Body of Truth Read Free Page A

again, but it was too foggy for her to see anything. She looked through the windshield to the wet, leaf-strewn lane where the girl had disappeared into the mists.
    “I asked him that,” she said. “He said she was upset. He said that she had cried. But…” She looked down at her purse, saw her hands gripping the wadded tissues. Slowly opening her fingers, she turned over her hands and regarded her rings, the diamond cluster, the emerald, the costly black pearl, with a detachment that reduced their value to smoke. “He said—and I was struck by his sensitivity to this—he said he wasn’t sure how to ‘understand’ it.”
    Haydon watched her, sensing her discomposure more than actually seeing it. It was as if he were witnessing an emotional implosion.
    “You haven’t the remotest…inkling…,” she said hoarsely, stopping to swallow as she raised her gaze to the window again, her empty eyes on the gray beyond the glass. “You haven’t the remotest inkling of the desolation I felt when he said that.”

CHAPTER 2
    “C olpa non perdonata dal genere umano, il quale non odia mai tanto chi fa male, nè il male stesso, quanto chi lo nomina. ”
    Haydon flipped through his Italian dictionary and studied the verb forms once again. They made no sense within the context of the Italian sentence, at least as far as he could tell. Without completely understanding the entry, he made a stab at the translation anyway. “Mankind does not forgive fault, or hate so much one who is evil, nor evil itself, as much as one who names it.” His rendering was literal enough, he thought, but it was not graceful, and he wasn’t sure how far he could go in improving the style without distorting the meaning. He studied the sentence a few more moments and then turned to De Piero’s translation: “Men do not so much hate an evildoer, or evil itself, as they hate the man who calls evil by its real name.”
    He laid down his pen in the center of his well-worn copy of Giacomo Leopardi’s Pensieri , its broken spine allowing the book to lie as flat as unbound sheets, sat back in his chair, and stretched out his legs to rest his feet on the thick cross-brace of the old refectory table. The subdued light of the winter afternoon suffused the library and Haydon’s clutter of Italian dictionaries, papers, and notebooks with a tenuous, hoary sheen. A copy of Leopardi’s Operette morali , still in its cellophane wrapper from Blackstone’s from whom he ordered most of his books, lay to one side. Forgetting his inept translation for the moment, he let his attention drift to the recording playing in the background, to the serene, seraphic voices of an a cappella requiem mass by Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina. Normally he couldn’t work with music playing, a personal quirk that he often regretted, but these masses were so extraordinarily ethereal that they offered no resistance at all to concentration.
    His eyes wandered to the slightly frosted glass panels of the French doors through which he could see the bare terrace and the dead winter-scape beyond, across the lawn and down to the two greenhouses visible through the naked branches of the trees. It was a desolate setting, and to him winter was a desolate season that he scarcely could tolerate, brief though it was along the Texas coast. He hated the effects of winter’s killing touch that stripped the trees and burned the summer vines, turning their graceful rambles to a bare and brittle unloveliness. Normally this was not a scene he had to contemplate very often, but this year had been exceptional. Just before Christmas a series of numbing northers had driven deep into the South and well into Mexico, hurling sleet and snow across the subtropical landscape with a stunning viciousness that was not seen but once or twice in several decades.
    The freezing nights that followed had devastated Haydon’s tropical gardens. The sluggish sap in the lime trees that clustered in a loose orchard down near