The Waters of Eternal Youth (5 page)

Just as Paola was setting a bowl of
paccheri con tonno
on the table that evening, Chiara said to her father, ‘Can I ask you a question?' While she waited for him to answer, Chiara took the serving spoon and gave herself a modest portion and then looked at Brunetti.

‘You can't ask me an answer, can you?' he replied, a response that had, over the years, become part of family speech ritual, a trap into which the children seemed unable to stop themselves from falling. It was Brunetti's revenge for the persecution he suffered from his ecologically minded children, who pounded violently on the door of the bathroom the moment he entered the second minute of a shower. They could take care of the environment, and he'd see to the logic, thank you very much.

Chiara rolled her eyes in exasperation, and Brunetti asked, ‘About what?'

‘The law.'

‘Large topic, I'd say,' Raffi interjected from across the table.

Ignoring her brother, Chiara lowered her head and concentrated on her pasta. Paola gave Raffi an icy stare.

‘What about the law?' Raffi asked; then, when his sister failed to look at him, he added, ‘Specifically.' He smiled at Paola to show the purity of his intentions.

Chiara glanced at her mother, who was helping herself to pasta, and then across the table at her brother, as if to test the sincerity of his question. ‘I wondered if it's against the law to ask people for money on the street.'

Brunetti set his fork down. ‘Depends,' he answered.

‘On?' This from Chiara.

‘On who sent you to ask,' he answered after some consideration

‘Could you give me an example?' Chiara asked.

‘If you're working for Médecins Sans Frontières and you have a permit to be there, then you can ask. Or if you're A
VAPO
and sell oranges and use the money to give help to cancer patients in their homes, and you have an authorized booth in Campo San Bortolo, then you can, too.'

‘And if you're not one of these?' Chiara asked, dinner forgotten.

He had to think about this for a moment. ‘Then I suppose you could be considered a mendicant.'

‘And then?' Paola broke in to ask, suddenly interested in the subject.

‘Then you're doing something the law – in simple terms – disapproves of. But you're not breaking it.' It was only after he'd spoken that Brunetti realized how absurd this sounded.

‘Is it a real law or just a pretend law?' Chiara asked.

Though well he knew what she meant, Brunetti felt the obligation to ask, ‘What do you mean by “pretend law”?'

‘Oh,
Papà
, don't go all official on me. You know exactly what I mean: a law that's a law but nobody pays any attention to.' Chiara shook her head at Paola's attempt to serve her more pasta.

How children spoke truths, Brunetti reflected, that parents were meant to deny. He and his colleagues had long since adjusted to the fact that some laws were decorative rather than enforced. People arrested for theft or violence: take them down to the Questura and charge them, tell the foreigners among them to leave the country within a certain number of days, and then let them go. Arrest them a week later for the same crime, and start the ­merry-­go-­round all over again, the same horses bobbing up and down with each turn.

He saw the moment when Paola gave in to her impulse to cause trouble when she could. ‘Like the law about . . .'

‘As I was saying to Chiara,' he interrupted her to say, ‘it's somewhere between legality and illegality. If you stop someone on the street to ask them for money it's not a crime, though it's an offence. But if you send minors to beg for money, then it's a crime.'

Brunetti had said this with the voice he used for professional explanations, hoping it would suffice.

But Chiara was still preoccupied. ‘What happens to you if you ask for money?'

‘It's a
contravvenzione
,' he answered, trying to make the word sound important. Not a crime, but a violation, he told himself. Will she understand the distinction? Did he?

‘Does that mean nothing happens if you do it?' Chiara asked.

He took time to finish his pasta and looked across at Paola. ‘What's next?' he asked, hoping Chiara would be distracted by the thought of more food.

‘Does it,
Papà
?' she asked again.

‘Well,' he said in his most Solomonic tones, ‘the person who does it gets an administrative sanction.'

‘That's just a term,' Chiara said quickly. ‘It doesn't mean anything.'

‘It opens a record with the police about you,' Brunetti said.

‘But nothing happens to you,' she insisted.

Through all of this, Raffi's head had turned back and forth between his sister and his father as though he were watching a shuttlecock. Paola pushed her chair back, collected the plates, and carried them to the sink at the end of the room. Brunetti took a sip of wine and finally asked, ‘Why are you curious about this, Chiara?'

‘Maybe she's looking for a way to pick up some pocket money in the afternoons after school,' Raffi suggested, ‘and she wants to know if she'll be arrested.' His sister snatched up her napkin and flicked it in his direction. Paola turned at the sound, but by the time she saw them, the napkin was already back in Chiara's lap and she was taking a sip of water.

Chiara looked at her father and then at her mother, and then down at her plate. Brunetti waited, and Paola, at the counter, returned to spooning vegetables into two ceramic bowls.

‘There's one of those new Africans,' Chiara began at last, then paused for a long time before continuing. ‘He stops us all and asks for money. Every day: he's always there when we get out of classes.'

‘What do you mean by “new” Africans?' Paola raised her voice to ask.

‘Not like the
vu cumprà
,' Raffi interrupted to explain. Brunetti expected Chiara to object, but she simply nodded in agreement. Over the years, Brunetti, like most Venetians, had grown accustomed to the presence of the Senegalese immigrants, called
vu cumprà
by everyone in the city, even though political correctness demanded that they be called
venditori ambulanti.
Brunetti had tried to use the polite term but kept forgetting it and so ended up calling them, as did everyone else, by their original name.

‘I still don't understand,' Paola said.

Chiara and Raffi exchanged a long glance, as though asking one another if their parents lived in the same city as they did, and then Chiara said, ‘They've been around for only the last year or so, the ones I mean. And they're different.'

‘In what way?' Paola asked.

‘Aggressive,' Raffi said, then looked across at Chiara for confirmation. ‘At least the ones I see are.'

Chiara nodded. ‘The
vu cumprà
have been here a long time. They all speak Italian. And they know a lot of us, too. So we joke with them, and it doesn't matter if we don't buy anything: they're still friendly,' she said, confirming Brunetti's impression of the Senegalese street vendors.

‘And the new ones?' Paola asked, bending to pull a platter from the oven.

Chiara propped her chin in one hand, something she was forbidden to do at table. Brunetti ignored it and Paola didn't see. ‘He gives me the creeps,' she finally said, as if confessing to a crime. ‘I know I'm not supposed to say that about immigrants, but this guy is different. He's sort of menacing, and sometimes he puts his hand on your arm.' Her voice grew stronger, as if she were defending herself. ‘The
vu cumprà
would never do that. Never.'

Brunetti, whose chair faced the stove, exchanged a glance with Paola, who was suddenly motionless and attentive to the conversation. Brunetti didn't like the idea of any man putting his hand uninvited on his daughter's arm. He realized how atavistic his response was and didn't care in the least.

‘While asking for money?' he asked in his calmest of calm voices.

‘Yes.'

Brunetti picked up his fork to give himself something to do while he thought about this. Glancing at his place, he was surprised to see that his plate had disappeared. As he looked at the empty place, it was suddenly filled as Paola set a plate of yellow peppers filled with meat and ricotta in front of him.

When everyone was served and Paola had sat down again, he took an exploratory bite. He ate a little more and was about to speak, when Raffi said, sounding both amused and exasperated, ‘And we've got the drug people, but they ignore us. It's only the tourists they want.'

‘What drug people?' Paola asked, her own voice rough with badly controlled fear.

Raffi turned to her and raised a hand. ‘Calm down,
Mamma
. I said it wrong: the ­anti-­drug people.'

Brunetti glanced at Paola and saw her plaster a look of amiable curiosity on to her face, then mirror it in her voice. ‘Which is it, Raffi, pro or con?' Surely this calm voice could not be that of the mother of a teenage child she'd just heard speak so casually of drugs.

‘Oh, they say they're against them,' Chiara said. ‘But look at them.'

‘At their teeth,' Raffi added, reminding Brunetti of what he had seen in the grimaces of some of the addicts who had passed through the Questura on their way to prison, and of what was to be seen in the photos taken when they were booked.

Chiara looked relieved to be free of her criticism of an African. She came, after all, from the generation that had absorbed the gospel of tolerance and believed in the sinful nature of any criticism of a person less fortunate than herself.

Brunetti thought he knew the people his children were talking about, had seen different groupings of them in the city, always at points of maximum tourist traffic. Of both sexes and indeterminate age, they wore some sort of official tag on a lanyard around their necks, which he assumed gave them the right to occupy public space and ask for money – like the
AVAPO
people or like Medécins Sans Frontières. Hearing himself class them with those other two groups made Brunetti faintly uncomfortable, as though he'd put salt in with sugar and honey. Although they had brushed his curiosity, they had never attracted his attention: he had always walked by, leaving them to the tourists or, more accurately, the tourists to them.

Paola asked if anyone would like another pepper. When they all declined, she asked, ‘May I ask what this is all about?' Her voice was level, curious, not a trace of suspicion to be heard.

Chiara and Raffi again exchanged a glance to see who would speak first. Chiara shook her head, and so Raffi said, ‘I see them once in a while in front of the Frari. They stop people and ask them if they want to do something to stop drugs, and when they say they do – it's only tourists who stop – they ask them to sign a paper, some sort of petition, and when they do, they keep talking to them.'

‘That's all?' Brunetti asked from the habit of precision.

Raffi considered his father's question, then said, ‘My friends say they ask for money.'

‘And do they?' Brunetti asked.

Raffi's surprise was evident. ‘Why else would they bother asking them to sign the petition? There's no use signing anything: no one cares what petitions people sign, so what's the use of asking people to do it?'

How casually different they were from his own gener­ation, Brunetti thought, not for the first time. They had so little to believe in, so little to hope for. He looked back at the political enthusiasms of his youth and was forced to admit that they had all come to nothing. But at least his gener­ation had tried.

‘So it's just a pretext to make money?' Paola asked, using the Venetian expression, ‘
ciappar schei
', probably to allow herself to hiss with contempt at the last word.

‘If they've got those
ID
cards, then they must have permits,' Raffi said, reminding both his parents that the times when he could be silenced by the mere tone of their voices were gone, gone, gone, and not coming back.

Brunetti turned to Paola: this was her fight, not his.

‘Maybe it's the only way these people can get money. God knows, the state's abandoned them,' she said.

‘The state's abandoned us all,' Raffi said with some heat. ‘It's abandoned me, too.' He hammered this home, startling Brunetti with the anger in his voice.

‘It doesn't matter how much time we spend at university or what degrees we get; my friends and I will never get jobs.' When he saw his mother about to speak, he ignored her, saying, ‘I will because of Nonno and all the businesses he has and the people he knows. But my friends won't, unless they know people too, or they'll have to go to England, or France, to get a decent job.' Then, roughly, after a moment's thought, ‘Any job.'

Across from him, his sister held up her hands in the ‘T' that umpires use to call ‘time out'. Raffi stopped, Paola refrained from saying anything to him, and Brunetti gave his daughter his attention.

‘May I remind you that I started this, and I still don't have an answer,' Chiara said impatiently, sounding strangely adult. ‘I told you about the African because I want to know what I can do about it. About him.' Brunetti waited to see if she was going to say she didn't want to hurt the man's feelings or frighten him, things he certainly expected her to say.

‘I want him to leave me alone,' she said, her voice even. Paola got to her feet and started to clear the table. Raffi began to help his mother, leaving Brunetti to speak to Chiara.

Vianello would be the person to ask to deal with it, Brunetti thought, although he had no idea what to ask his friend to do. What was it that British Chief Inspector used to say, the one he'd met at the conference in Birmingham? ‘Put the frighteners on him'? At the time, Brunetti had been amused by the phrase, however unpleasant he'd found the reality. But that was precisely what he wanted Vianello, his ­thick-­necked, ­ham-­fisted friend, to do for him: frighten off the person who was frightening his daughter. ‘I'll see what I can do,' he said, at which point Paola and Raffi returned, each of them bearing two plates with thick slices of fresh chestnut cake.