The Art of Waiting (9 page)

‘What's going on?' Aldo was saying. Then just, ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck . . .'

Massimo was looking at him, not laughing now, belching out a jumble of words. Fausto was over in the undergrowth now and Aldo hurried after him. Paolo was frantic in the chaos of torch beams, clasping Luca in his short stocky arms, holding him tight to his chest as Fausto tried to prop up Luca's lolling head, Luca's eyes barely open, eyelids flickering, blood coursing in a dark incessant stream from his mouth and his lips gibbering away frantically in a futile attempt at words.

Aldo leant down and his words spilled out, a tumbling confusion of apology and denial. ‘Dad, Dad, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry.' Then turning to the others, and shouting at them, ‘There was another shot, there was, I tell you! Didn't you hear it?'

Then back again to Luca, Aldo's hands pulling at his father's shirt, blood on his hands now, and blood still pouring from Luca's mouth, then Luca coughing, a choking sound and his eyes wild and then nothing, a sudden blankness, all bleak and gone, and the body limp and more shouting from the others and Fausto putting a heavy arm around Aldo's shoulder and saying something in his ear again. ‘Not your fault. An accident. You mustn't blame yourself.' And Aldo pushing his hand away, yelling at him, ‘You're a liar! There was a second shot, I heard it.'

‘An echo.'

‘No, not an echo! It was real!'

And Paolo putting his arms around Aldo too now, hugging him, saying nothing, and Massimo staring at Aldo over Paolo's shoulder and Aldo shouting at his fat friend, ‘Massimo, you heard it, didn't you? You must have. You were standing right next to me, you must have heard what I heard!'

And Paolo, ‘Is it true, Massimo? What did you hear?'

‘I don't know. I couldn't say. It sounded like an echo, I think. I'm not sure.'

‘Massimo! Massimo! Back me up on this, please! It wasn't me, it was someone else! There was another shot!'

‘But who, Aldo? Who?'

‘Fausto Pozzi!'

And then Aldo was on his knees beside the body, sobbing and begging forgiveness again and the confusion of the world fell in on him.

The police got involved the following day. They questioned Aldo and all the others, but they found nothing to support his denials, nothing to prove his accusations, no evidence or testimony that a second shot had been fired, nor any indication of where it could have come from or who would have fired it.

‘Fausto Pozzi,' said Aldo. ‘It must've been him. Firing simultaneously, so no one would know. He's clever like that.'

‘No, there was no second shot,' said Massimo, when pushed. ‘I'm sure I would have heard it if it had been so close.'

‘Call yourself a friend?'

The police tested the gun anyway, the Chief Inspector, no less, taking personal charge, seeing to it that the tests were carried out in just the right way.

‘Conclusive evidence,' he whispered, under his breath, when he came to give Aldo's mother the news. ‘Fausto Pozzi's gun shows no sign at all of having been fired for a period of at least several weeks. And the bullet – ballistics have confirmed – the rifle from which it was fired. I'm sorry, but it's your boy who did it. A dreadful mistake. A genuine tragedy. He will need his mother's love more than ever now.'

And Aldo standing quietly in the hall outside and listening to the Chief Inspector's words, like a judge reading out a verdict, and his mother's silence in response. Then the sound of the Chief Inspector lifting himself up out of the chair and pacing across the floor and into the hall, and his hand on Aldo's shoulder, a hard bony hand, and looking Aldo in the eye, a knowing look, then the Chief Inspector turning away and walking down the hall and out into the
street, the door pulled shut behind him. And Aldo silent in the hall, and his mother silent on the sofa in the living room, each out of sight of the other, both of them like that for what seemed like hours, neither of them able to speak.

And then Aldo went upstairs and closed the bedroom door and lay on his bed and closed his eyes upon the world.

They buried Luca Gardini on a grey October Friday, a large black gondola carrying the coffin the short distance across the lagoon from Cannaregio to the island of San Michele. Luca lay in his box beneath a gilded awning as the oarsmen pulled their long poles through the green water. Aldo sat beside his mother next to the coffin and fought off a desire to rip open the lid and shake the corpse, to wake Luca from his sleep, to tell him he was not really dead and must come back to her, must tell the oarsmen to stop rowing and take the vessel back to the house on Fondamenta della Sensa, where they would sit at dinner and forget the whole thing had ever happened. But instead she sat motionless and watched the bow of the boat as it cut through the drizzle, the brass eagle on the prow coated with fine drops that slid across its outstretched wings and slipped one by one onto the waves of the lagoon. And she thought of Luca's barrel chest and how, when she had first lain next to him in the house on Burano, her head resting on the mattress beside him, he had towered above her like a protecting mountain, a wall that would keep out all the bad in the world for the rest of their life together. But now the mountain had gone and she lay open to the wild creatures that roamed the plains and she would have to create her own refuge again.

The gondola hugged the outer wall of the cemetery as it moved up the western side of the island. It drew alongside the jetty near the north-west point, where the cypress trees stood, dark sentinels against the sky, the small dome of the church of San Michele in Isola, so white when the sun shone, now grey and indistinguishable
from the clouds and the rain. The pall-bearers carried Luca into the cemetery, through the lines of vertical tombs and the silent corridors of graves. Many were ornate, others simple, some well tended, fresh flowers in the holders, others uncared for and colourless, and Aldo noted that it was not necessarily the simplest that were the least cherished or the most ornate that bore the freshest flowers. He listened as the priest spoke the eloquent words that Luca had not been able to say in life, and then his father's body was passed over to the land of the dead. He stood beside his mother, looking around at the faces, the occasional glance in his direction, that questioning look, the one he had seen so many times since the shooting, sympathy and accusation rolled into one, and the blood drained from his face whenever he saw their eyes. His face was thinner than ever now, grey as wet ashes, his eyes as blank as the sodden sky. The name of Fausto Pozzi seeped like an illness from his mind, out of his mouth in a silent obsessive flow. The man himself stood a little further back, not welcome, as ever, barely tolerated but still going through the appropriate motions of sorrow. No one had turned him away and so there he was, hanging over Luca in death as he had done in life. A tragic accident, he had said. The poor boy, shooting his father dead, of course he would want to distance himself from blame, deny to everyone, including himself, what he had done. But it was Aldo who had fired the gun, of that the police, who had been most helpful in the matter, had provided conclusive proof. So everyone concurred: poor boy, what must he be feeling now? And how uncharacteristically reasonable it was of Fausto Pozzi to bear the boy's accusations with such good grace, to be so generous in his forgiveness of the slandering of his name. Yet Aldo persisted, he swore to everyone that he would not forgive, that he would prove one day that though he had also pulled his trigger, it was Fausto Pozzi who had killed his father. ‘Poor boy, he cannot forgive himself, and so he seeks another culprit,' they said, but Aldo knew his own truth and he knew that one day, somehow, he would reveal it to them all and Fausto Pozzi would pay the price for what he had done.

The wake was held at Casa Luca. They drank the wine and ate
the food and talked of Luca and tried to remember the good times, but the atmosphere was heavy and oppressive and the mourners drifted away empty and unfulfilled under a teeming rain. As Aldo watched each of them leave through the door of Casa Luca, the wind blew in and lifted the sawdust, the lace curtains shifted imperceptibly and then settled, and the door slammed shut in his face.

Aldo Gardini found the house, just as it had been described to him, in the depths of a dead-end alley, the walls dark and green with moss where water streamed down the walls from broken gutters overhead. Nice door, he thought, once upon a time, centuries before: solid oak, rotting around the edges now, gone all old and grey. He looked around, almost had second thoughts, stopped himself, then hammered on the door so hard that the rough wood drove a dusting of splinters into his knuckles. He called out to the man inside, wanting to get it over with, wanting to get it done.

‘Hey, it's me! We have an appointment, remember? Open up!'

‘Yes, yes, yes, patience, patience. I'm coming.'

Then footsteps and the door swung open and Aldo was looking down at a grim facial arrangement upon the body of a dwarf. He looked at the man's eyes, his clothes, their creases edged with grime, then back up to the twisted face. How appropriate, he thought. An ugly man for an ugly task.

‘Aldo? It
is
Aldo, I assume?'

‘Yes, Aldo. Who else?'

‘Come in. You're letting in the damp.'

The man set off, his metal-tipped heels echoing down the hall. He led Aldo down a staircase into a basement, an oil lamp burning in the corner, another propped up on a table by the far wall. A fire flickered in the grate, casting red and black shapes around the room. Aldo sniffed. The place stank.

‘Are you sure there's enough light in here for you to work?' Aldo said, uncertain again.

‘Every artist has his method,' the man replied, the candlelight revealing an awful smile. Not really a smile at all, thought Aldo, more of a threat.

‘Sit down,' the man said. He hooked his foot around the leg of a stool and pulled it out from under the table. ‘I said
sit.'

Aldo hesitated and the man's smile threatened him again.

‘Look, you made contact with me. If you want luxury, you'll have to go elsewhere.'

Aldo sat down.

‘So what was it you wanted?'

‘A pig.'

‘A
pig?'

‘Yes, a pig. A wild pig. You know, a boar. Just the head. Really ugly. Here, where I can see it easily.' He rolled up his sleeve and placed his forearm on the table. ‘Just here. About this size.' He clenched his other fist and placed it on his arm.

The man opened a cupboard and exhumed an oil-cloth bag and a dark bottle topped with a cork. He unfurled the bag, removed his instruments with the care of a surgeon, placed them on the table, extracted the cork with his teeth. The needle caught the light of the fire as the man rubbed Aldo's forearm with the noxious contents of the bottle. Then the man set to work and Aldo watched as the animal's face took gradual shape upon his arm, first the outline, then the heavy jaws, the teeth, the tusks, the wrinkled moustached snout. And then the eyes.

‘Fiercer than that,' said Aldo. He knew exactly what he wanted now. ‘Make them angry-looking. Furious. Evil.'

The needle worked away, the man occasionally wiping the image down with the stinging liquid from the bottle. Aldo gritted his teeth and swallowed the pain and held it in his stomach, staring all the while at the face that was forming on his arm. The man paid special attention to the expression of the eyes, working at the corners, increasing the depth, his digging and scraping bringing blood welling up out of the skin. Aldo wiped it away and urged the man on.

‘Dig a little deeper. I don't want it to fade.'

‘It won't fade.'

‘Dig a little deeper anyway.'

Finally, it was done, the skin angry and sore, and the man wiped it down again with the fiery liquid and Aldo bit his lip and handed over the money and made for the stairs.

‘Can't say I've done one of those before,' said the man. ‘Any particular reason for it?'