The Golden Egg (16 page)

‘It's hard, but it's not too hard,' Proni said. ‘She had never needed them before: she's always been a patient who takes very few medicines. I should have told her to try drinking something hot before she went to bed, or going for a walk in the evening.' He scratched idly at a point just above the middle of his glasses and then rubbed the tips of his fingers up and down his forehead. ‘I should have thought.'

‘Thought what?'

‘That they come in bright colours and have a slick, sweet covering, like candies. They would be very appealing to someone of Davide's mental age.' He scratched again. ‘But I didn't. I just wrote her the prescription.'

‘What
was
his mental age?' Brunetti asked.

Proni shot him a glance, as though he'd invited him into his home and found him ruffling through the drawers. ‘I have no idea.'

‘I see,' Brunetti said mildly. Then, ‘Did you ever treat him as a patient, Dottore?'

‘Do I have to answer this question?'

‘It would save a lot of time.'

‘What does that mean?'

‘That, eventually – but only by our going through channels and getting an order from a magistrate and spending days of work – yes, you can be required to answer that question.'

Proni pushed his chair back from the desk: its legs made an ugly, scraping sound on the tile floor. He rubbed at his forehead again. ‘I went to their home once when he had flu and another time when he had terrible diarrhoea. The first time all I could do was to tell her to keep him in bed and warm and see that he drank lots of liquids. The second time I wrote a prescription. I don't remember what I prescribed: this was years ago.'

‘Was this done officially?'

‘What do you mean?' Proni asked, obviously confused.

‘Was the prescription written for him?'

‘Of course it was written for him. He was the one who was sick.'

‘I'm sorry, Dottore. I wasn't clear enough. Was the prescription written in his name?'

Proni stared at Brunetti as though he had suddenly noticed smoke coming from his ears. ‘I told you this was years ago, Commissario. I don't remember what I prescribed and I don't remember whom I prescribed it for. He had symptoms, I wrote a prescription, and that was that.'

There was nothing to lose in being truthful, Brunetti thought. ‘Dottore, I see your irritation, and I think I understand it.' Embarrassed by having no tool left but honesty, he went on. ‘I saw him for years. He worked in the dry cleaner's where my wife and I take our clothes. And I'd see him on the street sometimes. He always looked so . . . I don't know the right word. Vulnerable, perhaps.' He paused, but Proni said nothing. Some inner sense of propriety or decency kept Brunetti from inventing a lie similar to Pucetti's and telling the doctor that his son had known and played soccer with Davide.

‘What was wrong with him, Dottore?' Before Proni could answer, he said, ‘I don't care if you saw him other times or treated him for other things. I just want to know that: what was wrong with him?'

Proni leaned forward and said, ‘He was born to a stupid woman. He was born to a woman who saw whatever was wrong with him as a curse from God, as though she were living in a hut in a forest and believed in witches. Like most Christians, she knew everything about guilt and nothing about charity, so she kept it hidden – remember, it was a curse – and made no attempt to get him trained or taught, and God knows how she raised him. That's why he looked so vulnerable: that's why he seemed so lost and alien.'

‘Did she tell you this, Dottore?'

Proni's face flushed, because of either the story he was telling or the fact that Brunetti should question it. His mouth tightened and the difference between his eyes grew more marked. ‘She didn't have to tell me, Commissario,' he added in a calmer voice. ‘It was implicit in the way she treated him and in everything she said about him.'

Abruptly, Proni got to his feet. ‘That's all I have to say, Commissario.'

Brunetti stood and leaned over the desk to offer his hand. Proni did not hesitate to take it.

‘Let him rest in peace,' the doctor said. ‘He had so little of it when he was alive.'

Sensing that there was nothing to be gained by asking anything else, Brunetti turned towards the door. In the waiting room, he paused and nodded at the three drawings, which had changed again to suit the greater distance from which he was seeing them. ‘You said he's a local artist,' Brunetti said, pointing at the drawings. ‘Would I recognize his name?'

‘Probably,' Proni said with a smile that shaved years off his face.

‘What is it?' Brunetti asked, thinking he was being asked to do so.

‘Davide Cavanella,' Proni said, moving past him. ‘That should explain my anger at his mother.' He held the door open, and Brunetti left.

Because he was so close to home, Brunetti decided to go there instead of returning to the Questura. The kids would not be there for lunch; he had told Paola he would not be back, either, but his conversation with Dottor Proni had left him wanting to talk to her.

He found her where he thought he would: lying on the sofa, reading. She looked up when he came in, not at all surprised, and he was prompted to ask, ‘What if I had been the axe murderer?'

She picked up a piece of paper on her chest and stuck it back in the book, tossed the book to the foot of the sofa, and said, ‘The axe murderer had your footsteps on the stairs, and his keys jingled the same way yours do.'

‘You can hear that well?' he asked, his surprise audible to both of them.

‘You mean at my advanced age or after having lived through years of the music choices of two teenaged children?' she inquired.

He smiled and hung his jacket on the back of a chair, moved the book aside and sat down. ‘Did you really hear me coming up?'

‘Yes.'

‘And you can tell my keys?'

She hesitated, the way she always did when considering the usefulness of telling a lie. ‘No.' He smiled; she shrugged. ‘But I did hear keys, and thieves – or axe murderers, for all I know – don't make a noise when they're trying to come in.'

She swung her feet around and put them on the floor. ‘Hungry?'

Brunetti couldn't answer; he didn't know. Davide Cavanella had come home with him, filling his thoughts, driving out all else. ‘I want to ask you something.'

‘What about?'

‘Noise,' he said. ‘That is, sound.'

‘What about it?'

‘I wonder what it's like to be deaf.'

She gave him a long look but said nothing.

‘How do they learn?' he asked.

‘Learn what?'

He waved his hand in the air. ‘Everything. How to eat or sit in a chair.'

‘I suppose they learn it the same way Raffi and Chiara did.'

‘Which was?' he asked, not because he didn't remember but because he didn't know if Paola would have the same memories.

‘By watching us do it, I'd say, though with eating we had to guide their hands with the spoon, and then the fork.'

‘And sitting?' he asked, having given no conscious thought to the choice of actions.

‘They sat in highchairs to eat at first because we put them there, and then when they were big enough to climb on to chairs, they copied what they saw us doing.' After a moment's thought, she added, ‘And I suppose they figured out that sitting's more comfortable than standing.'

‘You get hungry, so you put food in your mouth,' Brunetti said. ‘You don't want to stand or sit on the floor, so you sit in a chair. They're practical solutions to real problems.' He paused, but Paola said nothing. ‘Why would they brush their teeth? Even if they saw us do it, it wouldn't make sense to a kid. They don't see it as a problem.'

‘We told them it was good for them, I suppose,' she said, less interested now.

‘That's just it,' Brunetti said.

‘Just what?'

‘We told them. How do you tell a deaf child?'

Before she could answer, he said, ‘I spoke to his mother's doctor. He told me she never had him helped.'

‘Helped how?' she asked, her whole face alert.

‘I don't know. He didn't say. He told me she never told anyone there was anything wrong with him.' Even as he said it, Brunetti was struck by how terrible that phrase sounded. ‘So he grew up without any special training.' And then, ‘The doctor couldn't hide his anger when he told me.'

He saw understanding cross her face and leave her features dull with shock. He saw her begin to understand the consequences. ‘But people could see there was something wrong with him,' she said. Then, an instant later, ‘We did.'

‘We thought we did,' Brunetti countered.

Paola moved back on the sofa, accepting with the motion that there would be no thinking about lunch until this was settled. ‘What is it we didn't understand? Tell me.'

‘You remember when we first saw him, don't you? What was it, fifteen years? More?' Paola nodded. ‘I remember how the woman in the dry cleaner's – with him standing right there, less than a metre from her – told us he was both deaf and retarded. He might as well have been a piece of furniture.' He recalled that there had been no malice in her voice.

He saw that Paola recalled the incident as well as he. ‘I remember cringing at it,' she said. ‘“Deaf and retarded”. Sweet Jesus, just like that.' He watched her call up the memory of that scene. ‘He didn't react, did he? She could have been talking about the weather for all he understood.'

She rested her head against the back of the sofa and closed her eyes for a minute. Keeping them closed, she asked, ‘What are you trying to tell me?'

‘I'm not sure,' Brunetti admitted and then, after a long pause, said, ‘There are some drawings he did on the wall of the doctor's waiting room. They were extraordinary, unlike anything I've ever seen.'

Paola opened her eyes and smiled. ‘That doesn't tell me very much, does it?'

Brunetti acknowledged this with a grin and said, ‘They were landscapes created out of hundreds of horizontal lines drawn very close together. Only millimetres apart. Palazzo Soranzo, the Lido, a cityscape. Absolutely accurate, only you don't see it until you're just at the right distance from it. Otherwise, it's just lines.' Realizing how little justice he was doing to the drawings, he stopped.

‘And so?' Paola asked.

‘So maybe that's what the doctor was talking about. He couldn't control his anger.'

‘At what?'

‘Maybe he thought that she was ignoring his handicap and that this was making it worse for him, and that he wasn't retarded, only deaf.'

‘Is that possible?' Paola asked.

Brunetti latched his hands together than stared at them. ‘I don't know. I don't know that much about psychology and how brains develop. But if no one taught him sign, or to read lips, then . . .'

‘Then he'd become the way he was?' she asked.

‘Possibly. I don't know.'

‘But the drawings?'

He unlatched his hands and ran his fingers through his hair. ‘I don't know.'

It took Paola a while to answer, and when she did, her uncertainty was audible. ‘He never gave a sign that he understood much of what happened. Or had any interest in things.' When Brunetti did not contradict her, she said, ‘So I don't know why we would have questioned what we were told.' Then, with every evidence that she was reluctant to show how strong her case was, she added, ‘And there was the way he looked, Guido, and the way he walked.' Before he could object, she said, ‘I know it's terrible to say these things, but he looked as if there was something wrong with him.'

Working to keep his voice level, Brunetti said, ‘We believed what we were told about him and never thought to ask why he was like that.'

Paola leaned aside and placed her hand on his thigh. ‘I don't mean to sound heartless, Guido, but I don't think anyone would, especially if a person who knew him said he was deaf and retarded.'

‘He learned how to take things home for people, to go with them to their houses,' Brunetti insisted. ‘He had to
learn
that. Someone had to
teach
him. Think how difficult that would be if he was both deaf and retarded. We didn't have to teach the kids how to eat or sit: they wanted to. It's been a long time, but I think we had to persuade the kids to brush their teeth and teach them how to do it and then keep at them until they did it on their own. And that's like carrying a parcel to someone's home. It's not something you want to do or do instinctively. You have to be taught. Or trained.'

Paola remained silent, staring at the paintings on the far wall. ‘When are you going to tell me why we're talking about this?'

He let his eyes follow hers and studied the paintings: a portrait of a distant ancestor on her mother's side, a not very pretty woman with a beautiful smile; and an unframed wooden panel with the portrait of a man in a naval uniform holding a brown speckled bird that Brunetti had bought with his first pay cheque, decades ago.

‘If he – Davide – was both deaf and retarded, and if his mother never got him any help, then how was he taught to do the things he knew how to do?' Brunetti asked, right back at the beginning and thinking of those drawings.

Paola leaned her head back again. Brunetti wondered if he had exhausted her intellectual curiosity or her patience. The man had died an accidental death: there was no question of that. Paola's response forced Brunetti to realize that he could not, even to himself, explain what so disturbed him. This man had passed through life without having left a trace of himself save in the memories of the few people who had seen him: Brunetti couldn't even say they had known him. He thought of that conundrum posed in his first class in logic: if a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it fall, does it make a noise?

Is a human life defined by contacts with other people? If, as Brunetti believed, people lived on only in the minds of the people who knew them and remembered them, then Davide Cavanella's existence had indeed been a miserable one, and it would cease with his mother's death.

He looked at the portraits again. It had always bothered him that no one knew who the woman was, whether she was an aunt removed by many generations or the mother of someone who had married into the family. The portrait had been in the attic of Palazzo Falier, and Paola had taken it to her room when she was an adolescent but had failed to find anyone in the family who had even the vaguest idea of who the woman might be; nor was there any record of the painting.

Brunetti had also failed with the man he thought of as his naval commander. Even though he wore a uniform jacket, Brunetti had never so much as managed to identify the man's nationality. The bird had finally been identified by an ornithologist friend of Paola's, who told them it was a South American Ruff, whatever that was.

He got to his feet, realizing now how hungry he was and willing to scavenge lunch from whatever he found in the refrigerator.

Hearing him, Paola opened her eyes. ‘Is it because we all failed him?' she asked. ‘Is that what's bothering you?'

‘Probably,' Brunetti answered. ‘And now he's dead and there'll be no making up for it.'

Finally, Brunetti tried to shrug it off by asking, ‘You think it's still warm enough to eat on the terrace?'

She turned and looked out the windows, studying the angle of the sun: it seemed that things were dry enough. ‘Only if we hurry,' she said.

‘Good. I'll take the plates out.'

Paola got to her feet, and Brunetti noticed, for the first time, that she used one hand to push herself upright. She passed him and went towards the kitchen, stopped at the door and said, without turning to him, ‘It's good that it bothers you, Guido.' She went to see what was in the refrigerator.