No doubt wanting to save her mother the awkwardness of being caught in an open lie, Paola spoke into the general silence to explain, ‘I prefer not to eat beef; my daughter Chiara won’t eat meat or fish — at least not this week; Raffi won’t eat anything green and doesn’t like cheese; and Guido,’ she said, leaning towards him and placing a hand on his arm, ‘won’t eat anything unless he gets a large portion.’
Everyone at the table obliged with gentle laughter, and Brunetti kissed Paola’s cheek as a sign of good humour and sportsmanship, vowing at the same time to refuse any offer that might be made of a second helping. He turned to her and, still smiling, asked, ‘What was that all about?’
‘I’ll tell you later,’ she said and turned away to ask a polite question of her father.
Apparently having decided not to comment on the Contessa’s remarks, Franca Marinello said, when Brunetti’s attention returned to her, ‘The snow on the street’s a terrible problem.’ Brunetti smiled, quite as if he had neither noticed her shoes nor been listening to that same remark for the last two days.
According to the rules of polite conversation, it was now his turn to make some meaningless remark, so he did his part and offered, ‘But it’s good for the skiers.’
‘And the farmers,’ she added.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Where I come from,’ she said, in an Italian that displayed no trace of local accent, ‘we have a saying, “Under the snow is bread. Under the rain is hunger.”’ Her voice was pleasantly low: had she sung, she would have been a contralto.
Brunetti, urban to the core, smiled apologetically and said, ‘I’m not sure I understand.’
Her lips moved upward in what he was coming to recognize as her smile, and the expression in her eyes softened. ‘It’s supposed to mean that the rain simply runs away, doing only temporary good, but the snow lies on the mountains and melts away slowly all summer long.’
‘And thus the bread?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Yes. Or so the old people believed.’ Before Brunetti could comment, she went on, ‘But this snowfall was a freak storm here in the city, only enough to close the airport for a few hours; no more than a few centimetres. In Alto Adige, where I come from, it hasn’t snowed at all this year.’
‘So it is bad for the skiers?’ Brunetti asked with a smile, picturing her in a long cashmere sweater and ski pants, posed in front of a fireplace in some five-star ski resort.
‘I don’t care about them, only the farmers,’ she said with a vehemence that surprised him. She studied his face for a moment, and then added, ‘“Oh, farmers: if only they recognized their blessings.”’
Brunetti all but gasped, ‘That’s Virgil, isn’t it?’
‘The Georgics,’ she answered, politely ignoring his surprise and everything it implied. ‘You’ve read it?’
‘At school,’ Brunetti answered. ‘And then again a few years ago.’
‘Why?’ she inquired politely, then turned her head aside to thank the waiter placing a dish of risotto ai funghi in front of her.
‘Why what?’
‘Why did you reread it?’
‘Because my son was reading it in school and said he liked it, so I thought I should have another look.’ He smiled and added, ‘It was so long since I read it at school that I no longer had any memory of it.’
‘And?’
Brunetti had to think before he answered her, so rarely was he presented with the opportunity to talk about the books he read. ‘I have to confess,’ he said as the waiter set his risotto in front of him, ‘all that talk about the duties of a good landowner didn’t much interest me.’
‘Then what subjects do interest you?’ she asked.
‘I’m interested in what the Classics say about politics,’ Brunetti answered and prepared himself for the inevitable dimming of interest on the part of his listener.
She picked up her wine, took a small sip, and tipped the glass in Brunetti’s direction, swirling the contents gently and saying, ‘Without the good landowner, we wouldn’t have any of this.’ She took another sip, and set the glass down.
Brunetti decided to risk it. Raising his right hand, he waved it in a small swirling circle that encompassed, should one be inclined so to interpret it, the table, the people at it, and, by extension, the palazzo and the city in which they sat. ‘Without politics,’ he said, ‘we wouldn’t have any of this.’
Because of the difficulty her eyes had in widening, her surprise was registered in a gulp of laughter. This grew into a girlish peal of merriment that she attempted to stifle by putting one hand over her mouth, but still the helpless giggles emerged, and then they turned into a fit of coughing.
Heads turned, and her husband withdrew his attention from the Conte to place a protective hand on her shoulder. Conversation stopped.
She nodded, raised a hand and made a small waving gesture to signify that nothing was wrong, then took her napkin and wiped her eyes, still coughing. Soon enough the coughing stopped and she took a few deep breaths, then said to the table in general, ‘Sorry. Something went down the wrong way.’ She covered her husband’s hand with her own and gave it a reassuring squeeze, then said something to him that caused him to smile and turn back to his conversation with the Conte.
She took a few small sips from her water glass, tasted the risotto, then put down her fork. As if there had been no interruption, she looked across to Brunetti and said, ‘It’s Cicero I like best on politics.’
‘Why?’
‘Because he was such a good hater.’
Brunetti forced himself to pay attention to what she said rather than to the unearthly mouth out of which the words emerged, and they were still discussing Cicero when the waiters took away their almost untouched plates of risotto.
She moved on to the Roman writer’s loathing of Cataline and all he represented; she spoke of his rancorous hatred of Marc’Antonio; she made no attempt to disguise her joy that Cicero had finally won the consulship; and she surprised Brunetti when she spoke of his poetry with great familiarity.
The servants were removing the plates from the next course, a vegetable loaf, when Signora Marinello’s husband turned to her and said something that Brunetti could not hear. She smiled and gave her attention to him, and she continued speaking to him until the dessert — a cream cake so rich as to atone fully for any lack of meat — was finished and the plates had been taken away. Brunetti, called back to the conventions of social intercourse, devoted his attention to the wife of Avvocato Rocchetto, who informed him of the latest scandals involving the administration of Teatro La Fenice.
‘. . finally decided not to bother to renew our abbonamento. It’s all so terribly second-rate, and they will insist on doing all that wretched French and German rubbish,’ she said, almost quivering with disapproval. ‘It’s no different from a minor theatre in some tiny provincial French town,’ she concluded, sweeping the theatre to oblivion with a wave of her hand and taking French provincial life along with it. Brunetti reflected upon Jane Austen’s suggestion that a character ‘save his breath to cool his tea’, and thus resisted the temptation to observe that Teatro la Fenice was, after all, a minor theatre in a tiny provincial Italian town and so no great things should be expected of it.
Coffee came, and then a waiter moved around the table pushing a wheeled tray covered with bottles of grappa and various digestive. Brunetti asked for a Domenis, which did not disappoint. He turned in Paola’s direction to ask her if she wanted a sip of his grappa, but she was listening to something Cataldo was saying to her father. She had her chin propped on her palm, the face of her watch towards Brunetti, and so he saw that it was well after midnight. Slowly, he slid his foot along the floor until it came up against something hard but not as solid as the leg of a chair. He gave it two slight taps.