had been accidental, the result of her panic and their inability to get out of her way fast enough. That she could just about tolerate, but what had happened tonight was quite unspeakable, just too awful for words…
Which is precisely the problem, she finds, when she tries to explain. Whatever she says, however she phrases it, the whole thing sounds unreal, phantasmagoric, even to her. She doesn’t even quite believe her own experience, so how can she expect anyone else to do so? She glances once again at Aurelio Battista, crouching beside her on the low hard settle. His tone is sympathetic enough, but she’s already beginning to regret having phoned him.
‘Does it hurt?’ he asks, dampening the rag in the dilute vinegar she is using as an antiseptic.
Ada dabs the shallow cuts across the inside of her wrists.
‘It’s nothing.’
He shakes his head.
‘I’ll call an ambulance boat, contessa. We must get these injuries seen to.’
But that’s precisely what she doesn’t want. It’s one thing having the police involved. Despite Daniele Trevisan’s warnings, the policemen she’s dealt with so far have been perfectly correct, for all their evident scepticism. But the doctors are another matter altogether. Ada will never forget what they did to her the last time, even though she cannot actually remember in any detail what they did do. Never again, that much is certain. She’d rather slit her wrists than go back to San Clemente!
As it is, she is not even being consulted. Giustiniana’s boy is speaking into the telephone, giving orders in a peremptory way, referring to her as ‘the patient’, as though she were some sort of object. To get her own back, she blots him out in turn, replacing him with an earlier version dressed in a skirt and blouse, playing with one of Rosetta’s dolls, all alone in this vast cold salon, dwarfed by the furniture…
‘They’ll be here shortly,’ says the other Aurelio Battista. ‘Now then, what became of the knife?’
She points to the other side of the salon, towards the enormous dining table reputedly made from the timbers of a captured Turkish galley. ‘The dragon table’, little Aurelio used to call it, crawling about its giant legs carved in the form of claws… As he is again now, down on his hands and knees to gather up the carving knife lying there on the floor.
‘Is this yours, contessa?’ he asks, carrying the knife towards her by the tip of the blade.
Ada nods dumbly.
‘It’s so blunt,’ she murmurs.
He sets the knife down on a chair and stands looking down at her.
‘One of them held my arm while the other cut me,’ she explains. ‘He had to press quite hard, the knife is so blunt. It hurt.’
But it’s the fear rather than the pain she remembers most clearly. She knows now that they weren’t trying to kill her, but at the time she had no such assurance, and her terror was so extreme that she had lost control of her bladder. She does not tell Zen that her principal concern had been to remove all trace of this before he arrived.
‘Can you describe the intruders?’ he asks, sitting down again.
Of course she can. But she is unwilling to do so. She knows only too well that the grotesque appearance of the figures, with their exaggerated features and fantastic costumes, sounds totally absurd, something from a nightmare. And sure enough, as she talks about the tall one with the huge hooked nose, sunken eyes and gaping rictus, his voluminous clothes chequered like a harlequin, a knowing look comes over her visitor’s face.
‘Do you go out much, contessa?’ he asks casually.
She carefully disguises the fact that she cannot see the point of this question at all.
‘Once or twice a week to the shops…’
‘You never go to the Piazza, for example?’
She looks at him in bewilderment. The last time she went to the Piazza was before the war, when her husband was still alive. Who would she go with now? And why?
‘Whatever for?’ she demands.
The man shrugs.
‘Some people just like to go and stroll about there, to see and be seen. At carnival, for example.’
Ada Zulian tosses her head.
‘Carnival is for children. I have no children.’
They confront each other for a moment over this. Then the man nods, as though acknowledging what it cost her to say this.
‘This is the second night that this has happened,’ he says, moving to a less painful topic.
Ada nods.
‘And before that?’ he asks.
She thinks back, but before she can answer he comes back with another question.
‘Is there any pattern to these… experiences?’
‘How do you mean?’ she replies warily.
‘Do they occur at any particular time of day, or any particular day of the week?’
Ada spots the trap just in time. The doctors asked her just such a question the last time, about Rosetta’s reappearances. That was before she was on her guard with the doctors, when she still trusted them, before she knew what they were capable of. So she told them the truth, that her daughter appeared each night at exactly six o’clock. Her inquisitors had seized on that with evil glee. Six o’clock, they pointed out, was precisely the time that the real Rosetta had been expected to return home on the day she vanished. The fact that the hallucinations conformed to such a regular pattern was incontrovertible proof that they were manifestations of an obsessional delusion.
Well, she learned her lesson the hard way, but learned it she did. She won’t be caught that way again.
‘No,’ she replies firmly. ‘They come at any time they please. There’s no pattern at all.’
Aurelio Battista frowns.
‘Are you sure?’
‘I can prove it!’ cries Ada triumphantly.
She gets up and marches over to the cabinet in which she keeps the set of leather-bound folio volumes which her father used to record the accounts of the family cotton business. It is in the ample acres of blank pages at the rear of these volumes that Ada enters every day, in a hand so minute as to be practically illegible, the credit and debit balance of her own life.
She pulls out the volume she is currently using and flips back through the pages to the point, just over a month earlier, when these manifestations began to occur. In a steady, even tone, showing no trace whatever of excitement or disturbance, she recites the date, time and duration of each intrusion to Aurelio Battista, who writes it all down solemnly in his notebook.
As Ada replaces the huge volume in the cabinet, vindicated by the facts, she hears the seesaw clamour of a siren outside and sees a flashing blue light infiltrating the shutters on the windows at the front of the house, above the canal. In an instant, all her hard-won serenity deserts her. Can Giustiniana’s boy really be going to turn her over to the doctors?
‘I’ll need the key to the waterdoor,’ he tells her, putting away his notebook.
A cunning idea suggests itself to her.
‘The waterdoor? But that hasn’t been used for years. I’ve no idea where the key is.’
The siren dies to a guttural groan beneath the house. Aurelio Battista walks over to the window and undoes the fastenings.
‘Make fast to the mooring rings,’ he calls down. ‘We’ll be down in a moment.’
He turns to Ada. The flashing blue lamp on the roof of the boat makes the whole room pulse.
‘The key, contessa?’
Ada returns to the cabinet, opens a drawer and paws around among the keys of all shapes and sizes, some antiques, some modern copies, each labelled in her father’s pedantically legible script.
‘I’ve really no idea where it can be,’ she says. ‘Heaven knows when the thing was last opened.’
In fact she remembers all too well. It was when her father’s condition became critical and he had to be moved to hospital.
But her visitor is not to be deterred from his purposes so easily.
‘Then we’ll walk round to the bridge,’ he tells her. ‘There are steps down to the water there.’
