After five minutes, he felt some of the knots in his spine loosen, as the burning in the muscles of his shoulders was replaced by the burning of the water and the steam that was slowly enveloping the entire bathroom. A few minutes more and he was able to contemplate the possibility that he would be able to reach his office that morning, though it would be wonderful to be able to phone Sanitrans and have himself picked up by two strong young men, propped in a chair, and carried down four flights of steps by them and not by these stumps that had once been his legs.
As if one of those young men had been summoned, someone called his first name from the door of the bathroom, but it was a high voice and sounded agitated. He hadn’t had enough of standing there, but he decided he was ready to make the effort of getting dressed and so turned off the water and stood in the growing silence.
‘Guido?’ a familiar voice said. ‘Are you all right?’
Through the dripping glass, he saw what he thought was Paola, standing in the doorway. ‘Of course I’m all right,’ he answered, wondering if he would have to put up with a comment about his use of hot water.
‘Oh, good,’ she said and was gone.
He stepped slowly out of the shower and took a towel, dried most of himself and left his lower legs and feet to take care of themselves. Wearing the towel, he went down to their room, where Paola was in bed, reading.
‘You came all that way to check?’ he asked.
She peered over her glasses at him. ‘It was a long time. I was concerned.’ That said, she returned to her book.
‘Concerned about what?’
Over the glasses again. ‘That you might have fallen.’
‘Ah,’ he said and reached for the drawer in which his underwear was kept. His back and right shoulder screamed at him, but he ignored them and, however slowly, began dressing, then pulled out a pair of socks and went over and sat on the bed. The tops of his feet were still wet, but he ignored that and pulled on the socks.
Trousers – not easy, that – a shirt – child’s play – the heavy shoes Griffoni had advised him to wear – difficult – a tie, and his jacket. When he was dressed, he went over to the bed, bent and kissed the top of Paola’s head, and said, ‘I’ll go somewhere for lunch. I have to go out to the mainland to talk to people.’
Paola mumbled something. He moved closer, the better to see the title at the top of the page of her book. He read the last words, ‘the Dove’, and realized there was no sense in trying to talk to her. The stairs were painful at first but became easier the more of them he descended, until he got to the ground floor and felt in control of his limbs. As he opened the door and stepped out into the sunny day, it occurred to him that she had left Henry James to go and check on him in the bathroom. He was immeasurably cheered by the thought.
By the afternoon, he had learned how to use his body and could walk, bend to pick up objects – as long as they were on desks and not on the ground – and both sit down and get to his feet with reasonable ease. None of these actions was painless, but all were bearable. At two, having had only sandwiches for lunch so as to save time, Brunetti and Griffoni got into a squad car at Piazzale Roma, and the driver set off to the highway that would take them to Preganziol, on the outskirts of which was to be found the riding school.
Griffoni wore a short woollen jacket, jeans, and a pair of boots, attire that, at first, made Brunetti suspect she had dressed for what the English called ‘mucking out’, which he thought was pretty much what Hercules had done with the Augean Stables. But a closer look suggested that the jeans would hardly lend themselves to work, and the tan boots, however worn they might be, had the thin double belt and metal toggle at the top that Paola had once pointed out to him on a similar pair in a shop.
Her blonde hair was pulled back in a ponytail tied with a black ribbon: he wondered whether she perhaps had a black riding helmet in her bag.
It was always a strange experience for Brunetti to travel by car. He’d become accustomed to them during the periods he’d been assigned to work in different cities on the mainland, but he hadn’t grown up with them, and so cars were ever alien to him and seemed unnecessarily fast and dangerous.
Griffoni, perhaps sensing his nervousness, did most of the talking, finally drawing on her former career as a rider. ‘It’s true what people say, about a horse being able to read our feelings, although I think most animals manage to do that.’ She looked out of the window as she spoke, at the far-off fields, barren and dry, and, between them and the road, the endless low clusters of shops, restaurants, and factories that lined the road on both sides.
‘I suppose all of this was once farmland,’ she said by way of general observation.
The driver, who might have been ten years older than she, answered from his seat in front of her, ‘It was, Commissario. I grew up around here: my parents were farmers.’
They passed an enormous agglomeration of buildings on the right: supermarket, garage, one shipping warehouse then another, a furniture store, enormous trucks backed up to the metal doors at the back of a single-storey building.