Warm gusts of damp air came in through the window, along with a few mosquitoes, but above all a heavy silence, because there were no more cars passing on the road beneath the villa. His unhappiness increased when, despite his having washed himself, he found a long hair belonging to Françoise Hardy on his neck. In prison, too, these hours in the dead of night had been difficult ones to get through. He was ready for the onslaught of thoughts and memories, but when the wave arrived, it engulfed him, it was even worse than he had feared. But there was nothing he could do.
He had got everything wrong.
3
His first mistake had been to hate the director of the clinic. True, everything about Arquate was hateful-his physical appearance, like a horse dealer disguised as a surgeon, his character, the tone of his voice, his rude manner-but hate is pointless. If he didn’t like Arquate, he should just have left the clinic.
But hating Arquate as he did, he had been wrong to place so much weight on what happened that morning. Arquate and he had just left Signora Maldrigati’s room, after a purely routine visit, and Arquate, leaving the door open-he never closed doors, it was a matter of principle with him-had said, ‘The woman may be on my hands until the August bank holiday, or just after. They always seem to be on the verge but they never go.’ His voice, already as loud as a sports commentator’s, had boomed even more than usual because he was annoyed. Not only Signora Maldrigati, the poor lady in question, but all the patients in the clinic must have heard his words.
The reason for this annoyance was that every year from 5 to 20 August, Professor Arquate closed his small but busy clinic and sent the patients home, either declaring them suddenly cured or assuring them that they needed a change of air. He couldn’t always empty the clinic by the date fixed by him, or rather fixed by his wife, who needed to be in Forte dei Marmi by that date, because every year one of her sisters arrived from New York to spend her holidays with her; and when, because of a patient, he had to postpone the date, which meant quarrelling with his wife, Arquate got annoyed.
Duca shouldn’t have become so indignant at those words, or been so upset by the desperation of Signora Maldrigati, who had heard them. Both reactions had been serious mistakes.
Signora Maldrigati had heard the words, she had understood them perfectly, and had entered into a phase of terror. She moaned for a whole half-day, injections didn’t calm her down, only the strongest sedatives at last plunged her into a deep, desperate sleep. She had never been under the illusion that she still had a long time to live, but the great physician’s words had told her just how little time she had: she would be dead even before the August holiday, which was what Arquate hoped, or if not, then soon after it.
He should have let her be. It was a distressing case but not uncommon: thanks to the morphine Signora Maldrigati wasn’t in any pain, all he had to do was let the nurse get on with giving her the injections. Instead of which, he had stayed with her as much as he could and tried to convince her it wasn’t true that she was about to die. Another mistake, because, old and riddled with cancer as Signora Maldrigati might be, she was an intelligent woman.
At the trial, he had been asked how long it was after Signora Maldrigati asked him to help her die that he had agreed to give her the fatal injection of ircodine.
He had made the mistake of answering, ‘All through the morning of 30 July she kept begging me to let her die.’ He shouldn’t have mentioned the dates, should have kept everything vague, as if he couldn’t remember.
‘And when did you give her the ircodine injection?’
He had made the mistake of giving the chilling answer, ‘The night of 31 July to 1 August.’
‘In other words,’ the prosecutor had said, ‘you took the decision to kill a sick old woman, albeit under the specious name of euthanasia, in a mere thirty-six hours. Any soul-searching you may have done about the morality of killing a human being who might still have lived several more years lasted no more than thirty-six hours, or even less, because you must have slept for seven or eight of those hours.’
Ever since, he had been unable to silence that voice in his mind, but only because of the stupidity of what it was saying. Before the trial he had believed there must be a limit to stupidity, then he had realised he had been wrong even about that. Only the skill of the lawyer his father had provided for him had saved him, at least partly, from all the mistakes he had made: three years’ imprisonment and being struck off the register wasn’t too bad. He could have got fifteen years, just for making sure that Signora Maldrigati was relieved of the terror of death. Dying is a hundred times better than being afraid of dying, as he had tried-ridiculously-to explain at the trial, standing suddenly and crying out, ‘Signora Maldrigati’s eyes turned purple as soon as she saw Professor Arquate, after he had let her know the date of her death …’ The two carabinieri had made him sit down again, and as soon as sentence was pronounced, Signora Maldrigati’s niece had gone to the notary to talk about the inheritance.
His father had visited him in prison one morning, but had left again almost immediately because he had not felt well. Four days later, he had suffered a fatal heart attack. Left alone during those three years, Duca’s sister Lorenza had met a kind gentleman who had shown an interest in her and comforted her and got her pregnant, at which point he had told her he was married and promptly vanished from her life. Lorenza had asked Duca if he liked the name Sara for the child. From prison he had answered yes. How wrong it had all been.
And he was wrong, too, in not wanting to take sleeping pills, because he could have avoided staying awake until dawn and hearing Arquate’s voice or his father’s, or Signora Maldrigati’s moans, which only the ircodine had mercifully silenced forever. In prison, too, the doctor had offered him pills, but he had refused. Anyone might have thought the reason he couldn’t sleep was because of his remorse over killing a sick woman who might have lived several more years. But it was idiotic to think that Signora Maldrigati could have lived for more than a month or two at the most, it was only at the trial that anyone had thought of saying that. The reason he couldn’t sleep was simply that he didn’t like the world around him any more. Even a hen can find it hard to sleep in a henhouse it isn’t really happy about.
It was only four, but the wave started to recede inside him, maybe the usual nocturnal torture was coming to an end. A little earlier, he had heard a noise, it might have been a door being closed slowly, or a window. Michelangelo’s David was probably also having difficulty sleeping: the world he was in couldn’t be too pleasant either. Duca got up to fetch a book. He chose one at random, which turned out to be the history of the republic of Salò, and equally at random he read a memo from Buffarini to Mussolini: the enthusiasm of the Italian people for the war had been cooling rapidly since Stalingrad and the allied landings in Morocco, the Duce had to remember that the spirit of the population was quite different from the days of the Empire. Even their hostility towards their German comrades was increasing …
He closed the book abruptly, got up, and put it back on the shelf. At that moment there was something he didn’t like in the house, any more than he liked the streak of grey in the dawn sky. He left the room, as if he already knew what it was that he didn’t like, even though he didn’t, and knocked at the door of the next room, Davide’s room.
No answer. He tried to turn the handle: the door was locked. All at once, he realised what had happened and pounded with his fist, three or four times. ‘Open up, or I’ll knock the door down.’