‘Start by making him teetotal, and then we’ll see.’
‘All right. I’m ready.’ It was time to meet this victim of alcohol.
‘Thank you.’ But Auseri did not get up, he looked for something in his pockets. ‘If it’s all right with you, I want to leave him in your hands immediately and not have to deal with him again. I’ve been watching him for a month, and I’m exhausted. Seeing him drunk from morning to night is depressing. I’ve written this cheque for you, and there’s some cash, too, to cover your first expenses. I’ll hand my son over to you now, and then I’m going straight back to Milan, I have to be in Pavia by six o’clock tomorrow morning. I’ve already neglected my work long enough for him. Do whatever you want: you have carte blanche.’
In the darkness, he couldn’t tell the cheque from the cash, it was just a little wad of papers of a certain thickness, and Duca put them in his pocket. Engineer Auseri was well aware that people who are just out of prison don’t have very much to fall back on.
‘Let’s go.’
They started climbing towards the villa. When they entered, a young man stood up somewhat unsteadily from an armchair, but managed to stay on his feet without swaying. The living room of the villa was small, too small for him, it was like a doll’s house with him inside, not a real villa.
‘My son Davide. Dr. Duca Lamberti.’
2
It all happened very quickly: the little emperor with the narrow trousers had grown weary again, he came out with a few more lines, like an exhausted actor, his son would do the honours, he said, he was sorry he couldn’t stay, he seemed reluctant to even look at his son, he said goodbye to him with his back turned, then held out his hand to say goodbye to Duca and said, ‘Phone if you have to, but it won’t be so easy to reach me for a while,’ which was probably just a polite way of saying that he didn’t want to be disturbed. ‘Thank you very much, Dr. Lamberti,’ and only as he was about to disappear into the garden did he look for a moment at the gigantic young man who was his son, and in that look there was a bit of everything, just like in a supermarket: compassion, hate, fierce love, irony, contempt, a painful fatherly affection.
Then the crunch of his steps on the gravel, then silence, then the muted roar of an engine, the dull sound of tyres on the drive, then nothing.
They stood for a while in silence, barely looking at each other. Davide Auseri swayed only twice in all that time, but elegantly: there was nothing vulgar about his drunkenness, especially as far as his face was concerned. What was the expression on that face? Duca tried to figure it out, and then realised: it was the face of a schoolboy at a major exam who can’t answer a question: a mixture of anguish and shyness, and a few wretched attempts to appear natural.
It was a gentle face, a pageboy’s face, and yet manly, as yet unravaged by the alcohol. Elegant, too, was the parting on one side of his dark blond hair, the stubble on his cheeks, the white shirt with the long sleeves rolled up on his big arms with their coating of down, the black cotton trousers, the opaque black shoes: the model of a respectable young Milanese, with an echo of British style, as if Milan was somehow, morally, part of the Commonwealth.
‘Let’s sit down,’ Duca said to Davide, who swayed one last time, then eased himself into an armchair. He said it to him sternly, because even though he had been in prison he still had a heart, in the form not so much of a cardiac muscle, but like one of those hearts you still see drawn on greetings cards. Sternness masks your own emotion, your own weakness. Even a doctor can be upset by a moral disease, and this young man was morally ill. ‘Who’s in the villa apart from us?’ he asked him, again sternly.
‘In the villa, let’s see,’ the exam question wasn’t difficult, not as difficult as the mere fact of speaking to a stranger must have been for the young man, ‘in this villa, let’s call it a house, well, there’s the maid, who’s the wife of the gardener, there’s a butler, and then there’s the cook, she’s making dinner right now, even daddy says you can’t really call her a cook, but these days you just have to make do …’ He was smiling as he spoke, playing beautifully the part of a brilliant young conversationalist.
‘Anyone else?’ Duca cut in, harshly.
The giant young man’s eyes clouded over with fear. ‘Nobody,’ he said immediately.
It was a difficult case. He mustn’t make a mistake in establishing a rapport: the young man was drunk, but quite lucid. ‘Try not to be afraid of me, or we won’t get anywhere.’
‘I’m not afraid,’ Davide said, swallowing with fear.
‘It’s only natural for you to be afraid, you’ve never seen me before and you know you’re going to have to do everything I say. It’s not the most pleasant of situations, but it’s what your father wanted. I’d like to start my work by speaking ill of your father, if you’ll allow me.’ The young man did not smile at all, a teacher’s witticisms never makes the frightened examinee smile. ‘Your father has crushed you, he’s always imposed his will on you, he’s stopped you becoming a man. I’m here to help you kick the drink habit, and I can do that easily, but it’s not your real illness. You don’t treat a son as if he was still a child who has to sit quietly at the table. Your father made that mistake and I can’t remedy that, and won’t even try. When you’ve got out of the habit of drinking, I’ll leave you, and it’ll be a relief for both of us. So you should try to be as little afraid as possible. Apart from anything else, it bothers me when people are afraid of me.’
‘I’m not afraid, doctor.’ He seemed more afraid than ever.
‘Drop that. And drop the “doctor.” I don’t like being too familiar too soon, but in this case it’s necessary. We’ll call each other by our first names.’ It would be a mistake trying to become his friend, to lure him in: the young man was intelligent, sensitive, he would never believe such a sudden friendship. Better the truth, even though he could still hear his defence lawyer whispering in his ear: never, never, never the truth, better death.
Then the elderly maid came in. She looked more like a peasant woman who had entered the villa by mistake and was disconcerted to see them there. She asked sourly if she should lay the table, and for how many. ‘It’s half past eight,’ she added, almost with derision.
Even this question brought anxiety into the pageboy’s sad eyes, and Duca had to resolve it. ‘Let’s eat out. Tell the staff they can have the evening off.’
‘We’re eating out,’ Davide said to the sour woman, who looked at them mockingly for a moment then disappeared from the room as randomly as she had entered it.
But before taking the young man out, Duca decided he needed to give him a medical examination, and so he asked Davide to take him upstairs to his room, and there told him to undress. Davide stripped down to his pants but Duca gestured to him to take them off. He was even more impressive naked than clothed, and Duca felt as if he was in Florence, looking at Michelangelo’s David, grown a little fat, but only a little.
‘I know it’s a bother, but turn around and walk.’
Davide obeyed like a child, worse, like a laboratory mouse following a pre-arranged path according to the impulses received, except that he couldn’t turn with much precision and swayed more than before.
‘That’s enough. Now lie down on the bed.’ Apart from these motor disorders due to his drunken state, his walk presented no abnormalities. When he was on the bed, Duca felt his liver, and for what such a rudimentary examination was worth, it could have been a teetotaller’s liver. He looked at his tongue: perfect; he examined his skin centimetre by centimetre: perfect, although the texture was undoubtedly masculine, it was as limpid and elastic as that of a beautiful woman. Even alcohol would take time to eat away at this physical monument.
There might be some failure elsewhere. ‘Stay there on the bed,’ he said, ‘just tell me where I can find a pair of scissors.’