A Private Venus

3

His first mistake had been to hate the director of the clinic. True, everything about Arquate was hateful-his physical appearance, like a horse dealer disguised as a surgeon, his character, the tone of his voice, his rude manner-but hate is pointless. If he didn’t like Arquate, he should just have left the clinic.

But hating Arquate as he did, he had been wrong to place so much weight on what happened that morning. Arquate and he had just left Signora Maldrigati’s room, after a purely routine visit, and Arquate, leaving the door open-he never closed doors, it was a matter of principle with him-had said, ‘The woman may be on my hands until the August bank holiday, or just after. They always seem to be on the verge but they never go.’ His voice, already as loud as a sports commentator’s, had boomed even more than usual because he was annoyed. Not only Signora Maldrigati, the poor lady in question, but all the patients in the clinic must have heard his words.

The reason for this annoyance was that every year from 5 to 20 August, Professor Arquate closed his small but busy clinic and sent the patients home, either declaring them suddenly cured or assuring them that they needed a change of air. He couldn’t always empty the clinic by the date fixed by him, or rather fixed by his wife, who needed to be in Forte dei Marmi by that date, because every year one of her sisters arrived from New York to spend her holidays with her; and when, because of a patient, he had to postpone the date, which meant quarrelling with his wife, Arquate got annoyed.

Duca shouldn’t have become so indignant at those words, or been so upset by the desperation of Signora Maldrigati, who had heard them. Both reactions had been serious mistakes.

Signora Maldrigati had heard the words, she had understood them perfectly, and had entered into a phase of terror. She moaned for a whole half-day, injections didn’t calm her down, only the strongest sedatives at last plunged her into a deep, desperate sleep. She had never been under the illusion that she still had a long time to live, but the great physician’s words had told her just how little time she had: she would be dead even before the August holiday, which was what Arquate hoped, or if not, then soon after it.

He should have let her be. It was a distressing case but not uncommon: thanks to the morphine Signora Maldrigati wasn’t in any pain, all he had to do was let the nurse get on with giving her the injections. Instead of which, he had stayed with her as much as he could and tried to convince her it wasn’t true that she was about to die. Another mistake, because, old and riddled with cancer as Signora Maldrigati might be, she was an intelligent woman.

At the trial, he had been asked how long it was after Signora Maldrigati asked him to help her die that he had agreed to give her the fatal injection of ircodine.

He had made the mistake of answering, ‘All through the morning of 30 July she kept begging me to let her die.’ He shouldn’t have mentioned the dates, should have kept everything vague, as if he couldn’t remember.

‘And when did you give her the ircodine injection?’

He had made the mistake of giving the chilling answer, ‘The night of 31 July to 1 August.’

‘In other words,’ the prosecutor had said, ‘you took the decision to kill a sick old woman, albeit under the specious name of euthanasia, in a mere thirty-six hours. Any soul-searching you may have done about the morality of killing a human being who might still have lived several more years lasted no more than thirty-six hours, or even less, because you must have slept for seven or eight of those hours.’

Ever since, he had been unable to silence that voice in his mind, but only because of the stupidity of what it was saying. Before the trial he had believed there must be a limit to stupidity, then he had realised he had been wrong even about that. Only the skill of the lawyer his father had provided for him had saved him, at least partly, from all the mistakes he had made: three years’ imprisonment and being struck off the register wasn’t too bad. He could have got fifteen years, just for making sure that Signora Maldrigati was relieved of the terror of death. Dying is a hundred times better than being afraid of dying, as he had tried-ridiculously-to explain at the trial, standing suddenly and crying out, ‘Signora Maldrigati’s eyes turned purple as soon as she saw Professor Arquate, after he had let her know the date of her death …’ The two carabinieri had made him sit down again, and as soon as sentence was pronounced, Signora Maldrigati’s niece had gone to the notary to talk about the inheritance.

His father had visited him in prison one morning, but had left again almost immediately because he had not felt well. Four days later, he had suffered a fatal heart attack. Left alone during those three years, Duca’s sister Lorenza had met a kind gentleman who had shown an interest in her and comforted her and got her pregnant, at which point he had told her he was married and promptly vanished from her life. Lorenza had asked Duca if he liked the name Sara for the child. From prison he had answered yes. How wrong it had all been.

And he was wrong, too, in not wanting to take sleeping pills, because he could have avoided staying awake until dawn and hearing Arquate’s voice or his father’s, or Signora Maldrigati’s moans, which only the ircodine had mercifully silenced forever. In prison, too, the doctor had offered him pills, but he had refused. Anyone might have thought the reason he couldn’t sleep was because of his remorse over killing a sick woman who might have lived several more years. But it was idiotic to think that Signora Maldrigati could have lived for more than a month or two at the most, it was only at the trial that anyone had thought of saying that. The reason he couldn’t sleep was simply that he didn’t like the world around him any more. Even a hen can find it hard to sleep in a henhouse it isn’t really happy about.

It was only four, but the wave started to recede inside him, maybe the usual nocturnal torture was coming to an end. A little earlier, he had heard a noise, it might have been a door being closed slowly, or a window. Michelangelo’s David was probably also having difficulty sleeping: the world he was in couldn’t be too pleasant either. Duca got up to fetch a book. He chose one at random, which turned out to be the history of the republic of Salò, and equally at random he read a memo from Buffarini to Mussolini: the enthusiasm of the Italian people for the war had been cooling rapidly since Stalingrad and the allied landings in Morocco, the Duce had to remember that the spirit of the population was quite different from the days of the Empire. Even their hostility towards their German comrades was increasing …

He closed the book abruptly, got up, and put it back on the shelf. At that moment there was something he didn’t like in the house, any more than he liked the streak of grey in the dawn sky. He left the room, as if he already knew what it was that he didn’t like, even though he didn’t, and knocked at the door of the next room, Davide’s room.

No answer. He tried to turn the handle: the door was locked. All at once, he realised what had happened and pounded with his fist, three or four times. ‘Open up, or I’ll knock the door down.’

No sound, for a moment, he pounded again, more loudly, and as he pounded the key turned in the lock and the door opened. It was as he had feared. With his right hand Davide was holding a handkerchief over his left wrist, the handkerchief was already soaked with blood, it was trickling down. The most distressing way to die.

Duca didn’t say anything, just pushed Davide into the bathroom. There was a first aid case on the wall which, quite unusually, contained everything he needed. With his huge arm stretched over the wash basin, Davide let him do whatever he wanted. He had known what he was doing when he slit his wrist, had known what he was aiming for: the greatest loss of blood with the smallest cut. That made it easier for Duca to stitch and dress the wound, and less than half an hour later the would-be suicide was lying on his bed. The cuff of his shirt hid most of the bandage. He hadn’t said a word so far and, lying like that on the bed, still wasn’t saying anything.

Duca hadn’t said a word either. Not one. As soon as he had put him back on the bed he looked for the stash of whisky. It was child’s play: the only place a person as tall as Davide Auseri could hide a bottle was on top of the wardrobe; by standing on tiptoe he managed to reach that obvious hiding place and took down the bottle. He laughed nervously to himself: he wasn’t much shorter than Davide.

He started to drink from the bottle: one sip, then a breath, another longer sip, another breath, the third sip, enough now. He needed it, he was still frozen with terror, and even the whisky didn’t warm him up very much. He put the bottle back on top of the wardrobe, sat down on Davide’s bed and looked at him. His expression was normal, he hadn’t cried, he wasn’t pale, the skin of his face was dry. That was the terrible thing about it: he had decided quite calmly and lucidly that he wanted to die. At the age of twenty-two.

‘Don’t you ever think of other people?’ Duca asked. He looked at the window: the square of sky was milky with dawn. No answer. ‘No, I’m not talking about your father, the grief you’d have given your father if you’d died. I’m talking about other people, anyone, someone you might pass in the street. Me, for example. Suppose I hadn’t heard that noise just now: it was you going into the bathroom to get the scissors to slit your wrists. Suppose I’d been asleep, and when I woke up I’d found you, having already bled to death. Imagine my situation. I just got out of prison, only three days ago, I was sent there for an offence that some people called homicide, although with extenuating ideological circumstances. This morning they find me here, with a dead young man, after a night spent with women of easy virtue, the remains of our orgy still downstairs. You have no idea how imaginative the press can be, or how suspicious the police. They would have talked about drugs, and as a former doctor I’d have been accused of organising the whole sadistic party and providing heroin, cocaine, mescaline, marijuana: they might have found your suicide suspicious. “Someone cut his veins for him while he was in a drugged stupor”: there’s always a lawyer ready to make that kind of accusation in court. So I’d have immediately gone back inside, and would have been ruined forever. Now listen to me: it’s true that you barely know me, but I have a sister who’s twenty-two, with an illegitimate one-year-old daughter, and their lives depend entirely on me. If I work they eat, if I don’t they have to live on charity, as they did all the time I was in prison. If this stupid joke of yours of trying to die had succeeded, it would have been all over for me. I know you couldn’t have thought of these things, but I do, the reason I didn’t strangle you as soon as I saw you with your wrist cut was because I still have a lot of self-control.’

At last a word, just one, a brief one, bland and yet moving: ‘Sorry,’ and his eyes narrowed a little as he said it: Davide, too, had a lot of self-control.

‘Don’t do it again, Davide’-he had never before threatened a fellow man like this-’I can’t watch over you every instant and a person who wants to do himself in will manage it even with ten guards watching him. If you’re tired of life, wait till I’ve finished my job, in a month you’ll be drinking only mineral water, then I’ll go and you’ll be able to do whatever you like. But as long as I’m here with you,’ he grabbed the collar of his open shirt with one hand and, heavy as he was, lifted him until he was almost sitting up, and they were almost eye to eye, ‘as long as I’m here with you, you won’t do things like that, I’d stop you, but then I’d kill you myself, and I wouldn’t be gentle.’

However intelligent he was, the young man didn’t realise how much play-acting there was in this scene. Duca was exaggerating in order to give him a moral reason not to kill himself, he had given him a dramatic explanation of the way his suicide would have cruelly ruined a man, a man like him, even though he barely knew him. Sometimes, at the age of twenty-two, an appeal to your sense of morality actually works.

‘It won’t happen again,’ Davide said, narrowing his eyes even more: he must have been extremely unhappy, but he managed to hide it almost completely.

Duca stood up. He was still in his pants. ‘I’m going to get my cigarettes.’ He went back to his room and got dressed: the wonderful new shirt, the wonderful blue suit of ultralight material, the fantastic light blue tie, all given to him on coming out of prison by Lorenza or, more correctly, by Superintendent Carrua who had given her the money. His hair was only two millimetres high and didn’t need combing, but as he knotted his tie in front of the wardrobe mirror he realised that he needed a shave. He lit a cigarette and went back to Davide’s room.

It was still only dawn, daylight was a long time coming, but he didn’t need the light on any more and he switched it off. Davide was still there, monumental and unhappy, lying on a bed that was too short and too narrow for him, as if lying on a plank. Duca took a chair and moved it close to him. He kept smoking his cigarette, without offering him one.

‘I haven’t asked you why you tried to kill yourself, because you wouldn’t have told me.’ He didn’t wait for a reply, he knew there wouldn’t be one, he took a few more puffs of his cigarette, then said, ‘And I’m not going to ask you now, because you still wouldn’t tell me.’

In fact, he didn’t say anything at all. But Duca had understood. The question was not the drinking, the alcoholism, as Davide’s father the emperor thought. Parents always think their children are still at the lullaby stage. For a young man of that age to have such a clear-headed desire to die, the reason had to be a deep and serious one. Davide was a healthy young man, from every point of view, Mariolina and company had confirmed that, and for a healthy young man to consciously resolve on his own death, there must have been a painful wound to his ego. A simple event, however serious, wouldn’t have reduced him to this: even if he had killed someone, if he had set fire to an old lady or put a bomb in the basement of Milan Central Station, he wouldn’t have acted like this. Davide Auseri had been destroyed by something. Or by someone. That was what he had to discover. The drinking was a laughable matter.

‘And now that you’re rested, let’s go.’ He stood up and threw the cigarette end out of the window, which was still milky with dawn, neither more nor less than before, as if the dawn had come to a halt. Even stranger, there was no dawn chorus. It was just as silent as it had been in the middle of the night. ‘This isn’t the right place for you or for me. Let’s go straight away. I’ll pack your bag for you: for a couple of days it’s best that you use your left arm as little as possible. I don’t think you’re sleepy. Neither am I.’

Getting the necessary indications from Davide, he found a beautiful soft suitcase, dark blue, obviously, and put in it everything they would need. Then, with toilet paper he scrupulously cleaned the bloodstains that led from the room all the way to the bathroom-to support Lorenza and his niece he would have to do this and more-and when everything was ready he said, ‘Now you can get up. I may have missed a few bloodstains, so before leaving, wake the maid, the butler, whoever you like, and tell them you’re going, then even if they discover the bloodstains I missed they won’t think there’s been a murder and we ran away.’

Davide obeyed him promptly and gloomily, he woke the butler who had appeared in his nightshirt the previous night, had him take the case out to the car and sat down quietly next to Duca at the wheel, knowing already that he wouldn’t be the one to drive.

So they descended from the soft hills of the Brianza into the Milanese plain and near Monza they found somewhere open: obviously it didn’t have any drinkable whisky, it wasn’t so much a bar, more a kind of shed, but Michelangelo’s David was starting to turn pale and need refuelling. Duca ordered two grappas. Davide drank his straight down, so Duca passed him his own glass.

‘The treatment starts now,’ he said. ‘Whenever I think you really need a drink, I’ll give you one. Otherwise not a drop, and I’ll stop you any way I can.’

Davide drank the second glass, too, they were so small, so measly, so reminiscent of an earlier time, a world of rosepetal cordials and shoes with heeltaps, that Duca said, ‘Have another one: that’s an order.’ He got back behind the wheel and after a while looked at Davide: his pallor had gone, his breathing had got back to normal. It wasn’t the derisory loss of blood that had made him sick, obviously. It was the cobra he had inside him, which was eating him up.

‘If you tell me what happened to you, and let me help you, it’ll be much better for you,’ Duca said. He wasn’t expecting any reply. And he didn’t get one.