by Donna Leon
Like any man of sense, he fled to the vaporetto stop, got on the One, and found a seat inside, to the left. It was a far safer place from which to allow the assault of the beauty of the city. The sun jumped off the still surface of the bacino, forcing him to squint his eyes as they passed the newly restored Dogana and the church of the Salute. He’d been inside the first recently, thrilled to see how well it had been restored, appalled by what was on display inside.
When had they sneaked in and switched the rules? he wondered. When did the garish become artistic, and who had the authority to make that declaration? Why was banality of interest to the viewer, and where, oh where, had simple beauty gone? ‘You’re an old fart, Guido,’ he whispered to himself, causing the man in front of him to turn around and stare. Brunetti ignored him and returned his attention to the buildings on the left.
They passed a palazzo where a friend of his had offered to sell him an apartment six years before, assuring him that he would make a fortune on the deal: ‘Just keep it for three years and resell it to a foreigner. You’ll make a million.’
Brunetti, whose ethical system was monosyllabic in its simplicity, had refused the offer because something about profiting from land speculation made him uncomfortable, as did the idea of being indebted to anyone for having earned an easy million Euros. Or, for that fact, ten Euros.
They passed the university, and Brunetti looked at it with double fondness: his wife worked there, and his son was now a student. Raffi had, to Brunetti’s delight, chosen to study history, not the history of the ancients that so fascinated Brunetti, but the history of modern Italy which, though it also fascinated Brunetti, did so in a manner that led him close to despair.
Their arrival at the San Silvestro stop pulled his mind away from its continuing contemplation of the parallels to be found between the Italy of two thousand years ago and that of today. It was a matter of minutes until he was opening the front door of the building and turning into the first flight of steps. At each landing, Brunetti felt the weight of the brioche fall away from him, and by the time he got to his apartment he was sure he had burned it all off and was prepared to do justice to whatever remained of lunch.
When he entered the kitchen, he saw his children at their places, their untouched lunch in front of them. Paola was just placing a dish of what looked like tagliatelle with scallops in front of his place. Walking back to the stove, she said, ‘I was late today: had to talk to a student. So we decided to wait for you.’ Then, as if to prevent him from forming any idea of her occult powers, she added, ‘I heard you come in.’
He bent to kiss both children on the head, and as he took his place, Raffi asked, ‘Do you know anything about the war in Alto Adige?’ Seeing Brunetti’s surprise at the question, he added, ‘The First World War.’
‘You make it sound as long ago as the war against Carthage,’ Brunetti said with a smile, opening his napkin and spreading it on his lap. ‘Your great-grandfather fought in the war, remember.’
Raffi sat silently with his elbows on the table and chin propped on his folded fingers, a gesture in which his mother was reflected. Brunetti glanced in Chiara’s direction and saw that she was sitting with her hands folded in her lap: how long had it taken to train them?
Paola came back to the table, set down her own dish, and took her place. ‘Buon appetito,’ she said, picking up her fork.
Ordinarily, that injunction served as the starter’s whistle for Raffi, who sprinted through his first course with a velocity that could still astonish both his parents. But today he ignored his food and said, ‘You never told me.’
Brunetti had often repeated his grandfather’s war stories, to the general uninterest of his own children. ‘Well, he was,’ he limited himself to saying and began to twirl up some noodles with his fork.
‘Did he fight up there?’ Raffi asked. ‘In Alto Adige?’
‘Yes. He was there for four years. He fought in most of the campaigns except, I think, once when he was wounded and sent to Vittorio Veneto to recover.’
‘Not sent home?’ Chiara asked, drawn into the conversation.
Brunetti shook the idea away. ‘They didn’t send wounded men home to recover.’
‘Why?’ she asked, fork poised over her plate.
‘Because they knew they wouldn’t go back,’ Brunetti said.
‘Why?’ she repeated.
‘Because they knew they’d die.’ Before she could say that their great-grandfather, because they were there at the table talking about him, hadn’t died, Brunetti explained, ‘Most of them did; well, hundreds of thousands of them did, so they knew that the odds were pretty bad.’
‘How many died?’ Raffi asked.
Brunetti read little modern history, and when he read Italian history, he tended to read translations of books in other languages, so little confidence did he have that the Italian accounts would not be coloured by political or historical allegiance. ‘I’m not sure of the exact number. But it was more than half a million.’ He set his fork down and took a sip of wine, then another.
‘Half a million?’ Chiara repeated, stunned by the number. As if comment or question were useless, she could only repeat, ‘Half a million.’
‘Actually, I think it was more. Maybe six hundred thousand, but it depends on who you read.’ Brunetti took another sip, replaced his glass, and said, ‘That’s not counting civilians, I think.’
‘Jesus on the cross,’ Raffi whispered.
Paola shot him a sharp glance, but it was clear to all of them that astonishment, not blasphemy, had provoked the remark.
‘That’s twelve Venices,’ Raffi said in a small, astonished voice.
Brunetti, in his desire for clarity, even statistical clarity, said, ‘Since it was only young men between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five or so, it’s far more than that. It would go a long way to depopulating much of the Veneto in the next generation.’ After a moment’s reflection, he added, ‘Which is pretty much what it did.’ He remembered, then, listening as a child as his paternal grandmother chatted with her friends, a recurring topic their good luck in having found a man to marry – a good man or a bad man – when so many of their friends had never been able to find a husband. And he thought of the war memorials he had seen in the North, up near Asiago and above Merano, listing the names of the ‘Heroes of the Nation’, so often long lists of men with the same surname, all dead in the snow and the mud, their lives cast away to gain a metre of barren land or a medal for a general’s chest.
‘Cadorna,’ he said, naming the supreme commander of that benighted campaign.
‘We were told he was a hero,’ Raffi said.
Brunetti closed his eyes for a moment.
‘At least that’s what we were told in liceo, that he held off the attack of the Austrian invader.’
It was with some effort that Brunetti quelled the impulse to ask if the same teachers praised the brave Italian troops who had quelled the invading Ethiopians or the invading Libyans. He contented himself with saying only, ‘Italy declared war on Austria.’
‘Why?’ Raffi demanded, looking as though he could not believe this.
‘Why do countries ever declare war?’ Paola broke in to ask. ‘To get land, to grab natural resources, to maintain their power.’ It came to Brunetti to wonder why there was such fuss when parents explained the mechanism of sex to their children. Wasn’t it far more dangerous for parents to explain to them the mechanism of power?
He intervened. ‘You’re talking about aggressive war, I assume. Not like Poland, the last time?’
‘Of course not,’ Paola agreed. ‘Or Belgium, or Holland, or France. They were invaded and they fought back.’ Looking at the children, she said, ‘And your father’s right: we did declare war on Austria.’
‘But why?’ Raffi repeated.
‘I’ve always assumed from what I read that it was to get back land the Austrians had taken, or been given, in the past,’ Paola answered.
‘But how do you know
who it belongs to?’ Chiara asked.
Seeing that their plates were empty – Raffi having managed to clean his during some lightning pause in the conversation – Paola held up her hands in the manner of a soccer umpire calling ‘Time’. ‘I want to beg the indulgence of everyone here,’ she said, meeting their eyes one by one. ‘I spent my morning in the apparently futile attempt to defend the idea that some books are better than others, so I cannot bear a second serious discussion, certainly not at this table, not while I’m eating my lunch. And so I suggest we change the topic to something frivolous and stupid like liposuction or break dancing.’
Raffi started to protest, but Paola cut him off by saying, ‘There are calamari in umido with peas to follow – and finocchio al forno for Chiara – and then there is a crostata di fragole, but it will be given only to those who are subject to my will.’
Brunetti watched Raffi consider his options. His mother always made more finocchio than one person could eat, and this was the best season for fragole. ‘My only joy in life,’ he said, picking up his plate and preparing to take it to the sink, ‘is to live in abject subservience to the will of my parents.’
Paola turned to Brunetti. ‘Guido, you read all those Romans: which goddess was it who gave birth to a snake?’
‘None of them, I fear.’
‘Left it to us humans, then.’
10
FOR ALL BRUNETTI managed to achieve at the Questura that afternoon, he might as well have stayed at home for the rest of the day. Foa, he learned at four, had been chosen to accompany the Questore and a delegation from Parliament on a tour of the MOSE project – that money-guzzler that would, or would not, save the city from acqua alta – and then to dinner in Pellestrina. ‘This is why no one’s ever in Rome to vote,’ Brunetti muttered to himself when he hung up from receiving this news. He knew he could easily call the office of the Magistrate of the Waters and ask the question about the tides, but he preferred to keep within the confines of the Questura any precise information about the nature of the investigation.
He spoke briefly with Patta, who said that he, in the absence of the Questore, had spoken to the press and given the usual assurances that there was every expectation of a speedy arrest in the case and that they were following various leads. Things had been slow for the last month – few major crimes in the region – so the famished press was bound to fall upon this one. And how refreshing readers would find it to have a male victim for a change; it had been open season on women since the beginning of the year: one a day had been murdered in Italy, usually by the ex boyfriend or husband, the killer – according to the press – always driven by a ‘raptus di gelosia’, which excuse was sure to appear as the main pillar of the subsequent defence. If Brunetti ever lost his temper with Scarpa and did him a deliberate injury, he would surely plead a raptus di gelosia, though he was hard pressed to think of a reason why he would feel jealous of the Lieutenant.
Pucetti called after six to say he had had a technical problem but had just managed to isolate some still photos from the first video and was sure to have the prints within an hour or so. Brunetti told him that the following morning would do.
He resisted the urge to call Signorina Elettra and ask what success she had had with her friend in the health office, sure that she would let him know as soon as she learned anything, but no less impatient for that.
Becalmed, Brunetti flicked on his computer and tapped in mucche, wondering what Vianello and Signorina Elettra found so objectionable in those poor beasts. His family was Venetian as far back as anyone could remember, and then well beyond, so there was no atavistic memory of a great-great somebody who had kept a cow in the barn behind the house and thus no explanation for the sympathy Brunetti felt for them. He had never milked one; to the best of his memory had never done more than touch the noses of friendly cattle safely behind fences when they went walking in the mountains. Paola, even more fully urban than he, admitted that they frightened her, but Brunetti had never been able to understand this. They were, he believed, perfect milk machines: grass went in one end and milk came out the other: it was ever so.
He chose an article at random from those listed and began to read. After an hour, a shaken Brunetti turned off the computer, made a steeple of his palms and pressed his lips against it. So that was it, and that was why intermittently vegetarian Chiara, though she would occasionally backslide when in the presence of a roast chicken, adamantly refused to eat beef. And Vianello and Signorina Elettra. He wondered how it was that he had not known all of this. Surely everything he had just read was public knowledge; to some people it was common knowledge.
He considered himself a broadly read man, and yet much of this he had not known. The destruction of the rain forest to clear it for cattle: of course, he knew about that. Mad Cow and Foot and Mouth: he was familiar with them, as well, with their coming and their going. Only it seemed they were not gone, not really.
Brunetti’s ignorance had evaporated as he read the long account of a South American rancher who had attended an animal husbandry programme at a university in the United States. He painted a picture of animals that were born sick, kept alive only by massive doses of antibiotics, made productive by equal doses of hormones, and who died still sick. The writer ended the article by stating that he would never eat beef unless it was one of his own animals and he had overseen its raising and slaughter. Like Paola, who had heard too much that day about books, Brunetti suddenly decided he had read too much about beef. Soon before seven, he left his office, went downstairs and wrote a note for Foa, asking about the tides, and left the Questura; he started towards home, passing eventually through no-longer-crowded Campo Santa Maria Formosa. Campo San Bortolo was busy, but he had no trouble crossing it, nor were there many people on the bridge.
He arrived in an empty apartment before seven-thirty, took off his jacket and shoes, went down to the bedroom and retrieved his copy of the plays of Aeschylus – he didn’t know what force had driven him back to read them again – and sprawled himself on the sofa in Paola’s study, eager to read a book in which there was no risk of sentimentality – only bleak human truth – and eager to tell Paola about the cows.
Agamemnon was in the midst of greeting his wife after his decades-long absence by telling her that her speech of welcome, like his absence, had been much prolonged, and the hair on the back of Brunetti’s neck had begun to rise at the man’s folly, when he heard Paola’s key in the lock. What would she do, he wondered, if he were to betray her, shame her, and bring a new lover into their home? Less than Clytemnestra did, he suspected, and without physical violence. But he had no doubt that she would do her best to destroy him with words and with the power of her family, and he was sure she would leave him with nothing.
He heard her set down some shopping bags by the door. While hanging up her jacket, she would see his. He called her name, and she called back that she’d be there in a minute. Then he heard the rustle of the plastic bags and her footsteps retreating towards the kitchen.
She wouldn’t do it for jealousy, he knew, but from injured pride and a sense of honour betrayed. Her father, with a phone call, would see that he was quietly transferred to some stagnant, Mafia-infested village in Sicily; she’d have every sign of him out of the apartment in a day. Even his books. And she’d never speak his name again; perhaps with the children, though they’d know enough not to name him or ask about him. Why did knowing this make him so happy?
She was back, carrying two glasses of prosecco. He had been so preoccupied with their separation and her revenge that he had not heard the pop of the cork, though it was a sound that had the beauty of music for Brunetti.
Paola handed him a glass and tapped his knee until he pulled his feet up and made room for her. He sipped. ‘This is the champagne,’ he said.
‘I know,’ she said, sipping in her turn. ‘I felt I deserved a reward.’
‘What for?’
‘Suffering fools.’
‘Gladly?’
She gave a snort of contempt. ‘Listening to their nonsense and pretending to pay attention to it or pretending to think their idiotic ideas are worthy of discussion.’
‘The thing about good books?’
She pushed her hair back with one hand, scratched idly at the base of her skull. In profile, she was the same woman he had met and loved decades ago. The blonde hair was touched with white, but it was hard to see unless one were very close. Nose, chin, line of the mouth: they were all the same. Seen from the front, he knew, there were creases around her eyes and at the corners of her mouth, but she could still cause heads to turn on the street or at a dinner party.
She took a deep swallow and flopped against the back of the sofa, careful not to spill any wine. ‘I don’t know why I bother to keep teaching,’ she said, and Brunetti did not remark that it was because she loved it. ‘I could stop. We own the house, and you make enough to support us both.’ And if things got rough, he did not say, they could always pawn the Canaletto in the kitchen. Let her talk, let her get rid of it.
‘What would you do, lie on the sofa all day in your pyjamas and read?’ he asked.
She patted his knee with her free hand. ‘You pretty much prevent my taking up residence on the sofa, don’t you?’
‘But what would you do?’ he asked, suddenly serious.
She took another sip, then said, ‘That’s the problem, of course. If you quit, you could always be a security guard and walk around all night sticking little pieces of paper into the doorways of houses and stores to show you’d been there. But no one’s going to ask me to come and talk to them about the English novel, are they?’
‘Probably not,’ he agreed.
‘Might as well live,’ she confused him by saying, but he was so eager to talk about the cows that he did not ask her to explain what she had said.
