A Private Venus Read Free Page A

up publicity for himself,’ Auseri said. ‘Until now my son’s alcoholism has been a closely guarded secret, known only to a few discreet friends. With any other doctor, it would become an item of gossip in all the drawing rooms in Milan. But you won’t talk, and I know that if you accept thejob you’ll get it done. Another doctor would get bored after a week and leave the boy stuffed full of pills and injections, and he’ll get drunk anyway. I don’t want pills and injections. I want a friend and an inflexible guardian for my son. It’s my final attempt. If it doesn’t work, I’ll let him go, I’ll cut him off and wash my hands of him.’
    Now it was his turn. What time was it, and where were they? In a damp dark corner of the Brianza, on the side of a hill, with a villa ahead that seemed to be sliding towards them and inside the villa a young man clinging to a bottle of whisky, that was where they were. ‘I need to ask you a few questions,’ he said.
    ‘Of course,’ Auseri said.
    ‘You say your son has been drinking like this for a year. Did he drink before? Or did he just suddenly start drinking?’
    ‘No, he drank before as well, but not very often, he’d get drunk two or three times a month, no more than that. I don’t want to be ungenerous towards his dead mother, but it’s a tendency he gets from her.’
    ‘You also told me your son has no friends, no girlfriends. Does that mean he usually drinks alone?’
    ‘He’s drinking alone right now, in his room. But he drinks alone because he’s never with anybody. He doesn’t want to be.’
    ‘You also said that, despite appearances, your son is a normal young man. I’m prepared to believe that. But a normal young man doesn’t start drinking in that way without a reason. Something may have happened to him that drove him to drink more than he did before. He may have got involvedwith a woman, for example. In films, men drink to forget unhappy love affairs.’
    Auseri’s hand rose again, floated in the dark air, and moved across his face. ‘That was what I asked him when I hit him with the poker. We have a fireplace in our apartment in Milan, an old-fashioned one with a poker. A poker on the face hurts, and as it happened quite recently you can still see the mark on his cheek. I asked him if there was a woman, if he was in debt because he’d had to pay for some underage girl to have an abortion, he said no, and I believe him, because he’s useless—even at doing something wrong.’
    He must be a strange young man. ‘I’m sorry to insist, Engineer, I’m speaking now as a doctor,’ as an ex-doctor, of course, a doctor who’s been struck off, ‘you told me before that as far as women are concerned, your son doesn’t have girlfriends, he’s always turned to prostitutes. Given this habit, it’s possible he’s contracted what he thinks of as a terrible disease and in his desperation, considering himself human refuse, has started drinking. Syphilis is a less fearsome disease now than it was in the past, but it’s still a stigma, and a sensitive young man like your son could well find it traumatic.’
    In the darkness, Auseri said, ‘That was the first thing I suspected, and four months ago I had him see a doctor. He was given all kinds of tests. He’s in perfect health, no infection at all, not even the most commonplace.’
    So not even the fear of disease was driving young Auseri to drink. ‘But what does your son say? What excuse does he give?’
    ‘My son is humiliated and desperate. He says he doesn’t want to drink but can’t help himself. Whenever I hit him, he says to me, “You’re right, you’re right,” and starts crying.’
    It was time for Duca to make up his mind. ‘Have you told your son about me?’
    ‘Certainly.’ Auseri used that word often, which coming from him meant that he was absolutely sure, he wasn’t wasting his breath. ‘I told him that a doctor I really trust might agree to help him, and he promised me