‘I’ve written a letter recommending two weeks – renewable to three – away from your place of work. You should not be contacted for anything to do with your normal duties. Only for emergencies.’ Here she looked at him directly, and he noticed that her nose was bent just minimally to the left, as though from an old injury that had not been attended to properly. ‘Whatever those emergencies might be. And you should not be bothered for normal bureaucratic problems.’
He risked saying, ‘You sound like a person who has worked within a bureaucracy, Dottoressa.’
‘For my sins,’ she said. And then smiled again.
‘And when may I go home?’
‘If your wife will go with you, you can leave now.’
‘That’s very kind of you, Dottoressa,’ he said, trying to mask his relief.
She nodded but said, ‘It’s also very pragmatic of me.’
‘Excuse me.’
‘We need the bed.’
4
Outside the room, Brunetti found Paola, and in the corridor where he had lain while waiting to be seen by a doctor, he found his shoes. Some time later, they emerged, arm in arm, into the pounding light and worse heat of a late afternoon in mid-July. Stepping from the coolness of the enormous entrance hall of the Ospedale, Brunetti felt as though someone had wrapped him in an electric blanket after first throwing a bucket of hot water over his head. The interrogation room in which he had staged his collapse had been hot, but nothing like this.
Turning to Paola, he said, ‘I should have booked a return ticket with the ambulance.’
‘And gone back to the Questura?’ she asked, opening her bag to search for her sunglasses. Not finding them at once, she retreated into the shade until she did, then emerged with them in place.
‘Let’s go home,’ Brunetti said. ‘This is unbearable.’
They walked slowly, taking the shortest way, deliberately cutting through Campo della Fava to avoid the crowds in Calle della Bissa. When they arrived at the foot of the Rialto bridge, they looked up at it, horrified. Anthill, termites, wasps. Ignoring these thoughts, they locked arms and started up, eyes on their feet and the area immediately in front of them. Up, up, up as feet descended towards them, but they ignored them and didn’t stop. Up, up, up and across the top, shoving their way through the motionless people, deaf to their cries of admiration. Then down, down, down, the momentum of their descent making them more formidable. They saw the feet of the people coming up towards them dance to the side at their approach, hardened their hearts to their protests, and plunged ahead. Then left and into the underpass, where they stopped. Brunetti’s pulse raced and Paola leaned helpless on his arm.
‘I can’t stand it any more,’ Paola said and pressed her forehead against his shoulder. ‘I want Il Gazzettino to have a headline saying there’s cholera in the city. Plague.’
Brunetti kissed the top of her head. ‘Shall I pray for a tsunami?’ he asked.
He felt the motion of her giggle. She pulled away from him and said in her calmest voice, ‘No, I don’t want anything that would hurt the buildings.’
By the time they got to the front door, Brunetti had perspired through his shirt and jacket, and Paola had strings of damp hair falling across her forehead. They climbed the steps, saying nothing, wanting only to get to the top and let themselves into the current of air that flowed from one end of their apartment to the other.
Inside, Brunetti peeled off his jacket, convinced that he heard it suck free from his shirt. He moved into the living room and into the stream of merely warm air that flowed from north to south. He unbuttoned his shirt and flapped its open sides in the breeze. When he turned to Paola, she was running her fingers through her hair to hold it up in the same breeze.
Without thinking, he said,
‘la pastorella alpestra et cruda
posta a bagnar un leggiadretto velo,
ch’a Laura il vago et biondo capel chiuda.’
Paola let her hair fall to her shoulders and smiled at him. ‘If you can watch the shepherdess wash the veil that binds her hair from the wind, then I hope the burning heat of the day will fill you with the chill of love,’ she said, completing the poem.
‘Don’t I ever get to quote something you don’t recognize?’ Brunetti whined.
‘You’ll have to try someone more obscure than Petrarch,’ she answered amiably, and then added, ‘Why don’t you take a shower first? You’re the one who was in the hospital all morning.’
‘My own stupid fault,’ he said and went back to their room to find fresh clothing.
A new man emerged from the shower, one who had stood briefly under a stream of water as hot as he could endure and then switched to cold and stood stoically, though for a far shorter time. It was this man who found his wife sprawled across the sofa, sipping at a glass of pale liquid that, because of the moisture condensing on the outside of the glass, had to be cold. Silently praising his powers of observation, he noted a second glass on the tray in front of the sofa.
‘Mine?’ he asked.
Too tired, or too hot, to make a joking response, Paola contented herself with a nod. He sat beside her and picked up the glass. He set it down after the first sip. ‘Is this lemonade?’ he asked, doing his best not to sound like a policeman.
‘Don’t you like it?’ she asked. ‘I can’t bear the thought of drinking anything else.’
Brunetti took another sip. ‘You’re probably right. I asked only because I’m surprised.’
‘That it’s not wine?’ Paola asked.
The question made him uncomfortable, as if she’d suggested he would not drink anything that did not contain alcohol. ‘It’s fine,’ Brunetti said and took another sip. But it wasn’t a spritz, was it?
When Paola finished her lemonade, she set the glass down and asked, ‘Well?’
Brunetti gave the question some thought. ‘I’ve been authorized two or three weeks of complete rest,’ he finally said.
‘And you’re going to take them?’
‘Yes,’ he answered without hesitation. ‘Yes.’
‘Good,’ she affirmed. ‘It’s what you need.’
‘If only to stop me from doing stupid things?’ he inquired.
‘What you did wasn’t stupid, Guido, not at all,’ Paola said. ‘Rash, perhaps, or impulsive, but by no means stupid.’
Brunetti wondered if the children reacted the same way to her approval, if they, too, felt uncertainty or guilt fall away the instant she said what they’d done was right. ‘I’m glad you think that,’ he said, unable to stop it from coming out awkwardly.
Ignoring his remark, she asked, ‘What will you do with your two or three weeks?’
Brunetti realized he hadn’t given it any thought, other, that is, than knowing that he would take the time for himself. He kicked off his shoes and put his feet on the table in front of them. How nice a spritz would be, he thought again, and shifted himself down in the sofa. ‘I’d like to go somewhere and look at the water,’ he said.
‘Here in Venice, or somewhere else?’ she asked, as if his remark had been the most natural thing he could possibly have said.
‘Here,’ he said, and then surprised himself by adding, ‘I’d like to go rowing,’ an idea that had just come to him – as much the result of impulse as had been his original response to Pucetti’s action.