Painting Death by Tim Parks

Author:Tim Parks
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcade Publishing
Published: 2015-09-05T04:00:00+00:00

Part Two

Chapter Twelve

All’Avvocatessa Carla Cogni

Carissima Carla,

You ask me to send you a full account of my movements in the month leading up to my arrest and imprisonment, to help you in my defence. I shall do my best and just hope you won’t mind if I digress now and then. Solitary confinement is solitary indeed and without phone or Internet I may as well pass the time this way as any other. Then what appears to be digression may actually turn out to hold the key to the case, who knows; to date I remain as bewildered as anyone else as to who could have carried out such a strangely brutal, yet, in a curious way, as I felt at once when I discovered the body, beautiful murder.

A month before my arrest takes me back to where? 22 March? I don’t have my diary with me, so I might get a few days mixed up. Do you want to hear how I got my honorary-citizen’s scroll framed and was all set to hang it on the wall when I discovered they’d spelt ‘imprenditore’ wrong, with a double ‘t’ ‘imprendittore’? I was with my daughter trying to nail the thing up over the piano and she laughed and said they must be taking the mick out of my accent because I always got the doubles wrong, not pronouncing them when they were there and introducing them when they weren’t. Actually, I don’t think that’s the case at all. I’ve always taken great care over the pronunciation of double letters, which alas the English in their general linguistic slovenliness ignore and simply pronounce as one letter. And no, Carla, this is not one of the digressions I was warning of. I’m not digressing at all. I mention the language issue because it has frequently occurred to me that I am always considered the first suspect for a crime because I am a foreigner, I have an accent, or, even worse, because I have only the very slightest of accents. We’ve all seen in recent years how easy it has been for the police to accuse blacks, Arabs and Slavs whenever there’s some violent street crime, or even a perfectly ingenuous American like Amanda Knox, and how satisfied the public always is to suppose that a foreigner must be responsible for every ugly calamity on Italian soil. You should definitely ask yourself if this isn’t an issue in the way I’m being treated. A murder occurs within a relatively closed community— a state-run museum—in which there is just one foreigner, and what’s more a foreigner who more than any other has camouflaged himself as one of us, has demanded our approval for his achievements, has become a major benefactor of all kinds of civic institutions, has distinguished himself, we could say, as exactly the kind of cultural product we would wish our own nation to produce, if only we educated our children properly. Damn him! He puts us to shame. Obviously he is

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