Pierre smiled and did just that. Brando had been feeling peevish already, and Pierre’s remark had merely unleashed his anger. In his patched pyjamas and his worn-out slippers, sitting on the edge of the bed with his tousled curls falling over his eyes, and at least three days’ worth of stubble, Brando no longer looked much like the actor, and more like an old beggar.
Yes, Brando wasn’t entirely wrong, but he didn’t like it when people referred to Ferruccio, Angela’s little brother, as ‘spastic’ or ‘abnormal’. That was just Brando’s way, he enjoyed making fun of mad people, cripples, invalids. Perhaps it was because he was a barber — with all those hours spent listening to dull chat, recriminations and endless moaning — perhaps it made you a bit jaundiced, and if you were like that already, who knows what you would turn into. On the Via Libia, a few metres away from Brando’s shop, there was a fruitseller with no hands, he had lost them on the Russian front, and now he had claws instead. With the help of his wife he managed to do all the work, carry the boxes, weigh the fruit, put it in the bags, count the money and give out change, holding the coins tightly between the two claws and pouring them into the customer's hands. He was a fine person, and no one had ever heard him complain, but Brando had taken one look at him and nicknamed him ‘Houdini’, saying that if he was put in handcuffs he would be able to free himself in no time at all. Every now and again, when he was cutting someone’s hair, he told sniggering imaginary anecdotes about ‘Houdini’, saying that he always had blood pouring out of his nose from scratching himself with his claw, and nonsense of that kind. Yes, Brando could be unbearable. But he was a friend.
Ferruccio was the same age as Pierre. Ten years before, his and Angela’s mother had been killed in an air raid. He had survived by a miracle, after being trapped under the rubble for hours, clinging to that lifeless body, feeling it grow cold and stiff. Angela hadn’t been there, she had gone to get some flour with the ration card.
Her father, who had been recovering in a sanatorium for some time, had died of TB a few months later. Ferruccio had never recovered from those tragic events. He became anxious over trifles, he was afraid of thunder, once he had even hit Angela, and then there were also long periods when he never got out of bed and refused to talk to anyone. By day Angela worked, cleaning in Sant’Orsola Hospital, in the evening she returned to the little council flat and found herself alone with Ferruccio again. Sometimes he was totally distant, at other times quick to anger. It was a bad dream from which she was unable to awake.
One day, at the end of ’47, she had met Odoacre, who had by that time been a respected doctor for a number of years. Always an anti-fascist, of liberal family, during the Resistance he went secretly to treat injured partisans. After the Liberation he had joined the Communist Party and immediately become a member of the Federal Committee of Bologna.
Odoacre had a very fine way of life. A distinguished 38-year-old, and still a bachelor. Angela was a beautiful girl in poverty. He had started to court her, until their engagement and marriage in ’48, shortly before the elections. In the house in Via Castiglione, they had put poor Ferruccio in a little room on the ground floor. But Ferruccio didn’t like Odoacre, he responded badly to him, held his mouth when he was there, sometimes growing incandescent with fury, calling him ‘a criminal’, and saying that just because he had money he thought he could take advantage of his sister. Odoacre never lost patience, he tried to reason, to calm his brother-in-law, and sometimes he was successful, but there were some terribly uncomfortable moments for Angela. Before she too lost her mind, Odoacre had sent Ferruccio to Villa Azzurra, in the district of San Lazzaro, and from that day onwards he had taken care of him.
That had happened early in 1950. From then on, Ferruccio left the clinic only on Sunday, when Angela went to collect him and bring him to the cinema or take him for a walk. At Christmas and during the summer, Ferruccio stayed with Angela and Odoacre, for as much as a week or ten days in a row. His outbreaks of rage had grown rarer, because Odoacre gave him some new medicine with a complicated name, a very modern tablet that calmed him down.
Over the past three or four months, Angela had spent only two Sundays a month alone with her brother, because she spent the others with Pierre. So as not to arouse Odoacre’s suspicions, she went to pick up Ferruccio in a taxi, and then left him with a friend, Teresa Bedetti, who was for Angela what Brando was for Pierre, a friend and accomplice. Ferruccio had problems with his nerves, but he was not unintelligent, far from it. He knew everything, and he was also happy that Angela was cuckolding her husband. For some reason, he went on hating him, although he never attacked him verbally. On the other hand, Teresa, like Brando, didn’t really agree with what was happening, but she was also a friend.
Ferruccio went to the cinema with Teresa, and then they met up later and, all together, prepared the story they would tell Odoacre.
*
‘Oh, Brando, it’s not simple, you know. I really love Angela. It’s easy for you to make judgements from outside, but I know she doesn’t love Montroni. It’s gratitude on her part, and also it’s as you say, lack of choice. But what should I do, just give her up like that, without saying anything?’
‘And what would you say? You have no prospects. If you had the money you’d go to San Marino, but in Italy divorce isn’t even legal, and you know what they say about women who have separated from their husbands.’
Brando dipped his bread into some milk, sitting at the table on which Pierre and Angela had once made love. Pierre was standing by the window: outside it was already dark.
‘But even Togliatti married one woman and lives with another!’
‘Togliatti, Togliatti, what’s he got to do with it? Angela isn’t going to leave Montroni, she’s not going to just dump her brother, and she’s certainly not going to starve just because you satisfy her in bed and Montroni probably doesn’t.’
‘But they can’t even have children! She’s told me that Montroni is sterile. ’
Brando said nothing. He ran his hand over his prickly chin. Pierre bit his lips and felt like an idiot. He shouldn’t have revealed such a private detail. Brando was no different from the others, no different from the comrades in the Section or people like Melega: he respected Montroni, he put him on a pedestal, he considered him to be untouchable, and he really was, insofar as a big shot in the Party in the most left-wing city in Italy can be untouchable. That reference to his sexual life was sure to have wrong-footed or horrified Brando. Certainly no one had ever imagined Montroni in the intimacy of his bedroom; he was always so stylish and distinguished, perhaps a little gloomy, and he never showed his teeth when he smiled. Hard to imagine him in his pyjamas, or remember that he, too, like all ordinary mortals, shat and pissed every day.
It was Brando who, embarrassed, broke the silence: ‘Pierre, I repeat: you should break it off before something serious happens.’
Pierre looked into the distance beyond the window.
All he saw was a long black expanse stretching out ahead.
Chapter 21
Palm Springs, California, 15 February
His eyebrows were too thick, they almost met in the middle, and the cleft in his chin wasn’t very pronounced.
Jean-Jacques Bondurant strode across the drawing room. A forced smile, his right hand plunged into his pocket, he looked like a commercial traveller on his first business appointment. He tried to appear casual, as he would have done in the parochial little theatres of Montreal, but the Palm Springs house wasn’t the same thing. Neither was his audience.