The old man lowered his hands and said, ‘That’s all I did. But I didn’t hurt her.’
‘What was she wearing? And where were you?’
Morandi closed his eyes, this time putting his memory through the same routine. ‘We were in the hallway. Just in front of the door. I told you that. She never let me into the apartment, well, not more than a few steps from the door.’ He paused and lowered his head. ‘I don’t know what she was wearing: a shirt, I think. It was yellow, whatever it was.’
Brunetti cast his own memory back to the dead woman on the floor of the living room of the house. Heavy blue sweater and the bright yellow shirt below. ‘Only that?’ he asked.
‘Yes. I remember thinking that she should have been wearing something warmer. It was a cool night.’
As if seeing the emptiness for the first time, Brunetti looked around the room and asked, ‘Where is the rest of the furniture?’
‘Oh, I’ve had to sell that, too. There’s a badante who goes in to Maria every afternoon for three hours: to wash her and brush her hair and see that her clothes are clean.’ Before Brunetti could ask, he said, ‘And that’s expensive because the casa di cura won’t let them help unless they’re legal, and that makes it twice as expensive, with the taxes.’
The wind had started to whip things up in the Piazza, and the tips of the flags on the other side of the Basilica flashed into sight now and again, waving at them. ‘What will you do, Signor Morandi?’
‘Oh, I’ll sell everything here, little by little, and just hope it lasts long enough to pay them for as long as she lasts.’
‘Have her doctors given you a time?’
Morandi shrugged, no anger now at the ‘doctors’. He limited himself to saying ‘pancreas’, as if that would clarify things for Brunetti. It did.
‘And then?’
‘Oh, I haven’t thought about that,’ he said, and Brunetti believed him. ‘I just have to be here as long as she is, don’t I?’
Unable to answer that question, Brunetti asked, ‘What about this?’ waving his hand to take in the apartment that had belonged to Cuccetti’s wife and had passed to Morandi, after which both Cuccetti and his wife had died. ‘You could sell it.’
Morandi could not hide his surprise. ‘But if Maria could come home, even for a few days, before …?’ The old man glanced at Brunetti, smiling. He pointed with his chin towards the windswept panorama beyond the window. ‘She’d want to see that, so …’
‘It must be worth a great deal,’ Brunetti said.
‘Oh, I don’t care about that,’ Morandi said, speaking of it as though it were an old pair of shoes or a stack of newspapers neatly tied up for the garbage man. ‘Maria has no relatives, and all I have is a nephew, but he went to Argentina fifty years ago and I never heard from him.’ He paused, thinking; Brunetti said nothing. ‘So I suppose the state will take it. Or the city. I don’t care. It doesn’t matter.’ He looked around the room, up at the beamed ceiling, then returned to his study of the view: the flags had grown more agitated, and Brunetti thought he could hear the rising wind.
Finally the old man said, ‘I never liked this place, you know. I never felt it was mine. I worked like a dog to pay the rent on the old place, the one in Castello, so it was really mine. Ours. But this one came too easily; it’s like I found it, or I stole it from someone. All it ever brought me was bad luck, so it will be a good thing if someone else takes it.’
‘Where do you live?’ Brunetti asked, well aware of how silly a question that was to ask while standing in a person’s home.
But Morandi had no difficulty in understanding him. ‘I spend most of my time in the kitchen. It’s the only room I heat. And my bedroom, but all I do is sleep there.’ He turned away, as if to lead Brunetti to that part of the house. Brunetti let him take a few steps, and while the old man’s back was turned, he took the key out of his pocket and set it on the table beneath the window.
Brunetti called him, and when Morandi came slowly back to the window, Brunetti extended his hand. ‘Thank you for letting me see the view, Signore,’ he said. ‘It’s wonderful.’
‘It is, isn’t it?’ the old man said, ignoring Brunetti’s hand because his eyes had moved to the domes, the flags, the clouds that were now busy scuttling towards the west. ‘Isn’t it sad,’ Morandi continued, ‘that we spend so much time worrying about houses and having them and making them beautiful inside, when the most beautiful part is out there, and there’s nothing we can do to change that?’ This time it was Morandi who waved in the direction of the Basilica, his hand taking in the church and the past and the glory that was no more.
Donna Leon, Drawing Conclusions
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