Earthly Remains Page 5

  He hesitated then, anticipating the panic that came when there was nothing left to read. Real men busied themselves, he had always been told: hunting, chopping firewood, defending their territory and women from marauding hordes, buying low and selling high. Faced with two weeks on the outer edges of a city that had always needed brave men to defend it, Brunetti stood and looked at his books, pulled down a copy of Euripides, to have as many Greeks as Romans, put the four books into his suitcase and closed it.

  6

  After a consciously non-dramatic farewell from Paola, Brunetti took the Number One from San Silvestro to Ca’ d’Oro and walked back towards Fondamente Nove, arriving on time for the 10.25. Because it was midweek, there were not many people on the enormous Number 13, and, even though it was July, he identified few people as tourists. He wore a pair of faded cotton trousers and one of the white cotton shirts, which was clinging damply to him by the time he got to Fondamente Nove. He had called the number Paola gave him for Davide, whose surname was Casati, and told him he’d be arriving at the Capannone stop on Sant’Erasmo at 10.53. He assumed that the grunt of acknowledgement he’d received had included the promise that Davide would meet him there. The idea of walking any distance on the island, pulling his suitcase behind him, in no way appealed.

  The first stop was Murano Faro, where he watched idly as people got off and on. One woman caught his attention: tall, white-haired, more than robust, wheeling an enormous shopping cart while at the same time holding the hands of two little blonde girls, perhaps three and five. The taller one broke loose and started towards the door at the back of the vaporetto that led to the outside seats. ‘Regina!’ the woman called, and Brunetti heard the fear in her voice. The swinging doors led to seats, but they also led to a railing and then the drop into the water.

  Just as the child passed him, Brunetti leaned closer and swept her up, saying, ‘Ciao, Reginetta. You don’t want to run away from your nonna, do you?’ Speaking automatically in Veneziano, Brunetti said it loud enough for the woman to hear and was careful to hold the child under the arms and at a good distance from himself, familiar as he was with the fears – groundless or not – of parents and grandparents.

  He set Regina back on her feet and released her, hunched down in his seat to bring his eyes on a line with hers. She looked at him, startled, and Brunetti crossed his eyes and moved his ears up and down, a trick that used to drive his daughter Chiara to a delirium of giggles. Regina laughed aloud and clapped her hands in delight. Turning to the woman, she cried out in that piercing voice of child-joy, ‘Nonna, Nonna, come and look at the funny man.’ She, too, spoke in dialect rather than in Italian.

  He stood and turned to the woman, who called out, ‘Guido Brunetti, is that you?’

  His surprise left him without words, but he used the time it took him to recover to darken her hair, let it grow longer, take away fifteen kilos, and smooth the lines from her forehead and around her eyes. And yes, it was Lucia Zanotto, who had sat in the seat in front of him for four years of elementary school.

  ‘Lucia,’ he said, delighted. He had seen her only once – no, twice – in more than thirty years, and yet he knew her in an instant. Sweet-tempered, funny, generous Lucia, who had married her Giuliano Sandi while still in her teens and had three children, and here she was, on the boat to Sant’Erasmo.

  They hugged one another, stepped back to have a better look, then hugged again. Then two kisses on the cheek and unconditional delight at having found an old friend. ‘I’d know you anywhere. You look just the same,’ they said simultaneously. It was the truth for them, although the years had changed them.

  Lucia called the girls – the daughters of her son Luca – to her and introduced them both – Regina and Cinzia – to ‘Zio Guido’. They put out their tiny hands and shook Brunetti’s. Regina asked him to move his ears again so that Cinzia could see, and when he did, both of them clapped their hands at the sight.

  There was little time to talk, but Lucia managed to say she was going home from grocery shopping on Murano, and he managed to tell her where he was going and who he hoped would pick him up at the landing, asking if she knew him.

  ‘Everyone on Sant’Erasmo knows everyone else on Sant’Erasmo,’ was her answer.

  ‘And what they had for dinner?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘And where they caught it, too,’ she said and laughed out loud. Then, more seriously, she added, ‘If Davide said he’d be there, then he will be.’

  ‘Well, all he did was grunt when I said I’d arrive at 10.53.’

  Lucia laughed again, the same loud noise he remembered from those years of school. ‘With Davide, a grunt’s as good as a yes, and a yes is something you could put in the bank.’

  ‘Real chatterbox, eh?’ Brunetti prompted.

  ‘Really good man,’ she corrected him. ‘You couldn’t be in better hands out here. He and his daughter keep that house as if it were their own. The Faliers are lucky to have them.’

  Brunetti acknowledged this but went back to the subject of Davide. ‘How old is he?’

  ‘At least seventy,’ Lucia said, ‘but you’d never know it. Not to look at him or to see him work. Like a man half his age.’ She looked through the window of the boat, searching for the man they were talking about. Then, in that voice people use for passing on sad news, she said, ‘His wife Franca died four years ago, and he hasn’t been the same since then. She took his heart with her.’ Her voice deepened to that used for tragedy as she added, ‘She was a long time dying. It was one of the bad ones.’

  He heard the engines slowing and reached down for his suitcase. Beside him, Lucia pushed herself to her feet. ‘We get off here, too,’ she said. The girls rose; Cinzia took her hand; Regina took Brunetti’s.

  Hand in hand with the child, Brunetti disembarked. He looked upon the land and found it rich and pleasing. Trees and fields made a green assault upon him, reminding him that not only stone and the world of man could be beautiful. To his left stood rigorously straight files of grapevines, their pendulous triangles pink in the morning light. The fields to the right were a mess: unruly grass beaten down in paths that led to overladen apricot trees, so heavily burdened that even the thieves couldn’t carry away all the fruit. He and his friends had come out here during their school holidays, Brunetti remembered, and made tracks of their own to the ancestors of these trees.

  ‘Signor Brunetti?’ a man’s voice asked. Brunetti turned and saw a solid trunk of a man dressed in a shirt that had faded and a pair of brown corduroy trousers worn smooth just below the knees. Pale blue eyes stood out in his sun-worn face. Just to the left of his mouth was a Euro-sized patch of smooth, shiny skin. Seeing how cleanly shaved Casati was, Brunetti wondered if the smooth patch gave him trouble.

  Still holding Regina’s hand, Brunetti approached the man, set down his suitcase, and extended his right hand. Seeing the telltale rower’s calluses on the tips of the other man’s fingers, Brunetti gave only a mild grasp and quickly released Casati’s hand.

  ‘Davide Casati,’ he said in the grumbling voice Brunetti had heard on the phone. Turning from Brunetti, Casati went down on one knee and kissed Regina on both cheeks and then did the same when Cinzia ran over to greet him. ‘Zio Davide,’ the elder one implored, ‘when can we go out on the boat again?’

  Casati got lightly to his feet. ‘Your grandmother’s the one who decides that, ragazze, not me.’ He, too, spoke in Veneziano, Brunetti was pleased to hear. Casati turned to look at the girls’ grandmother, who had joined them. She nodded in assent.

  ‘But you’re a man,’ Regina said, pulling the last word out to twice its natural length.

  ‘I’m not sure that counts much,’ Casati answered. ‘Women are a lot smarter than we are, so I always try to do what they tell me.’

  The girls looked at their grandmother, but she said nothing, leaving it to the other man to solve this mystery. Like two tiny owls, they swivelled their heads towards Brunetti, who nodded and said, ‘Your Zio Davide’s
right. We’re really not very smart. You’re much better off listening to your nonna.’

  Hearing this, Lucia smiled at Brunetti and said, ‘I can’t wait until they ask Giuliano about this at lunch today.’

  ‘What’s he likely to say?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘If he knows what’s good for him, he’ll agree with both of you,’ she answered, then laughed at what she’d said. She looked at her watch, told Brunetti hurriedly that their number was in the phone book, under Sandi, and he should call and come to dinner one night. Then, calling to the girls to come along, she tilted her cart back on to its wheels and started walking directly away from the water, towards the other side of the narrow island.

  At no time during their brief conversation had she asked why he had come to the island alone. Perhaps married people didn’t dare to ask that question of other married people.

  When Brunetti turned his attention back to Casati, he saw the man walking away from him on the riva, Brunetti’s suitcase in one hand. Brunetti called goodbye to the little girls and Lucia. The girls turned and waved; Lucia raised a hand but did not turn to look.

  Brunetti hurried after Casati, who was walking towards a rope tied to one of the bollards. As he reached him, Brunetti looked into the water and saw floating a metre below them a puparìn, the wood glowing in the sun. Closest kin to the gondola, though a bit shorter, the puparìn was Brunetti’s favourite rowing boat, responsive and light in the water; he had never seen a lovelier one than this. Even the thwart glowed in the light, almost as though Casati had given it a quick polish before he left the boat.

  Casati set the suitcase on the riva and crouched down at the edge. For a moment, Brunetti thought he was going to jump down into the boat, as if a young man’s stunt would show Brunetti who was the real boatman. Instead, Casati sat on the riva, put one hand, palm flat, on the pavement and hopped down into the boat. He steadied himself before reaching up for the suitcase. Brunetti moved fast and handed it to him, sat on the riva, judged the distance, and stepped down on to the thwart.

  Involuntarily, it escaped Brunetti: ‘My God, she’s beautiful.’ He couldn’t stop his right hand from running along the top board of the side, delighting in its cool smoothness. Looking back at Casati, he asked, ‘Who built her?’

  ‘I did,’ he answered. ‘But that was a long time ago.’

  Brunetti said nothing in reply; he was busy studying the lines where the boards were invisibly caulked together, the hull’s gentle curves, the floor planking that showed no sign of moisture or dirt.

  ‘Complimenti,’ Brunetti said, turning away to face forward. He heard noises from behind, then Casati asked him to haul in the parabordo that served as a fender between the side of the boat and the stone wall. When Brunetti turned again, he saw Casati pull in a second parabordo and set it in the bottom of the boat, next to a piece of iron grating standing upright against the side. Brunetti faced forward again and heard the slap of the mooring rope tossed into the bottom of the boat, and then the smooth noise of the oar slipping into the fórcola. A sudden motion pushed them away from the wall, and then he thought he heard Casati’s oar slide into the water, and they were off.

  All he heard after that was the soft rubbing of the oar in the curve of the fórcola, the hiss of water along the sides of the boat, and the occasional squeak of one of Casati’s shoes as his weight shifted forwards or backwards. Brunetti gave himself to motion, glad of the passing breeze that tempered the savagery of the heat. He hadn’t thought to bring a hat, and he had scoffed at Paola’s insistence that he bring sunscreen. Real men?

  Brunetti had rowed since he was a boy, but he knew he had little to contribute to the smoothness of this passage. There was not the slightest suggestion of stop and go, of a point where the thrust of the oar changed force: it was a single forward motion, like a bird soaring on rising draughts of air, or a pair of skis descending a slope. It was a whish or a shuuh, as hard to describe as to hear, even in the midst of the silence of the laguna.

  Brunetti turned his head to one side, then to the other, but there was only the soft, low hiss. He wanted to turn and look at Casati, as though by watching him row, he might store the motions away and copy them later, but he didn’t want to shift his weight and thus change the balance of the boat, however minimally.

  A fisherman stood on the riva, looking both bored and impatient. When he saw the puparìn, he raised his pole in salutation to Casati, but the heat rendered him silent as a fish.

  They reached the end of the island and turned eastward, following the shoreline past houses and abandoned fields. Even the turning had been effortless. Brunetti watched houses and trees glide past and only then did he realize how fast they were moving. He turned, then, to watch Casati row.

  Seeing the perfect balance of his motion, back and forth, back and forth, hands effortlessly in control of the oar, Brunetti thought that no man his own age or younger would be able to row like this because he would spoil it by showing off. The drops from the blade hit the water almost invisibly before the oar dipped in and moved towards the back. His father had rowed like this.

  It was perfection, Brunetti realized, as beautiful as any painting he had ever seen or voice he had ever heard. He turned himself forward and looked to the right as they entered what seemed to be a wider canal.

  ‘It’s just up there,’ Casati said from behind him. Brunetti saw a tangled mass of vines that had managed to crawl over and repossess a brick sea wall, and behind it sick, desiccated trees, their lower parts moss-spattered and apparently fruitless. Like bones tossed to dogs under the table, dull orange fragments of the wall lay scattered among the tin cans and plastic bottles on the tidal beach that had washed up against it.

  ‘No, farther ahead,’ Casati said. Brunetti saw that the colour of the bricks lightened as the wall grew straight and more solidly made. Behind it he saw the tops of trees, each a vernal Lazarus, sickness cast aside, peaches and apricots rich on the branches, leaves as brightly polished as the boat they rode in. And amidst them the multi-chimneyed tiled roof of a countryside villa. From so low, he could see only the top floor and roof, but he noticed that the white paint on the plastered walls was fresh, as were the copper gutters and drainpipes.

  Casati steered them towards an opening in the wall in front of the house, where three moss-covered steps led down to the water. He passed the steps and pulled close to the sea wall. As the boat slowed, Brunetti, without being asked, tossed the parabordo over the side and put out his hand to slow them by grabbing a metal ring in the wall. When they came to a full stop, he moved forward and tied the rope lying at the front of the boat to the ring.

  Brunetti turned towards the back of the boat, and saw another rope already tied to a second metal ring, the second parabordo already over the side to protect the boat. Casati clambered up the three steps, suitcase in hand. In ordinary circumstances, with a friend, Brunetti would have made a joke about hoping the other man did not expect a tip, but he didn’t want to risk offending Casati.

  When he climbed up, Brunetti saw the villa standing fifty metres back from the brick wall. It looked like a square box covered with a four-segment tiled roof that peaked in the centre. A thick wooden door stood in the middle of the façade, three large windows on either side of it. A wide stone pavement led to the private mooring.

  Casati had already started towards the villa, and Brunetti followed him. The man opened the door, prompting Brunetti to ask, ‘You don’t lock it?’

  Casati looked at him as if he’d spoken in some language other than Veneziano, then answered, ‘No. Not out here.’

  ‘Just like when I was a boy,’ Brunetti answered, hoping it was the right thing to say.

  Apparently it was, for Casati smiled. ‘Come in, Signore.’

  It took about fifteen minutes for him to show Brunetti around the house. He started with the ground floor with a central staircase leading to the upper floor. In a large sitting room stood a random selection of easy chairs that had in common with the si
ngle sofa only the look of being comfortable and well worn; the library – Brunetti sighed with relief at the sight – had four walls of books. The dining room held a long walnut table scarred by centuries of use, and another, smaller sitting room had walls filled with fragments of ancient Venetian pottery that must have been rescued from the underwater dumps of the old pottery workshops on Murano. An enormous kitchen spanned the back part of the building and had what appeared to be the original brick floor and six French windows giving out to a walled-in garden.

  The centre of the garden was a sea of flowers, only flowers, growing in reckless abandon and with no apparent order, not of variety, colour, height, nor size. Brunetti recognized roses, marigolds, zinnias, and saw others that looked familiar but remained nameless to him. The back wall was covered with climbing plants: cucumber and what looked like squash as well as some trellised fruit trees. The trees he had seen from the water stood near the right wall, in front of them a long row of coloured boxes on waist-high stands. An equally long row of rosemary and lavender was planted to the left. Colour rioted, shapes stood where they pleased, yet the whole was strangely harmonious.

  Casati called to him from the front of the house, and Brunetti went towards his voice. ‘I’ll show you your room,’ Casati said and started up the stairs, still carrying Brunetti’s suitcase. At the top, Casati turned left and, passing a closed door, said, ‘That’s the bathroom.’ He passed the next door and continued to the last on the right side and opened it.

  ‘This is your room,’ Casati said and set the suitcase on a wooden rack next to a tall old wooden armadio that showed signs of having once been painted green. ‘I’m sorry you’re not closer to the bathroom, but this room has a view of the garden.’