I suggested ‘L’Internationale’, but Minna said that we were dealing with a capitalist running dog. We mimed despair, pointing at our packs and throwing up our hands or clasping them in prayer. We carried on like that, and at last the gate swung back. We followed the guard along paths that led past whitewashed, red-roofed villas. Most were shuttered, but one or two had a car parked outside, or a beach towel draped over a plastic chair. ‘What kind of person lives in a gated compound?’ hissed Minna. Some of the air seemed to have leaked out of her. ‘I don’t believe John Berger has anything to do with this woman. It would be just like Mummy to have got everything wrong.’
The guard told us, ‘La dottoressa,’ and rang a doorbell. An old woman opened the door and said, ‘Alfredo. Come sta?’ She was dressed for holidays, in a kaftan, and bright, spotted socks with pool slides. Alfredo talked to her, after which she looked us over, while Minna explained in English. Then she said, ‘Come in.’
On the table in the entrance hall was a little stack of envelopes. Minna’s letter was on top. ‘My mother wrote too, and arranged everything,’ said Minna all over again. The dottoressa spread out the mail she was collecting for her neighbour, and Minna drew her mother’s envelope from the fan. ‘This is all Mummy’s fault,’ she declared in her softest, scariest voice. ‘If only she’d use the phone.’ She chewed her nails. There was nothing to be done – as the dottoressa informed us, the woman who lived in the adjoining villa was away. She’d left weeks earlier, possibly to be with John Berger.
A large, lopsided dog appeared, his claws slipping on the tiles. The dottoressa said that we could stay the night if we didn’t mind sleeping on the floor. Visitors were one of her pleasures, she went on. She, too, had been a great traveller – she flung her arm wide to take in her living room. It contained many carvings, textiles and souvenir dolls from a variety of countries. The dottoressa brought us coffee and said, ‘Now tell me everything.’ Her face was broad, bronzed, gouged by time. She sank into a soft chair, and we sat on a hard couch draped with a mirror-embroidered cloth. The dog had lowered himself with difficulty onto a rug, groaned and fallen asleep. He answered to the name of Dondolo, said the dottoressa, and he had wandered into the village one day. ‘Abandoned. Brutalised. His spine is damaged. Who can say what sorrows he has suffered?’
This prompted Minna to recount the fate of Gina Lollobrigida. ‘What?’ shouted the dottoressa. She sat up so abruptly that her heavy amber necklace jumped. ‘Why didn’t you tell me at once? We must fetch Alfredo and send him to search for this poor animal. You will have to direct him.’ Her hand, covered in stony rings, was already on the phone beside her chair – a magnificent cream and gilt apparatus like a telephone in a film.