As the boat made its way slowly up the Grand Canal, Brunetti explained to Vianello why he wanted to see the former priest. ‘They trust him,’ he said, ‘and I know he helps find houses for a lot of clandestini.’
‘The Senegalesi?’ Vianello asked. ‘I always thought they were a sort of closed community. And I think they’re Muslim, most of them.’
Brunetti had heard the same, but Don Alvise was the only person he could think of at the moment who might be able to help, and he knew that the former priest cared little what god a person chose to worship. ‘Maybe,’ he temporized. ‘That is, maybe he knows them or some of them.’ When Vianello did not offer agreement, Brunetti asked, ‘Can you think of anyone else?’
Vianello didn’t answer.
The launch turned left into Rio di San Zan Degolà. Brunetti got to his feet and, lowering his head as he left the cabin, went up on deck. ‘Up there, before the bridge,’ he told the pilot, who pulled the boat to the side of the canal, flipped the motor into reverse, and drew silently up to the moss-covered steps. Brunetti studied them for a moment, but before he could decide whether to risk stepping from the bobbing boat, the pilot walked around behind him and, towrope in hand, jumped up on to the riva and pulled the front of the boat tight to the wall. He tied the end of the rope to a metal ring in the pavement and leaned across to offer Brunetti, and then Vianello, a hand.
Brunetti suggested the officer go and get himself a coffee and said they shouldn’t be more than half an hour. As the officer headed for a bar that stood to the right, Brunetti led Vianello around to the left of the façade of the church and down a narrow calle.
‘Calle dei Preti,’ the ever-observant Vianello read. ‘Seems the right place for him to live.’
Brunetti, turning left at the end of the street and heading back towards the Grand Canal, said, ‘Well, almost, except that we’re on the Fontego dei Turchi.’
‘He probably helps them, too,’ Vianello began, ‘so it’s probably just as good a name.’
Brunetti remembered the door, a heavy green portone with twin brass handles in the shape of lions’ heads. He rang the bell and waited. When a voice from the answerphone asked who it was, he gave his name, and the door snapped open, allowing them to enter a long narrow courtyard with a capped well at one end, wooden doors lining both sides. Without hesitating, Brunetti went to the second door on the left, which was open. At the top of the first flight of steps was another open door, where a short, stooped figure stood waiting for them as they climbed to the top.
‘Ciao, Guido,’ Perale said, taking Brunetti by the elbows and rising up on his toes to kiss him on both cheeks.
Moved by real affection for the man, Brunetti embraced him and took his right hand in both of his. Turning away from the priest, he said, ‘This is Lorenzo Vianello, my friend.’
No stranger to the forces of order, Don Alvise recognized a policeman when he saw one but extended his hand and shook Vianello’s warmly. ‘Welcome, welcome. Come inside,’ he said, pulling on Vianello’s hand to bring him into the apartment.
He turned just inside the door and closed it after them, then asked for their coats, which he hung on two hooks on the back of the door. He was at least a head shorter than Brunetti, though his stoop made him appear shorter still. His mop of grey hair looked a stranger to both comb and barber, lopped off unevenly on the sides and growing well below his collar at the back. He wore glasses with black plastic frames and lenses so thick they distorted his eyes. His nose resembled nothing so much as a lump of clay that had been pressed on to his face, and his mouth, lurking under the macho moustache, was small and round as a baby’s.
His appearance would have made him faintly ridiculous, even grotesque, were it not for the aura of sweetness that radiated from his every word and glance. He seemed a man who gazed on all he saw with approval and affection, who began every interchange with deep and abiding regard for the person in front of him.
He led them into a room which, because of the desk that stood at an angle in a corner, might have been an office, were it not for the bed set against one wall and the long board above it that served as a shelf and on which lay a few pairs of faded jeans, a pile of sweaters, and neatly folded underwear. Don Alvise pulled the chair behind the desk around in front and set it beside the single chair that stood there. He gestured to them and went to the desk and sat on it, though he had to give a little hop to get up, and his feet hung in the air as he sat.
‘How may I help you, Guido?’ he asked when his guests were seated.
‘It’s about the man who was murdered last night,’ Brunetti answered.
Don Alvise nodded, ‘I thought it would be,’ he said.
‘I thought you might know him or know about him.’ Brunetti kept his eyes on the priest’s as he spoke, looking for some flicker of recognition, but he saw none. He stopped there, waiting for the priest to answer his unspoken question.
‘You didn’t bring a photo,’ Perale said.
Brunetti gave him a long look before he answered. ‘I didn’t think it would be necessary. If people know that you knew him, they would have told you about it.’ Some impulse of charity, as well, had kept him from bringing the photo.
Don Alvise said, ‘That’s true.’
Brunetti allowed a pause to elapse before he said, ‘And?’
Like a small child under examination or observation, Perale looked down at the floor and began to bang his heels, one after the other, softly against the front of the desk. One two, one two, one two, his feet counted out, while his face remained hidden from the other men. Finally he looked at Brunetti and said, ‘I have to think about this and ask some questions before I say anything to you.’
‘Before you say anything or before you can say anything?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Isn’t it the same thing?’ the priest asked innocently.
Brunetti was uncertain how to greet the priest’s prevarication. ‘Come on, Don Alvise,’ he finally said then, laughing, added, ‘you weren’t a Jesuit when I first met you. Don’t start acting like one now.’
Tension and reticence vanished; ease slipped back into the room to take up its place among the three men. ‘All right, Guido, I understand. But I still need to speak to some people before I can talk to you.’
‘And if they tell you not to talk to me?’
Again, the small feet began to tap out their rhythm, as if their certainty could help Don Alvise resolve his own lack of it. ‘Then I’ll have to think about it,’ he said.
‘For whatever it’s worth,’ Brunetti said, ‘the Immigration Police aren’t involved in this, and, no matter what you tell me, they won’t be.’
The drumming stopped and the priest looked over at him. ‘Doesn’t that depend on what I tell you?’ he asked.
Brunetti decided to risk it. ‘If I give you my word that, no matter what you tell me, I won’t tell them, will you believe me?’
The tiny mouth broadened into a smile and Don Alvise said, ‘Guido, if you gave me your word that politicians are honest men, I’d believe you.’ Then, seeing Brunetti and Vianello’s astonishment, he added, ‘Though I’d still keep my hand on my wallet in their company.’
Brunetti decided to leave it at that. He knew that Don Alvise would tell him what he decided was wisest for him to know, and there would be no changing that. He could do nothing more than trust in the former priest’s wisdom. Having decided that, Brunetti got to his feet, and the three men exchanged polite farewells before Brunetti and Vianello left.
9
‘He always that sly?’ Vianello asked as they stepped outside.
‘Sly?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Clever. Whatever you want to call it.’ To explain his tone, which was something approaching anger, Vianello said, ‘He knows who the man is. Anyone could see that, and yet he gives you this runaround that he has to ask people before he can tell you.’ He let out an angry puff of breath which both men could see in the cold air. ‘If he knows him, or knew him, he has to tell you,’ he insisted. ‘That’s the law.’
Surprised to find Vianello, of all people, thinking in such legalistic terms, Brunetti temporized. ‘Well, he does and he doesn’t.’
‘Why doesn’t he?’ Vianello asked.
Instead of answering directly, Brunetti swerved across the calle towards a bar. ‘I need a coffee,’ he said as he pushed open the door. The overheated air wrapped around them and, as if on cue, the espresso machine let out a jet of steam that imitated Vianello’s angry huffing of a few moments ago.
At the bar, Brunetti glanced at Vianello and, at his nod, ordered two coffees.
While they waited, he said, ‘He doesn’t have to tell me if he believes what he says will put someone else in danger.’ Before Vianello could cite the law at him, Brunetti added, ‘That is, he knows he has to, legally, but that wouldn’t mean anything to him, not if he thought the information could cause someone harm.’
‘But you promised him not to go to the Immigration Police,’ Vianello insisted. ‘Doesn’t he believe you?’
‘The danger might come from somewhere else,’ Brunetti said.
‘Where?’ asked Vianello.
The coffees came, and they busied themselves with ripping open envelopes of sugar and spilling the contents into the tiny cups. After his first sip, Brunetti set his cup back in the saucer and said, ‘I’ve no idea. But for the moment, all I can do is wait to see what he tells me, or what he doesn’t tell me. And if he doesn’t tell me, then I’ve got to find the reason he won’t.’
Vianello did no more than wave his coffee cup in Brunetti’s direction by way of interrogation.
Brunetti went on. ‘Whatever he does — whether he gives me an answer or not — he’s still giving me information. And now that I have that, I can start thinking about what to do.’
Vianello shrugged and together they left the bar to go back to the launch.
The pilot had kept the motor running all the time they were gone, so they found the cabin comfortably warm. Brunetti had no idea whether it was the warmth or the boost given by the coffee and the sugar, but something lifted his spirits and allowed him to take joy in the beauty of the trip back to the Questura. Palazzi swept by on both sides, the drunken promiscuity of their styles competing for his attention: here a severe Gothic window, there a façade of parti-coloured mosaic, on the left the water-flooded atrium of Ca’ d’Oro, and opposite it the yawning space, deserted now, where Paola had that morning bought fish.
That thought turned his mind to his family and to the tension that had seeped into him during lunch. What to do about Chiara? For a moment, he thought of taking her to the morgue at the hospital and showing her the black man’s corpse, evidence of what could happen when you thought of them as ‘only’ vu cumprà. But this would be nothing more than cheap melodrama, and there was surely no guarantee that Chiara would agree with him that one thing led to the other. And did he know — know for certain — that the one thing had led to the other? This in turn took his thoughts back to Don Alvise.
Palazzo Ducale approached from the left, and its beauty pulled him to his feet. ‘Come on,’ he said to Vianello and went back up on deck. The cold hit him like a blow and the wind pushed tears from his eyes, distorting his vision and transforming the palazzo into a shimmering, shivering form suspended in the light reflected from the dancing waves.
Vianello came up the stairway and stood beside Brunetti. The flags on the tall poles in front of the basilica flapped wildly in the wind; boats and gondolas tied to the moorings bounced up and down and side to side, creating a series of booms so loud they could be heard above the wind. The Piazza seemed filled with huddled, bent shapes; the tourists kept their heads down, as protected from glory as they were from the wind.
Had it been better once, he wondered, when all of this was new and La Serenissima controlled the seas? Or had it been just as easy then to arrange the murder of some nameless Moor, certain that his insignificance and anonymity would serve to protect his killers? He closed his eyes for a moment, and when he opened them again, the palazzo had given way to the Bridge of Sighs and then to the façades of the hotels that lined the riva. The cold ate at him, worse here on the open water, but he stayed on deck until they docked at the Questura, when he thanked the pilot and asked Vianello to come up to his office with him.
The last part of the ride had chilled both of them to the bone, and it was more than five minutes before they felt sufficiently warm to remove their overcoats. As he was putting his own in the armadio, Brunetti said, ‘Wicked. It’s colder than I can remember its ever being at this time of year.’
‘Global warming,’ Vianello said, tossing his own coat over the back of one of the chairs in front of Brunetti’s desk and sitting down in the other.
Completely at a loss, Brunetti waited until he too was seated before he asked, ‘What do you mean, “global warming”? Isn’t that supposed to make it hotter?’
Vianello, still rubbing his hands together for warmth, said, ‘It is, or it will. That’s little, but it’s certain. But it will also make a mess of all the seasons. Remember how much it rained in the autumn and last spring?’ At Brunetti’s nod, Vianello said, ‘It’s all tied together. It has to do with ocean and air currents.’
Because Vianello sounded so certain, Brunetti asked, ‘Where did you get all this?’
‘I read the UN Report on Global Warming. Well, some of it. It’s all in there. The cherry on the cake is that the last place that will feel the influence — well, at least if all these scientists know what they’re talking about — you know which country, well, which continent will suffer the least and suffer last?’
Brunetti was still entirely lost and shook his head to admit it.
‘North America. That means the Americans. They’re protected on both sides by enormous bodies of water, and the currents are favourable to them, so while the rest of us are choking on their gases or dying from the heat, they’ll be able to go on the same as ever.’
Brunetti was alarmed by Vianello’s tone, which he found uncharacteristically heated. ‘Aren’t you being a bit severe, Lorenzo?’
‘Severe? Severe because they’ll shorten my life and kill my children?’
Too late Brunetti registered that he had once again stepped up and taken a seat on Vianello’s hobby horse: the ecology of the planet. Keeping his voice moderate, he said, ‘None of this is proven, you know, Lorenzo.’
‘I know. But it’s also not proven that, if I started smoking again and smoked three packs a day, I’d die of lung cancer. But the likelihood is pretty high.’
Too late Brunetti registered that he had once again stepped up and taken a seat on Vianello’s hobby horse: the ecology of the planet. Keeping his voice moderate, he said, ‘None of this is proven, you know, Lorenzo.’
‘I know. But it’s also not proven that, if I started smoking again and smoked three packs a day, I’d die of lung cancer. But the likelihood is pretty high.’
‘You think so? In this case?’
The sincerity of Brunetti’s question was so patent that Vianello answered in a much calmer tone. ‘I don’t know. I’m not an expert on these things. I just know what I read, and I know this report was commissioned by the UN, and the people who wrote it are climatologists from all over the world. So it’s good enough for me, at least until I read something more persuasive.’
‘You think there’s anything to do?’ Brunetti asked. Vianello’s knitted brows caused him to clarify by adding, ‘About this, I mean.’
‘There doesn’t seem to be. It’s probably too late.’
‘Too late for what?’ Brunetti asked, suddenly very interested in what his inspector had to say.
‘To avoid the consequences of what we’ve done in the last half-century.’
‘That’s a gloomy prospect,’ Brunetti said, surprised to hear Vianello speak so seriously about this. For years, people at the Questura had kidded Vianello about his interest in the environment, but Brunetti had always put it on the same level as his own children’s insistence that they not drink mineral water that came in plastic bottles or that they carefully collect all of their waste paper and take it to the ecological bins at Rialto. This, however, was a far more sombre vision than he had ever heard from Vianello.
‘Is there really nothing we can do?’ Brunetti asked.
Vianello shrugged.
For a moment, it looked as though Vianello were going to get up and leave; Brunetti feared that he would. He was very curious to hear Vianello’s answer and so prodded. ‘Well?’
‘Live life and try to do our jobs, I think,’ Vianello said after some time. Then, as if the subject had never been raised, he asked, ‘What about this black guy? How do we find out who he is if your Don Alvise decides not to tell us?’
Accepting that the subject of global warming was closed, Brunetti answered Vianello’s question. ‘Gravini says he knows one of the Africans; he lives down by his mother in Castello. He’s going to see if he can get anything from him. And I’ve asked Signorina Elettra to ask around to see if she can find the people who rent to them.’
‘Good idea. He’s got to have lived somewhere.’ Then, realizing just how silly that sounded, Vianello added, ‘That is, here in the city, if he didn’t have anything on him except a pair of keys.’
‘Did you read the autopsy report?’ Brunetti asked, surprised at himself for having forgotten to ask Vianello about it on the way to Don Alvise’s.
‘No.’
‘It says he was in his late twenties and in good health, and that either of two of the shots would have killed him.’
‘God, what a world,’ Vianello answered. He looked across at Brunetti, pulled his lips together in a gesture of confusion, and added, ‘It’s strange, that we don’t know anything at all about them, or about Africa, isn’t it?’
Brunetti nodded but said nothing.
‘Enough that they’re black, huh?’ Vianello asked with an ironic raising of his eyebrows.
Brunetti ignored Vianello’s tone and added, ‘We don’t look like Germans, and Finns don’t look like Greeks, but we all look like Europeans.’
‘And?’ Vianello asked, obviously not much impressed by Brunetti’s observation.
‘There must be someone who knows more about them,’ Brunetti said.
It was at this point that Signorina Elettra came into the office, carrying a sheet of paper Brunetti hoped would shed light on the identity of the vu cumprà. Even as he heard this term reverberating in his mind, he told himself to substitute it with ambulante.
‘I found two of them,’ she said, nodding a greeting to Vianello. He stood and offered her his chair, pulled the other one over and moved his parka to the back, then sat down again.
‘Two what?’ asked an impatient Brunetti.
‘Landlords,’ she said, then explained, ‘I called a friend of mine at La Nuova.’ She saw their response to the name of the newspaper and said, ‘I know, I know. But we’ve been friends ever since elementary school, and Leonardo needed the job.’ Having excused her friend’s choice of employer, she added, ‘Besides, it allows him to meet some of the famous people who live here.’ That was too much for Vianello, who let out a deep guffaw. She waited a moment and joined him. ‘Pathetic, isn’t it? Famous for living here? As if the city were contagious.’
Brunetti had often reflected on this, finding it especially strange in foreigners, this belief that some cachet adhered to their address, as if living in Dorsoduro or having a palazzo on the Grand Canal could elevate the tone of their discourse or the quality of their minds, render the tedium of their lives interesting or transmute the dross of their amusements into purest gold.
If he thought about it, he felt happiness in being Venetian, not pride. He had not chosen where to be born or what dialect his parents spoke: what pride to be taken in those things? Not for the first time, he felt saddened by the vanity of human wishes.
‘. . over near Santa Maria Materdomini,’ he heard Signorina Elettra saying when he tuned back into her conversation with Vianello.
‘Bertolli?’ Vianello asked. ‘The one who used to be on the city council?’
‘Yes, Renato. He’s a lawyer,’ Signorina Elettra said.
‘And the other one?’ Vianello asked.
‘Cuzzoni. Alessandro,’ she said, then waited to see if the name meant anything to either of them. ‘He’s originally from Mira, but he lives here now and has a shop.’
‘What sort of shop?’
‘He’s a jeweller, but most of the stuff he sells is factory made,’ she said with the easy dismissal of a woman who would never wear a piece of machine-made jewellery.
‘Where’s the shop?’ Brunetti asked, not because he was particularly interested but to show them that he really was listening.
‘Off Ventidue Marzo. On that calle that goes up towards the Fenice, down from the bridge.’
Brunetti sent his memory walking towards Campo San Fantin, down the narrow calle towards the bridge, past the antique shop. ‘Opposite the bar?’ he asked.
‘I think so,’ she answered. ‘I haven’t checked the address, but it’s the only one there, I think.’
‘And these two rent to extracomunitari?’ Brunetti asked.
‘That’s what Leonardo tells me. No long-term contracts, no questions about how many people will eventually live in the apartment, and everything paid in cash.’
‘Furnished or unfurnished?’ Vianello asked.
‘Either, I think,’ Signorina Elettra replied. ‘If you can call it furnished. Leonardo said they did a story once, about two years ago, about one of the apartments they were living in. He said you wouldn’t believe the place: seven of them sleeping in the same room, roaches all over the place. He said the kitchen and bathroom were unlike anything he’d ever seen, and when I asked him what it was like, he made it clear that I didn’t want to know.’
‘And was one of these two the landlord?’ Brunetti asked.
‘I don’t know, and he didn’t say. But Leonardo told me they probably rent to extracomunitari.’
‘Did he know where the apartments are?’ Brunetti asked.
‘No. As I say, he’s not even absolutely sure that they do rent to them, but he says he’s heard their names when people talk about who’s willing to rent to extracomunitari.’
‘Is this his office?’ Brunetti asked, looking at the address listed for Renato Bertolli and trying to calculate where it might be.
‘Yes. I checked it in Calli, Campielli e Canali, and I think he’s got to be just before the fabbro, the one who makes keys.’ This was enough for Brunetti. He had been over there a few times, about five years ago, to have a metal banister made for the final flight of stairs leading to their apartment. He knew the area, though it seemed a strangely out of the way location for a lawyer’s office.
‘I’m not sure how to approach them,’ Brunetti said, taking the paper and waving it gently in the air. ‘If we ask about the apartments, they’ll worry that we’ll report them to the Finanza. Anyone would.’ It did not for an instant occur to him that either man would be declaring the rent on the apartments and thus paying taxes on the money. ‘Can you think of anyone who might be able to get them to talk to us?’
‘I’ve some friends who are lawyers,’ Signorina Elettra said cautiously, as if admitting to some secret vice. ‘I could ask if anyone knows them.’
‘You, Vianello?’ Brunetti asked.
The inspector shook his head.
‘What about the other one, Cuzzoni?’ Brunetti asked.
This time both Signorina Elettra and Vianello shook their heads. Seeing Brunetti’s disappointment, she said,’ I can check at the Ufficio del Catasto and see what apartments they own. Once we know where they live, then we just have to check if there are rental contracts for their other apartments.’
Brunetti’s uncle, who lived near Feltre, used to go hunting, and with him went Diana, an English setter whose greatest joy, aside from gazing adoringly at his uncle as he stroked her ears, was to chase birds. In the autumn, when the air changed and the hunting season began, a wild restiveness came over Diana, who knew no peace until the day his uncle could finally take down his shotgun and open the door that led to the woods behind his home.
Looking at Signorina Elettra poised on the edge of her chair, Brunetti was struck by how much she resembled Diana: there were the same liquid dark eyes, the flared nostrils, and the badly restrained nervousness at the thought of prey that was to be seized and brought back. ‘Can you find everything with that thing?’ he asked, not needing to name her computer.
She turned towards him and she sat up straighter. ‘Perhaps not everything, sir. But many things.’
‘Don Alvise Perale?’ he asked. He sensed, rather than saw, Vianello’s start of astonishment, but when he turned to look at him, Brunetti saw that the inspector had managed not to display his surprise. Brunetti permitted himself a half-smile, and after a moment Vianello was forced to shake his head in rueful appreciation of Brunetti’s inability to trust anyone fully.
He remembered that Diana needed no encouragement or explanation: a flutter of motion and she was off, like the wind. Signorina Elettra wasted no time with questions or clarifications. ‘The ex-priest, sir?’
‘Yes.’
She rose to her feet in a single graceful motion. ‘I’ll go and see what I can find.’
‘It’s almost eight, Signorina,’ he reminded her.
‘Just a quick look,’ she said and was gone.
When the door closed behind her, Vianello said, ‘Don’t worry, sir. She doesn’t have a bed here. So she’ll go home eventually.’
10
Brunetti found a seat at the back of the cabin, on the left-hand side of the vaporetto, so his view was of San Giorgio and the façades on the Dorsoduro side of the canal. He studied them as he headed up towards San Silvestro, but his attention was far removed from Venice, even from Europe. He considered the mess that was Africa, and he considered the endless historical argument of whether it was caused by what had been done to the Africans or by what they had done to themselves. It was not a subject upon which he believed himself sufficiently expert to comment, nor one where he thought there was much hope that people would arrive at the kind of consensus that passes for historical truth.
His memory filled with images: Joseph Conrad’s battleship, firing round after futile round into the jungle in an attempt to force it to submit to peace; shoals of bodies washed up on the shores of Lake Victoria; the shimmering surface of a Benin bronze; the yawning pits where so many of the earth’s riches were mined. No one of these things was Africa, he knew, any more than the bridge under which the boat was passing was Europe. Each was a piece in a puzzle no one could understand. He remembered the Latin words he had once seen on a sixteenth-century map to mark the limit of Western exploration of Africa: Hic scientia finit: Knowledge Stops Here. How arrogant we were, he thought, and how arrogant we remain.
At home he found peace, or perhaps it is more accurate to say that he found a truce that seemed to be holding. Chiara and Paola talked as usual at dinner, and if the way Chiara packed away two helpings of pasta with broccoli and capers and then two baked pears was any indication, her appetite had returned to normal. Taking this as a good sign, he allowed himself to stretch out on the sofa in the living room after dinner, the smallest of small glasses of grappa on the table beside him, his current book propped on his stomach. For the last week, he had been rereading Ammianus Marcellinus’ history of the later Roman Empire, a book which Brunetti enjoyed chiefly for its portrait of one of his greatest heroes, the Emperor Julian. But even here he found himself drawn into Africa, with the account of the siege of the town of Leptis in Tripolis and of the perfidy and duplicity of both attackers and defenders. Hostages were killed, men were condemned to have their tongues cut out for speaking the inconvenient truth, the land was laid waste by pillage and slaughter. He read to the end of the twenty-eighth book but then closed it and decided that an early night would be better than this reminder of how little mankind had changed in almost two millennia.
In the morning, after the children had left for early classes, he and Paola spoke about Chiara, but neither of them was sure what her apparent return to normal behaviour implied. He also repeated his concern about the source of the opinion she had expressed.
‘You know,’ Paola said, after listening to him, ‘all these years the kids have been in school, I’ve listened to their friends’ parents respond to their kids’ bad grades. It’s always the fault of the teacher. No matter what the subject, no matter who the student: it is always the fault of the teacher.’
She dipped a corner of a biscuit in her caffè latte, ate it, and continued. ‘Never once have I heard anyone say, “Yes, Gemma’s really not very bright, so I understand why she didn’t do well in mathematics” or, “Nanni is a bit of a dope, you know, especially at languages.” Not a bit of it. Their children are always the best and the brightest, are perceived as spending every waking moment bent over their books, and into the lambent clarity of their minds no teacher has ever been capable of adding even the dimmest light or glimmer of improvement. Yet these are the same kids who come home with Chiara or Raffi and talk of nothing but pop music and films, seem to know nothing about anything except pop music and films and, when they can tear their attention away from pop music and films, do nothing except call one another on their telefonini or send SMS’s to each other, the grammar and syntax of which I most sincerely hope to be spared.’