Death of a Dutchman (2 page)

She lived on the top floor in the corner by the church. There was a goldsmith's workshop in the ground floor left, and on the right was a tiny place, hardly more than a hole in the wall, that sold flowers. Both had their metal shutters down. He rang the top bell and stepped back on to litter-strewn cobbles, expecting a face to appear at the window since there was no housephone. But the door opened immediately; she must have been waiting beside the switch. Inside, on the left, was a door with a frosted glass panel in it and a brass plate beside it saying 'Giuseppe Pratesi, Goldsmith and Jeweller.' The flower-seller's tiny den was entered directly from the piazza. Nevertheless, the scent of flowers mingled with the smell of metal filings and gas burners as the Marshal began to climb slowly up the gloomy staircase, having looked in vain for a lift. A thin rope, worn smooth by many hands, served as a banister; it was looped through black iron protruberances set into the pitted walls at each turn in the staircase. Each floor had two brown-varnished doors with big brass doorknobs.

She was waiting for him inside her doorway, and she began to cry as soon as he came into view, hat in hand, on the last flight. He was too out of breath to speak and made no effort to interrupt her first tirade as he followed her inside.

'And it's hours since I telephoned, but nobody listens to an old woman—I could be robbed of what few scraps I have left in this world—but that witch won't get me out! They don't know what it's like to be old and defenceless . . .'

He almost had to run to keep up with her because the straight-backed chair on castors, which was supposed to help her to walk, careered madly along the tiled corridor with her tiny figure tottering after it, chattering and wailing as it went. The flat was long and narrow, all the main rooms opening off the left side of the passage. The bedroom door was always open to reveal the scanty furniture inside it, but all the other big rooms, the Marshal knew from Lorenzini, were bare. Over the years she'd had to sell her good old furniture bit by bit. They came to rest in the kitchen at the end of the passage.

'Sit down.' The old lady had already settled her frail bones into a battered leather armchair filled with an assortment of crocheted and flower-printed cushions by the window. Before her was a low table with the telephone on a crocheted mat, a list of numbers written in large red print and a magnifying glass. She indicated the hard chair opposite her as the place where he should sit.

'And what are the sunglasses in aid of?'

'Excuse me.' He took them off and slid them into his top pocket. 'It's an allergy I have . . . the sun upsets my eyes . . .'

'Not in here it won't!'

It was true that the room was gloomy; the window overlooked a narrow, sunless courtyard. She must spend the day keeping an eye on the doings of her neighbours, sometimes trundling herself and her wheeled chair through to the bedroom to watch the busy piazza. Those eight flights of stone stairs ... it must have been >ears since she last left the building.

The old lady was quick to catch his sympathetic glance and play on it.

'You see what it comes to in the end? Stuck here alone day after day and not a soul ever to come near me. I haven't been out of this house for over sixteen years . . . just sitting here all alone . . . day after day . . .'

Big tears were beginning to spurt from her eyes and she took a handkerchief from her dress pocket.

'But the woman from the Council comes, surely, Signora? Doesn't she do your shopping, wash and dress you, prepare your meal?'

'That witch! I'm talking about friends, friends who should visit me, not servants! Do you think I'd have allowed a woman like that into my home when my husband was alive? But it doesn't do to have standards these days. Tinned food, she once tried to bring into this house, but I drew the line there all right. I told her straight . . .

She had done better than that, as the Marshal recalled; she had thrown the little tin of jellied chicken at the unfortunate young woman's head, cutting it badly. Lorenzini had arrived in the middle of the row, having been called out to investigate Signora Giusti's complaint about the youngsters on the floor below having their stereo on at full volume, and he had found the social worker sobbing and holding a wet towel to her temple which was bleeding profusely. Lorenzini had brought the young students up with him to try and make peace, and a couple from the second floor had arrived on the scene to find out what the din was about; the husband was a street cleaner who worked nights and had been trying to get some sleep. There had hardly been room for all these people in the small kitchen, and Signora Giusti, Lorenzini reported, had been in her element, alternately weeping and chattering, content to be getting the amount of attention she considered her due.

Even'so, the Marshal thought, as the tiny, bird-like creature twittered on about the evil doings of the Council social worker, there was no getting away from the fact that she
was
ninety-one, and that she could hardly hope to leave her flat again except when she left it in her coffin.

'. . . Telling me I should be grateful! Grateful! That the only person I see all day is a stranger who thinks she has the run of the house, who tells me what to do and what to eat . . . she even cut my hair off, do you know that? My beautiful hair . . .'

She was crying in earnest now, apparently, although you could never be sure. Certainly, her hair which was fine and white and fairly plentiful, considering her age, had been cut off just below her ears like a little girl's.

'Maybe she thought you'd find it easier,' murmured the Marshal unhappily. He remembered that they'd cut his mother's hair after the stroke three months ago . . . but she really was like a child now, and it hadn't been a stranger who'd done it, but his wife. Was it possible to be still vain at ninety-one?

On the shiny yellow kitchen wall, next to a gaudy coloured print of Pope John XXIII surrounded by a border of old Christmas tinsel and topped by a red plastic rose, there was a group of framed family photographs; good frames, too, probably silver. One of them was of an exceptionally beautiful girl with abundant dark hair, a high lace collar and heavy strings of pearls. The Marshal had been admiring it absent-mindedly for some minutes before he realized with a start that it must be Signora Giusti herself. She must have been used to a lot of attention all right, and now \ . . There were patches on the wall where two other photographs had been. Had she been obliged to sell the silver frames?

'She won't get me out! I won't be turned out of my own home as if I were a nobody, leaving the place to be ransacked. I've told her I could be robbed, but all she cares about is going off on holiday—that's the sort of person I have to let into my home! That's the sort of treatment I'm supposed to be grateful for—but I'll not go and she can't make me! You'll have to tell her. Coming from you . . .'

But the Marshal had completely lost track.

'I'm not sure I understand. Who wants you to go where?'

Her incessant chatter was exhausting him. He was hungry and tired, but she was as lively as ever, the frail little body rattling about in the big armchair, back erect, eyes and hands constantly in motion.

'I've already explained once, if you'd been listening, that she's trying to get rid of me for a month, put me in a hospital while she goes off on holiday—like putting a dog in kennels—'

'I see . . . you mean the social worker. But this hospital—'

'Well, it's not a hospital, not exactly, more of a convalescent home. Out in the hills. Supposed to be cooler than Florence.'

'I imagine it must be if it's out in the hills—and you know, Signora, this young woman, the social worker . . . what is she called?'

'I wouldn't know,' snapped Signora Giusti untruthfully.

'Well, I expect she has a family, has to take her holiday when the children are off school.'

'Then they should send me someone else, not shunt me about like a useless bundle of rags!'

She was weeping again.

The Marshal sighed. He couldn't imagine why she wanted to drag him into all this, but he felt sorry for the social worker who must be suffering this sort of thing every morning. He tried a different approach.

'Listen, Signora—' he leaned forward heavily—'you must remember that in a sense you're a very exceptional person . . .'

She stopped crying and began to pay attention.

'There are other people of your age in Florence, but I doubt if any of them have kept themselves in trim the way you have, kept their interest in life, kept their wits about them—you know what I mean.'

'Hm,' said the Signora, sniffing. 'Florentines.'

'There's never enough staff during the summer . . .' He was treading carefully. 'And nor are there many places in the . . . convalescent homes out in the country. It's a question of choosing who to offer them to, choosing people who are capable of taking advantage of it . . .'

'Very good. Very nicely put. And who chooses where
you
go for your holidays?'

'I . . .'

'And I'll choose where to go for mine! And it won't be a place like that, I can promise you.'

'But how do you know, until you've been, what—'

'I have been.'

'You have? When?'

'I forget. But I won't set foot in a place run by a woman like that.'

'What woman?'

'The matron.' She leaned towards him and explained confidentially, 'A southerner. You understand me. They're not like us.'

'We're all Italians,' murmured the Marshal, staring. He came from Sicily.

'
We
are. But not southerners. Some of them are practically Negroes. Or else Arabs. They won't work and they live like animals. Where are you going?'

The Marshal had risen.

'If you're wondering where to put that—I hope it's fruit; it's the only thing I can enjoy with no teeth, that and cake—but you'd be surprised how many people come round here empty-handed. Or else they bring me hard stuff I can't possibly eat. That looks like fruit.'

'Peaches.' The Marshal resigned himself. It was true that he hadn't thought of bringing her anything, that he'd almost forgotten to come at all.

'Put them in the fridge. You've brought too many, they'll go off before I can eat them. Over there, behind that bit of curtain.'

She really was impossible!

He opened the rickety fridge which could have done with cleaning. There was a saucer on the middle shelf with a ball of cooked spinach on it. A small box of sterilized milk in the door. Nothing else. He put the peaches in the plastic bin at the bottom.

'Not there.' She was behind him, leaning on the wheeled chair. 'I can't bend down.'

He moved the peaches higher up. Next to the fridge was an old gas cooker with a battered saucepan on it containing the remains of the milky coffee which the social worker prepared in the mornings.

'She
makes it,' commented Signora Giusti, 'and I heat it up after I've eaten my meal. But today I dropped the matches. I couldn't fancy drinking it cold. I suppose you wouldn't . . .'

The matches were down between the fridge and the cooker. The Marshal picked them up and lit the gas. She watched him quietly, worried, perhaps, that she had gone too far since he didn't speak.

'Not too hot . . .'

She sat in her chair and he gave her the plastic beaker of warm coffee. She was a pathetic figure once she stopped being bloody-minded.

'Now, Signora, I'll have to go.'

'Wait . . .' She pulled herself to her feet and reached for her walking chair. 'There's something I've got to show you.'

She tottered off, rattling down the passage to her bedroom, the Marshal following resignedly.

There was nothing in the huge shuttered room except one of what had obviously been a pair of high wooden beds, and a cheap plywood chest of drawers. The bed had a dusty wooden cherub sitting on top of the headboard, raising a plump finger to its lips for quiet. The other bed with its cherub, the wardrobe and the dressing-table had evidently been sold. So, very probably, had the carpets; there was a bit of cheap matting by the bed.

Signora Giusti was fishing, with some difficulty, under the mattress.

'Help me . . .'

He heaved the mattress up and her tiny hand grasped a leather pouch. She put it under his nose and said:

There! A hundred thousand lire. Don't tell a soul.' She pushed it back out of sight.

'That's my burial money. I know I can trust you. You're a family man. It's the one thing, now, that matters to me ... to be buried respectably. You know what I mean . . .'

He knew what she meant. To be 'buried respectably' meant to be buried in an airtight compartment, or
loculo,
set into specially constructed walls, with a memorial plaque and an icon light in front. These apartments for the dead, with their rows of red lights winking in the darkness, varied in price according to their position in the wall, but they were always expensive. For those who couldn't afford them, burial in the ground was free, but not permanent. After ten years the body had to be exhumed, identified, and the remains put into a small ossuary and sealed at last into a smaller, permanent
loculo.
If there was still no money to pay for it, or if nobody turned up to identify the body and foot the bill, the remains were disposed of at the discretion of the sanitary department.

'You understand —' Signora Giusti clutched urgently at his arm—'I have nobody ... If they don't bury me respectably what will happen to my poor old bones?'

She was weeping again.

'Now that you know where the money is . . . you'll see to it . . . you'll tell them . . .'

'I'll tell them..'

'I'm not a pauper yet. . . Oh, if you'd seen how beautiful I was as a girl you'd understand! I don't want to end up on some rubbish heap . . . you must see that they take the photograph that's on the wall in the kitchen, don't forget that.'

It was customary to reproduce a photograph on a little ceramic plaque to be placed by the icon light.

'I won't forget.'

'You're a respectable person so I can trust you. I daren't tell anyone else, you see, because of the money. I don't want to be robbed.'