The Golden Egg

28





Brunetti let himself out, being especially careful to close the door to the apartment very quietly, descend the steps with the silence of a wraith, cross the courtyard and emerge into the calle with thief-like care. It was still raining, but he did not notice until he was back at the Accademia, when he bought another umbrella from another Tamil.

Since his shoes were soaked through, he decided to walk. Plod, more like, but he thought of it as walking. Not talked to, not spoken to, no language, no contact, no words, no communication, no meaning, no sense to anything, no words to think in, no names for things. Nothing more terrible. No way to sort it all out; no way to distinguish between the sound of a dog and the words of a lullaby; ‘yes’ sounding the same as ‘no’, and both words the same as ‘upside down’.

He stopped at the door to their building. His pocket was sodden, the keys colder than he had ever known them to be. Tonight there were three hundred steps to the apartment. He closed the umbrella and dropped it outside the door, let himself in, kicked off his shoes, and bent to put them out on the landing. There were sounds from the kitchen: words, phrases: ‘he’s such a good . . .’ ‘she never says what . . .’, ‘five more minutes’. They all meant something, those snatches. Those words created the possibility for larger categories or for larger, more encompassing ideas. Praise, criticism, time.

He went into the bathroom and shed his clothing, socks first, draping them all, sodden and dark, on the edge of the bathtub. He wanted to take a shower, but resisted the desire and merely wiped at his hair with a towel, draping that next to his shirt. He put on his terrycloth robe and went down the hall to their room. He found an old pair of woollen slacks he had refused for years to allow Paola to throw away. He took comfort from their familiar, shapeless softness. He pulled on a T-shirt and an old green cashmere sweater he had saved time and time again from her discarding impulses. He pulled on socks and slipped his feet into leather slippers.

He went down the corridor and into the kitchen. At his entrance, Chiara said, ‘Your hair’s a mess, Papà. Come over here and let me fix it for you.’ She hopped to her feet and Brunetti sat in her chair, amazed at the way ‘fix’ was just right for this sentence, even though hair couldn’t be fixed, probably because it couldn’t be broken, but when hair was a mess, it could be set right again by being fixed, just as though it were broken, and wasn’t that an amazingly flexible thing to do with words?

Chiara spread her fingers and ran them through his still-wet hair, brushing at it repeatedly until she had it looking more or less the way it was supposed to look. When he didn’t say anything, she snaked her way around his shoulders and pulled her face close to his. ‘What’s the matter, cat got your tongue?’ she asked in English.

How remarkable that it happened in different languages, too, and that phrases could have two meanings. Obviously, there was no cat biting his tongue, but it was a wonderful metaphor for a motionless tongue. Like Davide’s.

‘Just thinking,’ he said and smiled round at them all.

‘What about?’ Paola asked. Raffi was interested, but he was more interested in his risotto.

‘About a joke my mother told me when I was a kid. I wouldn’t eat carrots one night, and she told me that carrots were good for my eyes.’

Chiara slapped her hands over her ears, knowing what was coming. Paola sighed; Raffi ate.

‘When I asked her how she knew that, she asked me if . . .’ and he paused to give them time to join in the chorus, as they did every time he told this story . . . ‘I’d ever seen a rabbit wearing glasses.’ Sure enough, they all joined in with his mother’s question, her mother-in-law’s question, their grandmother’s question, and Brunetti was left marvelling that his mother could have all those different names.

He ate the rest of the dinner, though he didn’t know what it was he was eating. He drank a glass of wine, left the second one unfinished, drunk with the words that crossed the table, their different meanings, the fact that they indicated time: future and past; that they indicated whether something had been done or was still to do; that they expressed people’s feelings: anger was not a blow, regret was not tears. At one point, Paola expressed a wish and used the subjunctive, and Brunetti felt himself close to tears at the beauty of the intellectual complexity of it: she could speak about what was not, could invent an alternative reality.

He began to return to the real world with dessert, helped in the descent by a cake topped with red plums. As Paola cut a second slice and put it on his plate, he asked her, ‘Do you think God is language?’

Raffi was having none of this. He held up a forkful of cake. ‘God is plum cake,’ he said and took communion.

Later, he sprawled on the sofa in Paola’s study and told her all about it, every detail, starting with his first conversation with Ana Cavanella and finishing with his quiet exit from the Lembo palazzo.

Paola sat in stunned silence for a long time and then did what she could to fight her way back to human understanding: she talked about what she had read. ‘There’s Kaspar Hauser, and there’s that girl in the United States. I’ve read about them, and I’ve read a bit of the theory.’

She looked his way, and he nodded. ‘They’re pretty much agreed – the people who write about this – that if you don’t learn language by about twelve, then the wiring is formed in your brain without language and you’ve missed the chance, and you’ll never get it, never understand how it works.’

‘Talking?’ he asked.

‘Language. The concept of it. That a noise can equal a thing, or an action.’

‘Or an idea,’ Brunetti added. ‘Or a colour.’

‘She would have been less a monster if she had poked out his eyes,’ Paola said with sudden ferocity. ‘He would still have been human.’

‘Don’t you think he was?’

‘Of course he was,’ she said. ‘But he wasn’t like us.’

‘Is that rhetorical exaggeration?’

‘I suppose so,’ she admitted. ‘But he really wasn’t. He’d never understand what we do. Or what anything meant.’

‘You think he understood other things?’ Brunetti asked, not knowing fully what he meant by that, but thinking of those drawings.

‘Of course.’ She ran her hands across her face and through her hair. ‘It’s so hard to talk about this without sounding like the worst sort of eugenic monster, placing different values on different people.’

‘Or defining what people are by what they can do?’ Brunetti suggested.

‘Can we go to bed now?’ she asked like a petulant child.

‘I think we’d better. We can’t answer any of these questions.’

‘Neither of us was asking questions,’ she said.

For a moment, Brunetti thought he’d contest that, but he was too tired for it. Instead, he said, ‘Besides, there aren’t any answers.’

They went to bed, and the next day dawned bright, but much colder.

Well, he’d gone this far, animated by nothing more noble than curiosity, he told himself as he studied the face of the man in the mirror, pushing his collar down over his neatly knotted tie. The man’s mind slipped into English: The cat’s got your tongue. Curiosity killed the cat. To stay in vein, the man in the mirror gave a Cheshire smile, and Brunetti left the house.

He could have gone anywhere. Because he was a commissario and there was little crime in the city at the moment, he probably could have got on a boat and gone out to the Lido to walk on the beach, but he walked the same old, familiar old, calli to the hospital and went to Geriatria, where his mother – she too having lost her mooring to language during her long descent – had once spent some months. Things looked cleaner, but the smell was the same.

He went in without knocking and found Ana Cavanella sitting in an orange plastic chair, staring out the window. A woman attached to a number of plastic tubes, like a ship unloading liquid cargo while taking on fuel at the same time, lay in the other bed, sailing on some other sea, not docked there with them.

Cavanella looked up at him, face impassive and unfriendly. The left side was almost black, darkest at the point on her forehead where the closing door had hit her.

Brunetti went and stood with his back to the window so at least what little light there was would shine on her face and into her eyes. ‘I’ve spoken to Lucrezia Lembo,’ he said.

‘About me?’ she asked.

‘The Signora and I have nothing else in common.’

‘You’re a policeman: what interest can you have in me?’

‘I’m curious about how you plan to prove it.’

‘Prove what?’ she asked, but her eyes slid across to the sleeping woman.

‘That Ludovico Lembo was Davide’s father.’

She was silent for a long time, and he watched her search for a way to answer him.

He watched her fight the desire to show him that she was clever, too. She lost. ‘There’s that test. DNU.’ She still hadn’t learned, yet she allowed herself the self-satisfied smile of the dullest student who believed she knew something the others didn’t.

‘And what will that prove?’

‘That he is. The father. Because of his other children. They can match them. It’s scientific.’

He decided not to tell her yet and, instead, asked, ‘And if no judge will order the test? After all, anyone can make that claim about any rich man, can’t they?’ To himself at least, his question sounded entirely reasonable.

She gave it long thought, consulted with the somnolent woman in the bed, with the tops of the pine trees

that rose up from the courtyard below. ‘Really?’ she asked, just as though she believed she could ask him to work in her best interests and suggest some other outcome.

‘You need stronger evidence.’

She tried, and failed, to repress a smile. He marvelled that he had ever seen signs of beauty in this face. ‘I have a letter,’ she said.

‘From him.’

‘His lawyer wrote to tell me about the house and about the money.’ To show her expertise, she added, ‘It’s dated, too,’ and could not repress a smile. Then, her voice a mixture of anger and self-satisfaction, ‘Any judge would believe that. People don’t give money away unless you force them.’

He’d let her go on believing for a while yet. ‘And you’re Davide’s heir, aren’t you?’ he asked as if the thought had just come to him.

‘Yes.’

‘First it goes to his estate, and then it passes to you?’

‘Yes.’ She was incapable of disguising how excited she was by this possibility, which to her was a fact. The right side of her face flushed pink at the thought: the other side remained close to black.

‘And the house and the money in the bank?’

‘That doesn’t matter now, does it?’ she asked, speaking with what life had taught her was the arrogance of wealth. A house with no rent to pay, three thousand Euros a month: these had suddenly become small change to the likes of Ana Cavanella, soon to be the heiress to one third of an immense inheritance. What did such paltry things mean to the mother of the son and heir of the King of Copper?

‘His death was very unfortunate,’ Brunetti said.

It was clear that she didn’t know who Brunetti was talking about, her son or her son’s father. But her face soon found a pious expression that suited both, and she said, ‘Yes. Very.’

‘But fortunate, in a way,’ Brunetti encouraged her. ‘Davide never would have appreciated all that money.’

She tried to suppress her smile and managed it after only an instant, but the sight of her teeth had been enough to seize Brunetti with the desire to strike her. He took a small step back, but it was to distance himself from her physically, not from the temptation of violence, which had only flashed through him, leaving him shocked.

‘I could have bought him so many things,’ she said with falsity so palpable Brunetti was amazed the woman in the other bed didn’t wake up screaming.

‘A radio, for instance,’ Brunetti suggested.

‘But he was deaf.’

‘Was he, Signora?’

‘What do you mean?’

There it was again, that question that was really an answer. ‘I mean there was nothing wrong with his ears. With his hearing, that is. The autopsy showed that.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Everyone in the neighbourhood understands, Signora.’

He watched her move from idea to idea, excuse to excuse, pose to pose. She couldn’t ask him again what he meant, so she settled on an angry noise instead of words.

‘They know, Signora.’

‘They don’t know anything,’ she hissed.

‘And once you make your claim to the inheritance, they’ll know about what happened to Davide, too. And if it comes to law, they’ll learn about the hot chocolate and biscuits he had, along with the little yellow candies.’

This time, one half of her face went white while the other remained suffused with the signs of the blow. She tried to speak, to give voice to the indignation she knew she was supposed to show, but she failed, tried again, choking with rage. Choking. He was conscious of that. Finally she managed to spit it out: ‘It doesn’t matter. Let them think what they want.’

A loud noise came from behind him; when Brunetti turned, he saw an immensely tall building crane slam a metal ball into the remaining wall of one of the old hospital buildings alongside the laguna. A piece of wall crumbled to the pile of rubble below, and an enormous cloud of white dust climbed up the wall that remained. Through the new opening, Brunetti saw, across the water, the wall of the cemetery and the tower of the church behind it, the tips of the peaceful cypress trees.

Brunetti decided not to tell her. Let her follow Beni Borsetta’s advice and demand a ‘DNU’ test. And please let some compassionate judge grant it to her, and let Lucrezia and – if she ever appeared – Lavinia give a sample of their DNU, and let the test show that their father was not the father of Ana Cavanella’s child. And let her live with that: with no home and no monthly cheque and with former neighbours, he hoped, pushed past the point of tolerance and the acceptance of what can’t be proven and needing a way to punish someone for their own guilt. And without her son. Though nothing he had seen so far suggested that this would bother her much.

Wasting no more words on her Brunetti left the hospital to go and get the boat to the Lido to go for a walk on the beach.