Read A Private Venus for Free Online Page B

father if you’d died. I’m talking about other people, anyone, someone you might pass in the street. Me, for example. Suppose I hadn’t heard that noise just now: it was you going into the bathroom to getthe scissors to slit your wrists. Suppose I’d been asleep, and when I woke up I’d found you, having already bled to death. Imagine my situation. I just got out of prison, only three days ago, I was sent there for an offence that some people called homicide, although with extenuating ideological circumstances. This morning they find me here, with a dead young man, after a night spent with women of easy virtue, the remains of our orgy still downstairs. You have no idea how imaginative the press can be, or how suspicious the police. They would have talked about drugs, and as a former doctor I’d have been accused of organising the whole sadistic party and providing heroin, cocaine, mescaline, marijuana: they might have found your suicide suspicious. “Someone cut his veins for him while he was in a drugged stupor”: there’s always a lawyer ready to make that kind of accusation in court. So I’d have immediately gone back inside, and would have been ruined forever. Now listen to me: it’s true that you barely know me, but I have a sister who’s twenty-two, with an illegitimate one-year-old daughter, and their lives depend entirely on me. If I work they eat, if I don’t they have to live on charity, as they did all the time I was in prison. If this stupid joke of yours of trying to die had succeeded, it would have been all over for me. I know you couldn’t have thought of these things, but I do, the reason I didn’t strangle you as soon as I saw you with your wrist cut was because I still have a lot of self-control.’
    At last a word, just one, a brief one, bland and yet moving: ‘Sorry,’ and his eyes narrowed a little as he said it: Davide, too, had a lot of self-control.
    ‘Don’t do it again, Davide’—he had never before threatened a fellow man like this—’I can’t watch over you every instant and a person who wants to do himself in will manage it even with ten guards watching him. If you’re tired of life, wait till I’ve finished my job, in a month you’ll be drinking only mineral water, then I’ll go and you’ll be able to do whatever you like. But as long as I’m here with you,’ he grabbed the collar of his open shirt with one hand and, heavy as he was, lifted him until he was almost sitting up, and they were almost eye to eye, ‘as long as I’m here with you, you won’t do things like that, I’d stop you, but then I’d kill you myself, and I wouldn’t be gentle.’
    However intelligent he was, the young man didn’t realise how much play-acting there was in this scene. Duca was exaggerating in order to give him a moral reason not to kill himself, he had given him a dramatic explanation of the way his suicide would have cruelly ruined a man, a man like him, even though he barely knew him. Sometimes, at the age of twenty-two, an appeal to your sense of morality actually works.
    ‘It won’t happen again,’ Davide said, narrowing his eyes even more: he must have been extremely unhappy, but he managed to hide it almost completely.
    Duca stood up. He was still in his pants. ‘I’m going to get my cigarettes.’ He went back to his room and got dressed: the wonderful new shirt, the wonderful blue suit of ultralight material, the fantastic light blue tie, all given to him on coming out of prison by Lorenza or, more correctly, by Superintendent Carrua who had given her the money. Hishair was only two millimetres high and didn’t need combing, but as he knotted his tie in front of the wardrobe mirror he realised that he needed a shave. He lit a cigarette and went back to Davide’s room.
    It was still only dawn, daylight was a long time coming, but he didn’t need the light on any more and he switched it off. Davide was still there, monumental and unhappy, lying on a bed that was