Donna Leon - The Golden Egg

Lucrezia’s mouth put on a smile. ‘My father bought a lot of things,’ she said, listened to the echo of her own words, and smiled again, but this smile, though real, was not pretty. She waved her hands at the almost empty shelves, and Brunetti looked at them admiringly. ‘So your father might have worked for him,’ she concluded, speaking as though the words were somehow meaningful and related to their previous conversation.

Brunetti repeated the smile that greets good times recalled. ‘He said your father was always very generous to him, and to the men who worked with him,’ Brunetti invented. Generosity was so appealing that everyone wanted it to be attributed to them, unlike a sense of justice or probity: those unwieldy, uncomfortable virtues.

‘Oh, he was very generous, my father,’ she said so slyly that Brunetti was left feeling they were not having the same conversation or not talking about the same thing.

‘That’s dangerous, too,’ Griffoni said with sibylline indifference. ‘Generosity.’ She followed this with a half-mocking snort.

Lucrezia started, as though she had no idea where that voice could be coming from. She turned the vague attention of her eyes towards Griffoni, but she had gone still again. Lucrezia’s confusion splashed across her face. Then, surprising them both, she said, ‘It was my mother who wasn’t generous.’ Her eyes moved to the shelves of the bookcase and then, as if the echo of her words had spent time there before coming back to her, suddenly slapped her hand across her mouth. ‘No. That’s not right. She was good. She made us say the rosary. Every night, before we went to bed, we had to kneel down with her and say the rosary: Monday the Joyful Mysteries, Tuesday the Sorrowful Mysteries, Wednesday the Glorious Mysteries.’ She closed her eyes and brought her hands together, as though holding the beads.

‘The Presentation of Jesus in the Temple,’ she said in an entirely different voice, solemn, deep, reverent. ‘Fruit of the Mystery: Purity. Obedience.’ Brunetti watched her hands move as the invisible beads slowly passed through her fingers. Her lips moved. It looked to Brunetti as if she were repeating the last two words.

In the same type of voice, falling into the same rhythmic incantation, Griffoni said, ‘Better to think of the Crucifixion, Signora. Fruit of the Mystery: Salvation, Forgiveness.’ The hair rose on the back of Brunetti’s neck, and he thought of her duplication of Signorina Elettra’s voice.

Lucrezia’s eyes opened slowly and she looked across at Griffoni, with a softer smile. ‘My mother taught us obedience.’ Her smile dimmed, and she said, ‘She taught it to my father, too.’

She turned her attention to Brunetti and, in an entirely normal voice, said, ‘People called him the King of Copper, I know. But it was my mother who ruled, not him.’

Brunetti was overwhelmed by fear of suffocation, trapped in a world of distorted femininity: Griffoni appeared to have taken leave of her senses and fallen into a religious trance, while the Lembo woman summoned up the spirits of her dead parents, and both of them recited the names of the decades of the rosary he had not

heard since he was a boy, staying with his grandparents and listening to the old women as they fell to their devotions.

He got to his feet and went to the nearest window and pulled it open. Cold air swept into the room. Lucrezia

did not notice, but Griffoni gave him a sharp look and jerked her head to the side, commanding him to close the window. He did so but remained beside it. From there, he could see both of them, but he turned away and looked to the north, where he saw the bell tower of Santo Stefano looking even more crooked than from the ground. ‘Everything tilts but nothing falls,’ he had heard his fellow Venetians say all his life.

Behind him their voices murmured: Brunetti had no idea whether it was the rosary they were saying or whether one of them was confessing to the other. He had not seen, nor had he heard, anything pass between the two women, but he had felt the moment when the rosary had united them in spirit. The memory of that look from Griffoni, however, sent him cringing away from the fraudulence of whatever union had been struck between them while leaving him eager for any advantage it would provide.

The light had diminished across the city while they had been inside. The tower of Santo Stefano was outlined against darkness only by the lights that glowed up from around it. Luminous and heaven-reaching, the tower was out of true and looked as though it would soon collapse: of how many of us could the same thing be said? Brunetti wondered.

Their voices drifted across him like smoke; Brunetti was unable to turn to look at the women and unwilling to know what they were saying: let them swap the names of the decades back and forth, tell each other what virtues they encouraged, but keep him free of it.

Though he tried to block or filter the words, they continued to float past him: ‘Contempt of the World’, ‘Grace of a Happy Death’, ‘Desire for Holiness’, ‘Mortification’, ‘Purity’. Hadn’t they had that one already? Why this obsession with sexual purity? he asked himself. What a distorting way to look at life.

The voices droned on. Finally, unable to endure it, Brunetti turned and looked at them. Lucrezia Lembo’s head was pressed against the back of her chair, her face covered with her hands. Griffoni was leaning forward, speaking to her in a voice so low Brunetti could not hear it.

Something in him snapped at this grotesque religious theatre. ‘Griffoni,’ he said, so loudly that both women turned to him in alarm. ‘That’s enough.’

She knew better than to dispute this with him. She got to her feet, leaned down over Lucrezia, who uncovered her eyes and whispered to her. Griffoni nodded and reached out to touch her arm with her right hand.

Brunetti ignored them both and started for the door. He held it open for Griffoni, who gave the back of the other woman’s hand a few pats and came obediently to Brunetti’s side. Together they left; silently they walked down

the stairs and across the courtyard. Brunetti found the handle and opened the door. Together they stepped out into the narrow calle .

He resisted the urge to slam the door and turned to the left, toward the Accademia stop. Hearing a muffled noise behind him he turned to see Griffoni standing with her arm pressed against the front of the house on the other side of the calle . The night’s chill hit him as Griffoni took a step towards him, grabbed his arm, and fell against him. Without thinking, he wrapped his arm around her and tried to hold her upright. But she started to sink away from him, and he stepped up in front of her to wrap his other arm around her. Her head banged against his shoulder, and one arm slapped against his side.

There was a low barred window nearby, and he half carried, half pushed her towards it. He lowered her until she was sitting on the sill, leaning forward, her

head against his stomach. He crouched down, one hand bracing her against the bars, the other feeling for her pulse, though he had little idea of what he was supposed to

feel there.

Her head fell back and rested against the bars. Her eyes opened, and Brunetti watched her confusion as she saw the wall of the building on the other side of the calle . Suddenly she was aware of him and pulled away, backing against the bars. Then she recognized him, and her face relaxed.

‘What happened?’ she asked and raised a hand to wipe her eyes.

Brunetti relaxed minimally. ‘I think you fainted.’

‘I never faint,’ she said, managing to sound offended.

‘Perhaps it was a vision of the Madonna,’ Brunetti risked saying.