Paola, plate in hand, returned to the table and took her place. She looked across at her daughter and inquired brightly, ‘Did you have a nice day at school today, dear?’
The rest of the meal had been strained, though Chiara did her best to help clear the table, even dried and put away the dishes before going silently to her room to do her homework. Brunetti had left them to work things out between them and gone into the living room to continue reading the Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes, a book he’d let sit ever since he’d struggled through parts of it in Greek in his last year in liceo. He had found an Italian translation in a second-hand bookshop a few weeks before, and he looked forward to being able to read it with less difficulty than it had presented decades ago.
Lolo had been the star pupil in Greek, could read it with the ease with which he read Italian. No one, least of all Lolo, could understand why that was, what place in his brain held the secret of language, for Lolo had the gift in a way Brunetti had seen in no other person. He needed a month to become comfortable in a language and to be able to read it; by the time they left school, he was fluent in English and French, and could read both Latin and Greek with no trouble. Since then, he’d picked up – that was his phrase – German, Spanish, and Catalan. He had once told Brunetti that, after a certain point, he no longer felt that he was translating a language into Italian but was simply reading it as though it were his own language.
When Paola came in, carrying two cups of coffee with spoons upright in them, he said, ‘I saw Lolo this afternoon.’
Her delight was evident and served to banish the scene she had made at dinner. ‘I didn’t know he was here. Where did you see him?’
‘We met for a drink. He’s been in Argentina sorting out some sort of mess his brother found himself in.’
‘Is he the one with the cows?’
‘Yes. Do you know him?’
‘I knew him in school. We used to do our chemistry homework together.’ She gave the spoon a stir and removed it, then sipped at her coffee. ‘Hopeless. We were both hopeless idiots. God knows how we got through the exam. I’m sure he charmed the teacher into giving him a passing grade: he understood less than I did.’
‘Is that how you got through it? With charm?’ Brunetti asked. It was hard for him to imagine Paola passing an exam in chemistry by any other means.
‘No, I simply memorized the textbook, even though I didn’t have any idea of what it all meant.’ She sipped again.
It had taken Brunetti years to become familiar with her extraordinary memory, and he still found it difficult to believe that she could memorize anything simply by reading it with special attention and telling herself to remember what she read.
‘That’s all any of us had to do. I’ve been suspicious of scientists ever since then.’
‘I know,’ Brunetti said and drank his coffee.
‘Tell me about Lolo,’ she said, coming to sit beside him.
‘He said Argentina makes Italy look like Switzerland.’
‘Oh, my,’ she said. ‘How long is he back for?’
‘I don’t know.’
She turned to stare at him. ‘You don’t see him for more than a year, and you don’t ask him how long he’s staying here?’
‘We talked about other things.’
‘What?’
‘Manuela Lando-Continui,’ he said, although he had not intended to use her full name. Brunetti realized he did it to make her – even if only for the time it took for him to say her name – a person, her own self.
‘Ah, that’s right,’ Paola said, sitting back and resting her head against the cushions. ‘He’s known them all for ever. I think he and Barbara, her mother . . .’
‘He and Barbara what?’ Brunetti asked.
‘There might have been something between them, years ago, when he was at university.’
‘And she?’
‘Oh, she was at the beginning of throwing her life away.’
‘I never met her,’ Brunetti said. ‘You know her well?’
‘No. There’s about six years’ difference in age between us, so we didn’t have friends in common and weren’t ever at school together. So I know her only by reputation, though I did see her occasionally, back then.’
‘What’s she like?’ Brunetti asked. Before Paola could begin to answer, he stood and went into the kitchen and was quickly back with two glasses and a nearly empty bottle of the home-made plum schnapps a friend gave him every Christmas. He poured two small glasses and returned to his seat.
She thanked him and took a small sip, as if barely willing to try it, which was the way she always drank this schnapps, a sort of transferred manifestation of the suspicions she entertained about the man who had given it to her husband.