Unto Us a Son Is Given (Commissario Brunetti #28)

by Donna Leon

Brunetti thought about how taking a look at one’s unconscious motives and prejudices was like walking barefoot in cloudy water: you never knew whether you were going to step on something disgusting or bang your toe into a rock.

This, Brunetti knew, was what happened to people who retired. Like photos left

Catherine Deneuve

how old is Brunetti hmmm

The law is beautiful. It’s like building a cathedral.’ ‘You’ve lost me,’ Paola said with a smile. ‘You want to make something that will last and that will give shelter, so you have to make it hold together, with no weak places. You have to think of all the problems that could arise if one part is weak or badly planned. You have to try, at least, to make it perfect.’

‘Because the writers don’t have to worry about giving an accurate record of events.’ ‘What do you think they want to do?’ Paola asked. ‘Forget about the facts and tell us the truth,’ Brunetti said with the certainty of a person who has come lately to a belief.

He’ll be charming and affable and pay you a lot of attention, but what he’s doing is looking for a way to profit from you. Every second of every minute he’s with you.’

‘I’ve never lived in a city where so many people are trying to seem richer than they are, or with so many people trying to seem poorer.’ He

venality

‘Has he ever done this before, fallen in love and tried to wrap the person up in his money or the promise of his money?’

‘Gonzalo taught me about modern art, and contemporary art, taught me how to distinguish between the good and the bad and between what would and would not sell. He told me which agents to flatter, which artists to promote, when to praise a young genius, and when to stay clear of writing about someone whose career was soon going to end.’ He broke off and took a sip of coffee, and Brunetti took the opportunity to remark, ‘You make it sound like a confidence game.’ ‘It is. It’s as fake as soccer: they’re both decided in rooms, not on the field. Agents decide who goes up and who goes down, who wins and who loses.

But in most cases, it’s the agent who does the real creative work and who transforms a mediocre painting into a masterpiece.’ ‘And a mediocre painter into a genius?’

‘And I became a good writer about bad art.’

He’s generous with what he knows, and most people aren’t.’

His understanding was that this world was much like any other cult: people talked to fellow believers in the language of belief, and dogma changed to follow the market. Both were about faith in winning entrance to Paradise, either final or fiscal.

Life was not meant to be merciless. They hadn’t lived long enough to understand what grace it was to die in an instant and not to linger.

Polite but not affable,

Innocent, guilty, it mattered not at all: most people reacted the same way, like a patient whose doctor asks if they eat a lot of sweets.

‘Apposite?’

as though driven by instinct to reprove a servant he caught wearing one of his shirts.

hoping to bait him with his inability to be embarrassed by the other man’s sarcasm.

like the noise an outboard motor made when it was suddenly switched into reverse.

affably

Brunetti listened to the silence on the line, resisting the impulse to say something to make it disappear.

went to see when they received any

She had, as did many wealthy English ladies, done charity work, though hers seemed more genuine than most.

This, Brunetti reflected, was what Paola called ‘verisimilitude’, a technique used by writers of fiction: the small detail, seemingly meaningless, tossed into the story to make it more resemble the truth.

the chronology, then added his own facts. Berta had been of an age to believe in the efficacy of political protest;

He recalled only the disgust felt by a character who thought another had been animated by the desire for profit. No baser motive could be imagined.

and exhausted, battered down by the sight of so many hard-faced men. Dinner

Lacking cerdibilty here too many men for the time period this is not a bus station

but he had always seen those as weaknesses and never bothered to question Gonzalo’s character because of them. ‘Oh, that’s just Gonzalo.’ But now his weaknesses had destroyed the two people he cared about the

choose to love people despite their flaws and weaknesses. We train ourselves to overlook or ignore them; sometimes these failures of character even fill us with a special kind of tenderness that has nothing whatsoever in it of a sense of superiority.