A Private Venus by Giorgio Scerbanenco Read Free Book Online

too short and too narrow for him, as if lying on a plank. Duca took a chair and moved it close to him. He kept smoking his cigarette, without offering him one.
    ‘I haven’t asked you why you tried to kill yourself, because you wouldn’t have told me.’ He didn’t wait for a reply, he knew there wouldn’t be one, he took a few more puffs of his cigarette, then said, ‘And I’m not going to ask you now, because you still wouldn’t tell me.’
    In fact, he didn’t say anything at all. But Duca had understood. The question was not the drinking, the alcoholism, as Davide’s father the emperor thought. Parents always think their children are still at the lullaby stage. For a young man of that age to have such a clear-headed desire to die, the reason had to be a deep and serious one. Davide was a healthy young man, from every point of view, Mariolina and company had confirmed that, and for a healthy young man to consciously resolve on his own death, there must have been a painful wound to his ego. A simple event, however serious, wouldn’t have reduced him to this: even if he had killed someone, if he had set fire to an old lady or put a bomb in the basement of Milan Central Station, he wouldn’t haveacted like this. Davide Auseri had been destroyed by something. Or by someone. That was what he had to discover. The drinking was a laughable matter.
    ‘And now that you’re rested, let’s go.’ He stood up and threw the cigarette end out of the window, which was still milky with dawn, neither more nor less than before, as if the dawn had come to a halt. Even stranger, there was no dawn chorus. It was just as silent as it had been in the middle of the night. ‘This isn’t the right place for you or for me. Let’s go straight away. I’ll pack your bag for you: for a couple of days it’s best that you use your left arm as little as possible. I don’t think you’re sleepy. Neither am I.’
    Getting the necessary indications from Davide, he found a beautiful soft suitcase, dark blue, obviously, and put in it everything they would need. Then, with toilet paper he scrupulously cleaned the bloodstains that led from the room all the way to the bathroom—to support Lorenza and his niece he would have to do this and more—and when everything was ready he said, ‘Now you can get up. I may have missed a few bloodstains, so before leaving, wake the maid, the butler, whoever you like, and tell them you’re going, then even if they discover the bloodstains I missed they won’t think there’s been a murder and we ran away.’
    Davide obeyed him promptly and gloomily, he woke the butler who had appeared in his nightshirt the previous night, had him take the case out to the car and sat down quietly next to Duca at the wheel, knowing already that he wouldn’t be the one to drive.
    So they descended from the soft hills of the Brianza intothe Milanese plain and near Monza they found somewhere open: obviously it didn’t have any drinkable whisky, it wasn’t so much a bar, more a kind of shed, but Michelangelo’s David was starting to turn pale and need refuelling. Duca ordered two grappas. Davide drank his straight down, so Duca passed him his own glass.
    ‘The treatment starts now,’ he said. ‘Whenever I think you really need a drink, I’ll give you one. Otherwise not a drop, and I’ll stop you any way I can.’
    Davide drank the second glass, too, they were so small, so measly, so reminiscent of an earlier time, a world of rosepetal cordials and shoes with heeltaps, that Duca said, ‘Have another one: that’s an order.’ He got back behind the wheel and after a while looked at Davide: his pallor had gone, his breathing had got back to normal. It wasn’t the derisory loss of blood that had made him sick, obviously. It was the cobra he had inside him, which was eating him up.
    ‘If you tell me what happened to you, and let me help you, it’ll be much better for you,’ Duca said. He wasn’t expecting any reply.