A Private Venus (13 page)

‘You’re driving the car, you’re following us in our investigations, you’re doing errands. In the police, a driver is an important person.’ It was no use, he didn’t react, he didn’t accept either conversation or jokes: for all his goodwill, the Frascati didn’t sustain him like whisky. Duca continued
speaking, as if he was alone: ‘I really like playing the policeman. My father didn’t like the idea of me following in his footsteps, but he was wrong.’ Of course, he couldn’t be a policeman even now, less now than ever. Especially in a case like this one. Carrua had been quite clear about this: ‘If you find something that isn’t right, don’t be afraid to come out with it, but do it discreetly, for two reasons, one is that you can’t be involved officially, otherwise we’ll all be in trouble, the other is that as soon as the press find out we’re taking an interest in the case, they’ll manufacture another Montesi affair. It has all the elements, at least in the wild imagination of some journalists. If it is a Montesi affair, if really big names are involved, if there’s something rotten behind all this, then don’t be afraid, as I said, but before making a fuss about it we need proof, otherwise the papers will have a field day, and it’s all over. Discretion, that’s the order of the day.’

Discretion. In other words, like looking for something in the dark. Alberta Radelli’s sister he had been able to tackle officially: we’re police, answer our questions. But with the others, he had to be careful: on what pretext, for example, could the police question this Livia Ussaro, a whole year after Alberta’s death, without being indiscreet, without risking kicking up a fuss? He looked for a pretext, but couldn’t find one that was sufficiently intelligent, and he didn’t like stupid pretexts.

But his desire to see Livia Ussaro was growing in him minute by minute, exacerbated by the aristocratic solitude of these hotel rooms, where you have everything you need to be comfortable, all the refinements you almost never get
in your own home, and all that’s missing is what you find in even the poorest home, something you can’t define and which may not even exist, but everybody feels it as if it did exist. In a hotel room you move in a different way from the way you do in your own home, you look at things in a different way, maybe you even think in a different way. And so he made up his mind: these evenings at the hotel, with Davide there but not really there thanks to the decreasing supply of alcohol, weighed heavily on him. ‘At least we can have a nice talk over the phone,’ he thought, or predicted, as if he could see into the future.

He got up and went and sat down on the bed, next to the bedside table, where the telephone was, and asked the switchboard operator to get him the number of Livia Ussaro, then put down the receiver and waited. He saw Davide’s sad, anxious profile, and on the table the bottle of Frascati on a large silver tray, aesthetically wrapped in a fine napkin. It was actually quite late to be telephoning a private number, a person he didn’t even know, and after a year Livia Ussaro might have moved, or died, or emigrated to Australia: things go so quickly these days, oh, yes.

‘Could I speak to Livia please?’ he said as soon as he heard a middle-aged woman’s voice.

‘Who shall I say is calling?’

‘Duca,’ he said, simply. Among friends that was how people spoke on the phone.

‘Duca?’ the woman said.

‘That’s right, Duca.’ Silence. The woman had moved away from the phone, she hadn’t sounded very convinced by his
name:
Duca
, as in duke. She wasn’t the only one, at school he had even got into punch-ups with his wittier classmates: ‘So what’s your big brother, then, a Grand Duke or an Archduke?’ The reply was always: ‘He’s this’—in other words, a kick in the kneecap or on the shin. His father had taught him that.

‘Hello?’ It must be her, the voice was low but quite girlish.

‘Livia?’

‘Yes, this is she, but I’m sorry, I don’t remember …’

It
was
her, she still existed, really existed. His desire to talk to Livia Ussaro was about to be satisfied. ‘I’m the one who should apologise. You couldn’t remember me because we’ve never met.’

‘Please, could you tell me your name again?’ There was such coolness and yet such energy in her voice.

‘Of course, but it wouldn’t mean anything to you. I wanted to talk to you about someone we both know.’

‘Either tell me your name, or I’ll hang up.’

What a world of obsessive bureaucrats, from Mascaranti, who wrote everything down, to this woman who needed to hear the four or five syllables commonly defined as a name, any name: he could easily tell her his name was Orazio Coclite and what difference would it make? ‘My name is Duca Lamberti, though you don’t know me. But we both knew someone in particular.’

She didn’t let him finish this time either. ‘Wait, I’ve heard that name before. Oh, yes, of course, you’re one of my idols! I was very innocent in those days, I used to have a lot of
idols, I don’t have many left, but you’re one, except that my memory …’

He looked at the tip of his shoes, the shoes, with his feet inside, were real entities, and he had to convince himself that he was really talking to a woman who was telling him that he was her idol. In what sense? For what reason?

‘… Three years ago, in the courtroom I shouted, “No, no, no, no!” when the judge read out the sentence, they dragged me outside and held me in a room for two hours, asking me who I was and who I wasn’t, and I kept saying: “It’s shameful, shameful, shameful, they shouldn’t have sentenced him to prison,” and they’d answer, “Signorina, keep quiet, otherwise we’ll put you inside for causing a breach of the peace,” and I cried all the way home. I’d attended the whole trial, I’d told everybody they had to acquit you, that you weren’t guilty of anything, that in fact they ought to give you a prize, I’d quarrelled with people in the corridor outside the courtroom.’

Of course, she was talking too much, but her warm, low tone of voice didn’t have the same irritating effect on him as the shrill chatter of many women. And besides, she was saying things he would never have expected, things he could never have imagined anyone saying to him, not even his father or his sister had ever said anything like that. He was an idol. He had a fan. Probably the only one.

‘And now I didn’t even remember your name! I really feel ashamed, you can’t imagine all the arguments I’ve had about euthanasia, everyone’s against it, they have their principles,
the principle of respect for life, the principle of putting on evening dress to go to La Scala.’

‘I’m very grateful, Livia.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry, I don’t usually talk so much, only when I’m speaking to someone intelligent, so I’m happy I can talk to you—but I’m sure there must be a reason you phoned me.’

‘Yes, I wanted to talk to you about someone you used to know: Alberta Radelli.’ A sudden silence, at the other end. ‘Not right away, obviously. One of these days, whenever you like.’ The silence continued, but she was still there, he could sense her presence, although he couldn’t even hear her breathing. ‘It’s very important to me, and you could be a great help.’

And finally her voice, so low, so warm, and at the same time, not bureaucratic, but something similar, professorial, yes, that was the word. ‘There are a lot of subjects I don’t like talking about, and Alberta is the one I like least. And like all the things I don’t like, I want to do them immediately.’

‘Now?’

‘Immediately.’

‘Where can we meet?’

‘Here in the Via Plinio. There’s a bar right near my apartment. I’m sure I’ll recognise you: at the trial I looked at you for hours on end. How soon can you get here?’

‘In ten minutes.’

Life is a well of marvels, there’s everything in it: rags, diamonds, cut-throats, and Livia Ussaro. He put down the receiver, feeling slightly dazed, as if he had drunk too much Frascati, and in fact he now poured himself half a glass, he
looked at Davide, who wasn’t alive even though he appeared to be living, and had a moment of weakness.

‘I have to go out now, but I’ll be back soon. I know you’re not feeling too good about the wine, I’ll have them send up a bottle of whisky, to help you stand the solitude and the darkness.’ He really felt quite sorry. ‘Act like a man, Davide: the less you drink the better it’ll be.’ This concession was a mistake, from both a medical and a psychological point of view. But even this time he had to risk it, above all he didn’t want Davide to drink on the sly during his absence. If he wanted to drink, he was free to do so, he had Duca’s permission.

He went out. Now he would see what Livia Ussaro looked like. He couldn’t imagine her somehow, his only idea was that she must be quite tall.

She was indeed tall. She stood waiting for him at the door of the bar and he was impressed by the fact that, as soon as he got out of the Giulietta, she came towards him, with that warmth in her walk and in her eyes, as if she was greeting an old and dear friend. Until ten minutes ago, he hadn’t even known he had a friend like her in the world, let alone so near.

‘We can talk quietly here, it’s the only bar in the area without a TV or a jukebox, so there are almost no customers in the evening.’

Her hair was brown, or rather black, a definite, natural black. It was cut quite short, a bit shorter than the hair of men who wear it long, but a little less short than the men who have it a normal length and go to the barber once every two weeks. A woman with short hair: he liked long hair, but he had to admit it looked good on her.

‘You said things to me that were very, very …’ it would be stupid to say ‘kind,’ but what could he say, so he broke off.

‘I said to you a hundredth of what I should have said to you years ago. But now you want to talk about Alberta, so let’s talk about her.’

She was wearing a dark green dress he liked a lot: smooth, high-necked, sleeveless. She was tanned, but normally, she didn’t look like a Papuan, nor was she pale like girls who never sunbathe. That green, that tan, that black hair, matched the place very well, because it was all in gold, the
walls were covered in gold plastic, and so was the counter, and the round tables gleamed dimly like old gold.

‘Two beers.’ They were the only customers, after serving them even the barman disappeared. There was no air conditioning, but a big fan with wide wooden blades gave the place an exotic, colonial tone and probably made it cooler than air conditioning might have.

‘Alberta killed herself a year ago. What do you want to know about a dead woman?’ Like him, she liked getting straight to the point, and when he didn’t reply immediately, she continued, ‘I can imagine how you met her. One evening you were going to the cinema alone, you hadn’t found any other way to spend the evening, you got there in time for the last show, you parked your car and looked around, still undecided whether or not to go in, and that was when you saw her, standing there, looking a bit self-conscious, near the entrance to the cinema. You must have thought she was just a normal girl who’d been stood up by her boyfriend, or else she was waiting for a girlfriend who hadn’t shown up. Before resigning himself to going to the cinema alone, a man has to try everything. So you smiled at her and it came as a pleasant surprise when she smiled back, a bit. Then you approached her, said some kind, considerate, witty words, and the rest is predictable.’

‘I never met Alberta Radelli.’ With this girl, he couldn’t hide.

She seemed to turn colder. ‘On the phone you told me you knew her.’

‘Indirectly. I’ve heard a lot about Alberta.’ Yes, a lot.

‘I don’t like equivocation. I can’t believe you’d indulge in it. Don’t disappoint me. A doctor willing to perform an act of euthanasia can’t be an equivocator. Why are you interested in Alberta? Tell me the truth, or I’ll leave now.’

She was a little too Kantian: behind her words there were categorical imperatives and prolegomena to any future metaphysics that would be able to present itself as a science. But she had beaten him and he had to tell her the truth. Or rather, he did more: he had brought with him the little leather briefcase, and gently—they weren’t images to be shown in public—he showed her Alberta’s photographs.

Livia Ussaro looked at them. ‘I told her not to.’

He thought he was intelligent, but he didn’t understand. He waited.

‘She told me there was someone who was offering her thirty thousand lire for a few photographs like this, and I told her not to. We almost quarrelled, that time. She told me it was less dirty being photographed like that than going with the first man she found. I told her that wasn’t true. She didn’t take any notice, and did this filthy job all the same.’

It was all starting to become clear. ‘What about this other girl, do you know her?’ He took the photograph of the blonde girl from the briefcase.

‘Maurilia, I only know her first name, I think she works at La Rinascente.’

Even clearer. Mascaranti would easily find a Maurilia, either in La Rinascente, or in all of Italy, there couldn’t be many Maurilias. ‘And how did you meet Alberta?’

Livia Ussaro started laughing, without a sound, the
silence of the gold-covered bar was not disturbed, but her somewhat masculine face grew softer with the laughter. ‘How I met her doesn’t matter. It’s what led up to it that’s important.’

‘Then tell me what led up to it.’

‘Of course, that’s all I want to do, we all want to open our hearts completely,’ she continued laughing the same way, but a little less. ‘I don’t know if I’m going to disappoint you, but what led up to it is this.’

She ordered two more beers. In a way, she was happy.

‘Ever since I was sixteen, I’d wanted to experiment with prostitution,’ she said, she had stopped laughing, and that tone had returned, not bureaucratic, but professorial, she was expounding a theory, which was as good as any other, that much was obvious. ‘It wasn’t morbid curiosity. You may be able to tell from my physical type that I’m frigid. Not completely. The gynaecologist and the neurologist have established that when the physical and environmental conditions are right, I can be a perfectly normal woman. Unfortunately these conditions are difficult to produce, and in practice it’s as if I was frigid. Some people who aren’t very perceptive think I’m a lesbian, which I find quite amusing.’