‘Fragolino,’ she said from behind him, and passed the glass to him, managing to spill only a drop, and that on the floor. ‘Can I have a sip? Mamma didn’t want to open it. She said there was just one more bottle after this, but I said you were very tired, so she said it was all right.’ Even before he could consent, she took the glass back and sipped from it. ‘How can a wine smell like strawberries, Papa?’ Why was it that, when children loved you, you knew everything, and when they were angry with you, you knew nothing?
‘It’s the grape. It smells like strawberries, so the wine does too.’ He smelled, then tasted, the truth of this. ‘You doing your homework?’
‘Yes, mathematics,’ she said, managing to put into the word an enthusiasm that confused him utterly. This, he remembered, was the child who explained his bank statements to him every three months and who was going to try to complete his tax form for him this May.
‘What sort of mathematics?’ he asked with feigned interest.
‘Oh, you wouldn’t understand, Papa.’ Then, with lightning speed, ‘When are you going to get me a computer?’
‘When I win the lottery.’ He had reason to believe that his father-in-law was going to give her a laptop computer for Christmas, and he disliked the fact that he disliked that fact.
‘Oh, Papa, you always say that.’ She sat down opposite him, plunked her feet onto the table between them, and placed them, sole to sole, against his. She gave a soft push with one foot. ‘Maria Rinaldi has one, and so does Fabrizio, and I’ll never be any good in school, not really good, until I have one.’
‘It looks like you’re doing fine with a pencil.’
‘Sure I can do it, but it takes me forever.’
‘Isn’t it better for your brain if you exercise it, rather than letting the machine do it?’
‘That’s dumb, Papa. The brain’s not a muscle. We learned that in biology. Besides, you don’t walk across the city to get information if you can use the phone to get it for you.’ He pushed back with his foot, but he didn’t answer. ‘Well, you don’t, do you, Papa?’
‘What would you do with all the time you saved if you got one?’
‘I’d do more complicated problems. It doesn’t do it
‘Do you have any idea of how much those things cost?’
‘Sure; the little Toshiba I want costs two million.’
Luckily, Paola came into the room then, or he would have had to tell Chiara just how much chance she had of getting a computer from him. Because that might lead her to mention her grandfather, he was doubly glad to see Paola. She carried the bottle of Fragolino and another glass. At the same time, the chattering voices on the television faded away and were replaced by the prelude to the third act.
Paola set down the bottle and sat on the arm of the sofa, next to him. On the screen, the curtain rose to display a barren room. It was difficult to recognize Flavia Petrelli, whom he had seen in the full power of her beauty little more than an hour before, in the frail woman slumped under the shawl who lay on the divan, one hand fallen weakly to the floor below her. She looked more like Signora Santina than she did a famous courtesan. The dark circles under her eyes, the misery of her drawn mouth, spoke convincingly of sickness and despair. Even her voice, when she asked Annina to give what little money she had to the poor, was weak, charged with pain and loss.
‘She’s very good,’ Paola said. Brunetti shushed her. They watched.
‘And he’s dumb,’ Chiara added as Alfredo swept into the room and grabbed her up in his arms.
‘Shhh,’ they both hissed at her. She returned to her figures, muttering, for her parents to hear.
He watched Petrelli’s face transform itself with the ecstasy of reunion, watched it flush with real joy. Together, they planned a future they would never have, and her voice changed; he heard it returning to strength and clarity.
Her joy pulled her to her feet, raised her hands toward heaven. ‘I feel myself reborn,’ she cried, whereupon, this being opera, she promptly collapsed and died.
‘I still think he’s a jerk,’ Chiara insisted over Alfredo’s lamentation and the wild applause of the audience. ‘Even if she lived, how would they support themselves? Is she supposed to go back to what she was doing before she met him?’ Brunetti wanted to know nothing of how much his daughter might understand about that sort of thing. Having voiced her opinion, Chiara scribbled a long row of numbers at the bottom of her paper, slipped the paper into her math book, and flipped the book shut.
‘I had no idea she was that good,’ Paola said respectfully, completely ignoring her daughter’s comments. ‘What’s she like?’ The question was typical of her. The woman’s involvement in a murder case had not been enough to interest Paola in her, not until she had seen the quality of her performance.
‘She’s just a singer,’ he said dismissively.
‘Yes, and Reagan was just an actor,’ Paola said. ‘What’s she like?’
‘She’s arrogant, afraid of losing her children, and wears brown a lot.’
‘Let’s eat,’ Chiara said. ‘I’m starved.’
‘Then go and set the table, and we’ll be there in a minute.’
Chiara pushed herself up from her chair with every show of reluctance and went toward the kitchen, but not before saying, ‘And now I suppose you’ll make Papa tell you what she’s really like, and I’ll miss all the good parts, just like always.’ One of the great crosses of Chiara’s life was the fact that she could never get information from her father to transform into the coin of schoolyard popularity.
‘I wonder,’ Paola said, pouring wine into both their glasses, ‘how she learned to act like that. I had an aunt who died of TB years ago, when I was a little girl, and I can still remember the way she looked, the way she was always moving her hands nervously, just the way
