A Question of Belief

9

By the time he reached his office the next day, Brunetti was resigned to the fact that he was not soon going to have his own computer, though he found it more difficult to resign himself to the temperature of his office when he arrived. The family had, the night before, discussed where they were to go for their yearly vacation, Brunetti apologizing that the uncertainty of work had kept him this long without knowing when he would be free. He had quickly squashed all discussion of going to the seaside: not in August with millions of people in the water and on the roads and in the restaurants. ‘I will not go to Puglia, where it is forty degrees in the shade, and where the olive oil is all fake,’ he remembered saying at one point.

In retrospect, he accepted the possibility that he might have been too firm. In his defence of his own desires, he had been emboldened by the fact that Paola never much cared where they went: her only concern was what books she should take and whether wherever they went had a quiet place for her to lie in the shade and read.

Other men had wives who begged them to go out dancing, travel the world, stay up late and do irresponsible things. Brunetti had managed to marry a woman who looked forward to going to bed at ten o’clock with Henry James. Or, when driven by wild passions she was ashamed to reveal to her husband, with Henry James and his brother.

Like the president of a banana republic, Brunetti had offered democratic choice and then rammed his own proposal past all difference of opinion or opposition. A cousin of his had inherited a farmhouse in Alto Adige, above Glorenza, and had offered it to Brunetti while he and his family went to Puglia. ‘In the heat, eating fake olive oil,’ Brunetti muttered, though no less grateful to his cousin for the offer. And so the Brunettis were to go to the mountains for two weeks; thinking of it, Brunetti’s spirit flooded with relief at the mere thought of sleeping under a quilt and having to wear a sweater in the evening.

Vianello and his family had rented a house on the beach in Croatia, where he planned to do nothing but swim and fish until the end of the month. While they were both away, their unofficial investigation into Stefano Gorini would go on vacation, as well.

Brunetti spent the first part of the morning using the computer in the officer’s squad room to check the trains to Bolzano and to consult the various tourist sites in Alto Adige. Then he went back to his own office and called a few colleagues to see if they had ever come into contact with Stefano Gorini. He had more success with the train schedule.

A bit after twelve-thirty, he dialled his home number. Paola answered on the third ring, saying, ‘If you can get here in fifteen minutes, there’s prosciutto and figs and then pasta with fresh peppers and shrimp.’

‘Twenty,’ he said and hung up.

To walk it that quickly on a hot day, he feared, would kill him, so he went out to the riva and was lucky enough to step directly on to a Number Two. At San Tomà he caught a Number One that pulled up after two minutes, and got off at San Silvestro. It had taken longer than it would by foot, but he had been spared crossing the city in the middle of the day.

Inside the apartment, Paola and the kids sat at the table in the kitchen: the terrace was a broiler during the day and could be used only after sunset. Brunetti hung up his jacket, wondering if he should wring it out first, and took his place at the table.

He glanced at the faces and wondered if the apathy he saw there was the result of his behaviour about their vacation or merely the heat. ‘How’d you spend your morning?’ he asked Chiara.

‘I went over to Livia’s and tried on some of the new things she got to go back to school,’ Chiara answered, carefully trimming the fat from her prosciutto and passing it silently to Raffi’s plate, she apparently having decided that vegetarians can eat the ham but not the fat.

‘Autumn things? Already?’ Paola asked, putting a plate of prosciutto and black figs in front of Brunetti. She rested her hand on his shoulder when she leaned down with the plate, allowing Brunetti to believe that at least one member of the family looked forward to the vacation.

‘Yes,’ Chiara said, mouth full of fig. ‘When we were in Milano to visit her sister last week — Marisa: she’s at Bocconi — they took me shopping with them. The stuff there is much better than what you find here. Here it’s all for teenies or old ladies.’

His daughter had gone to Milano, Brunetti reflected, site of the Brera Gallery, site of Leonardo’s Cenacolo, site of the greatest Gothic cathedral in Italy, and she had gone shopping. ‘Did you find anything you liked?’ he asked and ate half a fig. His daughter was perhaps a philistine, but the fig was sweet perfection.

‘No, Papà, I didn’t,’ she said in the descending measures of tragedy. ‘Everything’s crazy expensive.’ She trimmed another piece of prosciutto and used the point of her knife to transfer the fat to Raffi, who was busy with his lunch and apparently uninterested in tales of shopping.

‘I had my own money, but Mamma would have gone crazy if I’d spent two hundred Euros on a pair of jeans.’

Paola glanced up from her antipasto. ‘No, I wouldn’t have gone crazy, but I would have sent you to a work camp for the rest of the summer.’

‘How are we supposed to get out of the financial crisis if no one spends any money?’ Chiara demanded, sure proof that she had spent a day in the company of a student at Italy’s best business school.

‘By working hard and paying our taxes,’ Raffi said, thus putting an end to any lingering doubts Brunetti might have had that his son’s flirtation with Marxism was at an end.

‘Would that it were that easy,’ Paola said.

‘What do you mean?’ asked Raffi.

‘To work hard, you have to have a job,’ Paola said, looking across the table at him and smiling. ‘Right?’ Raffi nodded. ‘And to pay taxes, you also have to have a job. Or run a business.’

‘Of course,’ Raffi said. ‘Any idiot knows that.’

‘And how does a person find a job?’ Before Raffi could answer, Paola forged ahead. ‘Without knowing someone or having a father who’s a lawyer or a notary who can give him a job as soon as he finishes his studies?’ Again, before her son could answer, she said, ‘Think about the older brothers and sisters of your friends in school. How many of them have found decent jobs? They’ve got all sorts of elegant degrees in I don’t know what sort of elegant subjects, and they sit at home and live off their parents.’ And before her son could accuse her of insensitivity, she added, ‘Not necessarily because they want to but because there are no jobs for them. If they’re lucky, they get some sort of temporary work, but as soon as their contract is up, they’re let go, and someone else is hired for six months.’

Good Lord, Brunetti thought, who sounded like the Marxist now? ‘So how are they to get jobs and pay their taxes?’ he inquired mildly.

Paola started to speak but apparently decided to abandon the topic. ‘I think it’s ready,’ she said. It was: Paola had seared off the skins of the peppers, leaving behind a sweetness and consistency reminiscent of the figs. The family, soothed by the pleasures of lunch, spent the rest of the meal in peaceful discussion of how to spend their time in the mountains.

After lunch, Brunetti sat on the sofa and leafed through Il Gazzettino, but even the lightness of its every word and phrase could not lift the vague uneasiness created by Paola’s obvious change of subject. Retreat was not a tactic to which she was much given.

She came in with coffee, handed him his cup, and sat in an easy chair across from him. She put her feet on the low table and took a sip. ‘If I ever say again, any time in my life, how nice it is to live on the top floor, under the roof, would you please stuff me in the oven and keep me there until I come to my senses?’

‘We could get air conditioning,’ he said, to provoke her.

‘And have Chiara move out?’ she asked. ‘She’s toxic on the subject. One of her friends’ fathers had it put in, and Chiara refuses to go to her house any more.’

‘You think we’ve created a fanatic?’ Brunetti asked.

Paola finished her coffee and set the cup and saucer on the table. After some time, she said, ‘If she’s got to be a fanatic, I’d rather it be the ecology than anything else.’

‘But don’t you think her response is a bit excessive?’ Brunetti asked.

Paola shrugged. ‘It is now, this year, in this historical period. But ten years from now, twenty, she might be proven right, and we’ll look back at the excess of our lives and see it as criminal.’ She closed her eyes and let her head fall against the back of the chair.

‘And then people will call her a prophet and not a fanatic?’

‘Who knows?’ Paola said, eyes closed. ‘They’re often the same thing.’

‘Why’d you change the subject?’ he asked.

‘About jobs and taxes?’ she asked.

He studied her face. She was more than twenty years older than when he had first met her, and yet he could see no difference. Blonde hair that had a will of its own, a nose that was perhaps too large for this era of female beauty, the cheekbones that had drawn his first kisses. He grunted by way of answer.

‘I didn’t want to talk about taxes,’ she said at last.

‘Why?’

‘Because I think we’re crazy to continue to pay them, and if I could, I’d stop.’

‘Is this excessive rhetoric?’ long experience prompted him to ask.

She opened her eyes and smiled across at him. ‘Probably. But I was surprised to realize a few days ago that some of the things the Lega says — those same things that had me wild with anger a decade ago — they’re beginning to make sense to me.’

‘We become our parents,’ Brunetti said, repeating something his mother had often said. ‘What things?’

‘That our tax money goes South and is never seen again. That the North works hard and pays its taxes and gets very little in return for it. That the Vatican tells us to be generous to immigrants but doesn’t take any in.’

‘You going to start talking about building a wall between the North and the South?’ he asked.

She let out a snort of laughter. ‘Of course not. I simply didn’t want to talk like this in front of the kids.’

‘You think they don’t know?’

‘Of course they know,’ she said. ‘But they know only from what we do or what their friends’ parents do.’

‘For example?’

‘That when we eat in a restaurant where the owner is a friend, we don’t get a ricevuta fiscale, so no tax is paid.’

Brunetti was always, and uncontrollably, defensive about any suggestion of frugality on his part and quickly jumped to his own defence. ‘I don’t do it to make them charge less. You know that.’

‘That’s just my point, Guido. That at least would make sense because it would save you money. But you do it out of principle, not greed, so that this disgusting government of ours won’t get at least that little bit of money to give to their friends or put in their own pockets.’

He nodded. That was exactly the point.

‘And that’s why I don’t want to talk about taxes in front of them. If they’re going to end up feeling that way about the government, then they have to discover it themselves: they shouldn’t learn it from us.’

‘Even if it is, as you say, a “disgusting” government?’

‘It’s not as bad as some,’ she temporized after a moment’s reflection.

‘I’m not sure that’s the most eloquent defence of our government I’ve ever heard,’ he said.

‘I’m not trying to defend it,’ she said angrily. ‘It’s disgusting, but at least it’s disgusting in a non-violent way. If that makes a difference.’

After some reflection, Brunetti said, ‘I suppose it does.’ He pushed himself to his feet, walked around the table and bent to kiss her and said he’d be back at the usual time for dinner.