‘They’re so strange, the Greeks,’ Brunetti said as he sat down.
He took a few bites of his pasta, nodded in approval, swallowed, and said, ‘It’s like reading about America in the nineteenth century: so many of them accepted slavery as part of society.’
‘And the connection?’ Paola asked and set down her fork to sprinkle a bit more cheese on her pasta. It was pecorino affumicato and not parmigiano : he approved.
‘The Greeks saw nothing wrong in going to war over the kidnapping of a woman, yet when a city was conquered, the men were slaughtered, the women enslaved, and no one gave it a thought,’ he said.
‘Well, no one on the winning side,’ Paola said, then added, ‘The victors get to write the poetry.’
‘I thought that was the history.’
‘They write both,’ Paola said and got up to get them more pasta.
As they drank their coffee, Paola, holding her cup in the air, asked him with no introduction, ‘Do you think she knows?’
Brunetti raised an eyebrow, wanting to make sure he knew what she meant
‘This girl. Woman. Manuela. That something’s wrong with her.’
Brunetti knew Paola well enough to know how much work she’d put into making the question sound casual. ‘Most of the time I think she has no idea,’ he answered.
She set down her cup. ‘But sometimes?’
‘But sometimes her whole face tightens and she looks around, as if she’s misplaced something. But then it passes and her faces loses all animation.’
Paola picked up both cups and saucers and put them beside the sink. She raised her head and looked out of the window, staring off in the direction of the mountains, invisible now. She stayed that way a long time.
Later, when he was under the covers and reading, he came upon a passage and read it to Paola, about the birds who defended the island of Ares by hurling their pointed wing feathers against the Greeks and wounding ‘the left shoulder of goodly Oileus’, who ‘dropped his hands from his oar at the sudden blow’.
‘How very bizarre,’ she observed, putting down her book and turning off her light.
Brunetti continued reading until the end of Book Two and then turned off his own light. He feared that his sleep would be troubled, filled with drowning girls, but instead it was peaceful, and he woke to bright sunshine and a sense of optimism.
Brunetti had just finished reading an email from Bocchese when Griffoni knocked on his door and came in. He looked at his watch and saw that it was just after eleven.
‘I called her mother at nine and asked if I could stop on my way to work. She said she and Manuela were going to see her mother-in-law, but we could meet on the way.’
‘Did you?’ Brunetti asked. He didn’t know where Griffoni lived, so he had no idea of how convenient it would be for her to get to Santa Maria Mater Domini or to a place between that campo and the Contessa’s palazzo.
‘There’s a bar near Palazzo Mocenigo: it was the only one I could think of,’ Griffoni said. ‘We met there and Barbara and I had a coffee, and then I suggested I walk along with them, so that she and I could speak,’ she said.
Brunetti noted the use of the first name but said nothing.
‘Manuela likes to stop and look in shop windows, so we had the chance to talk. I asked her mother if the doctors had ever told her the full extent of Manuela’s injuries.’
Concerned that the use of her first name might have led Griffoni to some sort of all-girls-together delicacy, Brunetti asked, ‘Did you ask her explicitly?’
Griffoni’s glance was level, and she said, ‘I asked her if she’d been told that Manuela very likely had been raped before she went into the water,’ she said, then asked, ‘Is that sufficiently explicit?’
‘Yes,’ Brunetti answered. ‘What did she say?’
‘She said that she might have been told but that, over the years, she’s managed to wipe away the memory of the time she spent in the hospital with Manuela.’
‘Does she have any idea if her mother-in-law knows about this?’
‘I thought to ask,’ Griffoni said neutrally. ‘She says it’s impossible.’
‘Why?’
‘Because her mother-in-law would have intervened if she’d known.’
Brunetti knew she wasn’t finished, so he waited.
‘Guido, I don’t have kids, so I don’t know what it’s like to have one of them in a coma. But I believed her when she said she made herself forget it all, and I’d also believe – if you asked me – that even if she had been told at the time, she might not have let herself register what she heard.’ After a moment, she added, ‘That’s all.’
It was only then that Brunetti thought to ask himself if it made any difference whether Manuela’s mother had been told or not, had chosen to believe or not.