A door on the wall opposite the kitchen had opened, and a tall man stood with his back to them, pulling it closed. Brunetti saw grey hair, cut very short, a thin stripe of white above the collar of a black jacket, and very long legs encased in baggy black trousers. The man moved across the room. Brunetti noticed his thick eyebrows, an even paler grey than his hair, and a large nose in the centre of a clean-shaven face. His eyes seemed almost black by contrast, his mouth warm and relaxed into an expression that could very easily become a smile.
As the man crossed the room slowly, he nodded to a few people, pausing once or twice to place his hand on someone's arm as he said something, but never slowing in his progress towards the chair that stood facing the others.
By unspoken agreement, everyone set their glasses on the table and made their way towards the neatly aligned folding chairs. Brunetti, Vianello, and their wives followed and found four seats at the end of the last row. From here, they could see not only the man facing them but the sides of the faces of some of the people sitting in front of them.
The tall man waited for a moment before the people, looking across at them and smiling. He raised his right hand, fingers half cupped and half pointing at them, a gesture Brunetti had seen in countless paintings of Christ newly risen from the grave. The man made no attempt to make the sign of the cross over the heads of his seated audience.
The smile that had been the promise of his mouth broke forth as he began to speak. Tt gives me great joy to be with you again, my friends, because it means that, together, we can examine the idea of doing some good in the world. We live in a time, as you all know, when there isn't a lot of good in evidence where we would most like to see it. Nor do we see much virtue in the people whose duty it is to offer an example.'
The man did not specify, Brunetti noticed, just who these people might be. Politicians? Priests? Doctors? For all Brunetti knew, he could be talking about film producers or television comedians.
'Now, before you ask me who I'm talking about,' the man went on, raising his hands in a gesture that attempted to quell even their unasked questions, 'let me explain that I'm talking about us, about those of us here in this room.' He smiled as though he knew he had just played a joke on them, inviting them to be as amused by it as he was.
'It's too easy to talk about politicians and priests and bishops and I don't know who else, about their duty to set us a good example. But we can't force them to behave in a way we think is good unless we are willing to commit ourselves to the good.' He paused a long moment and then added, 'And, I'm afraid, not even then.
'The only person we can influence in any way to do what we think is good is ourselves. Not our wives or husbands, nor our children, or relatives, or friends or the people we work with, and not the politicians we have elected to act on our behalf. We can tell them, of course, and we can complain about them when they don't do what we think is right. And we can gossip about our neighbours,' and here he gave a complicit smile, as if to suggest he was one of the first to do this, ‘But we can't affect their behaviour, not in any positive way.
'The simple fact is that we can't force people to be good; we can't beat them with a stick, the way we can a donkey or a horse. Well, of course we can force them to do some things: we can get children to do their homework, or we can make people give us money and we can give that money to a charity. But what happens when we put the stick away? Do people continue to give money? And do the children continue to do their homework?'
A number of people in front of Brunetti shook their heads or turned aside to whisper. He glanced at Paola and heard her say, 'Clever, isn't he?'
'… only ourselves that we can make do good things, because it's only ourselves that we can persuade to want to do good things. I know this must sound like an insult to the intelligence of all of you here, and I apologize for that. But it is a truth, at least I think it is a truth, so self-evident that it is easy, too easy, to overlook it. We cannot make people want to do things.
'By now, I'm sure most of you are thinking how easy it is for me to talk about doing good. And I agree: it's too easy to sit and tell people that they should do good, but it's not at all easy to decide just what good is. I know, I know, those of you who have studied more than I have – and that's probably most of you, I'm afraid -' he said with a proper note of humility, 'you know that philosophers have been arguing about this for millennia, and they're still arguing about it today.
'Yet while philosophers argue about it and write treatises about it, you and I have an instinctive understanding of what good means. We know, in the instant that we see or hear something, that this is good or that is good, or that that other thing is not good.'
He closed his eyes and when he opened them he seemed to be studying the floor in front of his feet. 'It's not my place to tell you what is good and what is not. But I will tell you that goodness usually leaves people who receive it, and those who do it, better in spirit. Not richer, not more wealthy, not with a bigger house or a better car, but simply aware that the sum of goodness in the world has been increased. They can give or they can receive, but afterwards they are richer in spirit and can live more easily in the world.'
He raised his eyes and gazed out at each of the faces in front of him. 'And at the base of this idea of goodness is nothing more complicated than simple human kindness and generosity of spirit. Because we are united here in the Christian spirit, we most often turn to the Gospels for our examples of human kindness and goodness, to the Beatitudes and to the example set by Jesus Christ in His dealings with the world and with the people around Him. He was a well of forgiveness and patience, and His anger, those few times when it was shown, was always directed at offences that we too would see as wrong: turning religion into a business run for profit, corrupting children’
After some time, he went on, 'People sometimes ask me how they should behave’ He smiled, as though he found the very idea absurd. 'And I have little to tell them, for the example is already there, in the life of Christ and in the examples He has given us. So I think I will do what comes most naturally and most easily to me: I will ask you to speak to my boss’ He laughed, and the others joined him.
'Or perhaps better to say "our boss", for I assume that all of you here tonight believe that He is the one who can tell us and show us by His example how to do good. He never used a stick, never even thought of using a stick. He simply wanted us to learn to see that the good is there for us to choose, and He wanted us to choose it’
He stopped speaking, raised his hand to the height of his shoulder, and let it fall again.
As the silence lengthened, Brunetti decided that the man had finished, and he turned to Paola, but then the man resumed, though what he said was little different from what had gone before. Citing the Gospels, he gave examples of Christ's charity and goodness and pointed to the spirit of loving kindness that must have animated Him to behave in this fashion. He spoke of Christ's sacrifice, described His suffering, both before and during the Crucifixion, in vivid detail, always explaining that these were things that Christ had chosen to do in order that good would result. Few things, he said, were a greater good than giving mankind the gift of salvation.
He repeated that Christ had not needed to use a stick. The metaphor, so often repeated, could well have sounded hackneyed or absurd if spoken by someone less in harmony with his audience, but it did not. If anything, its clarity and the tone in which he proposed such a ridiculous possibility struck the audience with great force; Brunetti appreciated the rhetorical power of the argument, however absurd he thought it to be.