They walked side by side, Brunetti with the oars and Casati with the two fórcole lying on the grating. They turned right on to a dirt path at the far end of which stood a small stone house, the tiles on the roof and the new window frames speaking of a recent restoration. Before Brunetti could ask, Casati said, ‘The Contessa restored the house for us. But then …’ His voice trailed off, and Brunetti saw the life go out of his face for an instant. ‘I live here with my daughter and her family now.’
Casati turned into an even smaller path that led to a narrow wooden shed at the back. He led the way inside, placed the grating against the wall, and helped Brunetti set the oars and fórcole on pegs on the wall.
‘Thank you for the lesson,’ Brunetti said. He pulled the gloves from his pockets and held them out to Casati. ‘And thanks for these.’
‘Keep them for tomorrow, why don’t you?’ Casati suggested.
‘What time?’ Brunetti asked casually, trying not to show signs of his delight.
‘Seven-thirty,’ Casati said straight-faced. ‘That way we can get where we’re going and back before the real heat begins.’
‘I’ll be there.’ Brunetti shook Casati’s hand, and started back towards the larger house. From behind him, Casati called, ‘Federica will bring you fresh bread,’ and Brunetti raised a hand in the air to acknowledge that he had heard.
He looked at his watch as he entered and was surprised to see that it was almost six. They must have spent more time in the bar than he thought or gone farther than he was aware of. He went up the stairs to his room to get his telefonino, and on the third step felt reports begin to arrive from various parts of his body. Calves tight, back sore, neck shooting pain up into his skull, hands bruised, thumb flaring, feet chafed raw on the soles. He couldn’t wait to tell Paola about it.
She, as it turned out, was sympathetic but not impressed. She expressed Zerlina-like concern for his various injured and exhausted parts, but not having been out on the laguna with him, she could not feel the immense relief of being free of the city, of people and the noise and demands they made.
How to explain to her, Brunetti wondered, how to make her feel the triumph of exhaustion? Instead, he told her that Casati’s daughter – he’d already told her how warm his welcome from Casati had been – had left dinner in the fridge for him.
‘Surely you’re not going to eat now,’ she exclaimed.
‘No, I’ll read for a while and then eat. I’m too tired to do anything else.’
‘Good,’ Paola answered promptly. ‘That’s why you’re there, after all. Loaf around, eat, go to bed, and I hope tomorrow is even better than today. Did he say where he’d take you?’
‘No. But it doesn’t matter where it is or where we go. It’s wonderful: you don’t have to think about anything except putting the oar in the water. And the bees, Paola; you can’t believe how wonderful they are. And the honey. I wish you could have tasted it, and you should have seen the Queen, crawling around and laying eggs.’ Brunetti knew that, no matter how much he babbled, he was incapable of conveying the magic of the scene. ‘If you come out …’
‘Maybe next week, Guido. You said you needed to be away from everything. And I’m a thing. We can talk about it in a few days.’
‘You’re spending all your time reading, aren’t you?’ he asked, pretending to sound like a jealous husband and succeeding only in sounding like a real one.
‘I’ve decided it’s time to reread Jane Austen, and I’ve spent the day with Emma. Laughing out loud.’
‘It’s unlikely that Pliny will have the same effect on me,’ Brunetti said. They exchanged wishes for a pleasant evening, then he hung up and went to find Pliny.
Brunetti walked around the lower rooms of the house, a bit like Baby Bear, testing all of the chairs in the large sitting room until he found the one that was kindest to his aching body: a sway-backed easy chair low enough to allow him to cross his legs comfortably with a view through the garden to the sky. Beside it hung the portrait of a man with a strong nose and wide-set eyes who might have been a member of the Falier family. He wasn’t much in the way of company, Brunetti thought, but then he recalled that he had wanted solitude, and this was what solitude felt like.
He opened the Natural History to the eleventh book, curious to learn what the ancient world had thought about bees. He learned that they worked assiduously and, if caught too far from the hive by the fall of night, promptly lay down on their backs so as best to preserve their wings from being dampened by the dew, the better to jump up for work at the first sign of dawn. Brunetti had spent much of his reading life amidst the minds and convictions of people who had lived thousands of years ago, and he had learned not to laugh at their ideas but to try to understand why they thought the way they did. After all, his own world lived in constant discovery of its own ignorance.
Brunetti had read about people who believed the universe had been created on Sunday 23 October, about 6,000 years ago. He always forgot the year, but he found the precision of the date so charming that he had no difficulty in recalling it. What are bees sleeping on their backs when compared to that?
Pliny also believed that bees have the gift of foreknowing the wind and rain, and if the day is fine the swarm issues forth and immediately applies itself to its work, some bees managing to load their legs from the flowers while others fill their mouths with water.
This suggested to Brunetti that he might want to fill his mouth with something other than water. He went into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. Ah, Pinot Grigio. Perhaps he could fill his mouth with that?
He took an exploratory look farther in and saw an enormous cellophane-covered platter of frutti di mare and, beside it, what looked like a bowl of salad, in which he saw slices of avocado and pear.
Taking the bottle and a glass with him, Brunetti returned to his chair, his book, and his bees.
And learned from Pliny the Elder that ‘honey comes from the air; during its fall from a great height it is dirtied and is stained with the vapour of the earth; when the bees collect it, it is fermented and purified in the hive.’ Brunetti looked up from the book and studied the sky: cloudless and growing dim with the passing of the day. No doubt the honey would soon begin to fall.
What a strange, optimistic, single-minded man Pliny must have been, impassioned to collect and record all aspects of nature, ceaselessly investigating everything, and ultimately a victim of his own scientific curiosity.