Traitors to All by Giorgio Scerbanenco Page A

woman in her black peasant dress, almost a regional costume, but with a low neckline, looked at them.
    ‘I have to talk to Ulrico,’ he said, in the pleasant, somnolent gloom of the dining room: Ulrico must be a man with his head screwed on, he hadn’t employed either an architect or an interior decorator. Not having ever seen him, Duca felt like laughing when he called him Ulrico. ‘It’s about a serious matter.’
    This, too, had an effect on the woman. She couldn’t havebeen fifty yet, when she was younger she must have been what a Milanese would have called a handsome figure of a girl. But a kind of anger in her overcame the effect his words had had, and she said, ‘More serious than what’s happened? He was supposed to get married, instead of which his fiancée drowns in a ditch, it was such a blow I thought he’d end up in the cemetery, too. Anyway he left, I even told him to go away for a while.’
    ‘And who are you?’ Duca asked her impudently, wickedly.
    ‘I’m his assistant,’ she said, ‘his assistant in the butcher’s shops, here and in Ca’ Tarino.’ Then she insisted on adding, ‘The cashier,’ which made her sound more important.
    That was notable – in fact, it was what in texts on arithmetic is defined as a notable product. Ulrico had a younger assistant, something of a nymphomaniac, in his shops in Milan, and a mature assistant for his shops outside Milan.
    ‘I also keep house for him,’ she said proudly, satisfied she had got them to understand what she wanted them to understand.
    She kept it very well, Duca thought: the red floor tiles were well polished, not unpleasantly reflective, they were old-fashioned, warmly intimate, no dust, no smells, nothing out of place, if she kept Ulrico as neat and tidy as this, Ulrico was a lucky man.
    ‘I have to talk to Ulrico,’ he said again, in an even tone, neither threatening nor insistent. ‘It’s very important.’
    She sat down, moving one of the four chairs at the table, and suddenly a ray of sunlight came through the plain curtains at the half-open window, hit the shiny surface of the table, although not strongly, and was reflected on her face, bringing out the circles under her eyes, the little wrinkles, the tiredness of her skin. Proudly, she did not move fromthat reflection, she scorned it, haughtily exposed herself to it in all her decay. ‘I don’t know where he’s gone.’
    It was an interesting conversation: he kept saying that he wanted to talk to Ulrico, and she kept saying that she didn’t know where he’d gone. So he decided to raise the stakes. ‘Silvano left me something, Ulrico knows what it is.’
    She fell into his little trap, and her face stiffened in the reflection. ‘I don’t know anything about that.’
    I don’t know anything
means a lot of things. It means that you know something, but you don’t want to say it, want to make it seem in fact as if you don’t know anything. How crafty some people are! But now he knew that she knew.
    ‘I can’t keep that thing in my home,’ he said to her, but politely. He was starting to feel a bit embarrassed: despite everything, her age, her experience, her peasant guile, she still retained, as so many women do, a genuine innocence. And indeed she now put her other foot in the trap. ‘He’s supposed to be phoning me today, I’ll tell him.’
    This was important. Ulrico Brambilla would be phoning, whether or not the woman knew where Ulrico was, he would be phoning. She probably didn’t know, he probably hadn’t told her where he was going, and he might not even be staying too long in one place. Did that mean he was running away? If so, why? There are a lot of reasons to run away, one of them being grief: if your fiancée ends up in a ditch, as the woman in black had put it, downgrading the Naviglio, you might well close up your four butcher’s shops – although Carrua was of the opinion that Brambilla had more, registered in other names, obviously – and go