Drawing Conclusions

by Donna Leon

  ‘Rizzardi?’ the other man surprised Brunetti by asking.

  ‘Yes. Do you know him?’ Brunetti had not considered the possibility that this man’s title was a medical one.

  ‘I know of him. Or did, when I still worked. Solid man,’ he said. The doctor’s lips moved as he spoke, and his eyes paid careful attention to Brunetti, but the grooves in his cheeks remained motionless, and his expression was to be read only in his eyes.

  What he said of Rizzardi was both description and praise, pronounced in a voice that should not have been able to emerge from that form. The doctor closed his eyes again, and that simple act transformed him, subtracting the spirit and leaving in its place nothing more than that ravaged head and the sticks below it, under the covers.

  Not wanting to invade, Brunetti glanced away, but the window beside the bed gave out on a narrow calle and provided nothing more than a view of a wall and a shuttered window. He continued to look at them until the other man said, ‘Did you know her?’

  He looked back then, and saw animation and interest reborn. ‘No. Only her son. I was with him while Rizzardi …’ The sentence languished, Brunetti uncertain what to do with it.

  ‘He asked me to come here to speak to the sisters,’ Brunetti resumed. ‘He said his mother was happy when she came here. I took it upon myself, after I spoke to the Mother Superior, to try to speak to the people she was especially fond of.’

  ‘Did the son know our names?’ he asked, and Brunetti heard the surge of hope in his voice.

  He wanted to lie and tell the doctor that, yes, she had spoken to her son about the people she cared for most, but Brunetti couldn’t bring himself to do it. Instead, he said, ‘I don’t know. I decided to try to speak to you after I talked to the Mother Superior. She gave me your name.’

  The man in the bed turned his head aside when he heard this, surprising Brunetti with the motion. But his eyes did not close, and he did not repeat that complete disappearance of humanity Brunetti had observed.

  He turned back; his glance met Brunetti’s, and he asked in a level voice, ‘What is it you want to know?’

  Brunetti considered for a moment whether he should perhaps ask what the man meant. But Dottor Grandesso held his glance, and Brunetti saw that this was a man who had no time to waste. The expression, so often used as a cliché, came to him with stunning force. The doctor had an appointment, not with him, and not one that anyone wanted to keep, but there was no avoiding it.

  ‘I want to know if there is any reason a person might have wanted to do her an injury,’ Brunetti said. Hearing himself say it, he felt a sudden chill, as though he had been asked to put a coin in this man’s mouth to pay for his voyage to the other world or, worse, had given him some heavy burden to take with him.

  ‘If I were somehow able to call Rizzardi, would he tell me that she died of a heart attack?’ the doctor asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  Grandesso looked away from Brunetti, as if examining the shuttered window across the calle in search of what to say. ‘You’re not a religious man, are you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But were you raised believing?’

  ‘Yes,’ Brunetti had no choice but to admit.

  ‘Then you remember the feeling when you came out of confession – when you still believed in it, I mean – and you felt elevated – if that’s the right word – by being rid of your guilt and shame. The priest said the words, you said the prayers, and your soul was somehow clean again.’

  Brunetti nodded. Yes, he remembered it and was wise enough to be glad he had had the experience.

  The other man must have read Brunetti’s face, for he continued. ‘I know it sounds strange, but she had a capacity that reminded me of that. She’d listen to me. Just sit there and smile at me and sometimes hold my hand, and I’d tell her things I’ve never told anyone since my wife died.’ He disappeared behind closed eyes, and when he came back, he said, ‘And some things I never told my wife, I’m afraid. After that, she’d squeeze my hand, and I felt relieved at having been able, finally, to tell someone.’ The doctor tried to raise a hand to make some sort of gesture but managed to lift it only a few centimetres from the bed before it fell back. ‘She didn’t ask, never seemed curious in any prurient sense: maybe it was the stillness in her that made me want to tell her things. And she was never judgemental, never showed surprise or disapproval. All she did was sit there and listen.’

  Brunetti wanted to ask what he had told her but could not do it. He told himself it was respect for the doctor’s situation, but he knew that some sort of religious taboo prevented him from daring to break the seal of that confessional, at least in the presence of one of the speakers. Instead, he asked, ‘Do you think she listened to everyone the same way?’

  Something that might have been a smile flashed across the doctor’s face, but his mouth was too thin for it to register on his lips. ‘Do you mean do I think that everyone talked to her?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I don’t know. It would depend on the person. But you know how old people love to talk, and love most to talk about themselves. Ourselves.’

  He went on. ‘I’ve seen her with them, and I think most of them would talk to her freely. And if they thought she could actually forgive them, then …’ His voice trailed away.

  Brunetti could resist his curiosity no longer. ‘Did you?’

  He struggled to move his head, but when he failed to do that, he said, ‘No.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because, like you, Signore,’ the doctor said, and this time the smile did reach his lips, ‘I don’t believe in absolution.’

  17

  It suddenly occurred to Brunetti to wonder how this bedridden man had managed to see Signora Altavilla in the company of other people. ‘Is this something you observed, Dottore?’ he asked.

  The doctor was some time in answering him. ‘I haven’t always been like this,’ he replied simply, as if to declare that the time for explanations had run out, and fact was all he had time for now.

  Brunetti remained silent so long that the doctor said, ‘I think you’d be more comfortable if you sat.’ Brunetti pulled a straight-backed chair to the side of the bed and did as he was told.

  It was as if Grandesso, not Brunetti, had relaxed. His lids closed once, twice, but then they snapped open and he said, ‘I’ve sat near her when people have told her things they might better have kept to themselves,’ then, even before Brunetti could ask, he added, ‘Doctors are in the business of keeping secrets.’

  Smiling, Brunetti said, ‘I’d guess you’re good at that, Doctor.’

  Dottor Grandesso started to smile in return, but then his face twisted in a vice of pain; the tendons of his jaw pulsed a few times, and Brunetti thought he could hear his teeth grind, but he wasn’t sure. Tears emerged from the man’s eyes and ran down the sides of his face. Brunetti was pulled halfway out of his chair, uncertain whether to take the Doctor’s hand or to go for help, but then the other man’s face relaxed. His jaws unclenched and his mouth fell open; he gasped a few times, then grew calmer, though he still fought to pull in enough air to breathe.

  ‘Is there anything I can …’ Brunetti began.

  ‘No,’ he said between gasps. Then, ‘Don’t tell them. Please.’

  Brunetti shook his head, unable to respond.

  ‘No hospital,’ the doctor gasped. ‘It’s better here.’ His voice came in short spurts, punctuated by long breaths. He closed his eyes again, and this time his face relaxed and the tortured sound of his breathing quieted.

  For an instant, Brunetti feared that the man had died before his eyes, he helpless to prevent it; then he heard another of those long breaths, but softer. He sat motionless and watched until he was sure the doctor was asleep. As quietly as he could, Brunetti got to his feet and backed towards the door. He went into the corridor, leaving the door open so that the sleeping man could be seen.

  The corridor was empty; the clink of plates and the rushing sound of w
ater came from behind the closed door of the kitchen. Brunetti leaned against the wall. He put his head back until it touched the wall and stood like that for a few minutes.

  One of the dark-skinned novices emerged from the kitchen and headed in the other direction. Hearing her footsteps, Brunetti turned towards her. ‘Excuse me,’ he said and pushed himself away from the wall.

  She smiled when she saw him. ‘Sì, Signore?’ Then she asked, ‘How is he?’

  ‘Resting,’ Brunetti answered.

  Pleased to hear that, she started to turn away. Brunetti forced himself to ask, ‘Could you tell me where I’d find Signora Sartori?’, still uncertain how to address her. She wore the habit of a novice, so he could not call her ‘Suora’, and she had renounced the chance of being called ‘Signorina’.

  ‘Ah, I don’t know if she’s supposed to have visitors,’ she said, then added, sounding uneasy, ‘Only her husband visits her now. He says it will upset her to have other people in her room, and he doesn’t want her bothered.’ Brunetti wondered when ‘now’ had begun.

  ‘Ah,’ he said, giving voice to disappointment. ‘Signora Altavilla’s son asked me to try to speak to the people his mother was closest to and tell them how important they were to her,’ he explained with the easy smile of an old friend of the family. He watched her face for signs of belief or sympathy, and when he saw the first signs, he added, ‘He told me he was sure she would want them to know.’

  ‘In that case, I suppose it’s all right,’ she said. She allowed herself to smile, revealing gleaming white teeth, their perfection augmented by the contrast to her dark skin. Brunetti wondered how anyone could be ‘bothered’ by Signora Altavilla’s visits or how anyone could see them in this light. He gave no indication of his uncertainty, however, as the young woman asked him to follow her to Signora Sartori’s room.

  The door to this room was also open; she walked directly in without announcing either herself or the man who followed her. The woman he had seen eating with such solitary intensity now sat on a simple wooden chair in front of the room’s single window. She was staring at the shuttered window opposite, or perhaps at the wall surrounding it: her face was inert, and again Brunetti saw it in profile. The flash of lipstick was still the same glaring red and appeared newly applied.

  ‘Signora Sartori,’ the novice said. ‘I’ve brought you a visitor.’ The woman remained intent in her contemplation of the wall.

  ‘Signora Sartori,’ she tried again, ‘This gentleman’s come to speak to you.’ Still no response.

  There was a noise behind them, and when they turned they saw the other dark-skinned novice – the one Brunetti now thought of as the Toltec statue – who, careful to keep both hands hidden under her scapular, said, ‘Sister Giuditta needs your help in the kitchen.’ She gave Brunetti a nervous smile, uncertain whether she should say something to him, as well.

  At the news, the first novice pressed her hands together, glanced at Brunetti, then at her companion, then back to Signora Sartori. Brunetti puffed himself up with the air of casual command and said, ‘Fine, then. You go and speak to Suora Giuditta, and I’ll wait for you here.’ To show how patient he was, as well as to assert his intention to remain in the room, he looked around and chose to sit on a chair to the left of the door, a safe, declared distance from the woman at the window.

  In the face of this manifestation of male authority, both girls – for they were hardly more than that – nodded and left the room together, leaving him to Signora Sartori. Or her to him.

  He sat quietly, trying to sense how aware, or unaware, she was of his presence, and as time passed he began to suspect that she was as sensitive to his presence as he to hers. He let more time pass. Occasionally people walked past the door, but because Brunetti was sitting to the side of it, no one noticed that he was there. No one stopped to look in, nor did anyone come in to speak to Signora Sartori. After ten minutes or so Brunetti began to suspect that the novices had forgotten about him or perhaps assumed that he had left.

  He thought back to the tables in the dining room and his choice of seat. He had sat to Signora Cannata’s left, the seat closest to Signora Sartori. How easily she could have heard everything they said, especially in the silence left by the departure of the other two people. So intent had she been on her food that it had not occurred to him at the time that she might have been intent on anything else, though he had said little to Signora Cannata, certainly nothing to raise interest or arouse curiosity.

  The silence and the passing of time began to weigh on him, but he forced himself to remain both silent and still.

  Her voice, when it came, was rough, the voice of someone no longer accustomed to speech. ‘She was a good woman.’ How many times was Brunetti to hear this? he wondered. He had never questioned it, and nothing he had heard about her made him suspect that it was not true. Events, however, had placed Signora Altavilla beyond criticism, and so it now mattered little whether she had been a good person or not, or who maintained that she was.

  ‘She understood things. Why people do things.’ She spoke a dialect so dense a non-Venetian would have struggled to understand what she said. She nodded in self-affirmation, then again and then again, but without looking in Brunetti’s direction. In an entirely different voice, she said, ‘We had to,’ letting the last word die out in a terminal fall into silence.

  ‘It’s hard, sometimes, to know,’ Brunetti ventured.

  ‘We knew,’ she said, quickly, defensively.

  ‘Of course,’ Brunetti agreed.

  She turned to look at him then. ‘Are you a friend of his?’ she asked.

  Brunetti settled for a noncommittal noise.

  ‘Did he send you?’ Like a bad actress, she squinched up her eyes as she asked this question, as if to show that she was both a suspicious and a clever person and would know if he lied. Seeing her whole face for the first time, he was surprised by its plumpness and the fullness of her mouth. Two deep vertical lines ran beside it; a third line, this one horizontal and in the middle of her chin, turned her face into a wooden puppet’s, a resemblance that was augmented by the impassivity of her glance and her strangely round blue eyes.

  ‘No, Signora, he didn’t,’ Brunetti said, with no idea who they were talking about. ‘I came to see you, just as I came to see Signora Cannata: to tell you how important your friendship was to Signora Altavilla and how very fond of you she was.’

  She must have preferred whatever she saw on the other side of the calle, for she turned her eyes back to it.

  He let some more time pass. ‘You told her what you did,’ he said in an entirely conversational voice, phrasing it as something halfway between a question and a reminder.

  His words seemed to strike a blow, for she hunched her shoulders and brought her fists together at the centre of her chest, but she did not turn to face him.

  Casually, as though presenting some old adage about the behaviour of children, Brunetti said, ‘I think it helps, to be able to tell people what we did and why we did it. Talking about it helps it to go away.’ Speaking to her seemed to Brunetti like trying to order from a menu in a language he did not speak: he might see a familiar word or two, but he had no idea what was going to arrive after he spoke those words.

  ‘Trouble comes,’ she said to the window on the other side of the calle.

  As if summoned by her words, a man walked through the door. He was older than she, well into his eighties, one of those common types seen in bars: short, stocky, nose thickened by decades of hard drinking, a bit askew from years of hard living. His sparse hair, dyed a dark mahogany, was longer on one side of his head; it had been carefully combed over his bald scalp and sealed in place by some sort of shiny gel that made his head look as though it had recently been painted or oiled, then streaked with dark paint.

  He came in just as she spoke, his arrival an antiphon to her words. He stopped short, apparently at the sight of Brunetti on the chair near the door. ‘Who are you?’ he demanded angrily, as if
Brunetti had been provoking him and he wasn’t going to put up with it any longer. When Brunetti did not answer immediately, the man took a few steps towards him, stopped and planted his feet solidly, giving himself a firm base from which to launch an attack. ‘I asked you who you are,’ he said.

  The broken veins in his cheeks and nose grew red, as if his anger had switched them on. ‘What are you doing in here?’ he demanded, looking at the woman, whose attention had remained on the window. His face softened when he looked at her, but she ignored him and he made no move to approach her. He turned back to Brunetti. ‘Are you bothering her?’

  Brunetti got slowly to his feet and adopted a look of mild relief. He bent down and carefully pulled at the knees of his trousers to show his concern that they should not wrinkle. ‘Ah,’ he said with relief he made audible, ‘if you’re the Signora’s husband, perhaps you could give me the information.’

  This confused the old man and he asked, ‘Who do you think you are to ask me questions? And what are you doing here?’ In the face of Brunetti’s refusal to answer, he repeated, voice rising another notch, ‘Have you been bothering her?’ He stepped closer to the woman, placing the thickness of his body between her and Brunetti.

  Brunetti reached into his pocket for his notebook. ‘All I did was try to ask a question,’ he said, allowing annoyance to slip into his own voice. ‘But I realized I’d have to speak to someone else, Signore.’ He pursed his lips and, making no attempt to disguise his irritation, said, ‘I couldn’t get any sense out of her.’ A look between anger and pain crossed the old man’s face. Brunetti licked a finger and turned a few pages, then pointed down at a page on which he had written, in preparation for a parent–teacher meeting that was to be held at Chiara’s school the following week, a list of her teachers and the subjects they taught.