‘Shut up! Leave me alone! You’re just a bully, like all policemen. Well, you don’t scare me, do you hear? I’ve lived my life, and I have nothing to be ashamed of. Go to hell! Dio boia, Dio can, vaffanculo! You can’t do anything to me!’
The deckhand was watching them with alarm, trying to work out what was going on. It occurred to Claudia that she and Zen might well appear to him to be the two lovers she had fantasized about earlier, having a classic end-of-the-affair row. She strode down the gangplank and off under the trees. Zen made no attempt to follow, but his voice floated after her from the deck of the ferry which was already pushing off for its final run down to the city centre.
‘I’m not going to do anything to you.’
The words were reassuring, but there was a disquieting undercurrent to them. It took her a moment to work out what it was. ‘ Non ti faccio niente, io.’ He’d addressed her in the familiar form used only with family, close friends, inferiors and people you are condescending to. What a nerve! The emphatic personal pronoun at the end added another dimension to her unease. ‘I’m not going to do anything to you.’ So who was? Was he going to try and enlist the aid of the local police chief? The idea was ridiculous. The Swiss were fiercely independent and notoriously bureaucratic. This Zen would need every legal document under the sun, translated into three languages, before they’d even begin to consider arresting a foreign tourist happily spending her money and causing no disturbance whatsoever on their territory.
The clerk at the desk handed her her key with that exquisitely diffident yet friendly courtesy which all the staff seemed to possess as a birthright. Claudia was of course a regular, and a generous tipper. She could afford it. The extent of her fortune, once Gaetano’s will was read, had quite bewildered her. Where had all this money come from? Not from his salary as an army officer, that was for sure. She’d asked Danilo, who had muttered about it being one of those things — and how many there were in this life! — that was better not enquired into too deeply.
In her room, immaculately remade in her absence, she opened the windows and then the shutters on to the balcony overlooking the lake. Then she called room service. A plate of Scottish wild smoked salmon, a green salad and a bottle of champagne. A rich elderly widow’s sad supper. Well, so be it. She didn’t normally drink alone, despite Danilo’s snide comment, but tonight she felt like getting slightly tipsy. She deserved it, after what she’d just been through.
The fumes of the lake rose to meet her as she went out on to the balcony, like the bad smell of a goldfish bowl in urgent need of cleaning. Across the lake, the lights of the casino at Campione were reflected in the torpid water. What had this Zen meant about her husband being a gambler at games they didn’t play in the casino? Gaetano had never understood gambling, but she had understood it immediately. It brought meaning to your life, if only for a while and at a potentially high price. But there was no price too high to be paid for meaning, nothing that could replace it, nothing that could compare. What was money besides that infinite gift? And, money aside, it didn’t matter whether you won or you lost. Something had happened, your life had been structured for a few hours, you wept or you exulted. It was like sex. Yes, that was the only thing that could compare.
There was a discreet knock at the door and a waiter entered with a wheeled trolley bearing her meal. She tipped him lavishly and then, the moment he had left, tore into the salmon and open-throated the wine almost with desperation, like Leonardo making love shortly before he grew cold and dropped her, eager to get it over with before his appetite failed him.
When hers was sated, she surveyed the wreckage of the dinner tray. It had all been so clean and perfectly arranged, and she’d turned it into this mess. Still, it was another meal, she thought with a slight burp. And more meals tomorrow and the day after, and more burps. But no more gambling. No more illusions of meaning, however fleeting. She stepped back out on to the balcony with her glass and the bottle of champagne. Far below, the fan-shaped pattern of the paving stones seemed to beat gently, like wings. She was a little drunk, she realized. And she’d never had a head for heights. Unless that was precisely what she had had, and to excess.
From a room close by, the strains of a solo violin rose above the miasma of the lake, probably the soundtrack to a movie or TV programme that someone was watching. The encounter with that policeman seemed as distant as her childhood. She found herself muttering the German lullaby rhyme which her mother had used to send her to sleep. Her parents had met in the Alto Adige shortly before the war. Her mother spoke almost perfect Italian, but her native tongue was German. Claudia’s father, however, had forbidden the language to be spoken in the house. It had remained a secret between mother and daughter, and seemed all the more powerful and precious for that.
How did the rhyme go? Her mother had later claimed it was a poem by a famous writer, but she had always had intellectual pretensions, and the verses were too natural and artless ever to have been written down. Despite the innumerable times her mother had recited it to her, she could only now remember scattered phrases, and realized that she had no precise idea what they meant. ‘ Nun der Tag mich mud gemacht… wie ein mudes Kind… Stirn, vergiss du alles Denken…’ Something about children feeling tired at the close of day, and it being time to stop doing and thinking, time to let go.
If only she could! But she knew what Zen’s appearance portended. He thought he had been so clever, apparently talking about Leonardo and Naldino and Nestore, but she had seen right through him. The discovery of Leonardo’s body had clearly triggered a reinvestigation of all the circumstances surrounding Gaetano’s death. A new man had come along, insusceptible to the pressures that had been brought to bear on Inspector Boito, and much better informed about the affair with Leonardo, and he had instantly realized the truth. It was all very well to say that he was powerless while she remained in Switzerland, but she couldn’t stay at the hotel for ever. And the moment she returned home, he would be watching and waiting, biding his time. They might even arrest her at the frontier. What would she get? Twenty-five years? A life sentence. She would die in prison.
From the room below the music drifted up again, the same theme, but this time taken up by the whole orchestra. Below, the splayed paving stones of the courtyard glowed up at her. ‘ Und die Seele unbewacht will in freien Flugen schweben…’ She’d understood that die Seele meant l’anima, the soul, and then there was something about flying, but she’d never understood unbewacht. And when she’d asked her mother, she had started to weep and then said, ‘It means unwatched, unsupervised, without anyone to tell you what to do or say or feel or how to behave or anything else. It means to be at perfect liberty, free at last.’
At the time, this outburst had just made the idea more problematic, not to mention threatening in some sense, as though a taboo had been broken. Nor had she really understood what die Seele meant, except as an ideal version of herself, with better hair and none of the acne and period pains and the fat which had been quite a big problem at the time, although it had turned out all right later on. And she certainly hadn’t understood unbewacht. Watched over was exactly what she had so desperately wanted to be, and particularly when she was asleep, except that her parents weren’t up to the job. Her mother’s tears had been the final proof of that.
It occurred to her for the first time that in her marriage to Gaetano, and even perhaps her affair with Leonardo, she had merely been replaying the hand of cards that her parents had been dealt, as if to prove to them posthumously that it could after all have been a winner.
She leant over the balcony, gazing down at the paving stones spread out like interlocking angels’ wings. Unbewacht. She understood the word now all right, and she understood Seele and she understood her mother. She also understood, and it was perhaps her supreme moment, that this understanding had come too late, not as an epiphany but an epitaph.