Then he put Sara to bed, too-in his arms the little rascal fell asleep immediately-and when he and Lorenza were alone in the kitchen, which was shady although not cool, he told her that he almost felt like crying.
‘If it was just a matter of weaning him off alcohol, it’d be an easy job, but the man has a guilt complex about a murder, he’s been drowning his sorrows in whisky for a year without telling anybody. The idea that he killed a girl has been simmering inside him, and even Freud would take years to get it out of his head. As soon as he’s alone he’ll try to cut his wrists, the same method the girl used, and in the end he’ll succeed.’
‘You can tell his father, he can put him in a clinic, and you can look for an easier job.’
‘Yes, I could do that. He’s in a clinic, one month, two, six, whatever you like, and when he gets out he slits his wrists.’ He finished eating the thick slice of cooked ham which Lorenza had made him for lunch. ‘And then I’ll be the one who’s haunted by the thought that if I’d stayed with him I could have saved him. We’re too sensitive. In other words we’re ridiculously divided into two distinct categories, those with hearts of stone and the sensitive. One man can kill his own family, wife, mother, and children, then in prison calmly ask for a subscription to a puzzle magazine so that he can do the crosswords, while another man has to be admitted to the psychiatric ward because he left the window open and his little cat climbed up on the windowsill and fell from the fifth floor: he thinks he killed his cat, so he goes mad.’
At about seven in the evening Davide Auseri woke up, soaked in sweat: he had all the characteristics of an old maid affected by hypothyroidism, even the nervous sweats. Duca made him take a cold bath, staying with him in the bathroom because he didn’t feel confident leaving him alone, while Lorenza ironed Davide’s suit and shirt and forced him to eat half a roast chicken that she had gone to buy from the nearby butcher. Duca twice filled his glass with red wine, then asked him to come into his study. There had been no conversation: it was as if Davide had closed his front door and had stopped receiving visitors. Duca would make him receive him, by force if need be.
‘Sit down there,’ he said. This was the study his father had made for him to use as a surgery: the display case with the medical samples was still there from three years earlier, the couch covered with plastic that looked like leather, the screen in front and in a corner by the window which looked out on the Piazza Leonardo da Vinci, the glass table with the penholder and the long drawer with the little cards in it, maybe more than a hundred-his filing cabinet. His father had imagined it would soon be full of the names of all the sick men, women, and children who turned to him to be cured. What an imagination! He lowered the Anglepoise and lit a cigarette.
‘I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I haven’t even tried to tell you that you didn’t kill anyone, and that you’re not to blame for that girl’s death.’ He stood up and went in search of something to use as an ashtray, came back with a little glass bowl, and sat down again. ‘And I’m not going to try now. If you want to think of yourself as a murderer, go ahead. There are people who think they’re Hitler, and you’re suffering from the same disease. I’m telling you that right now, before I hand you back to your father, because I can help a young man who drinks a little, but I can’t do anything for someone who’s mentally ill.’
He hadn’t expected it but at that first knock, the door opened immediately. ‘If I’d taken her with me she wouldn’t have killed herself, it isn’t a mental illness, it wouldn’t have taken any effort, on the contrary, I’d have liked it, I could have taken her away with me, I wouldn’t even have had to say anything to my father, I could have phoned Signor Brambilla and asked him to tell my father that I was taking a short holiday, my father didn’t even care all that much whether or not I worked for Montecatini, it was only to give me something to do, I’d only have had to take her with me for a few days, until the crisis had passed.’ He was panting as he spoke, but it wasn’t because of the heat: the idea of being considered mentally ill, and by a doctor to boot, had shaken him.
‘Oh, no, Signor Auseri,’ Duca interrupted him, ‘it’s pointless for you to try and drag me into this discussion,’ his tone was cool and mocking, ‘in the treatises on psychiatry there are famous examples of absurd dialectic. I have no desire to have it demonstrated by you that you killed that girl. By the same reasoning, the gas company is responsible for all the people who gas themselves to death, and if you were the director of the company, you’d start drinking whisky and wanting to die. So forget it, the more you persist with this idea, the more you demonstrate how serious your case is.’ That must have touched a sore point, because he saw Davide raise his fist, as if about to pound on the table, but he didn’t, he simply held it like that, in mid-air.
‘But if I had taken her with me …’ He was almost crying.
‘Enough!’ Duca now pounded on the desk with his hand. ‘A normal person doesn’t bother with ifs. But you’re not normal. Here’s more proof: for a year, your father did everything he could to find out why you’d started drinking like that, why you were behaving so strangely, he nearly broke your jaw with a poker, so why didn’t you ever tell him the truth? What were you afraid of?’
The reply came, unexpected and limpid. ‘Because he wouldn’t have understood.’
He was right, Engineer Auseri wouldn’t have understood: depth psychology isn’t something emperors wish to engage with. Of course he didn’t tell him he was right. ‘Okay. In that case why did you tell me the truth? You’ve known me less than twenty-four hours, and I never even asked you.’ He already knew why but he wanted to see if Davide was capable of explaining it.
‘I hadn’t been back to the Via dei Giardini for almost a year,’ he said, looking down at the floor, ‘and this morning you took me there, you parked your car almost at the same spot where I had parked it a year ago, and you left me there while you went into Police Headquarters … And then you took me to the cemetery, you talked to me about your father, I saw all those graves …’
Exactly: without knowing it, that morning he had put young Auseri in a position to unblock his complex, and now, in order to unblock that other, more dangerous, complex-guilt-he had managed to scare him into thinking he might be mad, and poor Michelangelo-esque Davide was trying to demonstrate to him that he wasn’t: thinking you’re mad is more painful than thinking you’re guilty of murder. But it was too unpleasant a job: selling pharmaceuticals would have been less lucrative but also less disagreeable.
‘That handkerchief and that other object she left in the car,’ Davide resumed, ‘I didn’t want to see them, they made me feel bad, but I couldn’t resist, I’d take them out, I’d think about when she wiped her lips and instead of taking her with me I threw her out …’
He was a pitiful spectacle, so athletic and yet so morbidly sensitive, but at least he wasn’t closed up in himself as if inside a ball of concrete, the way he had been before.
‘All right, I’d like to see those things for myself. Where are they?’ Just to allow him to let off steam as much as possible, to get him to free himself, at least a little. Davide didn’t want to tell him at first, but he insisted.
They were in his beautiful soft suitcase, in an internal pocket with a zip.
‘I’d have liked to throw them away and never see them again, but even thinking about where I’d throw that made me feel bad.’
Of course, the morbid psychology of memories. On the glass surface of the little table, he now had the famous handkerchief which, in Davide’s mind, was the handkerchief of the girl he’d killed, and that little object, which looked like a tiny telephone receiver for a doll, two little wheels joined on one side by a strip of metal, no more than three centimetres in length. He barely looked at the handkerchief, but picked up this other object and held it in the palm of his hand. In a tone very different from his previous sharp, harsh one, he asked, ‘This object fell out of the girl’s handbag that day, is that right?’