A Private Venus (2 page)

‘You’re a doctor,’ Auseri said.

He didn’t reply immediately, but a few moments later, and in that darkness, in that silence, it was a long pause. ‘I was. I’m sure you were told.’

‘Certainly,’ Auseri said, ‘but you’re still a doctor. And I need a doctor.’

Duca counted the windows in the villa: there were eight of them, four on the ground floor and four on the first floor. ‘I can’t practice any more. I can’t even give injections—especially not injections. Weren’t you told?’

‘I was told everything, but it doesn’t matter.’

Curious. ‘If you need a doctor,’ Duca said, ‘and choose
one who’s been struck off the register and can’t even prescribe an aspirin, then it must matter a bit.’

‘No,’ the emperor said, politely but authoritatively. In the darkness he held out the packet of cigarettes. ‘Do you smoke?’

‘I even spent three years in prison.’ He took a cigarette and Auseri lit it for him. ‘For murder.’

‘I know,’ Auseri said, ‘but it doesn’t matter.’

Then maybe nothing really mattered.

‘My son is an alcoholic,’ Auseri said in the darkness, smoking. ‘He’s in that room on the first floor right now, the only lighted window on the first floor. That’s his room. He must have managed to hide a few bottles of whisky from me, and he’s tanking himself up while he’s waiting for us.’

From his voice, it was obvious that his son didn’t matter all that much to him either.

‘He’s twenty-two,’ Auseri said, ‘two metres tall and weighs, I think, ninety kilos. Up until last year he didn’t worry me too much, the only thing that made me a bit sad was that he wasn’t very bright. I couldn’t send him to university, I only managed to get him through his high school exams by bribing his teachers. He’s also very shy and submissive. To be honest, he’s a big lump.’

In other words, tall and stupid. Auseri’s bitter voice seemed to come from out of nowhere, it somehow just materialised in the dark air.

‘I wasn’t too upset that he was like that,’ Auseri said. ‘I don’t care about the joy having a genius as a son may bring. When he was nineteen, I sent him to work for Montecatini.
He went through all the offices and departments, so that he could learn; he didn’t learn much, but he kept going. Then last year he started drinking. For the first few months he managed to hide his vice, then he started going in late to work, or not going in at all, then I had to keep him at home because he was going into work with whisky bottles, the flat kind, in his pocket. You are listening, aren’t you?’

Oh, yes, in prison he had learned to listen; his cellmates all had long stories to tell, lies of course, stories about how they were innocent, how they’d been ruined by women, every one of them was an Abel killed by Cain or an Adam corrupted by Eve. The engineer, though, was telling him something different, something sadder and more meaningful, and he was really listening. ‘Of course,’ he replied.

‘I need to explain a lot of things so that you’ll understand,’ Auseri said. In the darkness, his voice did not lose any of its authority, but rather became more stubborn. ‘My son gets drunk three times a day. By lunchtime he’s completely drunk, he doesn’t eat anything and falls asleep. In the afternoon he gets drunk a second time, then sleeps until dinnertime. At dinner he eats, but he begins with the third course, and falls asleep in his chair. That’s what he’s been doing for most of the past year, unless I’ve physically prevented him.’

For a twenty-two-year-old it was a worrying way of drinking. ‘You must have tried a lot of things to stop him from drinking.’ He couldn’t yet figure out what was wanted of him, but he was making an effort to be polite. ‘Keeping him away from whichever friends of his are making him drink.’

‘My son doesn’t have any friends,’ Auseri said. ‘He’s never
had any, not even in elementary school. He’s an only child. I was widowed eleven years ago but, busy as I’ve been with my work, I never abandoned him to tutors and governesses. I know him well, he’s never played tennis with anyone, he’s never gone to the swimming pool, to the gym, or to a dance with friends. Since he’s had his car, he’s only used it for drives along the autostrada. The only normal thing about him is that he likes driving fast. One of these days he’ll kill himself, and his alcohol problem will be solved.’

Duca waited for the bitter emperor to start speaking again. He had to wait a long time.

‘I did a lot of things to stop him drinking.’ Auseri was in expository mode now, as if listing the sections of a disastrous balance sheet. ‘The first method was persuasion, talking to him. I’ve never in my life known anybody to be persuaded of anything with words, but I had to try. Psychologists say young people need to be persuaded, not controlled, but my attempts at persuasion were all defeated by the whisky. I talked, and he drank. Then I tried the restrictive method. No money, maximum surveillance, I was with him for almost two weeks, without ever leaving him alone. We were in St. Moritz; we passed the hours looking at the swans on the lake, with our umbrellas in our hands, because it rained all the time, but he managed to drink all the same, he drank at night, because we slept in separate rooms. Somebody working in the hotel must have brought him something to drink without my knowledge, and by the morning he was blind drunk.’

Every now and again they looked at the only lighted
window on the first floor: the drinker’s room, though all you could see was the light, the play of light on the ceiling.

‘The third method didn’t give any better results,’ Auseri said. ‘I’m a great believer in corporal punishment. Slaps and punches force a man to think fast about the best way to avoid them. Every time I found my son drunk, I’d hit him, a lot, and hard. My son respects me, and even if he’d tried to rebel I would have crushed him. After that corporal punishment, my son would cry and try to tell me that it wasn’t his fault, that he didn’t want to drink, but couldn’t stop himself. After a while, I abandoned that method, too.’

‘Have you tried any others?’

‘No. I did call a doctor and talk to him about the matter, and he told me that the only way was to put my son in a detox clinic.’

Yes, it was true, in a clinic they would detoxify the young man and then as soon as he got out he would probably start drinking again. But he didn’t say this: Auseri did.

‘I’d already thought of putting him in a clinic, but when he comes out he’ll only start drinking again: as soon as he’s alone he starts drinking. He needs friends, he needs women.’ Auseri offered him another cigarette and lit it and they started smoking. The air was still damp, and now it was also dark, apart from the lighted windows at the end of the drive. ‘Especially women. I’ve never known him to have a girlfriend. Don’t get me wrong. He likes women, I can tell that from the way he looks at them, and I believe he often uses prostitutes. But he’s too introverted to get a girlfriend. I’ve seen girls run after him, he’s a good match after all,
but he clams up when he’s with a woman, he literally never opens his mouth. He may give the impression of not being normal. But that’s wrong. He did the whole of his military service, and as a private, not an officer. At first his companions teased him, because he always kept himself to himself. He almost broke one fellow’s head and cracked another’s ribs, after that they respected him and left him alone. My son is normal, he just takes after his mother. She was like that, too, she had no friends, or even acquaintances, she was quite happy to stay at home with me. I only ever managed to take her to receptions or parties a few times. Defects can be inherited, whereas qualities are recessive. It’s a kind of biological entropy.’

The little emperor waved a hand, unhappily, but in the darkness it almost didn’t seem like a living hand, it appeared as vague and phosphorescent as ectoplasm, and even more unhappy in that funereal darkness.

‘And now I’d like to make one last attempt,’ Auseri said, ‘put him together with someone who could be both a friend and a doctor, who’d use any method he wanted to, to make him stop drinking, who’d stop him physically every minute of the day, even in the toilet. I don’t care if it takes a year, or what means he uses, he could even beat him to death, I’d rather he was dead than an alcoholic.’

In prison you can actually become intelligent, and words mean a lot, the words you say and those you listen to. Outside, where you were free to say what you liked, words, and listening to words, were wasted, underestimated: people spoke without knowing what they were saying, and listened
without understanding. But with Auseri it wasn’t like that. That was why Duca liked him, apart from the pain and bitterness concealed within the imperious exterior. He said, ‘You want me to be that person who’s both a friend and a doctor, and who gets him off the drink.’

‘Yes, the idea came to me yesterday. Superintendent Carrua is a friend of mine, he knows the whole story. I had to go to Police Headquarters yesterday and I dropped by his office. He talked to me about you, and asked me if I could find you a job with Montecatini. Of course I could find you a desk job with Montecatini if you wanted it, but then it struck me that someone like you could help me with my son.’

Of course, someone who’s only been out of prison for three days helps everyone, does everything, sings any song. He was certainly lucky to be a friend of Superintendent Carrua’s, he already had many things to choose from. Carrua had also found him a job selling pharmaceuticals, it was the ideal profession for a doctor who had been struck off, a suitcase with samples, a car with
Ciba
or
Farmitalia
painted on the doors, driving around the region, calling on doctors and pharmacists: it was almost better than being a doctor yourself. Or if he preferred something more unusual, he could accept Engineer Auseri’s offer and devote himself to his alcoholic son, cure him, remove the poison from him, be a kind of social worker. Or if he had lost the taste for socially redeeming work, he could make sure that Auseri got him that position with Montecatini: a desk somewhere in one of those neat offices, he could gratify his small-minded selfishness, the inertia of a man who no longer believes in
anything. But in prison you also become sensitive, easily irritated. And because he was irritated now, he said calmly, ‘What made you think of me? Any other doctor could treat your son.’

‘I don’t think so,’ Auseri said. He had become irritated, too. ‘I need a person I can trust absolutely. From the way Superintendent Carrua spoke to me about you, I know I can trust you. I have an intuition about these things. Earlier, when I saw you sitting here, with those stones in your hand, I knew I could trust you.’

These weren’t empty words, he could hear it in the tone of Auseri’s voice, and his irritation vanished. He liked talking to a man, after having talked to so many fools: the director of the clinic in the beanie hat who told dirty jokes as he operated, the prosecuting lawyer who shook his head each time he uttered Duca’s name in his closing statement: ‘… I don’t understand how Dr. Duca Lamberti’—a shake of the head—‘can maintain such an absurd version of events. Dr. Duca Lamberti’—a shake of the head—‘is either more naive, or more cunning, than may appear. Dr. Duca Lamberti’—another shake of the head—how could anyone be such an idiot? Auseri, though, was a man, and he liked listening to him.

‘Any other doctor would take advantage of the situation to drum up publicity for himself,’ Auseri said. ‘Until now my son’s alcoholism has been a closely guarded secret, known only to a few discreet friends. With any other doctor, it would become an item of gossip in all the drawing rooms in Milan. But you won’t talk, and I know that if you accept the
job you’ll get it done. Another doctor would get bored after a week and leave the boy stuffed full of pills and injections, and he’ll get drunk anyway. I don’t want pills and injections. I want a friend and an inflexible guardian for my son. It’s my final attempt. If it doesn’t work, I’ll let him go, I’ll cut him off and wash my hands of him.’

Now it was his turn. What time was it, and where were they? In a damp dark corner of the Brianza, on the side of a hill, with a villa ahead that seemed to be sliding towards them and inside the villa a young man clinging to a bottle of whisky, that was where they were. ‘I need to ask you a few questions,’ he said.

‘Of course,’ Auseri said.

‘You say your son has been drinking like this for a year. Did he drink before? Or did he just suddenly start drinking?’

‘No, he drank before as well, but not very often, he’d get drunk two or three times a month, no more than that. I don’t want to be ungenerous towards his dead mother, but it’s a tendency he gets from her.’

‘You also told me your son has no friends, no girlfriends. Does that mean he usually drinks alone?’

‘He’s drinking alone right now, in his room. But he drinks alone because he’s never with anybody. He doesn’t want to be.’

‘You also said that, despite appearances, your son is a normal young man. I’m prepared to believe that. But a normal young man doesn’t start drinking in that way without a reason. Something may have happened to him that drove him to drink more than he did before. He may have got involved
with a woman, for example. In films, men drink to forget unhappy love affairs.’

Auseri’s hand rose again, floated in the dark air, and moved across his face. ‘That was what I asked him when I hit him with the poker. We have a fireplace in our apartment in Milan, an old-fashioned one with a poker. A poker on the face hurts, and as it happened quite recently you can still see the mark on his cheek. I asked him if there was a woman, if he was in debt because he’d had to pay for some underage girl to have an abortion, he said no, and I believe him, because he’s useless—even at doing something wrong.’

He must be a strange young man. ‘I’m sorry to insist, Engineer, I’m speaking now as a doctor,’ as an ex-doctor, of course, a doctor who’s been struck off, ‘you told me before that as far as women are concerned, your son doesn’t have girlfriends, he’s always turned to prostitutes. Given this habit, it’s possible he’s contracted what he thinks of as a terrible disease and in his desperation, considering himself human refuse, has started drinking. Syphilis is a less fearsome disease now than it was in the past, but it’s still a stigma, and a sensitive young man like your son could well find it traumatic.’