Unto Us a Son Is Given

by Donna Leon

  Slowly, a grey penumbra slipped into the room from the lights on the riva below, faintly illuminating the man and the objects in the room. The man leaned back in his chair and raised his arms above his head, grabbing one wrist with the other hand. He waved his arms from side to side a few times, freed his wrist and put his hands on the arms of his chair. He pushed himself to his feet, reached for the newspaper but pulled his hand back and did not pick it up. He moved towards the door and reached for the handle. A flash of light cut into the room as the door to the corridor opened. The man walked through the door and pulled it closed.

  8

  Brunetti walked home the usual way, through Campo SS. Giovanni e Paolo, Santa Marina, and then over the Rialto Bridge. Without thinking, he turned at the bottom of the bridge so that he could walk along Riva del Vin and then cut through San Silvestro. Although his feet recognized the way he was going, his mind paid little attention and let them do what they chose, sure they’d bring the rest of him home.

  At the bottom of the steps to their apartment, he gave no thought to mineral water and started up. It was only on the third landing, when he saw four bottles lined up beside the door of the Nicchettis’ apartment, that Brunetti realized he’d walked home pretty much in a fog.

  He bent and grabbed two bottles in each hand and continued up to his own apartment. Outside the door, he was still so distracted that he had to stop and consider for a moment what he had to do with the bottles before he could reach his keys. He set them down, opened the door. He picked up the bottles and backed into the apartment. Setting the bottles on the floor, he shut the door, then picked them up again and took them into the kitchen. The counter seemed a good enough place for them.

  He found an open bottle of Pinot Grigio in the refrigerator and poured himself a glass. He took it with him into the living room, leaving the uncorked bottle next to the water bottles on the counter. He sat on the sofa, pulled a cushion behind his back, stretched out his legs and placed his feet on the low table in front of him.

  He had intentionally left the papers Signorina Elettra had given him in the office, wanting to force himself to remember what he’d read, thinking that the most important events would come to his memory first. As he sat there, allowing himself to relax, the information in the report lined up and started to settle into his memory.

  The first fact to slip in was the most surprising: when Gonzalo was in his early twenties, his father, the owner of the hat factory, had taken out a page in the local newspaper to declare that Gonzalo was no longer to be considered his son. They did not live in Madrid, but in a medium-sized town in the North, which his family had more or less ruled for centuries. Gonzalo was first in line to succeed his father as head of the family, owner of the factory, and Viscount of … Brunetti could no longer remember the name of the place. The announcement, a copy of which was in the file, made it clear that something called the Deputation of Grandes of Something had drummed Gonzalo out of the club.

  Because no mention was made in the document of a reason, the choice was open; Brunetti put his chips down on politics or sodomy. Spain in the late Fifties: wealthy conservative family, Francoists. It certainly wasn’t because Gonzalo was trapping goldfinches.

  Being disowned probably spurred Gonzalo to seek success, and fortune, on his own, and Signorina Elettra had managed to catch glimpses of him along the way. He set out for the Promised Land and found it in Argentina, where he became a farmer, then a rancher, then an exporter of beef, then a millionaire. Signorina Elettra had found no evidence that he was involved in politics in any way while he was there: he had his cows, and that seemed to be enough. Then, in the late Sixties, in what seemed an act of voluntary exile, he packed up and moved to Chile, began farming again, avoided politics, stayed through the first year of the Pinochet regime, and returned to Spain in the mid-Seventies.

  His father had died some years before, but Gonzalo had apparently made no claim to the family business. Instead, he opened a gallery in Madrid, specializing in pre-Colombian art, and within a few years had other galleries in Paris, Venice, and London.

  Brunetti gazed through the opening between his upraised feet. The day’s light was long gone, but he could see rectangles of light and, off in the distance, the bell tower: live on an upper floor, and you saw it from most parts of the city. Heard it, too.

  He finished the wine and leaned forward to set the glass on the table, then went back to considering the official evidence that various bureaucracies had accumulated about Gonzalo as he made his way through the world and through the years.

  The purchase of his apartment in Venice, where he apparently still lived alone, had been registered in the Ufficio Catasto, more than twenty years before and at a price that would today cause anyone searching for an apartment a convulsion of envy. Brunetti knew enough about buying a house to know that the price declared on the official documents was perhaps half the price Gonzalo had paid, but even if it had cost three times what had been declared, it was still a bargain.

  The copies of the permissions for the restoration that Signorina Elettra had found in various offices suggested that the low price reflected the condition into which the apartment had fallen. The list of permissions for building work was impressive: new roof and windows, heating system, new electrical system, twenty centimetres of insulation under the roof, as well as three bathrooms and the reconstruction of three walls.

  Paola had once remarked that a home was merely a hole in the ground, at the side of which the owner stood, while a deep voice from the pit called up, ‘Give me Euros, dinars, francs, krone, yen, dollars, ducats, your first-born son, blood. Give me everything.’ She was right, he thought.

  The papers Signorina Elettra had managed to obtain spoke only of the type and extent of the renovations, not of their cost, nor of the inevitable increases in cost. The apartment was declared ‘abitabile’ two years and four months after the permissions were granted, six years and three months after they were first requested. Had Oblomov worked in the office of building permits? Brunetti wondered.

  In the first year of this century, Gonzalo retired from the art business: Vanity Fair, among other magazines, carried a story about the party he gave to celebrate his retirement; the issue contained photos of the parties at all three galleries. Brunetti, when he’d looked at copies Signorina Elettra had made of the articles, had been surprised to recognize some of the guests: a rock star and a football player in Paris, and a politician and his actress wife at the party in London. He had once arrested the lawyer, though not his wife, who appeared at the party in Venice.

  Two of the articles reported that Gonzalo had sold his galleries and client list to a famous auction house for an undisclosed sum. Interviewed at the party in Venice – the one he had chosen to attend – he said he planned to spend his retirement going to museums to see the paintings and objects he had never had enough time to really study. He wished the new owners well and said that he would certainly work with them as a consultant in the next year.

  And then almost nothing. Mention was never made of anything he might have done for the new owners. His photo appeared a few times in magazines like Chi and Gente, but as time passed, the photos grew fewer and smaller and moved farther towards the back of the magazines. When Brunetti thought about the photos that accompanied the articles, it seemed to him that Gonzalo had grown not only older, but paler and less vibrant.

  This, Brunetti knew, was what happened to people who retired. Like photos left too long on the wall, their colours began to fade. Hair followed life and began to grow dim, the brightness of their eyes diminished. A strong jawline became harder to see; skin dried and grew more fragile. They remained the same people, but they began to disappear. Certainly, others no longer noticed them, nor what they wore nor what they said or did. They were there, hanging suspended, washed out and considered useless, trapped behind the glass of age. Dust gathered on the glass, and one day they weren’t there on the wall among the other fading photos, and soon aft
er that people began to forget what they looked like or what they had said.

  ‘Oh, how very clever you are,’ Brunetti said to himself. He got to his feet and went into the bedroom to change for Lodo’s dinner.

  Lodovico Costantini, as well as being one of Conte Orazio’s lawyers, was also his friend and so, by something resembling the law of inheritance, he was Paola’s friend, as well. The same law made him well disposed towards Brunetti by right of marriage. Lodo welcomed Brunetti warmly and told him that Paola was already in the salone: she’d come directly from the University, where the English Literature faculty had held its yearly meeting to decide who would administer the oral exams at the end of the semester.

  When he entered the large and too brightly frescoed salone, Brunetti looked for Paola among the people in the room. He nodded to a few familiar faces, bowed to kiss the hand of Lodo’s sister-in-law, and then finally saw Paola speaking to a man he did not recognize, a glass of champagne in her hand.

  Because the man was at least a decade younger and not unattractive, Brunetti put his arm around Paola’s shoulders as he reached them and kissed the side of her forehead. She leaned closer to him for an instant, enough to acknowledge his kiss, and said, ‘Ah, Guido, I’d like you to meet Filippo Longo. He’s a colleague of Lodo. He’s here for a hearing tomorrow: he was just telling me about it.’

  While Paola was speaking, the other man had taken a flute of sparking wine from a tray offered by a passing waiter and handed it to Brunetti, who nodded his thanks. Longo was thick: neck and chest and even his wrists, emerging from the sleeves of his jacket, seemed covered with an extra layer of muscle. His face, in contrast, was delicate and fine-boned. The effect was like seeing a Greek statue with the head of Apollo and the body of a bear.

  ‘What sort of hearing, if I might ask?’ Brunetti inquired and sipped at the wine, which was exceptionally good.

  ‘The worst sort,’ Longo said in the kind of voice a chest that size would produce: a bass baritone with a reverberation a singer would envy. ‘Inheritance.’ He shook his head and gave a theatrical shiver with his entire body. ‘The hearings are terrible.’ But then he grinned and added, ‘It’s my speciality, so please understand that I’m describing, not complaining.’

  Brunetti asked, ‘Why are they the worst?’

  Longo tilted his head and looked off behind Brunetti’s. ‘Because things are never what they seem and often not what your client tells you they are.’ He paused before continuing, as if trying to think of a way to explain exactly how terrible these cases were. He nodded. ‘Yes, that’s it. You think your client is being cheated by their siblings or their children or by the housekeeper of the person whose will they’re fighting about, and you think they do this because they honestly believe in all good faith that they really have a right to more money or an apartment, or their mother’s diamonds.’

  The lawyer sipped at his wine, and Brunetti thought how good this man would be at oral arguments: he was a man who knew how to use a pause.

  ‘But what they’re really doing is re-fighting childhood battles, getting even for old rancour, and they don’t care in the least about the objects or the money, only about spiting someone who hurt their feelings half a century ago.’ He took another sip and then said, voice lower and slower, and dire as a funeral cortège: ‘The tragedy is that they will never realize this.’

  Before the lawyer could say anything more, a different waiter came to the door and announced to the room, ‘Signori, la cena è servita.’

  It was then, as the people in the room looked around for places to set their glasses, that Brunetti saw Gonzalo. At first Brunetti didn’t recognize him because this Gonzalo was at least ten centimetres shorter than Gonzalo was supposed to be. And his hair, once wiry and pugnacious, pushing itself where it wanted to go, lay limply on his skull, not quite succeeding in covering the patches of pink skin beneath.

  The older man moved towards the door, his head sunk forward tiredly. At a certain point he must have remembered where he was, because he pulled himself up straight. He walked to the table and moved behind the chairs, glancing at the name cards that stood in front of each place. As Brunetti watched, Gonzalo reached the end, crossed behind the single chair at the head of the table, and started slowly down the other side, looking at the cards propped against the plates.

  He found his place, to the right of the host, Lodo. He placed both hands on the back of his chair, not bothering to hide the fact that he needed its help. To his right, Lodo’s sister-in-law, seeing this, slipped into her chair and patted his to invite Gonzalo to sit. He lowered himself into the chair, one hand braced on the table, and turned to thank her, then responded to something she said.

  Brunetti, who was sitting in the seat farthest from him, on the opposite side, had his view of Gonzalo blocked by one of two enormous bouquets of gladioli that stood in the centre of the table.

  On Brunetti’s right sat Lodo’s daughter, Margherita, who had studied law at Ca’ Foscari a few years after him and whom he considered one of his legal friends. On her other side was Paola, to whose right sat the director of a film festival in Tuscany, whom she’d met when he delivered a series of lectures at the University.

  The two seats opposite Brunetti and Margherita were empty, but just as the door from the kitchen opened to admit the waiters bringing the food, a very young woman slipped into the seat opposite Brunetti and turned to Lodo’s wife at the head of the table opposite her husband, saying, ‘Scusa, Nonna.’ After that she sat with her head bowed until Brunetti exclaimed, ‘Good heavens, you’re Sandra. I haven’t seen you since you were about as high as this table, and now you’re a beautiful young woman.’ She raised her head and smiled across at him, then looked around the table to see who else was there.

  The first course, an antipasto di mare, was served with a particularly good Ribolla Gialla Brunetti remembered having had here a few years before. In response to his question about what she was working on, Lodo’s daughter said she was currently representing the family of a worker who had died in an accident at the port of Marghera: tired after climbing up six floors of scaffolding, he had paused to lean against the wall. But it was not a wall, only a piece of white cloth draped between two upright beams, and he had fallen six floors and died on the spot.

  While she was telling him this, Brunetti heard voices behind him and turned his head to see what was happening. A clean-shaven man in a dark grey suit was speaking in a low voice to one of the waiters, who listened for a few seconds, head lowered to hear him. The waiter nodded and led the man around the table to the empty seat two places to Gonzalo’s right, directly opposite Margherita. He sat down quickly and muttered something that must have been an apology to the table at large. What Brunetti was beginning to think of as The Great Wall of Flowers blocked part of the man’s face, but Brunetti could see enough to tell that he was dark-haired and handsome: large, dark eyes and curly hair cut very short. He spoke to Lodo’s sister-in-law on his left, then to Sandra, both of whom nodded and smiled easily in return.

  As the man continued his conversation with Sandra, Brunetti saw Gonzalo place his palms on either side of his plate and start to rise, but almost immediately he relaxed back into his chair and picked up his knife and fork. He looked at his plate, his face without expression. Even through the obstacle of the flowers, Brunetti saw the tension in it. Gonzalo leaned forward and looked to his right, at the man on the opposite side of the older woman. ‘Buonasera,’ Gonzalo said, still looking towards the newly seated man. A waiter was clearing the plate from in front of Margherita, who stopped speaking while he did it. Gonzalo’s voice was tentative, and Brunetti turned away from the sound of it.

  The younger man turned towards Gonzalo and met his glance. Three seconds passed – Brunetti counted them – before he nodded and directed a blazing smile at the older man.

  ‘Sorry I’m late,’ he said, as if Gonzalo were the host and thus the person who deserved an apology for his lateness.

  The d
ecades Brunetti had spent observing and pondering human behaviour made him consider this brief exchange. The apology demanded a response, and the only response the younger man expected – Brunetti was certain – was submission, and that could be acknowledged only by the other person saying that the lateness didn’t matter in the least.

  Gonzalo smiled from a face that was relaxed and renewed. ‘So long as you got here,’ he said and picked up his fork.

  The other man’s laugh brought an answering smile to Gonzalo’s face. As Brunetti watched Gonzalo eat, he saw him sit up straighter; his shoulders seemed to better fill his jacket, and his voice lost all sign of age and grew deep and sonorous, as Brunetti remembered it had once been.

  He and the younger man did not speak directly to one another more than a few times during the rest of the meal, but the way they spoke left no question that there was a bond between them. Brunetti’s view of both was obstructed by the flowers, but he saw how Gonzalo inclined his head towards the other man whenever they spoke, although the other did not bother to turn to catch Gonzalo’s eye when he answered.

  Margherita, seeing how little interest Brunetti took in her details of evidence and witness statements, turned and spoke to Paola for a while.

  The waiter appeared at Margherita’s left and served something that Brunetti didn’t bother to glance at. He heard the play of emotions in Margherita’s voice as she repeated to Paola her description of the dead worker’s family, but he paid far more attention to the play of emotions on the portion of Gonzalo’s face he could see as the older man leaned forward and looked down the table towards the younger man.

  Conversation on both sides of the table, from what Brunetti was able to hear, was chiefly about films, the topic no doubt originated by the director of the festival. Brunetti believed this topic prevailed at so many dinners because, in recent years, it had become increasingly dangerous to discuss politics or immigration or, indeed, almost any major topic; even comments on the politics in neighbouring countries could lead to trouble. Brunetti had nothing to contribute to a discussion of cinema because he had little free time and begrudged the watching of movies. Those few times he was cajoled into going, he invariably returned home grumbling about the waste of time: he could have been reading.