. ‘He never gave a sign that he understood much of what happened. Or had any interest in things.’ When Brunetti did not contradict her, she said, ‘So I don’t know why we would have questioned what we were told.’ Then, with every evidence that she was reluctant to show how strong her case was, she added, ‘And there was the way he looked, Guido, and the way he walked.’ Before he could object, she said, ‘I know it’s terrible to say these things, but he looked as if there was something wrong with him.’

Working to keep his voice level, Brunetti said, ‘We believed what we were told about him and never thought to ask why he was like that.’

Paola leaned aside and placed her hand on his thigh. ‘I don’t mean to sound heartless, Guido, but I don’t think anyone would, especially if a person who knew him said he was deaf and retarded.’

‘He learned how to take things home for people, to go with them to their houses,’ Brunetti insisted. ‘He had to learn that. Someone had to teach him. Think how difficult that would be if he was both deaf and retarded. We didn’t have to teach the kids how to eat or sit: they wanted to. It’s been a long time, but I think we had to persuade the kids to brush their teeth and teach them how to do it and then keep at them until they did it on their own. And that’s like carrying a parcel to someone’s home. It’s not something you want to do or do instinctively. You have to be taught. Or trained.’

Paola remained silent, staring at the paintings on the far wall. ‘When are you going to tell me why we’re talking about this?’

He let his eyes follow hers and studied the paintings: a portrait of a distant ancestor on her mother’s side, a not very pretty woman with a beautiful smile; and an unframed wooden panel with the portrait of a man in a naval uniform holding a brown speckled bird that Brunetti had bought with his first pay cheque, decades ago.

‘If he – Davide – was both deaf and retarded, and if his mother never got him any help, then how was he taught to do the things he knew how to do?’ Brunetti asked, right back at the beginning and thinking of those drawings.

Paola leaned her head back again. Brunetti wondered if he had exhausted her intellectual curiosity or her patience. The man had died an accidental death: there was no question of that. Paola’s response forced Brunetti to realize that he could not, even to himself, explain what so disturbed him. This man had passed through life without having left a trace of himself save in the memories of the few people who had seen him: Brunetti couldn’t even say they had known him. He thought of that conundrum posed in his first class in logic: if a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it fall, does it make a noise?

Is a human life defined by contacts with other people? If, as Brunetti believed, people lived on only in the minds of the people who knew them and remembered them, then Davide Cavanella’s existence had indeed been a miserable one, and it would cease with his mother’s death.

He looked at the portraits again. It had always bothered him that no one knew who the woman was, whether she was an aunt removed by many generations or the mother of someone who had married into the family. The portrait had been in the attic of Palazzo Falier, and Paola had taken it to her room when she was an adolescent but had failed to find anyone in the family who had even the vaguest idea of who the woman might be; nor was there any record of the painting.

Brunetti had also failed with the man he thought of as his naval commander. Even though he wore a uniform jacket, Brunetti had never so much as managed to identify the man’s nationality. The bird had finally been identified by an ornithologist friend of Paola’s, who told them it was a South American Ruff, whatever that was.

He got to his feet, realizing now how hungry he was and willing to scavenge lunch from whatever he found in the refrigerator.