Read A Private Venus for Free Online

words, or been so upset by the desperation of Signora Maldrigati, who had heard them. Both reactions had been serious mistakes.
    Signora Maldrigati had heard the words, she had understood them perfectly, and had entered into a phase of terror. She moaned for a whole half-day, injections didn’t calm her down, only the strongest sedatives at last plunged her into a deep, desperate sleep. She had never been under the illusion that she still had a long time to live, but the great physician’s words had told her just how little time she had: she would be dead even before the August holiday, which was what Arquate hoped, or if not, then soon after it.
    He should have let her be. It was a distressing case but not uncommon: thanks to the morphine Signora Maldrigati wasn’t in any pain, all he had to do was let the nurse get on with giving her the injections. Instead of which, he had stayed with her as much as he could and tried to convince her it wasn’t true that she was about to die. Another mistake, because, old and riddled with cancer as Signora Maldrigati might be, she was an intelligent woman.
    At the trial, he had been asked how long it was after Signora Maldrigati asked him to help her die that he had agreed to give her the fatal injection of ircodine.
    He had made the mistake of answering, ‘All through the morning of 30 July she kept begging me to let her die.’ He shouldn’t have mentioned the dates, should have kept everything vague, as if he couldn’t remember.
    ‘And when did you give her the ircodine injection?’
    He had made the mistake of giving the chilling answer, ‘The night of 31 July to 1 August.’
    ‘In other words,’ the prosecutor had said, ‘you took the decision to kill a sick old woman, albeit under the specious name of euthanasia, in a mere thirty-six hours. Any soul-searching you may have done about the morality of killing a human being who might still have lived several more years lasted no more than thirty-six hours, or even less, because you must have slept for seven or eight of those hours.’
    Ever since, he had been unable to silence that voice in his mind, but only because of the stupidity of what it was saying. Before the trial he had believed there must be a limit to stupidity, then he had realised he had been wrong even about that. Only the skill of the lawyer his father had provided for him had saved him, at least partly, from all the mistakes he had made: three years’ imprisonment and being struck off the register wasn’t too bad. He could have got fifteen years, just for making sure that Signora Maldrigati was relieved of the terror of death. Dying is a hundred times better than being afraid of dying, as he had tried—ridiculously—to explain at the trial, standing suddenly and crying out, ‘Signora Maldrigati’s eyes turned purple as soon as she saw Professor Arquate, after he had let her know the date of her death …’ The two carabinieri had made him sit down again, and as soon as sentence was pronounced, Signora Maldrigati’s niece had gone to the notary to talk about the inheritance.
    His father had visited him in prison one morning, but had left again almost immediately because he had not feltwell. Four days later, he had suffered a fatal heart attack. Left alone during those three years, Duca’s sister Lorenza had met a kind gentleman who had shown an interest in her and comforted her and got her pregnant, at which point he had told her he was married and promptly vanished from her life. Lorenza had asked Duca if he liked the name Sara for the child. From prison he had answered yes. How wrong it had all been.
    And he was wrong, too, in not wanting to take sleeping pills, because he could have avoided staying awake until dawn and hearing Arquate’s voice or his father’s, or Signora Maldrigati’s moans, which only the ircodine had mercifully silenced forever. In prison, too, the doctor had offered him pills, but he had refused. Anyone might have thought the