The cleaner was dark-skinned, Zen saw as he drew nearer. Some sort of immigrant. Probably didn’t speak Italian. Still, it was worth a try.
‘I’m looking for my mother,’ he said.
The man straightened up, pressed his left hand to his back and winced slightly. He did not speak, but looked at Zen with an unnerving intensity, as though registering without surprise the fact of a birth or a murder.
‘My mother,’ Zen repeated, enunciating each syllable with exaggerated emphasis.
‘What about her?’ the cleaner replied.
His startlingly liquid eyes regarded Zen with the same neutral exactitude, neither compassionate nor dispassionate.
‘She’s dying.’
The cleaner spun his mop, splaying the strands out like a witch’s hairdo, then propped it up against the wall.
‘Come with me,’ he said.
He strode off down the corridor, never once looking back. A few paces behind, Zen followed up flights of stairs and through a set of double doors.
‘Your mother’s name?’ his guide demanded in his eerily alien Italian.
‘Zen, Giuseppina.’
The other man stood still a moment, as though attending to some imperceptible sound or scent.
‘This is the terminal ward,’ he remarked, fixing Zen with his disconcertingly lucid gaze. Zen nodded. The cleaner turned away, wiping his hands on the back of his blue overalls and looking at the names scrawled in black marker on the shiny boards outside each door. He worked his way to the end of the corridor, then retraced his steps to a door where the board showed no name, just a large black X stretching from corner to corner.
‘That means the patient’s dead, but they haven’t moved the corpse yet,’ he said, gripping the handle. ‘None of the other names are Zen, so this might be her.’
The room was smaller than Zen had anticipated, most of it taken up by a single bed in which an elderly woman’s body lay covered by a sheet. The cleaner lifted the bottom corner. A brown cardboard luggage label dangled on a length of plastic cord from the big toe of the woman’s right foot. He turned the label over and beckoned to Zen, who bent to read it. There was a name and an address. Both were familiar to him, unlike the body in the bed.
‘It’s not her,’ he said, turning towards the door.
‘Aurelio?’
The voice seemed to come from nowhere and from everywhere. Then Zen realized that the body lying on the bed had opened its eyes and was staring up at him.
‘Mamma?’ he whispered.
A withered arm extended itself towards him, shrunk to its essence: veins, tendons, bone. Zen sat on the edge of the bed and grasped it.
‘I’ve just arrived. Mamma,’ he muttered breathlessly, as though he’d run all the way from Catania. ‘Gilberto phoned me, and then I spoke to Maria Grazia. Where are they all? They shouldn’t have left you alone like this! But I’m here now, and I’ll look after everything. You don’t have to worry any more. I’ll take care of you.’
The woman beside him started to talk, a low melodious monologue to which he listened with increasing desperation, nodding frantically and clasping the fibrous limb which, like a rusted anchor cable, was now his last best hope. Perhaps he’d just gone mad, he thought, as he sat there while the woman talked and talked, a stream of verbiage parsed into perfectly rounded phrases and variously inflected vocables, of all of which he understood not one single word.
‘She had a stroke,’ a sonorous voice intoned somewhere off-camera. ‘They brought her here, the people you mentioned, but the doctors told them that she would be in a coma for some time and that there was no point in staying. Then they came again, the doctors, and said she was dead. Since that it’s been peaceful. She was worried when the door opened because she thought that they had come back to bother her. Then she heard your voice and realized that it was you, her beloved son, and then she knew why she had not been permitted to die when the doctors wanted her to. She loves you and would… What’s the word? She would be worried about you, but she knows now that there’s nothing to worry about. She says you brought her great joy. It was all worth it, every moment of every hour of every day. You must never doubt that. She’s sorry to have caused you so much bother, but she’s glad you were able to come. Now she’s going to die.’
The moment the voice fell silent, Zen swivelled around. The cleaner was leaning against the wall, regarding a spot somewhere above the bed and slightly to one side.
‘What the fuck was all that sentimental drivel?’ Zen shouted, rising to his feet. ‘She was speaking gibberish!’
‘She was speaking French,’ the man replied, his eyes never wavering from their seemingly random point of focus.
Zen gave a brutal laugh.
‘French? Oh, yes, right, with some Greek and Latin thrown in, no doubt!’
‘No, it was pure French. Well, a little incorrect here and there, above all in the gender of nouns, where they differ from Italian. But completely comprehensible, none the less.’
Zen stared at him. He essayed another laugh, but it backfired.
‘You expect me to believe that someone like you understands French?’ he demanded.
When the cleaner at last lowered his implacable gaze to meet Zen’s, it suddenly became clear that he had been trying to spare the other man precisely this eye contact all this while.
‘I am from Tunisia,’ he said. ‘I speak French and Arabic. And now a little Italian.’
Zen gestured towards the bed.
‘And my mother? Is she Tunisian too? She’s Venetian born and bred! Never even been to Turin, never mind France! How could she possibly start spouting absurd speeches in French on her deathbed? The whole thing’s ridiculous!’
The cleaner shrugged.
‘I’ve seen stranger things, particularly where there’s cerebral trauma. I remember one example when I was an intern at a hospital in Tunis. A man was brought in, an emergency case. He’d been hit by a metro tram. This man was from the desert, you understand. A Berber, from the extreme south of the country. They don’t have trams there, so he wasn’t paying attention.’
‘What happened?’ Zen demanded in a peremptory tone, as though he was behind his imposing desk in the Questura di Catania.
The cleaner shrugged.
‘He recovered. Eventually. But first he talked. For hours, maybe days, in this gibberish which no one could understand. We brought in professors from the university, experts in all the dialects and patois of the desert people. And then at last one of them, who had studied the Renaissance at university, spotted that the man was speaking Italian.’
‘Italian?’
‘He had spent some time, early in his life, in that part of the desert now called Libya. It was an Italian colony at the time. We worked out later that he could have been no more than five or six when he was taken to a town somewhere by someone hoping to resolve some bureaucratic problem. A murder, maybe, or a marriage. He was there only a few days, soaking up this new language that was everywhere about him. And then they left again, the problem resolved or not, and he never spoke or heard Italian for the rest of his life until the impact of the tram jarred it to life again.’
He glanced at Zen, then walked around him, took the woman’s arm and felt her wrist with two delicately probing fingers. Zen sat down heavily in a chair by the bed.
‘When she was in her teens, my mother worked for a French family who had rented a palazzo on the Grand Canal,’ he said dreamily. ‘I remember her telling me, years ago, when I was a child, about the stylish dresses and dazzling jewellery which the wife owned. My mother had never seen anything like that. She lived in the house with them for three months, one summer before the war, back in the thirties.’
There were tears in his eyes. He hastily brushed them away.
‘So you studied medicine?’ he asked the Tunisian.
