Acqua Alta

He slammed the door of his building behind him: in wet weather, the lock tended to stick, and only violence would get the massive door to close or open. He shook his umbrella a few times, then furled it and stuck it under his arm. With his right hand, he grabbed the handrail and began the long climb to their apartment. On the first floor, Signora Bussola, the deaf widow of a lawyer, was watching the telegiornale, which meant that everyone on the floor got to listen to the news. Predictably, she watched the news on RAI Uno; not for her those radical leftists and communist scum on RAI Due. On the second floor, the Rossis were quiet: that meant their argument was over and they were in the back of the house, in the bedroom. The third floor was silent. A young couple had moved in there two years ago and bought the entire floor, but Brunetti could count on one hand the times he had met either one of them on the stairs. He was said to work for the city, though no one was sure what he did. The wife left every morning and came home at five thirty every afternoon, but no one knew where she went or what she did, a fact which Brunetti thought miraculous. On the fourth floor, there were only scents. The Amabiles seldom emerged, but the stairwell was always awash with the glorious, tempting smells of food. Tonight it appeared to be capriolo and, if he wasn’t wrong, artichokes, though it might be fried aubergine.

And then there was his own door and the promise of peace. Which lasted only as long as it took him to open the door and step inside. From the back of the apartment, he could hear Chiara sobbing. This was his little Spartan, the child who almost never cried, the girl who could be punished by being deprived of the things she most desired and who would never shed a tear, this the child who had once broken her wrist but had sat tearless, however pale, while it was being set. And she was not merely crying; she was sobbing.

He walked quickly down the hall and into her room. Paola sat on the side of the bed, cradling Chiara in her arms. ‘But, baby, I don’t think there’s anything we can do. I’ve got the ice on it, but you’re just going to have to wait until it stops hurting.’

‘But, Mamma, it hurts. It hurts so much. Can’t you make it stop?’

‘I can give you more aspirin, Chiara. Maybe that will help.’

Chiara gulped back her tears and repeated, her voice gone strangely high, ‘Mamma, please do something.’

‘Paola, what is it?’ he asked, keeping his voice very calm, very level.

‘Oh, Guido,’ Paola said, turning to him but keeping firm hold of Chiara. ‘Chiara dropped the table on her toe.’

‘What table?’ he asked, rather than what toe.

‘The one in the kitchen.’ That was the one with the woodworm. What had they done, tried to move it themselves? But why do that when it was raining? They couldn’t take it out on to the terrace; it was too heavy for them.

‘What happened?’

‘She didn’t believe me that there were so many holes, so she turned it on its side to look, and it slipped out of her hands and landed on her toe.’

‘Let me see,’ he said and, as soon as he spoke, saw that her right foot lay on top of the coverlet, wrapped in a bath towel that held a plastic bag of ice against the injured toe to work against the swelling.

It proved to be just as he imagined, and the toe proved to be worse. It was the big toe of her right foot, swollen, the entire nail red with the promise of the blue that would emerge with time.

‘Is it broken?’ he asked.

‘No, Papa, I can bend it and that doesn’t hurt. But it throbs and throbs,’ Chiara said. She had stopped sobbing, but he could see from her face that the pain was still strong. ‘Papa, please do something.’

‘There’s nothing Papa can do, Chiara,’ Paola said, pushing the foot a bit to the side and placing the bag of ice back on top of it.

‘When did it happen?’ he asked.

‘This afternoon, right after you left,’ Paola answered.

‘And she’s been like that all day?’

‘No, Papa,’ Chiara said, defending herself from the unspoken accusation that she had spent the entire afternoon in tears. ‘It hurt at the beginning, and then it was all right for a while, but now it hurts a lot.’ She had already asked once if he could do something; Chiara was not the sort of person who repeated a request.

He remembered something he had learned years ago, when he was doing his military service and one of the men in his unit had dropped a manhole cover on his toe. Somehow, he had managed not to break it because it had caught his toe just at the end, but it had, like Chiara’s, gone red and swollen.

‘There is one thing,’ he began. Paola and Chiara swung their heads to look at him.

‘What?’ they asked in unison.

‘It’s disgusting,’ he said, ‘but it will help.’

‘What is it, Papa?’ Chiara asked through lips that were beginning to tremble again with pain.

‘I have to stick a needle through the nail and let the blood out.’

‘No,’ Paola shouted, tightening her grip around Chiara’s shoulder.

‘Does it work, Papa?’

‘It worked the one time I saw it done, but that was years ago. I’ve never done it, but I watched the doctor do it.’

‘Do you think you could do it, Papa?

He removed his coat and laid it across the foot of her bed. ‘I think so, angel. Do you want me to try?’