XIV
The door was opened by a bearded man who ignored Aurelio Zen’s identification card and waved him into a large room insulated from the harsh external environment of the Milan suburbs both by a hovering layer of stringed music and by shelves of books stacked from floor to ceiling on every wall, leaving only a minimal escape hatch in the form of the door through which Zen had entered.
‘Quite a change from the last time the police called on me,’ said Luca Brandelli. ‘That was back in the terrorist years. For some reason they’d got it into their heads that I knew where Toni Negri and the Red Brigades leaders were hiding out, so they went through the place with a bulldozer. A good third of my research files disappeared for ever.’
‘They weren’t returned?’
‘The files were. Shame about the contents. Still, one can’t have everything.’
Brandelli was a stocky, powerful man of medium height, with a full head of loose white curls and a beard to match. He shuffled about the apartment in faded jeans, a baggy sweater and moccasins, as if to proclaim in advance that wherever he was taking his stand, it wasn’t on his appearance. No, he’d given up the journalism, he told Zen while he prepared a pot of Chinese green tea in the minuscule kitchen.
‘I can get by on my pension, more or less, so I’ve decided to devote my remaining years to writing a book.’
‘What about?’
‘A definitive account, explanation and analysis of all the misteri d’Italia.’
‘A slim volume, then,’ commented Zen.
‘Virtually invisible.’
They returned to the living room, temporarily bonded by this shared moment of irony. Brandelli walked over and turned off the radio.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Schubert after Mozart won’t do. That’s when everything started to go wrong. For all his facile melodic gush, Schubert was a neurotic. Even Beethoven, although eminently sane, couldn’t escape self-consciousness. Whereas Mozart had no self at all, in his music I mean. Nor should we forget that Karl Marx was born in 1818, and in Trier, a stagnating little provincial town on the Moselle with a glorious past as a Roman colony, a staid present at least thirty years behind the times, and no future to speak of. Some people argue that he rebelled against that very childhood, or at least forgot it. I disagree. You may forget your childhood, but your childhood does not forget you. To all intents and purposes Marx grew up in the 1780s, a child of the Enlightenment, a pre-Romantic. It was only when he went to Paris in his mid-twenties that he formulated his doctrine of “merciless criticism of everything existing”.’
The two men sat down, Zen on a spongy sofa, his host on a creaky wicker chair opposite.
‘Marx always looked back to earlier eras of production — and hence of course social organization and personal psychology — with a great sense of warmth and nostalgia, just as I look back to the struggles of the working class in Genoa and Turin in the 1950s. Whatever those people were doing, and whatever mistakes they may have made in retrospect, they weren’t doing it for themselves. They were as selfless in their work as was Mozart, just as Marx’s vision of a socialist future was based on the sense of community, however wrongly organized, that still lingered in the Trier of his youth, but had since been obliterated by Romantic egotism. In Paris, it was all “Me, me, me! My feelings, my needs!”. He recognized the danger, and tried to avert it by his overt hostility to the most fashionable contemporary revolutionary movements, and above all by his lifelong labour to formulate a broad, dialectic solution which would transcend the individual in order to remake him. It was a noble attempt, but in the end it failed. The neurotic ego won. Schubert banished Mozart, and we’re still living with the consequences two hundred years later.’
Aurelio Zen sipped his tea and said nothing. The room was very warm, almost suffocating. He wished that he had removed his coat, but to do so now might seem pointed. Luca Brandelli cleared his throat stagily.
‘But I think that I’m in danger of making my diagnosis appear a symptom of the disease,’ he said. ‘Enough from me, let’s talk about me. In what specific manner may I be of service to the authorities on this occasion?’
Zen took his time about answering and sipped his tea, considering the best way forward.
‘I may be able to contribute a chapter to the book you’re working on,’ he said at last. ‘Or perhaps an episode, an anecdote. At worst, a footnote.’
‘Concerning what?’
‘Something that happened thirty years ago.’
‘Well, as I said, my records of that period are incomplete, and my memory is not what it used to be.’
Zen nodded sympathetically.
‘Does the name Ferrero mean anything to you?’ he asked.
Now it was Brandelli’s turn to take refuge in the tea ceremony.
‘Leonardo Ferrero,’ added Zen.
‘Possibly.’
‘Possibly meaning yes, or possibly meaning no?’
They exchanged a glance.
‘Possibly meaning I’d like to know a bit more about the nature of your interest in this affair before committing myself to an answer. As a good citizen, one naturally wishes to cooperate with the authorities, even though I note that in this instance they haven’t presented themselves with the necessary documentation to command an answer. Nevertheless, I still have a somewhat tattered and faded sense of journalistic honour and responsibility. So before going any further, and in the absence of the aforesaid official documentation, I would like to know a little more about the circumstances before replying.’
Talkative, but a bit of a bore, thought Zen. But the man was obviously intelligent, and the combination of his articulate, professorial delivery and cuddly teddy-bear physique made it easy to understand the popularity he had once enjoyed in left- wing circles.
‘Let me outline the basic facts. A body has been discovered. It is as yet officially unidentified, but an individual has come forward and asserted that the dead man is one Leonardo Ferrero. I have been assigned to make preliminary enquiries. In the course of these, your name emerged as someone who had known this Ferrero.’
He had actually been on the phone to the editorial offices of L’Unita and to the Questura in Milan for the best part of an hour from his hotel room in Lugano before identifying the correct name and full address of the journalist that Marta had remembered as either Brandoni or Brandini. A call to the Ministry would have cut the time to a few minutes, but the risk of his whereabouts being traced and reported was too great.
Luca Brandelli looked at Zen in some wonderment.
‘Leonardo Ferrero, eh? Now there’s a name I never expected to hear again.’
‘You knew him, then?’
Brandelli made a qualifying gesture.
‘We met. Once. Long ago.’
‘Under what circumstances?’
‘One moment. Are you asking me to identify the body?’
Zen paused a moment, then shrugged.
‘Why not? It can’t hurt.’
He took an envelope from his coat pocket and passed over the photographs taken by the Austrian caver who had descended into the blast pit. Brandelli looked through them and frowned.
‘Where are these?’
‘Photographs of the body in situ at the place where it was found. They’re not terribly clear, I’m afraid, and the face is not visible. Not that there was much left of it, according to the hospital in Bolzano.’
‘Bolzano?’
‘Where the corpse was taken. It was discovered in an abandoned military tunnel in the Dolomites. You may have heard about it on the news, although the story seems to have died now. Or been killed.’
Brandelli handed the photographs back.