Brunetti knocked on the screen door, and after a time Federica opened it. ‘Come in,’ she said in an empty voice and turned towards the back of the house. ‘In here,’ she said, opening a door at the end of the corridor. Chairs stood around a long wooden table with elephantine legs, probably used only for large family meals. There were three dark velvet easy chairs arranged in a circle near the window, but they wore plastic coverings and were thus unavailable for use.
Brunetti and Vianello sat on one side of the table, Federica on the other, facing Brunetti. ‘What is it you’d like to know?’ she asked. She was the same woman he had met almost two weeks ago, who had brought him his breakfast and prepared meals for him, with whom he had often spoken, the same woman he’d seen going into and leaving her home and then at the hospital the day before, but the light was gone: her eyes were sombre, her movements slow, her voice level and without inflection. He realized that her eyes reminded him, now, of something he had seen in Casati’s, and the thought chilled him.
‘Federica,’ he began, ‘my sorrow is nothing like yours. I know that. But I want to speak to you as a friend, as a man who thinks of your father as a friend. I say that because I want you – and need you – to trust me.’ He spoke without thinking, with no anticipation of how she would react.
‘What do I have to trust you about?’ she asked in an uninterested voice.
‘I want to know more about your father,’ he said.
Her eyes shot to his, and her expression changed to the one he had seen on his own children’s faces when he or Paola had to talk to them about something wrong they had done. He saw something stronger than the shifty trace of unspoken guilt in Federica’s eyes. Her voice grew soft, almost fearful, and she asked, ‘Why?’
‘He wasn’t the same, not with me, during the last days we went rowing together,’ Brunetti said.
Federica looked at the surface of the table. After a moment, she swept her hand across it in a cleaning motion, as though there were dust or something dirty on the surface. Then she wiped it again, this time in an arc that reached farther from her body, then she folded her hands in front of her. ‘Why are you telling me this?’ she asked the surface of the table.
‘Because I want to understand what happened,’ Brunetti said.
Beside him, Vianello nodded but said nothing.
‘What do you think happened?’ she asked, glanced up at him, then down at her hands. When Brunetti didn’t answer, she said, ‘You have to say it, Guido. I can’t.’
‘I think he might have given up on life, Federica. I’ve seen it in people before. They give up from sickness or from trouble, or from things other people can’t understand.’
She closed her eyes and sat motionless for a long time. Finally she looked up at him and said, ‘We tried. All of us. Massimo, the kids. But it wasn’t enough, no matter what we did.’
Brunetti waited, leaving her to tell it as she could. ‘When Mamma died, he went inside himself and didn’t talk about it or about her. At first, I thought it would get better, but it didn’t. All he said was that he was guilty for what happened to her. He watched her die – it took more than three years – and then when she was dead, all he’d say was that he killed her. Nothing more. Then, when his bees began to die, he said he was killing them, too. Nothing anyone said to him made any difference.’
She looked at them, as if to ask if they could understand such madness, but neither seemed capable of answering.
‘Over the last few weeks, he became worse.’ Her voice had changed, Brunetti noted: a rancorous note had come into it. ‘It’s that woman on Burano, I’m sure. Ever since he started spending time with her, he got worse. It was like she poisoned his life.’ Gathering momentum, she went on. ‘Every time he came back from seeing her …’ she began, and before he could ask, she said, ‘I have friends there, and they told me when he went to see her.’ She closed her lips and pulled them inwards, as though she wanted to prevent them from speaking.
‘I tried to talk to him, but he wouldn’t listen. Massimo wouldn’t say anything to him; told me I was being foolish.’ Suddenly her face softened as she said, ‘Then you came and went out rowing with him, and he seemed his old self for a while, even though he kept seeing her. But then it stopped. And then this happened.’
She forced her hands to embrace one another in some sign of peace, and stopped talking, hands folded in front of her.
‘Did he ever say anything that would lead you to think …?’ Brunetti asked.
She shook her head.
‘He seemed very wise to me,’ Brunetti heard himself say. ‘But I always had the feeling that he had struggled or suffered to earn that wisdom.’ He watched her face as he said this, realizing only now that this was indeed the opinion he had formed. ‘I think he had to learn how to be good.’
Federica looked from him to Vianello and back. Then she turned and looked out the window that gave on to the garden and the trees, and, far beyond them, to the Dolomites, invisible now and waiting for the next rain to sweep the air clean enough to bring them back to visibility.
‘My mother was much younger than my father,’ she said. ‘More than twenty years. He was forty when they married, and she was only eighteen. I was born when my mother was nineteen.’
Neither man acknowledged in any way what she was saying: they’d learned that this was the best way to behave once a person began to speak.
‘When I was a little girl, we lived in Marghera because they both worked there. He worked in a factory and she worked in a warehouse. Then, when I was about nine, he was in an accident – he never wanted to talk about it, and my mother wouldn’t tell me anything – and he was in the hospital for a long time. Months, I think. But I don’t really remember because … well, I was a child, and children have strange memories. I remember that I went to live with my mother’s brother then, in Castello, and went to school there.’ Then, as though surprised at the realization, she said, ‘I must have spent a long time there. Because I went at the beginning of school, and I stayed. When school finished, I didn’t go back to Marghera but came out here to live. I remember because the day I came here from my uncle’s was my birthday.’
‘Were you happy to move out here to the island?’ Vianello asked.
‘My uncle’s wife …’ she began, and Brunetti found it interesting that she did not refer to her as ‘my aunt’. Then, leaving that to stand alone, her face softened towards a smile and she continued. ‘I liked having my parents again.’ Did she sound hesitant when she said that? ‘Yes,’ she added, suddenly decisive, ‘I did: I had my mother back, too. She’d stayed there and been with my father in the hospital. But then we all came here and could live together again.’ It sounded to Brunetti like a child’s recitation of a fairy tale.
‘I had my mamma and papà back again, and I could go swimming all the time. And my father, when he came back from the hospital, started to fish and got the bees, and he didn’t have to go to the factory any more and come home angry all the time.’