Stay out of it. Keep your head down. So of course we would quarrel. You know, at that age. He was afraid, I think, that I would get involved in the resistance. So many of the students-”
“Did you?”
“No. I wanted to, of course, everybody did, but in the end-I don’t know, a coward maybe. Too much a lady, my friend used to say, my mother’s daughter. So maybe she was right.”
“But not your father’s?”
“Oh, a little bit. I think secretly he admired the resistance too. But he was afraid of it. For him it was simple- the family, Venice. The Church-well, maybe that was for my mother. He believed in those things. And what was the resistance? Maybe a threat. Something else to survive. So he kept his head down. No sides.” She turned at a soft rap on the door, an even quieter opening. “Ah, Maria,” she said, “thank you.” Not surprised.
The maid, in a starched linen collar and apron, carried a coffee tray to the table in front of the reading chairs. The cups and pot lay on a white doily, also starched, as if it had been meant to match her uniform. Shy smiles and murmurs in Italian, part of the ceremony of getting the tray on the table.
“I’ll pour, shall I?” Giulia said, at once dismissing Maria and taking up the pot in her hand, poised, her mother’s daughter.
I sat on the other side of the low table. It was the funeral all over again, nothing extra, everything as it should be, sure of its own taste. Even her dress, I noticed, was suitable, black without any purple frills, a discreet mourning-mourning because I had held his head under. Now we were drinking coffee, polite.
“But it must have been hard in the war, not taking sides,” I said.
She took a sip, then held the cup in her hand, thinking. “Of course in the end you do. It’s your country. I didn’t have the courage, maybe, but I had money. So I helped with that. We were alike that way. Keep your head down, but do it anyway. No sides, but he helped the partisans.”
“He told you that?” Maybe as plausibly as he’d told it on the fondamenta, but why?
She shook her head, then smiled. “Well, I didn’t tell him about the money either. But I know. He made it a question of medical ethics-what’s the right thing to do? You know, they do this in the law school too. So it’s good training for me. But this is his way of telling me. A man is brought in with a gunshot wound, a man you know. The law says you must report all such wounds. But you know that the only way he could have been shot is in the fighting, a partisan. If you report it, the government will kill him. If you don’t, maybe it goes badly for you, for helping a traitor. The man begs you-‘Help me, don’t give me up.’ What do you do?”
“And what did he do?” I said quietly.
“We agreed that the first obligation must be to save the man.”
“Even if he’s a traitor.”
“But if the government itself is illegal-”
“And who decides that?”
“Yes, who? You see how it goes on? He liked these questions. Well, I liked them, so he would ask.”
“And how did it end, this one? What did he do?”
“Oh, he said you can make it complicated if you like, but the simple fact is, if you know a man, you can’t give him up. So I know he didn’t.”
I put down my cup. “What if you gave up someone else instead?”
“Someone else?”
“To save the first. Your friend. If you gave up someone in his place.”
She looked at me for a second, then down at her cup. “What makes you ask this?”
“It’s a question he once asked me.”
“And you think,” she said, stirring her cup, still not looking up, “this was his way of telling you something.”
For a minute we were quiet, still enough to hear the clock.
“Do you think he did that?” she said finally, sitting up straight, braced.
I hesitated, then sat back, moving away from it. “I think it was just a question.”
“It’s a terrible thing.”
“Yes.”
“Why would he ask that?”
“As a moral dilemma, maybe. An impossible choice.”
“But you can’t choose someone’s death.” She was looking at me now, her face longer, more severe, like her mother’s again. “That’s murder.” Sure, admitting no exceptions.
I said nothing, kept quiet by her stare. Then her face began to change, no longer as properly arranged as the tray, and I saw that she was distressed, waiting for me to say something.
“He wouldn’t do that,” she said. “You knew him. Do you think he would do that?”
“I think it was just a question.”
“Then why-”
“Something may have put it in his mind. Something that actually happened. The story about the partisan- when did he tell you that?”
“When? Last year,” she said, composed again, interested.
“After the war?” I said, confused.
“No. I mean the year before. Forty-four. When he came to see me. I remember he told me at lunch.”
“When was this, exactly?”
“Autumn. October, maybe.”
“Why did it come up? I mean, why do you think he told you?”
She smiled a little, shaking her head. “Maybe to make me like him. Always we were arguing then. So maybe this was his way of saying, You see, Papa’s not so bad. I’m on the right side too.”
“But he never actually said he’d done this.”
“No, but that wasn’t his way. He never talked about himself. Maybe he thought it wasn’t dignified. He was private, a Maglione. My mother was like that too.”
“Secretive?”
“No. Private,” she said, making a distinction to herself. “I never knew what he was thinking. But what does a child know? All those years, here we are in this house, a family, and I never knew-” She leaned forward, placing the cup on the tray. “Maybe a little secretive. A doctor has to be, you learn that. You don’t talk about your patients. I used to ask him things and he’d say, ‘That’s not my secret to tell.’ Always somebody else’s secret. ‘I won’t tell,’ I’d say, and he’d wag his finger, like this,” she said, demonstrating, so that I looked up, seeing Gianni. “You know the old saying.” She lowered her voice, becoming him. “Two people can keep a secret, if one of them is dead.” She paused. “So I didn’t ask. And then it turned out he must have had one of his own.”
“What do you mean?”
“He was murdered. Do you know why? No. So it’s still his secret.”
I sat back, looking around the room to avoid her gaze. “Well, it’s safe here. There’s nothing else? Files?”
“At the hospital. His real life was there, I think,” she said, her voice wistful. “Not here.”
There was an awkward pause.
“I should go,” I said, getting up. “Maybe there’ll be something in the patient files. That’s next. He seems to have erased himself everywhere else.”
“Yes, he was good at that. He didn’t like to keep things.”
I smiled, glancing around the old library, virtually an archive.
“Oh, this was Paolo. Poor Paolo, Papa erased him too. Threw out his books. You know, he was always writing in those books- appunti for the family history, and Papa said they were rubbish. Well, what did he expect? Mazzini from Paolo? But, you know, now it just stops. Unless I write it, I suppose,” she said, her voice diffident, as if she were talking to herself, suddenly alone.
“Wait. Paolo kept notebooks and your father threw them out?”
“Not all. Just the ones with his activities. ‘What will people think later?’ he said. It was an embarrassment for him.”
“But where are they?”
She gestured toward the shelves.
“Paolo kept them here?”
