A Private Venus (3 page)

In the darkness, Auseri said, ‘That was the first thing I suspected, and four months ago I had him see a doctor. He was given all kinds of tests. He’s in perfect health, no infection at all, not even the most commonplace.’

So not even the fear of disease was driving young Auseri to drink. ‘But what does your son say? What excuse does he give?’

‘My son is humiliated and desperate. He says he doesn’t want to drink but can’t help himself. Whenever I hit him, he says to me, “You’re right, you’re right,” and starts crying.’

It was time for Duca to make up his mind. ‘Have you told your son about me?’

‘Certainly.’ Auseri used that word often, which coming from him meant that he was absolutely sure, he wasn’t wasting his breath. ‘I told him that a doctor I really trust might agree to help him, and he promised me that he’ll do whatever you want. Even if he hadn’t promised, I’d have made him do it all the same.’

Naturally, or even: certainly. What should he do? This wasn’t a job, it was shaping up to be a right old mess, but the idea of being a pharmaceuticals salesman, when he thought about it, did rather turn his stomach. He tried to be calm, not to become irritated with himself. ‘I don’t think it’ll be difficult to stop your son from drinking. In little more than a month you can have him teetotal again. What will be difficult, if not impossible, is to stop him starting again, as soon as he’s free. Alcoholism is a symptom here, if we don’t find the cause, we’ll be back at square one.’

‘Start by making him teetotal, and then we’ll see.’

‘All right. I’m ready.’ It was time to meet this victim of alcohol.

‘Thank you.’ But Auseri did not get up, he looked for something in his pockets. ‘If it’s all right with you, I want to leave him in your hands immediately and not have to deal with him again. I’ve been watching him for a month, and I’m exhausted. Seeing him drunk from morning to night is
depressing. I’ve written this cheque for you, and there’s some cash, too, to cover your first expenses. I’ll hand my son over to you now, and then I’m going straight back to Milan, I have to be in Pavia by six o’clock tomorrow morning. I’ve already neglected my work long enough for him. Do whatever you want: you have carte blanche.’

In the darkness, he couldn’t tell the cheque from the cash, it was just a little wad of papers of a certain thickness, and Duca put them in his pocket. Engineer Auseri was well aware that people who are just out of prison don’t have very much to fall back on.

‘Let’s go.’

They started climbing towards the villa. When they entered, a young man stood up somewhat unsteadily from an armchair, but managed to stay on his feet without swaying. The living room of the villa was small, too small for him, it was like a doll’s house with him inside, not a real villa.

‘My son Davide. Dr. Duca Lamberti.’

It all happened very quickly: the little emperor with the narrow trousers had grown weary again, he came out with a few more lines, like an exhausted actor, his son would do the honours, he said, he was sorry he couldn’t stay, he seemed reluctant to even look at his son, he said goodbye to him with his back turned, then held out his hand to say goodbye to Duca and said, ‘Phone if you have to, but it won’t be so easy to reach me for a while,’ which was probably just a polite way of saying that he didn’t want to be disturbed. ‘Thank you very much, Dr. Lamberti,’ and only as he was about to disappear into the garden did he look for a moment at the gigantic young man who was his son, and in that look there was a bit of everything, just like in a supermarket: compassion, hate, fierce love, irony, contempt, a painful fatherly affection.

Then the crunch of his steps on the gravel, then silence, then the muted roar of an engine, the dull sound of tyres on the drive, then nothing.

They stood for a while in silence, barely looking at each other. Davide Auseri swayed only twice in all that time, but elegantly: there was nothing vulgar about his drunkenness, especially as far as his face was concerned. What was the expression on that face? Duca tried to figure it out, and then realised: it was the face of a schoolboy at a major exam who can’t answer a question: a mixture of anguish and shyness, and a few wretched attempts to appear natural.

It was a gentle face, a pageboy’s face, and yet manly, as yet unravaged by the alcohol. Elegant, too, was the parting on one side of his dark blond hair, the stubble on his cheeks, the white shirt with the long sleeves rolled up on his big arms with their coating of down, the black cotton trousers, the opaque black shoes: the model of a respectable young Milanese, with an echo of British style, as if Milan was somehow, morally, part of the Commonwealth.

‘Let’s sit down,’ Duca said to Davide, who swayed one last time, then eased himself into an armchair. He said it to him sternly, because even though he had been in prison he still had a heart, in the form not so much of a cardiac muscle, but like one of those hearts you still see drawn on greetings cards. Sternness masks your own emotion, your own weakness. Even a doctor can be upset by a moral disease, and this young man was morally ill. ‘Who’s in the villa apart from us?’ he asked him, again sternly.

‘In the villa, let’s see,’ the exam question wasn’t difficult, not as difficult as the mere fact of speaking to a stranger must have been for the young man, ‘in this villa, let’s call it a house, well, there’s the maid, who’s the wife of the gardener, there’s a butler, and then there’s the cook, she’s making dinner right now, even daddy says you can’t really call her a cook, but these days you just have to make do …’ He was smiling as he spoke, playing beautifully the part of a brilliant young conversationalist.

‘Anyone else?’ Duca cut in, harshly.

The giant young man’s eyes clouded over with fear. ‘Nobody,’ he said immediately.

It was a difficult case. He mustn’t make a mistake in establishing a rapport: the young man was drunk, but quite lucid. ‘Try not to be afraid of me, or we won’t get anywhere.’

‘I’m not afraid,’ Davide said, swallowing with fear.

‘It’s only natural for you to be afraid, you’ve never seen me before and you know you’re going to have to do everything I say. It’s not the most pleasant of situations, but it’s what your father wanted. I’d like to start my work by speaking ill of your father, if you’ll allow me.’ The young man did not smile at all, a teacher’s witticisms never makes the frightened examinee smile. ‘Your father has crushed you, he’s always imposed his will on you, he’s stopped you becoming a man. I’m here to help you kick the drink habit, and I can do that easily, but it’s not your real illness. You don’t treat a son as if he was still a child who has to sit quietly at the table. Your father made that mistake and I can’t remedy that, and won’t even try. When you’ve got out of the habit of drinking, I’ll leave you, and it’ll be a relief for both of us. So you should try to be as little afraid as possible. Apart from anything else, it bothers me when people are afraid of me.’

‘I’m not afraid, doctor.’ He seemed more afraid than ever.

‘Drop that. And drop the “doctor.” I don’t like being too familiar too soon, but in this case it’s necessary. We’ll call each other by our first names.’ It would be a mistake trying to become his friend, to lure him in: the young man was intelligent, sensitive, he would never believe such a sudden friendship. Better the truth, even though he could still hear his defence lawyer whispering in his ear: never, never, never the truth, better death.

Then the elderly maid came in. She looked more like a peasant woman who had entered the villa by mistake and was disconcerted to see them there. She asked sourly if she should lay the table, and for how many. ‘It’s half past eight,’ she added, almost with derision.

Even this question brought anxiety into the pageboy’s sad eyes, and Duca had to resolve it. ‘Let’s eat out. Tell the staff they can have the evening off.’

‘We’re eating out,’ Davide said to the sour woman, who looked at them mockingly for a moment then disappeared from the room as randomly as she had entered it.

But before taking the young man out, Duca decided he needed to give him a medical examination, and so he asked Davide to take him upstairs to his room, and there told him to undress. Davide stripped down to his pants but Duca gestured to him to take them off. He was even more impressive naked than clothed, and Duca felt as if he was in Florence, looking at Michelangelo’s David, grown a little fat, but only a little.

‘I know it’s a bother, but turn around and walk.’

Davide obeyed like a child, worse, like a laboratory mouse following a pre-arranged path according to the impulses received, except that he couldn’t turn with much precision and swayed more than before.

‘That’s enough. Now lie down on the bed.’ Apart from these motor disorders due to his drunken state, his walk presented no abnormalities. When he was on the bed, Duca felt his liver, and for what such a rudimentary examination was worth, it could have been a teetotaller’s liver. He looked
at his tongue: perfect; he examined his skin centimetre by centimetre: perfect, although the texture was undoubtedly masculine, it was as limpid and elastic as that of a beautiful woman. Even alcohol would take time to eat away at this physical monument.

There might be some failure elsewhere. ‘Stay there on the bed,’ he said, ‘just tell me where I can find a pair of scissors.’

‘In the bathroom, just go out in the corridor, it’s next door.’

He came back from the bathroom with the scissors and began pricking Davide’s feet, his calves, his legs, with one or both of the points of the scissors. The answers were always clear: young Davide was a drinker on whom alcohol had so far had absolutely no effect.

‘You can get dressed again, then we’ll go to dinner. I think there’s a place near Inverigo.’ He looked out of the window while Davide dressed, then said, ‘Your father may have told you I’m only just out of prison.’ It wasn’t a question.

‘Yes.’

‘Then I’m sure you’ll understand. We’ll start the treatment tomorrow. Tonight I’d like to relax. Quite apart from the surroundings, a prison diet is depressing. Tonight you’ll be the one to keep me company.’

Before they went out, Duca made Davide stop under the light and passed two fingers over his left cheek, where there was what looked like a coal smudge, only it wasn’t coal.

‘Does it hurt?’

‘Yes.’ He seemed less afraid. ‘Not much, only at night. It’s best if I don’t sleep on that side.’

‘Hitting you with a poker was a bit extreme.’

For the first time Davide smiled. ‘I’d drunk a bit too much that night.’ He was excusing his father, he thought the punishment was just, he would have turned the other cheek for a second blow.

The strange young man’s car was a Giulietta, dark blue obviously, and obviously with a grey interior, obviously without a radio or any other accessory: that would have been vulgar. It wasn’t far from the hill where the villa stood to Inverigo, but in no time at all after Davide had sat down behind the wheel, Duca saw the villa rise up into the sky, then the road below almost hit him in the face, there were a series of jolts, blinding lights, presumably the lights of the other cars, and the Giulietta stopped: they had arrived.

‘Your father told me how fast you drive,’ he said, ‘but he didn’t tell me how well.’ The road was narrow and full of bends, and there was a lot of traffic at this time of year: you had to be a really good driver to do that journey so quickly.

He continued working on his difficult patient, but it was like trying to make friends with a blank, talking into a void, coaxing a desert. Davide never spoke of his own accord, he only answered questions, and where possible answered only ‘yes.’ First, he took him to the bar. ‘Go ahead and have a whisky, we’ll start the treatment tomorrow.’

The place, which, like the villa, was on the side of a hill, had pretentions to being a nightclub, though it was more like a dance hall. The dance floor was on a veranda overlooking the garden. It was almost empty, a few couples of modest weekday sinners could be seen in the dim lighting. For the
moment, two young people were dancing to the music of the jukebox. According to a poster, a fabulous orchestra would be playing at ten o’clock, which rather suggested about fifty musicians, but there were only four instruments on the stand.

On a little terrace there were a few laid tables: that was the restaurant. In less than an hour they ate ham that tasted of the refrigerator, chicken in aspic which by way of contrast was very well cooked, and a mediocre capricciosa salad. The best thing was the mild, slightly damp air and the view, through the darkness, of all those dots of light, houses and cottages and street lamps, sloping down towards the Milanese plain.

Davide ate, but it was clear he was making an effort, he hadn’t drunk even half a glass of wine, and he wasn’t speaking, so before he finished the salad Duca stood up, went to the bar and found three kinds of whisky. He brought the three bottles back to the table. ‘Choose the kind you prefer, I don’t mind which one.’

‘Neither do I.’

‘Then we’ll keep the biggest bottle. I didn’t ask for ice or soda because I didn’t think you needed them.’

‘I always drink it straight.’

‘So do I.’ He poured some whisky into Davide’s wine glass. ‘From now on, any time you want a drink, help yourself. I’m absent-minded, and besides, I have a lot of things to talk to you about.’

And he resumed his questions, which was the only way to talk to his companion, the only way to get a few sentences
out of him. Every now and again he would ask a question, and every now and again Davide would reply, and every now and again the music of the band would drift through from the dance floor, and there were actually stars over the little terrace.

Yes, his mother was very tall, that was the answer to one question. His mother was from Cremona, another answer. No, he didn’t like the sea, but his mother did, she liked it a lot, they had a house in Viareggio but since his mother’s death they had only been there once; no, he’d never had a steady girlfriend: this was in answer to the question, ‘Can you tell me about your first girlfriend?’

‘Steady is just a manner of speaking,’ Duca insisted, ‘a girl to go out with for a few days, a week.’