Transient Desires (Commissario Brunetti #30)
Donna Leon
For Romilly McAlpine
“The depths have covered them:
they sank to the bottom as a stone.”
Handel Israel in Egypt
Part the Second: 18
1
Brunetti slept late. At about nine, he turned his head towards the right and opened one eye, saw the time, and closed his eye again. He did not move for some time, and when he next opened his eye, he saw that it was half past nine. He reached out his left arm in the hope that he would find Paola beside him, but he found only the indentation of her former presence, long since gone cold.
He levered himself on to his side and then his back, rested for a moment after achieving this, and opened his eyes. He studied the ceiling, glanced at the far corner on the right and saw the mark above the window where water had leaked in some months before, creating a brown patch that looked like an octopus, a rather small one. Like an octopus, this stain changed colour with the light, sometimes changing shape, as well, although there were always only seven legs.
He had promised Paola he would get up on the ladder and paint it over, but he was always in a hurry, or it was night-time and he didn’t want to get on the ladder, or he didn’t have his shoes on and didn’t want to risk climbing the ladder wearing only socks. This morning the stain annoyed him, and he decided he would ask the man who did odd jobs for them to come and paint it over and have done with it.
Or his son could tear himself loose from his computer or from talking to his girlfriend on the phone and get the ladder and paint it and help his parents for a change. Detecting the distinct note of resentment and self-pity in his thoughts, Brunetti pushed them aside and considered some of the events of last night’s dinner, among which were three glasses of grappa that were most likely the cause of his current condition.
As was their custom once a year, last evening he and some companions from liceo had met for dinner in a restaurant at the beginning of Riva del Vin, where the obliging owner always put them in the same corner by the window on to the Canal Grande.
As the years passed, their number had shrunk from more than thirty to just ten, reduced for the usual reasons: geography, employment, and sickness. Some had tired of the inconveniences of the city and had moved away; others had taken better jobs in other parts of Italy or Europe, and two had died.
This year, as well as Brunetti, the other three original organizers of the dinner had attended. The first was Luca Ippodrino, who had turned his father’s trattoria into a world-famous restaur-ant by following three relatively simple rules: he served the same food his mother had served for thirty years to the men who unloaded the boats at Rialto; it was now served on porcelain plates and in far smaller and delicately decorated portions; the prices had been inflated almost beyond bearing. The waiting list for a table – especially during the Biennale and the Film Festival – started filling up months in advance.
The second, Franca Righi, Brunetti’s first girlfriend, had gone on to study physics in Rome and now taught at the same university where she had studied. It was she who had towed Brunetti through their biology and physics classes and now delighted in telling him each time one of the laws they had studied turned out to be false and had to be replaced.
The last was a newly divorced Matteo Lunghi, a gynaecologist, whose wife had left him for a much younger man, and who had had to be encouraged through the dinner by his friends.
The remaining six were successful – or content – to varying degrees or at least behaved that way when in the company of people who had known them most of their lives. Much of that ease of communication, Brunetti believed, came of their having a common store of cultural and historical references as well as their generation’s unspoken and unconsidered ethical standards.
Before allowing himself to consider what those might be, Brunetti pushed aside the covers and went down to the bathroom to have a shower.
The hot water restored his spirits, as did the length of time – his children not there to protest about the waste of water – he spent under it. He went back to the bedroom, draped the towel over the back of a chair, and started to get dressed. He pulled out the trousers of a suit he hadn’t worn since the winter, dark grey cashmere and wool and bought for almost nothing when the men’s clothing store in Campo San Luca had closed two years before. Strange, he thought, as he pushed the button through the buttonhole: they had seemed to fit him better when he had bought the suit. Perhaps the dry cleaning had tightened them somehow; surely they would loosen up as the day wore on and he moved around wearing them.
He sat on the chair, pulled on a pair of dark socks and black shoes he’d bought in Milano years before and that had moulded themselves to his feet as time passed and that never failed to convey a thrill of sensual delight as he slipped them on.
Before he put on his jacket, he considered wearing a vest but, remembering how warm it had been the day before, decided it was unnecessary: the good weather of late autumn could be counted on for another day. In the kitchen, he looked on the table for a note from Paola but found nothing. It was Monday, so she would not be home before late afternoon, spending the time in her office at the university, ostensibly to speak to the doctoral candidates whose dissertations she was overseeing. She delighted in the fact that they seldom came to speak to her, leaving her quite happy to sit undisturbed in her office, preparing classes or reading. Thus the life of the scholar, Brunetti reflected.