‘You’re a doctor,’ Auseri said.
He didn’t reply immediately, but a few moments later, and in that darkness, in that silence, it was a long pause. ‘I was. I’m sure you were told.’
‘Certainly,’ Auseri said, ‘but you’re still a doctor. And I need a doctor.’
Duca counted the windows in the villa: there were eight of them, four on the ground floor and four on the first floor. ‘I can’t practice any more. I can’t even give injections-especially not injections. Weren’t you told?’
‘I was told everything, but it doesn’t matter.’
Curious. ‘If you need a doctor,’ Duca said, ‘and choose one who’s been struck off the register and can’t even prescribe an aspirin, then it must matter a bit.’
‘No,’ the emperor said, politely but authoritatively. In the darkness he held out the packet of cigarettes. ‘Do you smoke?’
‘I even spent three years in prison.’ He took a cigarette and Auseri lit it for him. ‘For murder.’
‘I know,’ Auseri said, ‘but it doesn’t matter.’
Then maybe nothing really mattered.
‘My son is an alcoholic,’ Auseri said in the darkness, smoking. ‘He’s in that room on the first floor right now, the only lighted window on the first floor. That’s his room. He must have managed to hide a few bottles of whisky from me, and he’s tanking himself up while he’s waiting for us.’
From his voice, it was obvious that his son didn’t matter all that much to him either.
‘He’s twenty-two,’ Auseri said, ‘two metres tall and weighs, I think, ninety kilos. Up until last year he didn’t worry me too much, the only thing that made me a bit sad was that he wasn’t very bright. I couldn’t send him to university, I only managed to get him through his high school exams by bribing his teachers. He’s also very shy and submissive. To be honest, he’s a big lump.’
In other words, tall and stupid. Auseri’s bitter voice seemed to come from out of nowhere, it somehow just materialised in the dark air.
‘I wasn’t too upset that he was like that,’ Auseri said. ‘I don’t care about the joy having a genius as a son may bring. When he was nineteen, I sent him to work for Montecatini. He went through all the offices and departments, so that he could learn; he didn’t learn much, but he kept going. Then last year he started drinking. For the first few months he managed to hide his vice, then he started going in late to work, or not going in at all, then I had to keep him at home because he was going into work with whisky bottles, the flat kind, in his pocket. You are listening, aren’t you?’
Oh, yes, in prison he had learned to listen; his cellmates all had long stories to tell, lies of course, stories about how they were innocent, how they’d been ruined by women, every one of them was an Abel killed by Cain or an Adam corrupted by Eve. The engineer, though, was telling him something different, something sadder and more meaningful, and he was really listening. ‘Of course,’ he replied.
‘I need to explain a lot of things so that you’ll understand,’ Auseri said. In the darkness, his voice did not lose any of its authority, but rather became more stubborn. ‘My son gets drunk three times a day. By lunchtime he’s completely drunk, he doesn’t eat anything and falls asleep. In the afternoon he gets drunk a second time, then sleeps until dinnertime. At dinner he eats, but he begins with the third course, and falls asleep in his chair. That’s what he’s been doing for most of the past year, unless I’ve physically prevented him.’
For a twenty-two-year-old it was a worrying way of drinking. ‘You must have tried a lot of things to stop him from drinking.’ He couldn’t yet figure out what was wanted of him, but he was making an effort to be polite. ‘Keeping him away from whichever friends of his are making him drink.’
‘My son doesn’t have any friends,’ Auseri said. ‘He’s never had any, not even in elementary school. He’s an only child. I was widowed eleven years ago but, busy as I’ve been with my work, I never abandoned him to tutors and governesses. I know him well, he’s never played tennis with anyone, he’s never gone to the swimming pool, to the gym, or to a dance with friends. Since he’s had his car, he’s only used it for drives along the autostrada. The only normal thing about him is that he likes driving fast. One of these days he’ll kill himself, and his alcohol problem will be solved.’
Duca waited for the bitter emperor to start speaking again. He had to wait a long time.
‘I did a lot of things to stop him drinking.’ Auseri was in expository mode now, as if listing the sections of a disastrous balance sheet. ‘The first method was persuasion, talking to him. I’ve never in my life known anybody to be persuaded of anything with words, but I had to try. Psychologists say young people need to be persuaded, not controlled, but my attempts at persuasion were all defeated by the whisky. I talked, and he drank. Then I tried the restrictive method. No money, maximum surveillance, I was with him for almost two weeks, without ever leaving him alone. We were in St. Moritz; we passed the hours looking at the swans on the lake, with our umbrellas in our hands, because it rained all the time, but he managed to drink all the same, he drank at night, because we slept in separate rooms. Somebody working in the hotel must have brought him something to drink without my knowledge, and by the morning he was blind drunk.’
Every now and again they looked at the only lighted window on the first floor: the drinker’s room, though all you could see was the light, the play of light on the ceiling.
‘The third method didn’t give any better results,’ Auseri said. ‘I’m a great believer in corporal punishment. Slaps and punches force a man to think fast about the best way to avoid them. Every time I found my son drunk, I’d hit him, a lot, and hard. My son respects me, and even if he’d tried to rebel I would have crushed him. After that corporal punishment, my son would cry and try to tell me that it wasn’t his fault, that he didn’t want to drink, but couldn’t stop himself. After a while, I abandoned that method, too.’
‘Have you tried any others?’
‘No. I did call a doctor and talk to him about the matter, and he told me that the only way was to put my son in a detox clinic.’
Yes, it was true, in a clinic they would detoxify the young man and then as soon as he got out he would probably start drinking again. But he didn’t say this: Auseri did.
‘I’d already thought of putting him in a clinic, but when he comes out he’ll only start drinking again: as soon as he’s alone he starts drinking. He needs friends, he needs women.’ Auseri offered him another cigarette and lit it and they started smoking. The air was still damp, and now it was also dark, apart from the lighted windows at the end of the drive. ‘Especially women. I’ve never known him to have a girlfriend. Don’t get me wrong. He likes women, I can tell that from the way he looks at them, and I believe he often uses prostitutes. But he’s too introverted to get a girlfriend. I’ve seen girls run after him, he’s a good match after all, but he clams up when he’s with a woman, he literally never opens his mouth. He may give the impression of not being normal. But that’s wrong. He did the whole of his military service, and as a private, not an officer. At first his companions teased him, because he always kept himself to himself. He almost broke one fellow’s head and cracked another’s ribs, after that they respected him and left him alone. My son is normal, he just takes after his mother. She was like that, too, she had no friends, or even acquaintances, she was quite happy to stay at home with me. I only ever managed to take her to receptions or parties a few times. Defects can be inherited, whereas qualities are recessive. It’s a kind of biological entropy.’
The little emperor waved a hand, unhappily, but in the darkness it almost didn’t seem like a living hand, it appeared as vague and phosphorescent as ectoplasm, and even more unhappy in that funereal darkness.
‘And now I’d like to make one last attempt,’ Auseri said, ‘put him together with someone who could be both a friend and a doctor, who’d use any method he wanted to, to make him stop drinking, who’d stop him physically every minute of the day, even in the toilet. I don’t care if it takes a year, or what means he uses, he could even beat him to death, I’d rather he was dead than an alcoholic.’