Painting Death

by Tim Parks

  3) Above all, I need your help over my legal situation. The single thing most likely to bring about a rapid end to my imprisonment would be the identification of the real murderer. I am convinced that Professor Zolla, an art historian who works at Castelvecchio, and two young Libyans (‘friends’ of the murdered man) Samira and Tarik Al Zuwaid, who live at Via Dietro San Zeno 21, apartment 5, know more about the death than they have told the police. Perhaps you and your many Hellas friends could keep an eye on those Libyans. Since Zolla is also Massimina’s art history professor at the university and since he knew her and she professed privately to me to have a crush on him, there is just a chance that he has information as to her whereabouts. I leave it to you to decide how to proceed.

  So, Mauro, that is the situation. You are being asked to grow up rather quickly. I can only pray that you will show the same courage and wisdom now that you showed in the witness box at your trial. I also beg you to close your ears and eyes to all the ludicrous speculation and accusations that are no doubt being made against me in the press. Be assured that they have no foundation.

  Your much maligned father,

  Morris

  Sorry, I broke off for the afternoon there, Carla. Sheer depression. Sometimes I feel I should just let them condemn me to however many years it will be and the hell with it. But enough self-pity. Onward. So, the morning after the funeral, flying back to Italy, I felt determined to establish better relations with my children and to be kinder and more attentive to Antonella. Come hell or high water, Mauro must be saved from gaol, I thought, and given his chance in Fratelli Trevisan. I would not let the family I have struggled for all these years go to pieces. As for the email I had received from Volpi, I decided to ignore it and continue as before. The museum needed my sponsorship. All the trustees had stressed their support for the Painting Death initiative. I would simply smile at Volpi as if pretending not to have noticed an unpleasant smell.

  Speaking of which, Carla—I know you’ll forgive me—the diet here, at least for the vegetarians amongst us, is truly awful. All I get is beans. Raw, boiled, baked, fried. No wonder I’m suffering from wind. Is there anything you can do to help? Are prison systems sensitive to lawyer’s complaints?

  I flew back from England just in time to see my son cross-questioned by the prosecution. The big surprise, as you can imagine, was the presence of the mayor. He was in jeans and an old sweater, looking more like a defendant than the town’s first citizen; all the same I thought it was a generous gesture on his part, obviously undertaken with the intent of putting political pressure on the judge, showing his willingness to defend a citizen of Verona against the brutal Brescia police.

  I took my seat between Massimina and Antonella and tried to hold my wife’s hand to comfort her, but she seemed perfectly relaxed, chatting away to Don Lorenzo on the other side of her about the Sunday flower arrangements.

  ‘Mauro Dackwert, do you accept,’ the prosecutor began, ‘that on the evening of so and so on the corner of so and so and so and so in the town of Brescia, in the company of etc., etc., etc., you attacked six policemen identified as etc., etc., etc.?’

  My son pronounced an emphatic no. I was thrilled. He has decided to lie, I thought. He has a chance! However, when the prosecutor then read out the boy’s original statement confessing that he had ‘purposefully and deliberately attacked the police’ and asked him if this ‘no’ meant he was retracting that confession, my son replied:

  ‘Not at all, but you have taken the word “attacked” out of context. You forget that we boys, all seventeen years of age, were attacked first by twenty and more heavily armed grown men. If you repeat the question with the word “counter-attacked” I will reply in the affirmative.’

  I must say, mad as it was, I was rather impressed. Perhaps Tonbridge had had some positive effect after all.

  ‘Counter-attack is considered a legitimate form of defence by the United Nations,’ Mauro added.

  As you can imagine the prosecuting lawyer was taken aback. He had been expecting a cretin, had reckoned without the Duckworth gene(ious). The mayor actually clapped out loud. I hadn’t realised clapping was permissible in a court of law.

  ‘Is it or is it not true that you and your fellow thugs were armed with sticks?’

  Mauro seemed to think for a moment. He had slipped off his jacket, probably he was sweating, and you could see his thick shoulders and bull neck. He said coolly. ‘I am not a thug and do not keep company with thugs.’

  Now he really has decided to lie, I thought.

  ‘Is it true that you and . . . bla bla bla . . . were armed with sticks?’

  The boy actually smiled. ‘I wonder if the court is aware that regulations for flag-bearing poles brought into football stadiums require that they be no longer than one metre and be made from flexible polythene weighing no more than eighty grams.’

  ‘Mauro Dackwerth please limit yourself to answering the question. Were you and your companions armed with sticks, or not?’

  ‘I’m sorry, but in that case I need a definition of the word “sticks.” Meantime, I take the word “armed” to be ironic. As in, “armed with a toothbrush.”’

  There was some laughter in court. The lawyer appealed to the three presiding judges, a man and two women. They consulted. The middle judge, an elderly man in a red gown eventually said: ‘Avvocato Falletti, I think it has been established that the defendants were carrying flexible polythene poles intended for flag waving and weighing eighty grams. Whether we refer to them as sticks or not is beside the point.’

  ‘Grazie, Signor Giudice.’ The prosecuting magistrate cleared his throat. He didn’t seem as upset as you might have expected by this lack of judicial support. ‘Is it true,’ he continued, ‘that you and your fellow Hellas Verona “brigades” so called—I hope you are not going to deny that you are a member of the brigades, Signor Duckworth—share a deep hatred of the police?’

  ‘I am proud to be a Hellas fan,’ Mauro said very seriously. ‘There is no formal membership of the brigades, but we are a tight-knit community with a strict code of honour. We do not hate the police. But we reserve the right to defend ourselves and counter-attack against discrimination and violence whatever quarter they may come from.’

  ‘Alé !’ the mayor called out loud.

  ‘Brescia, Bergamo and Vicenza in particular,’ Mauro added.

  ‘Alé !’ repeated the mayor.

  There was a general murmur of approval. What I was thinking was this: if my son was capable of such lucidity and articulation, such effective timing too, and even irony, why had he never bothered to display these qualities in my presence? Why hadn’t he joined the debating society at Tonbridge? Antonella was smiling quietly. It was as if she were watching something unfold exactly as she had expected. Massimina glanced up, shook her head and went back to her texting.

  But now I had missed some of the questioning.

  ‘If we had intended to do serious harm,’ Mauro was saying, ‘we could have armed ourselves with stones, or bottles, could we not? Our plan was just to show them they hadn’t intimidated us with the beating they gave us as we left the stadium. Two of our friends had been taken to hospital. We felt we would be letting them down if we didn’t make some statement.’

  It was a tough story to swallow, but the boy did have a chubby adolescent charm about him. My own feeling was that the prosecuting magistrate was incompetent. He kept leaving long spaces between questions, reading through his notes as if he’d never seen them before. It was during one of these embarrassing pauses that I noticed that the main presiding judge had red hair. Oh, not flaming red like Mauro’s. More a sort of coppery brown. But curly too. I turned to Antonella and saw she was watching with shining eyes. However, since, from where we were sitting, Mauro in the witness box and the judge on the dais fell into the same rising line of vision, it was impossible to tell who she was looking at, the boy or the man, both red-haired.

  But enough. I really am wasting your time now. The
more I write the more I realise I am paranoid, deeply paranoid. It was probably inevitable that the little hooligans would be let off with a caution. Elections were imminent and the mayor needed to grab some xenophobic consensus by painting the picture of a Verona besieged by the malice of jealous neighbours. Hence my honorary citizenship. The trial of these stupid kids fitted his plans perfectly. Two of the other boys turned out to be sons of a leading banker and a top urologist (a useful man for an ageing elite). Why should the judges make themselves unpopular? There was probably never any doubt the young thugs would win their case, and certainly no need for some kind of Jesuit conspiracy to fling open the prison doors. Which doesn’t mean there wasn’t a Jesuit conspiracy. The only downside to an acquittal was that my son had been somewhat encouraged in a life of lawlessness. After consultation with Antonella I decided to act at once to get him involved in the company, if only to keep him out of trouble. I urged him to accept a worker’s position full-time in our bottling factory and report back to me after a month with ten cost-free measures to improve productivity.

  But I have wearied you and you are eager to hear about the events leading up to my discovery of the body.

  To Signora Antonella Trevisan

  Carissima Anto, mio amore,

  My heart bleeds. It is only now that I’ve been away from you for so long, cara, that I appreciate how much I count on you for companionship and wisdom. Forgive me if I have been a less than attentive husband in recent years. There is nothing like a spell of enforced loneliness and silence to alert one to one’s multitudinous shortcomings. As for the legal situation, I have a good idea who might be responsible for the murder, but as long as I’m in prison, what can I do? Paradoxically I cannot get it out of my head that all this has happened to us because we have been too good for too long. Do you know what I mean? We have, as it were, defied the gods with our goodness. Perhaps a little transgression on our part would have spared us this ordeal. It’s a strange thought. Such is the effect of solitary confinement.

  Has there been no news at all of Massimina? When the magistrates start allowing it, please visit at once. I miss your eyes and the reassuring purr of your voice.

  Do give my regards to Stan. Hopefully he is offering you some support through this difficult time. Has he made any progress with his search for Forbes? I’m eager to hear of any new details.

  Un abbraccio appassionato,

  Your Morris

  PS, trouble with constipation and haemorrhoids again. The food is awful and I am not getting enough exercise. I shall take advice about suing for damages when they let me out.

  Here we go then, Carla. The final helter-skelter.

  With the trial over and having spent a couple of days in Fratelli Trevisan and on various construction sites, I went to see Zolla to discuss progress with the loans for the show. Judging from the faces of the museum staff as I walked through the offices, they had no notion that my role had changed in any way. I was admitted at once to Zolla’s office, he rose and shook my hand and commiserated me on the tragic loss of my father. I asked him how the loan requests were coming on and he said the confirmations had been flowing in ‘theeck and faster.’ He seemed completely unaware of the email Volpi had written to me.

  We sat down to a discussion of which paintings should go where and how exactly the space should be divided and designed. The walls might be re-clad in a satiny black, I thought, to have the strong red pigments of the blood stand out. Or perhaps we could have different cladding for different sections in line with the themes they featured, fratricide, infanticide, uxoricide. I must say I found it all very exciting to be working on the details of the show at last. I asked him if I could move a painting we were planning to use from a church in San Briccio into the museum storeroom because the storage situation in San Briccio was primitive to say the least, and he said, why not. (This is an important detail, Carla!)

  As I was leaving, Zolla said, ‘About your daughter.’

  Well, I must admit that the combination of my father’s funeral and Mauro’s trial had rather led me to take my eye off the ball as far as Massimina was concerned.

  ‘The fact is that she hasn’t been present at any classes since Christmas. I just wanted to be sure that you were aware of that.’

  He spoke as if to excuse himself.

  ‘Naturally I was aware that she is mainly at home, these days,’ I said, ‘though she appears to be in constant communication with the world, via her iPhone.’ I tried to make the remark as pointed as I could.

  ‘It’s a plague,’ Zolla agreed. ‘Students text all the time during the lessons.’

  ‘Would you have any idea why she is not coming to lessons?’ I asked him. ‘Especially since she spoke so, er, enthusiastically about you.’

  Zolla shook his head. ‘These young people are very unpredictable. With their love lives and so on.’

  ‘And so on?’ I asked him what he meant.

  ‘They fall in love,’ he sighed. ‘And they fall out of love. They take it badly perhaps and lose heart.’

  Was it an admission?

  Then he added: ‘Why don’t you tell her to come and discuss the matter with me in my tutorial hours. Tuesdays at 4.30. Perhaps I can help.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I told him. ‘I’ll do that.’

  Was the man now trying to use me as a go-between to patch up an affair that she had wisely pulled out of, but at the expense of her university career? I decided to confront the matter head on with Massimina. However, when I went to dinner that evening I found that we had a guest, Stan Albertini.

  I must explain in a few words my relationship with Stan. Stan was the sort of unofficial leader of an ‘alternative’ English-speaking hippy community in Verona back in the eighties when I arrived and briefly courted Massimina Trevisan before her unhappy disappearance. Later, when I was married to Paola Trevisan, he was teaching English privately to Antonella and her then husband, sadly deceased of course. Stan also became close friends with a man called Michael Forbes, an Old Etonian whom I had helped to set up a summer school in the Valpolicella for English public-school boys. Forbes was a good amateur painter and after the school was closed I kept him alive financially by commissioning copies of paintings from him. Then some six years ago, Forbes left, leaving no contact details. However, it turned out that Stan, who had long since returned to the USA, had been keeping up a regular correspondence with Forbes, and having taken an early pension he came back to Italy shortly before Christmas, in part, it seems, to look up Forbes. He was so upset not finding him, particularly as he’d lent him a considerable sum of money, that he had insisted on reporting him as missing to the police.

  Forgive me, Carla, but once again I’m having difficulty keeping my account short and to the point. One of the problems is working on paper. If I had my computer here I could do a bit of editing. Instead I’m condemned to scribbling in these school exercise books. Never mind. The fact is that the very evening I had planned to speak to Massimina, Stan came over to complain that in the month since he’d reported Forbes’s disappearance the police had done—surprise surprise—absolutely nothing. He wanted to ask us if we knew anyone who could pull a string or two.

  A visitor at table meant meat for dinner, which in turn meant the children were present. Mauro and Massimina love their steak and both seemed extremely pleased to see Stan. They’re too young to appreciate how superficial he is. He cultivates an easy Californian manner and cracks lots of innocuous little jokes in his atrocious Italian, sexual innuendos more often than not. They love it. I notice they never correct him the way they do me. After a third or fourth glass of wine, he started to tell us he was convinced the police knew more than they let on but wouldn’t take action because Forbes had been implicated, along with various members of the cloth, in molesting little boys.

  ‘Italy is a can of worms,’ he announced. ‘I’m glad I didn’t stay.’

  ‘It’s not a country for faint hearts,’ I told him. I really couldn’t understand why he w
as pursuing the matter so insistently. I had already told him that if he was out of pocket over the matter, I was willing to come to his assistance.

  Antonella was just saying it was too easy to imagine all priests were paedophiles, when who should hobble into the room but our spiritual adviser, Don Lorenzo. On hearing what we were talking about he immediately seemed troubled; he went white in fact. We had to help him to the sofa and find some quality port. Finally he said that given the kind of confession he had heard from Forbes shortly before his disappearance, he was sure Stan had done the right thing going to the police. ‘Though it was wrong,’ he added, ‘to imagine it had anything to do with priests.’

  For my own part, I think if confessions are to be confidential, then frankly they should be so one hundred per cent, without the confessor tossing out hints and titbits left and right. I don’t know why—and again, you will see now the point in my telling you this—but at that moment, hearing Don Lorenzo reflecting that Stan had done well to go to the police, I had a blisteringly clear foreboding that very soon I would be arrested for murder. It’s crazy isn’t it, but whatever goes wrong I feel that people are always going to point the finger at me. This is what Italy has done to me, Carla. It must be a syndrome.

  Anyway, I was so paralysed by all this unpleasantness, and frankly rather disgusted with the overheated way my children were chattering about these deeply distasteful matters as if they were the merest entertainment, that I forgot to pursue the question of Zolla with Massimina and by the time I remembered she and Mauro had been spirited off by our Californian calamity to listen to live music in some hip/cool pub he’d discovered in, of all miserable places, the sad suburb of Chievo—Stan was always one for the music scene, f lowers, love, dope and multiple partners (perhaps he had more in common with Forbes than he lets on). After the noisy brigade departed I remember Antonella enthusing to Don Lorenzo, who still seemed extremely troubled, how nice it was to see Mimi in such a good mood again; she must invite old Stan more often, she said. He had really cheered the girl up.