Authors: Giorgio Scerbanenco
‘Mascaranti, can you take me to Inverigo tomorrow morning?’ He would spend a few days with his sister and Livia and try to forget all these things.
‘Yes, of course,’ Mascaranti said.
‘Then take the case with the submachine gun to Superintendent Carrua.’
‘Yes,’ Mascaranti said.
‘And tell him I’m dropping this business and that he can go ahead himself.’
‘Yes, I’ll tell him.’
Duca exchanged the pages of the newspaper with Mascaranti, and as soon as the brandy arrived, he drank slowly but without stopping until he had finished the generous glass, then realised that he had taken the literary page and read, again with real pleasure, a review, entitled
A Doctor of 2,000 Years Ago,
of a book about Hippocrates by Mariano Vegetti, published in Turin, 6,000 lire, and re-read with genuine, deep pleasure a quotation from the Corpus Hippocraticum: “In acute diseases, you should first observe the countenance of the patient, if it be like that of a healthy person in health, and especially if it be like his usual self, for that is best of all. But the opposite is the worst, such as: a sharp nose, hollow eyes and sunken temples; ears cold and contracted and with the lobes turned outwards; the skin of the forehead rough, stretched and dry; the colour of the face green or livid.” And he too, two thousand years later, was a doctor, even though they weren’t allowing him to be one, he would buy the book, and then, as they say, move heaven and earth to be put back on the medical register and so he
would start again, and even his father, from the grave, would be happy to see him say once more, ‘Cough, say 33,’ and measure the blood pressure, because for his father that was what medicine was: prescribing the right syrup to get rid of a cough.
He looked at his watch: the restaurant was emptying, it was ten o’clock, maybe it wasn’t too late to phone Inverigo. He left Mascaranti alone and went to the telephone on the cash desk, and beside the cash register stood a pleasant lady who was taking the thread from some beans, and as Inverigo was available by direct dialling, he dialled the prefix, 031, and then the number and then he heard the manly, low and deeply aristocratic voice of the incredible butler from the Villa Auseri.
‘Signora Lamberti, please.’ Strictly speaking, his sister was Signorina, as she was unmarried, and a functionary in the town hall of Milan could have reported him for false pretences.
‘
Just a moment, sir.
’ He gave exactly the answer that butlers give in films, in real life he had rarely heard anyone say Just a moment, sir. And instead of his sister’s voice, he heard the voice of Livia Ussaro. ‘It’s me, Signor Lamberti, Lorenza and Sara have already gone to bed.’
Signor Lamberti
: after receiving seventy-seven cuts on the face, from forehead to chin, from one cheek to the other, all because of him, Duca Lamberti – it was his colleague, the surgeon at the Fatebenefratelli who had tried to put her together, who had informed him of the number, because he had had to count them, which he, Duca, had not had to do – after all that, Livia did not feel close enough to him to dispense with the terminology
Signor Lamberti.
‘I just wanted to hear your voice,’ he said.
Silence, a silence that breathed kindness, the silence of
a woman wrapping herself in a man’s kind words as if in an expensive fur. And at last, very sweetly, very courageously for someone as formalistic as her, she said, ‘I wanted to hear your voice too.’
He looked at the woman who was taking the thread from the beans, and feeling herself being looked at she raised her head and smiled at him. ‘And I also needed your advice,’ he said.
Again that breath of kindness: ‘It isn’t easy to give advice.’
This miracle of kindness and surrender was possible because, at least in calls between Milan and Inverigo, videophones hadn’t been invented yet, in other words, they could still talk without seeing each other, and over the telephone she could emerge, in those few minutes of conversation, from the abyss of her desolate state as a victim, an aesthetic outcast, and again became a woman like any other, she felt that she could, with her voice, do what every other woman is able to do with a man.
‘It isn’t really advice, it’s a game,’ he returned the smile the woman behind the cash register gave him and with his eyes asked for a bean and took it and crushed it between his fingers, just to perpetrate violence on something, because violence against people was prohibited by the law.
‘A game? Really?’
‘The thing is,’ he said, ‘I have to make a choice.’ It was pleasant to crush a bean between your fingers, your fingers felt rough but clean and gave off a cool, bitter smell of spring. ‘I’ll say, heads or tails, and you have to choose either heads or tails.’
‘But then you must tell me the choice you have to make.’
‘No, Livia, if I tell you that, it isn’t a game any more. You just have to say heads or tails. Heads is one of the two
things I have to choose, tails is the other, but you mustn’t know what it’s about.’
‘Then I have to toss a coin.’ There was a smile in her voice.
‘Yes, are you ready?’
‘I’m ready.’
‘Heads or tails?’ The woman with the beans smiled, because she was listening good-naturedly, and he too smiled, waiting for Livia to reply: heads meant being a doctor, choosing a sensible profession, a normal, quiet life, while tails meant being a policeman, playing cops and robbers.
He heard her sigh. ‘Tails.’
He did not reply immediately, then said, ‘Thanks.’
‘Signor Lamberti,’ she said, ‘when we have to choose between two things it’s because we prefer one of the two more, even though it’s not as sensible as the other. At least tell me if tails was the thing you preferred.’
‘Oh, yes,’ he replied almost before she had finished speaking: exactly the thing he preferred, even if it was the less sensible of the two.
The next morning Mascaranti said to him, ‘So let’s go to Inverigo.’
‘No,’ he said, ‘let’s stay here, next to that case.’
Mascaranti saw him pointing at the case, out there in the hall, as soon as you opened the door everybody could see it, and he did not ask if he had changed his mind, he did not say that he knew, he was an intelligent man and said only, ‘Yes.’
And they started waiting again, the thief catcher and his assistant, in the kitchen, that way they were near the precious case, exactly the way that, on safari, you stayed near the goat you were using as bait and waited for the lion to arrive. And the lion arrived.
She was a lioness. Anatomically so tall and brown, with those white boots over black cowboy-style trousers and the white jacket held together just over the breasts by a big black button in such a way that on either side of the button the breasts swelled as if to advertise them, she might even be considered beautiful. But the vulgarity of her face, of the slightest expression of her face, the vulgarity of her slightest gesture, even the way she held her handbag, the vulgarity of her voice, reminiscent not of a region, because it was too vulgar to be a dialect, but of army barracks where the recruits converse in obscenities, or the waiting rooms of syphilis clinics where the patients tell each other their life stories, that was the kind of vulgarity she evoked, and in spite of her height and brownness and sex appeal it was repellent.
‘Dr Duca Lamberti?’ she said as soon as Duca had opened the door to her, and as she said it, she looked at the case, because the case was right there and it was impossible not to see it.
‘Yes,’ he said, letting her in, while Mascaranti appeared from the kitchen.
‘I’m a friend of poor Silvano’s,’ she said, and there was something very vulgar in that
poor Silvano,
as if she was trying to convince him of the depth of her grief at Silvano’s death.
‘Oh,’ Duca said, not coldly: there was even a touch of happiness in his voice, he sensed that the safari had begun.
‘He left a case here, and I’ve come to pick it up.’
Duca pointed to the case in the corner. ‘Is it that one?’ he asked, and only a stupid lioness could not have noticed the irony of the question.
‘Yes,’ she said, oblivious.
Duca crouched next to the case and opened it, lifted some of the wood filings, took out the grip of the submachine gun and showed it to her. ‘With this?’ he said.
‘Yes,’ she said, going closer, still oblivious.
‘You can check it’s all there, if you like.’
His great politeness made the woman, in all her obliviousness, play the lady. ‘Oh, there’s no need.’
He closed the case again. ‘Then take it.’ He held out the case and she took it.
Mascaranti was watching. Duca went to the door, as if to open it, instead of which he turned the key three times to close it and said, ‘Mascaranti, show her your ID’: the police ID, the thief catcher’s ID.
Mascaranti took his ID from the pocket of his jacket and showed it to the lioness, and standing there with the shiny white handbag in one hand, and the case in the other – it was so heavy that the veins on the back of her hand had already become swollen with blood – she took a good look at the badge, almost as if she was a connoisseur, and even glanced at Mascaranti’s face to compare it with the photograph, then, gently, but with a face that, even under the very vulgar make-up, which suited her, became distorted with anger – lionesses easily get angry – put the case back down on the floor, spat in Mascaranti’s face and said, ‘Filthy bastards, you’re always screwing us, just like your …’ indicating an unmistakable male attribute.
‘No, Mascaranti,’ Duca said, stopping Mascaranti’s left arm, which was rotating like an Indian club, a fraction of
a second before it landed a lethal slap on the lioness’s face. ‘And you, give me your handbag, I want to see your papers, I don’t like talking to people I don’t know.’
The lioness spat at him, too: we each use whatever means of communication we possess, and in her case the principal means seemed to be her saliva glands. Duca was able to avoid this communication only by a fraction of a millimetre, but he was unable to prevent Mascaranti hitting the girl this time.
It was a nasty slap: she did not cry out, but her mouth suddenly sweated blood and she slammed against the wall and would have collapsed on the floor if Duca hadn’t supported her.
‘I told you no, Mascaranti!’ he yelled angrily.
‘I’m sorry,’ Mascaranti yelled back, ‘but I don’t like people spitting in my face and I don’t like them spitting at my friends either.’
‘Let’s stop shouting,’ Duca said, ‘and while I’m here I forbid you to use violence.’ He lowered his voice a little. ‘I want to be the only one to use it.’ He supported the woman, who was dazed, her mouth covered in blood, and took her into the kitchen and led her to the sink. ‘Clean yourself up.’ He gave her a napkin, found a half-finished bottle of whisky, and poured a little bit of it into a glass. ‘Wipe your mouth with this.’
She wiped her mouth a bit, and drank the rest, took a small mirror from her handbag and examined her teeth: she had withstood the blow quite well, and had broken only one canine.
‘Filthy bastards,’ she said, looking at her tooth.
‘Sit down and drink some more,’ Duca said. ‘You can finish the bottle if you like.’
She sat down. She was a bit tottery, because she was still
in shock, and her left cheek was swelling. He poured the rest of the whisky into the glass, filling the glass almost to the brim, until the bottle was empty. She immediately took the glass and drank: she drank the whisky as if it was cold tea.
‘There’s still some blood coming out,’ Duca said, ‘clean yourself up and in the meantime I’ll get you some ice.’
‘Filthy bastards,’ she said, and stood up and went and washed herself.
He approached her with the ice holder, took out three or four cubes, managed to break them with a fork, filled a spoon with the fragments and said, ‘Keep this in your mouth.’
He spoonfed her as if she were a baby, and she stared at him, trying to make it clear to him with her eyes – in fact she made it very clear – that the only thing she wanted to do was spit the ice back in his face. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, sitting down, ‘but you shouldn’t have provoked us.’
Every now and again there was a wavering in the look of hate she gave him: his politeness, the kind way he spoke to her, couldn’t have been familiar to her and puzzled her. She stood up, spat the now melted ice into the sink, sat down again, her black hair turning bluish in the ray of sunlight that fell on her head, took a big gulp of whisky, cleaned her lips with the tissue, checked that her mouth was no longer bleeding, and said, ‘Filthy bastards.’
This was a problem that had sometimes vaguely exercised Duca: how to instil obedience in a woman, how to get her to cooperate. Duca considered the use of force on a man perfectly fair and reasonable. If you ask a man, ‘Excuse me, do you know who killed that old fellow?’ and the man replies, ‘I don’t know,’ a series of slaps, or even kicks, may suddenly remind the man as to who killed the old fellow and even make him reply, ‘I did.’
But for reasons – instincts, rather – that must have been completely irrational, he felt himself incapable of using force on a woman. An ancestral sense of chivalry perhaps, because if a woman can kill – and the one facing him now would certainly have killed him if she had been armed, and would have done so without hesitation, killed him or Mascaranti or both – then that woman should be prepared for the reactions of the person she is ready to kill, as well as all the punishments consequent on her ability to kill. But despite this geometrical demonstration, he hesitated to use force on a woman. If he used it, in three minutes he would know everything he needed to know, everything she knew, but he refused to do so.
‘Listen,’ he said.
‘Filthy bastards,’ she said.
She was a woman who would yield only to violence, Duca thought, looking beyond the woman, at the view of the shabby courtyard afforded by the kitchen window, and given that he did not want to use violence, that meant she would not yield.
‘All right,’ he said, then: ‘Mascaranti.’
He was also there in the kitchen, the ray of sunlight that had hit the head of the lioness, in continuing its trajectory, came to rest on Mascaranti’s dark brown tie as he leaned against the dresser. ‘Yes, doctor.’