by Donna Leon
Head still bent, attention apparently on the birds, he said, ‘Seven.’
‘Do you know what they are?’
‘No,’ the old man said, shaking the idea away. ‘I’ve tried to go into galleries to look at other ones, or into the museums. I get in for free now, because of my age. But I can’t remember what I see, and the names don’t mean anything to me.’ He unfolded his hands and raised them apart as an indication of his ignorance and confusion. ‘So I just have to trust the man who tells me what they are.’
‘And what they’re worth,’ Brunetti added.
Morandi nodded. ‘Yes. He was a patient when Maria still worked in the hospital; she told me about him then. I remembered him when … when I had to sell them.’
‘Do you trust him?’
Morandi looked at him, and Brunetti saw a flash of intelligence as the old man said, ‘I don’t have any choice, do I?’
‘You could go to someone else, I suppose,’ Brunetti suggested.
‘They’re a mafia,’ Morandi said with absolute certainty. ‘Go to one, go to another: it’s all the same thing. They’ll all cheat you.’
‘But maybe someone else would cheat you less,’ Brunetti suggested.
Morandi shrugged away this possibility. ‘By now they all know who I am and who I belong to.’ He spoke as though he was sure that this was true.
‘What happens when they’re gone?’ Brunetti asked.
Morandi lowered his head to consider the birds that still crowded round his feet, looking up and demanding food. ‘Then they’re gone.’ He sounded resigned. Brunetti waited and finally the old man said, ‘I might get enough to make the difference for two years.’
‘And then?’ Brunetti asked with bulldog tenacity.
The old man’s shoulders rose as he gave an enormous sigh. ‘Who knows what will happen in two years?’
‘What did the doctor tell you?’ Brunetti asked, nodding in the direction of the casa di cura.
‘Why do you ask?’ Morandi asked with a return to his former sharpness.
‘Because you seemed so worried. Before, when you talked about it.’
‘And that’s enough to make you want to know?’ Morandi asked, as though he were an anthropologist being exposed to an entirely new form of behaviour.
‘She seemed like a woman who has had enough trouble in her life,’ Brunetti risked saying. ‘I hoped she wouldn’t have any more.’
Morandi’s eyes drifted towards the windows of the second floor of the casa di cura, windows which Brunetti thought might be those of the dining room where he had first seen Signora Sartori. ‘Oh, there’s always more,’ Morandi said. ‘There’s more and more, and then it’s over and there’s no more.’ He turned to Brunetti and asked, ‘Isn’t that right?’
‘I don’t know,’ was the best thing Brunetti could think of, though it took him some time to bring himself to speak. ‘I hoped she would have some peace.’
Morandi smiled at the last word, but it wasn’t a pleasant thing to see. ‘We haven’t had any of that since we moved.’
‘To San Marco?’ Brunetti asked.
He nodded, loosening one of the strands of hair, which shifted over to lean against its neighbour. ‘Things were all right before then. We worked, and we talked, and I think she was happy.’
‘Weren’t you?’
‘Oh,’ he said, and this time it was a real smile, ‘I’ve never been so happy in my life.’
‘But then?’
‘But then Cuccetti offered me the house. We were renting a place, down in Castello. Forty-one square metres; ground floor. We were like sardines in there,’ he said, his mind obviously wandering back to that tiny place. Then, with another smile, he said, ‘But we were happy sardines.’
He took another deep breath, pulling the air through his nostrils and pushing himself up again. ‘And then he talked about the house we could have. More than a hundred metres. Top floor, two baths. It could have been a castle, it sounded so wonderful.’
He looked at Brunetti as if willing this man who had no idea what it meant to live in a forty-one-metre apartment to imagine what this would represent for people like them. Brunetti nodded. ‘So I said I’d do it. And get Maria to do it because Cuccetti said he needed two witnesses. And then I thought about the drawings that the old woman had. She’d told Maria about them.’ He tilted his chin to one side and asked, a real question, ‘Do you think that’s what made it go wrong? That I got greedy and told him I wanted the drawings?’
‘I don’t know, Signor Morandi,’ Brunetti said. ‘I can’t make a judgement like that.’
‘Maria knows that’s when it all went wrong. But she doesn’t know why,’ the old man said, his despair audible. ‘So it doesn’t matter what I think about it, or what you do. She knows something bad happened.’ Morandi shook his head and then continued to shake it, as if each motion renewed his guilt at what he had done.
‘What happened when you went to Signora Altavilla’s?’ Brunetti asked.
His head stopped moving. He stared at Brunetti and suddenly crossed his arms over his chest, as if to show he had had enough of this and would say no more. But then he surprised Brunetti by saying, ‘I went to talk to her, to try to make her understand that I needed the key. I couldn’t tell her about the drawings. She might have told Maria, and then she’d know what I did.’
‘She didn’t know?’
‘Oh no, nothing,’ he said very quickly. ‘She never saw them. They were never in the house. When Cuccetti gave them to me, I took them right to the bank, and I paid them in cash once a year for the box. There was no way Maria could know about them.’ The very possibility infused his voice with fear.
‘But she knew you had the key?’ Brunetti said, thinking that, over the years, she would surely have figured out what the key was for.
‘Maria’s not stupid,’ Morandi said.
‘I’m sure she’s not.’
‘She knew the key was important, even if she didn’t know what it was. So she took it and gave it to her.’
‘You know that?’
Morandi nodded.
‘Did she tell you?’
‘Yes.’
‘When? Why?’
‘At first she wouldn’t tell me anything. But – I told you she couldn’t lie – after a while she told me she’d taken it. But she wouldn’t tell me what she did with it.’
‘How did you find out?’
Morandi looked across at the front of the building, like a sailor seeking a lighthouse. His mouth pulled back and he made an animal noise of pain, then he leaned forward again and put his face in his hands. This time he started to sob the way a child sobs, suddenly and brokenly, all hope of future happiness gone.
Brunetti could not endure it. He got to his feet and walked over to the church, stood in front of the stone announcing that it was the baptismal church of Vivaldi. Minutes passed. He thought he could still hear the sobs, but could not bring himself to turn and look.
After reading the inscription again, Brunetti went back to the bench and resumed his seat.
Morandi reached out suddenly and grabbed Brunetti’s wrist. ‘I hit her.’ His face was blotched and red, and two strands of hair had fallen down on either side of his nose. He hiccuped with residual grief, then said it again, as if confession would purge him, ‘I hit her. I never did that, not in all the years we were together.’ Brunetti looked away but heard the old man say, ‘And then she told me she’d given her the key.’
He pulled at Brunetti’s wrist until he was turned round and facing him. ‘You have to understand. I had to have the key. They won’t let you into the box unless you have it, and I had to pay for the casa di cura. Or else she’d go to the public place. But I couldn’t tell her that because then I’d have to tell her everything.’ His grip intensified to add significance to what he had to say. He started to speak, coughed, and then said in a whisper, ‘And then she wouldn’t respect me any more.’
Brunetti’s mind flashed to Signora Orsoni’s
account of her brother-in-law’s justification for his every act of violence. And here he was listening to the same story. But what a gulf between them. Or was there? With his right hand he prised Morandi’s fingers, one by one, from his wrist. To enforce the action, he took the old man’s hand and placed it on Morandi’s thigh.
‘What happened when you went to see Signora Altavilla?’ Brunetti asked.
The old man seemed taken aback. ‘I told you. I asked her for the key.’ As if aware of his disarray, he ran his hands up over his face, pulling his hair free to hang across his collar.
‘Asked?’
Morandi showed no surprise at either the word or the tone in which Brunetti repeated it. ‘All right,’ he said reluctantly. ‘I told her to give me the key.’
‘Or else?’
This startled him. ‘There was no or else. She had the key and I wanted her to give it to me. If she didn’t want to, there wasn’t anything I could do about it.’
‘You could have threatened her,’ Brunetti suggested.
Morandi’s face showed bafflement as well as confusion, and Brunetti thought it was genuine. ‘But she’s a woman.’
Brunetti refrained from saying that Signora Sartori was a woman, too, and that had not prevented him from hitting her. Instead, voice calm, he asked again, ‘What happened?’
Morandi looked at the ground again, and Brunetti watched his head flush with embarrassment. ‘Did you hit her?’ asked Brunetti, stopping himself from adding, ‘too.’
Keeping his eyes on the ground, like a child attempting to escape a reprimand, Morandi shook his head a few times. Brunetti refused to allow himself to be manipulated by the other man’s silence and asked again, ‘Did you hit her?’
Morandi spoke so softly as to be almost inaudible. ‘Not really.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘I grabbed her,’ he said, shot a look at Brunetti and went back to staring at the pavement. Again, Brunetti decided on silence. ‘She told me to leave, that there was nothing I could say that would make her give me the key. And then she moved towards the door.’
‘What was she going to do with the key?’ Brunetti asked.
Morandi raised a blank face to Brunetti. ‘I don’t know. She didn’t say.’ Brunetti’s imagination vied with his knowledge of the law. The only person who had the right to open the box was the keyholder, accompanied by a representative of the bank with the second key. For anyone else to use it, a court order was necessary, and to get that, evidence of a crime was necessary. But after so many years, there was no longer a crime.
Morandi could have told the bank he had lost it. It would have taken time, but eventually he would have been given access to the box and its contents. Possession of the key was meaningless: it conveyed no power and no authority to the person who had it; only the authorized person could open the box. Signora Altavilla did not know this, and apparently neither did Morandi. Empty threats. Empty menaces.
Relentless, Brunetti asked, ‘What happened?’
It took a long time, and Morandi had no obligation to answer, but he didn’t know that, either, and so he said, ‘She walked over to the door, and I tried to stop her.’ As he spoke, Morandi raised his hands in front of him and cupped his fingers. ‘I said her name, and when she turned around, I put my hands on her shoulders, but when I saw her face, I remembered my promise.’ He looked at Brunetti. ‘I started to move my hands away, but she pulled herself free and went to the door and opened it.’
‘And you?’
Voice even smaller, softer, Morandi said, ‘I felt so ashamed of myself. First I hit Maria, and then I put my hands on this other woman. I didn’t even know her, and there I was, holding her by the shoulders.’
‘That’s all you did?’ Brunetti insisted.
Morandi covered his eyes with one hand. ‘I was so ashamed I couldn’t even apologize. She opened the door for me and told me to get out, so there was nothing else I could do.’ He reached a hand towards Brunetti but then, remembering what had happened when he touched him before, he pulled it back. ‘May I tell you something?’
‘Yes.’
‘I started to cry on the staircase, on the way down. I hit Maria and then I frightened that poor woman. I had to stand inside the door until I stopped crying. That time, when I hit Maria, I made a promise that I’d never do a bad thing again, never in my life, but there I was, doing a bad thing again.
‘So I told myself that, if I loved Maria the way I said I did, I’d never do another thing like that again in my life.’ He stopped at the sound of his words, looked at Brunetti with an embarrassed grin and added, ‘Not that there’s much of that left.’ The smile faded and he went on. ‘And I told myself I’d never lie again and never do a single thing that Maria wouldn’t like.’
‘Why?’
‘I told you why. Because I was so ashamed of what I’d done.’
‘But what did you think would happen if you did what you promised?’ Brunetti asked.
Morandi put the tip of his right forefinger on the centre of his thigh and pushed it in a few times, each time waiting for the small impression to disappear before pushing it down again.
‘What would happen, Signor Morandi?’
Pushing, waiting, pushing, waiting, the right moment would come. Finally Morandi said, ‘Because maybe, if she knew, she’d love me.’
‘You mean go back to loving you?’ Brunetti asked.
Morandi’s astonishment was total: Brunetti read it in the wide blankness of his eyes as he turned to look at him. ‘No. Love me. She never has. Not really. But I came along when she was almost forty, and so she took me and lived with me. But she never loved me, not really.’ The tears were back, falling on to his shirt, but Morandi was unaware of them. ‘Not the way I love her.’
Again, he gave that doglike shake. ‘We’re the only people who know that,’ he said to Brunetti, placing his hand fleetingly on his arm, touching it and quickly off, as if afraid for his hand. ‘Maria doesn’t know it, or she doesn’t know that I know. But I do. And now you do.’
Brunetti didn’t know what to say in the face of these awful truths and their even more awful consequences. There was no answer to be had, neither from the façade of the church nor from the casa di cura.
Brunetti got to his feet. He reached a hand down for the old man to take and helped him to stand. ‘Why don’t you let me walk you home?’
29
The old man had to be helped up the stairs. Brunetti disguised this fact by saying he was curious about the view a top floor apartment in this area would have of the Campanile and the Basilica and asked Signor Morandi if he would show it to him. Brunetti, his grip under the old man’s arm secure, paused on every landing, inventing an old knee injury that slowed him down. They arrived at the top, Morandi pleased to have had less trouble than a much younger man, and Brunetti pleased that the old man had been protected from acknowledging his own infirmities.
Morandi opened the door and stepped back to let his guest enter first. Knowing that this old man had been living alone in the apartment for three years, Brunetti had prepared himself to find disorder, if not worse, but nothing could have prepared him for what he found. The late afternoon sun flowed down the corridor from a room at the end. The light glistened up from the high-polished cotto Veneziano. It looked like the original surface, rarely seen in the higher floors of palazzi and today all but impossible to imitate and difficult to repair. Though the ceiling was not particularly high, the entrance hall was large, and the corridor was unusually broad.
‘You can see the Basilica from this room,’ Morandi said, starting down the corridor and leaving Brunetti to follow. There was no furniture against the walls, and there were no doors to the rooms on either side. Brunetti glanced into one room and saw that it was entirely empty, though the windows glistened and the floor gleamed up at him. After a moment, Brunetti realized how very cold it was, how the cold seeped up from the floor and through the walls.
In the last room, the vie
w was, indeed, splendid, but there was so little furniture – a table and two chairs – that it had the feel of a house that was no longer lived in and was open only for inspection by prospective buyers. Off in the distance the domes bubbled up, their crosses poking the tiny balls that topped them at the sky, and beyond them Brunetti saw the back of the wings of the angel that looked out over the bacino. Behind him, Morandi said, ‘Maria used to stand there for hours, looking at it. It made her happy to see this. In the beginning.’ He came and stood next to Brunetti, and together they looked at the signs of the power of God and the power of the state, and Brunetti was struck by the majesty those things had once had, and had no longer.
‘Signor Morandi,’ he said, speaking in the formal ‘Lei’ and making no grammatical concession to the things the old man had told him, ‘were you telling me the truth when you said that, about wanting to lead a better life?’
‘Oh, yes,’ he answered instantly, sounding just like Brunetti’s children, years ago, doing their drills for catechism class.
‘No more lies?’ Brunetti asked.
‘No.’
Brunetti thought of those mind-twisters they had been given when they were in school. There was one about getting a hen and a fox and a cabbage across a river, and one about nine pearls on a scale, and one about the man who always lied. He had vague memories of the puzzles, but the answers had all fled. If Morandi always lied, then he would have to lie about not lying, wouldn’t he?
‘Would you swear on the heart of Maria Sartori that all you did was put your hands on Signora Altavilla’s shoulders and that you did not hurt her in any way?’
Beside him, the old man stood quietly. Then, like someone beginning their t’ai chi exercise, he let his arms go limp beside him, then raised his hands slowly, hands cupped towards the earth, to shoulder height. But instead of pulling them back to prepare to push against an invisible force, Morandi rested them on some invisibility in front of him. And then Brunetti watched his fingers tighten, and Morandi saw that Brunetti saw the motion.
