A Private Venus (4 page)

Answer: ‘No.’

It was a bit tiresome. Duca poured Davide a drink: stoically, once the first round was over, he hadn’t served himself again, and he almost over-filled the young man’s glass. ‘It isn’t good, but this way we spare ourselves the trouble of pouring twenty times. Then maybe you’ll contribute a bit to the conversation. I want to talk about women, and not just talk about them. The last time I touched a girl’s arm was forty-one months ago. I woke up next to her and realised I had my hand on her arm, she was still asleep, then she woke up and took her arm away. Since then forty-one months have passed. I don’t think I can carry on any longer with this involuntary abstinence.’ If he did, he felt he would end up in the same kind of bunker in which Davide had taken refuge.

‘You may not have much luck here,’ Davide said. Coming from him, it was quite a long sentence.

‘I don’t know, I’m going to see.’ He left him alone on the little terrace under the stars and walked through the bar to the dance floor. It had filled up a little, and there weren’t many men, although the few there were were making quite a racket. He examined the refined young ladies one by one: the ones from Milan all had companions and were all got up to look like Princess Soraya, the others had a homely air, with plastic necklaces, hairdos done by their apprentice hairdresser friends, and weird gold-coloured sandals. But he had long ago stopped believing in that homely air. He went back to the little terrace, where he was pleased to see that Davide had finished his glass of whisky, and led him to the dance floor. He wasn’t swaying much more than before; once you’ve had a certain amount of alcohol, you either regain your balance or fall asleep.

‘I can’t dance,’ Davide said. They sat down at a table a long way from the band, in one of the most private and least well-lit corners of the place.

‘Well, I dance very well.’ Having satisfied the eager waiter with an order of whisky, he stood up and went and asked one of the girls for a dance: one of the homeliest, she wasn’t even wearing make-up. At the end of the dance, the girl accepted an orange juice at their table. ‘I can’t stay very late. My father lets me stay out until eleven, I can go home at midnight, but if he wakes up I’ll be for it.’

‘What a pity,’ he said. ‘My friend has a villa here, and he has a hi-fi and some wonderful records.’

At the word ‘villa’ the girl turned pensive, he took her back onto the dance floor as soon as the band struck up again and spoke to her gently. She seemed like the kind of girl who could understand the aspirations of two men alone on a starry night like tonight, and by the end of the dance she had agreed to two things: she would come to the villa, and she would bring along a friend.

‘But you’ll have to take us home early, half-past at the most,’ she insisted, somewhat unwillingly. She had even extended her schedule by half an hour.

It didn’t take long for the friend to appear, the girl was away for three minutes and came back with another girl just like her, they seemed like two suits of the same cut, one of one colour and the other of another, because the first was blonde, the second was a brunette. Their resemblance wasn’t so much physical, or in the clothes they wore, it was a spiritual resemblance. They both approved his buying a number of small bottles, they were pleased with the Giulietta, and got ready to make conversation during the ride, but at a hundred and twenty kilometres an hour on that road it was beyond them and they didn’t catch their breaths until they pulled up outside the villa. ‘I don’t like going so fast,’ the brunette said: her name was apparently Mariolina, or was Mariolina the other one? ‘Please drive slower on the way back, or we’ll have to walk.’

Davide didn’t sway again for the rest of the party, he was just a little stiff, and didn’t speak, Duca was the one who did the talking, because when you devote yourself to socially redeeming work you have to see it through to the end, isn’t
that true, Dr. Duca Lamberti—shake of the head—and you, Dr. Duca Lamberti—shake of the head—are the prince of socially redeeming work, nay, the duke, Duca meant duke, didn’t it, ah, what a sense of humour: yes, he could liberate mankind, embodied for the moment by Davide Auseri, from the scourge of alcoholism; he could liberate mankind from the fear of death, mankind in that case in the form of Signora Sofia Maldrigati whose eyes went purple with terror as soon as the consultant who told dirty jokes came anywhere near her; he could liberate anyone, from any ills, liberation was his profession, and he spoke for almost an hour to the girls and to Davide, he tried to get the hi-fi to work but it was broken and then one of the girls switched on the radio to Roma 2, and he continued speaking, like a presenter now, with dance music in the background.

As he poured the drinks, he told the girls that his friend’s name was Davide and that he was a mute. The girls behaved themselves and didn’t drink too much, the things they told the two men about themselves were somewhat unlikely, but he and Davide accepted these things as if they believed them, and so they all managed to make this little get-together seem not at all vulgar, until Duca took Mariolina aside for a few moments, assuming that it was Mariolina, and explained the situation.

A few minutes later, Mariolina managed to get Davide up out of his armchair and walked sinuously up the stairs with him towards the sleeping quarters on the first floor: even with her high heels and her hairdo she didn’t come up to his shoulder. Once the two young lovers had disappeared,
Duca stretched out on the sofa; the other girl, softened up by the music and a couple of drinks, sat down on the floor next to him, and, with her long hair around her face, turned into a sophisticated Françoise Hardy, murmuring the lyrics of a sad song. Then she broke off and said, more concretely and clearly, although passionately, ‘Well, here we are, is there somewhere we can go, too?’ And she turned her gaze towards the upper floor, hoping there was also a bed for her.

He poured her another drink, and drank some more himself. He couldn’t tell the girl that prolonged abstinence generates a kind of mental block, an adjustment to the state of chastity. Basically, chastity was just another vice: once you start being chaste, you can’t get out of the habit and you become even more chaste. But after a question like that from a woman, especially in Italy, a rejection, however skilfully done, was impossible. An honest, conscientious tramp like this Françoise Hardy, who had honestly agreed to keep him company, would never understand: she’d be offended, she’d think he was a cripple, in every sense of the word, she might even think he was queer. He didn’t want to upset such a nice girl from the nice Brianza. ‘It’s better here, but turn off the radio.’ There had been a high-ranking Fascist official during the Spanish Civil War who had liked to make love to a record of Ravel’s
Bolero
: Duca didn’t want to get to that point.

About 1:30, with great refinement, Mariolina came downstairs, alone. Duca and Françoise Hardy had switched the radio on again and, with great refinement, were trying to seem like good friends. Before Mariolina could get all the way downstairs, he went to her and gently sat her down
on the bottom step, sat down next to her and requested a friendly explanation. The questions he asked her were very indiscreet, but the girl was intelligent in her way, and he appealed to her sense of understanding.

At question number 1, which was one of the less indelicate, the girl laughed out loud. ‘I also thought he’d fall asleep afterwards, but he didn’t, quite the contrary.’

Question number 2 was more indelicate, and the girl simply answered, ‘No.’

She also answered no to questions 3, 4, and 5. Her friend brought a drink over for her and clearly wanted to stay there, listening, but after hearing questions 6 and 7, and Mariolina’s answers, she seemed offended by their indecency and went back to the sofa next to the radio.

Question number 8 was the last one and Mariolina replied, almost moved, ‘No, he didn’t do that, he switched on the little radio next to the bed, and that was the only light in the room.’ She liked describing the scene: it must have impressed her. ‘He lit a cigarette for me and apologised for not speaking very much, then he asked me if I wanted to spend the night here or if I preferred to be taken home. I told him that I had to go home, I went in the bathroom and when I came back he was already dressed, trousers, shirt, shoes, and he apologised again.’

‘What for?’

‘For not taking me back himself, he told me he felt uncomfortable.’

‘Uncomfortable about what?’

‘About seeing you again.’

The psychosexual investigation was over. Even from that
point of view Michelangelo’s David was perfectly normal. Boringly normal. The eight technical and analytical questions he had asked Mariolina had received unequivocal answers. Davide Auseri was a vigorous young man, with an old-fashioned craving for the opposite sex, and without any abstract desires or variants that would have been anomalous for someone of his age. The alcohol, even the high volume he was consuming, had not yet had any effect: there was no failure or irregularity, Mariolina’s expert testimony had been specific on this point.

He got up from the bottom step and helped his sexual informant to her feet. ‘One quick drink, and home we go.’

A few of the banknotes Engineer Auseri had given him were discreetly transferred from his jacket pocket into the girls’ handbags, but then the whole evening had had a tone of refinement about it. Duca dropped the girls outside the restaurant under the stars where they had been picked up, and which was still open, and then drove slowly back to the villa in the Giulietta. At the gate, he was met by a distinguished-looking old gentleman wearing a raincoat over his long nightshirt, who informed him in perfect Italian without even the slightest trace of dialect that he was the butler, apologised for his attire, and told him that he had been asked by young Signor Auseri to show him to his room and provide him with anything he needed for the night.

The cinematic butler led him to the first floor and showed him his room, as well as the bathroom, which he already knew, and after a deferential bow, one hand over his heart to keep his raincoat closed, left him alone.

The room was next door to Davide’s. The layout of the
house wasn’t hard to grasp: this was probably the room Engineer Auseri slept in when he came here. Not only was this logical, it was confirmed by the books on a shelf on the wall. There were two histories of the Second World War, a history of the Republic of Salò, a history of Italy from 1860 to 1960,
Human Knowledge
by Bertrand Russell, a sales brochure in English about non-flammable paint, and issues of the Touring Club’s travel magazine in a couple of binders. Constructive reading for a well-constructed mind like Auseri’s.

He hadn’t brought any luggage with him, not knowing when he had left Milan that he would be staying here. It didn’t matter. In the bathroom, he put a little toothpaste on his tongue and rinsed his mouth, quickly performed his ablutions, and went back to his room wearing nothing but his pants. He wasn’t feeling very happy.

Warm gusts of damp air came in through the window, along with a few mosquitoes, but above all a heavy silence, because there were no more cars passing on the road beneath the villa. His unhappiness increased when, despite his having washed himself, he found a long hair belonging to Françoise Hardy on his neck. In prison, too, these hours in the dead of night had been difficult ones to get through. He was ready for the onslaught of thoughts and memories, but when the wave arrived, it engulfed him, it was even worse than he had feared. But there was nothing he could do.

He had got everything wrong.

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.