This rather strict upbringing gave rise to its reversal, point by point, that is, a counteretiquette that consisted entirely of belching and farting, foul language trotted out with stubborn determination and a complete doggedness, and then rude gestures, filthy and blasphemous nursery rhymes, obscenities and profanities—these latter relatively rare, but blasted out with particular delight in that school run by priests.
I remember one guy in middle school, Puca, who would curse after taking communion. He’d stand in line to take the wine and the wafer, then he’d retrace his steps slowly and mournfully, kneel at the pew, the wafer still in his mouth, and I’d hear him murmur a profanity, head bowed, hands clasped, and who knows why, what pleasure he took from it . . .
At school, a new and blasphemous nursery rhyme was sent around every day.
THE GOLGOTHA GRAN PRIX was held today: winner, Jesus, riding Barabbam, showing in second place, Judas Iscariot, riding Matra Dito, and coming in third, Pontius Pilot. (Brabham: a famous Formula One racing team founded by the ace driver Jack Brabham; Matra: an auto manufacturing group that also made race cars and won the Formula One championship in 1969.)
IN OTHER WORDS, there was a delight in defiling and disfiguring anything that we had been taught was good or just or sacred or decorous: all good manners, starting with polite language. At school we vented that tendency with pervasive vulgarity.
Say, what is the law of Gay-Lussac?
My dick up your ass goes clickety-clack.
And what, pray tell, is the rule of Tartini?
My dick up your ass won’t make bambini.
The goddess Kali
Ate bowls of rice
and shat out arancini
Took a boat to North Korea
and Sandokan had diarrhea
10
AROUND ELEVEN AT NIGHT on September 30, 1975, from the window of his apartment, a resident of Viale Pola 5 (two hundred yards from where I live), notices two young men parking a Fiat 127 in the apartment building driveway, then they get out of the car, discuss something animatedly, and then leave.
Later, in the middle of the night, he is awakened by his mother, who tells him that she heard noises downstairs; he goes again to the window, and looks down into the street. He notices that the trunk of that Fiat 127 is shaking, as if being pounded by someone locked inside. First he calls the Carabinieri, then he goes down into the street and walks over to the vehicle.
He calls out, asking who could be in there.
A young woman’s voice replies: “The guys who pulled off the Bulgari kidnapping locked me in here . . . I’m wounded and I’m wrapped around a dead woman’s body.” And then: “Open the trunk, I can’t take it anymore . . .”
In the meantime, another tenant has emerged from the same apartment building.
“Don’t leave, they haven’t gone far!”
Before long, the Carabinieri arrive. They force open the trunk, from which moaning and cries for help can be heard.
INSIDE WAS A BULKY OBJECT WRAPPED in a blanket and behind it, wedged against the back of the rear seat, the wounded girl was groaning. The Carabinieri had a hard time understanding what she was saying, and getting her out of the car as well: she was half-naked and smeared with blood. It was only after she’d almost completely emerged from the trunk that they understood that there was another girl in there; that the bulky object concealed in the blanket was the body of another young woman, naked and lifeless. They pulled out the corpse and laid it on the asphalt, after extracting it from the sheets of plastic wrap that the murderers had used to transport it.
TWO OF THEM WERE ARRESTED immediately. They were wandering around the quarter and couldn’t provide any explanation of their presence in the street at that hour. With respect to Viale Pola, they lived so to speak right around the corner, one on Via Capodistria—the street that ran parallel to Viale Pola, likewise a cross street of Via Nomentana—and the other on Via Tolmino. By sheer coincidence, one of them was arrested downstairs from the apartment of the other, where the Carabinieri had gone in search of the father, who was named on the documents as the owner of the Fiat 127. They asked him where his son might be, were duly informed, of course, that he wasn’t home, and then, on their way out, right in the courtyard of the palazzo on Via Capodistria, they picked up that son’s accomplice.
The other one was spotted, also in the vicinity, by a security guard on night patrol. When asked to explain his presence on the streets late at night, the suspect took to his heels, while the security guard fired shots in the air in order to attract the attention of the police, who were carpeting the QT by this point, in the aftermath of the discovery of the two girls locked in the car trunk. The chase was a long one and the security guard was running out of breath so, panting, he shouted at the fugitive: “Stop, or I’ll shoot you!” The other man stopped and leaned against the wall, every bit as exhausted as his pursuer. While the security guard caught up to him, his weapon leveled, he said: “I didn’t kill the girls!”
THE THIRD CULPRIT in the crime will never be apprehended.
WHAT HAPPENED is in its way fairly elementary and yet tangled, not such a simple story to tell, in part because, aside from the two victims and the three culprits, it also involves a considerable number of costarring walk-ons who, one after another, or in pairs, come on stage and leave it rather randomly, with no clear explanation why they did so, what their role was, and especially where they went and came from; if their movements were traced on a map with the QT at the center, it would eventually be blackened with lines. Just the comings and goings of that one night, between September 30 and October 1, 1975, on Viale Pola (a lovely tree-shaded little street that resembles anything but the boulevard of its name, “viale,” since it is a oneway street with a single lane of traffic, and till then it was known only for the presence of the most respected private university in Rome, whose frontage lined a good long section of the street), reveal an astonishing frequency, like the fibrillation of a seismograph. It is on that same narrow street that two of the main players live, who were at first swept up in the investigation, questioned, and so on. It is also hard to say, quite honestly, when talking about this story, exactly where it begins and ends, its onset and its conclusion. And so I’ll make use of abbreviations, omissions, and simplifications.
NOW, let’s take a short step back in time, to five days earlier, Thursday, September 25, when two young women are given a ride from in front of the Empire cinema (Viale Regina Margherita, southern boundary of the QT) by a young man who tells them his name is Carlo, even though it’s not true, since his real name is Gian Pietro. Courteous, solicitous, he drives them to the Termini train station, where they’ll be able to catch the metro to E.U.R. Of the two girls, only one, D.C., the one with the curly hair, will wind up half-dead in the trunk of the Fiat 127; and the self-proclaimed Carlo (that is, the same student who had smashed my classmate Marco Lodoli’s eyeglasses), though arrested immediately after the rapes and murder, will be found to have had nothing to do with it. In short, of the three people who begin the episode, only one will wind up in the torture villa made so notorious by the press accounts.
Two days later, on Saturday, September 27, the young man who claimed his name was Carlo calls D.C. and suggests they meet for a date in a place so characteristic and typical of those years that it has been immortalized in films and TV series, while I couldn’t say that it’s as popular and busy these days. It’s at the southern end of E.U.R., which means it’s at the outskirts, indeed in many ways already outside the city, where the scent of the sea is in the air and the light is different, clean, windy; it’s known as “Il Fungo,” that is, the Mushroom, because it’s a tower and at the top it spreads out into a large ring that in fact resembles a mushroom cap, and inside that ring is housed a restaurant with a panoramic view. A smaller-scale but nonetheless spectacular precursor, sensational in its time, of the famous Landmark Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, the one that the aliens blow up in Mars Attacks! A longtime meeting
spot for genuine Fascists and two-bit fascistelli, identifiable as Fascists only by their speech and their attitudes, or else ordinary people stopping off there to meet friends and then continue on their way to the beach at Ostia. D.C. went to the appointment accompanied not by her girlfriend of two days earlier, Nadia, who had other plans (she was at the Lunapark amusement park with two other girlfriends), but another young woman, let’s say, a substitute, the unfortunate R.L., who will end up a corpse on the asphalt of Viale Pola; while “Carlo” (let me remind the reader once again, if the reader has any need, that I am not changing his name here out of any authorial prudence, but rather that it was he who from the very outset declined to give his real name, and later had a hard time explaining to the police the reason for his masquerade: “I just did it, for no special reason . . .”) showed up together with a young man I’ll call Subdued and with Angelo, who had joined the crew, apparently, by pure chance, happening to meet the so-called Carlo at Piazzale delle Muse. A half hour of conversation at Il Fungo and then a new date for the following Monday, out front of the Ambassade cinema, which is also near E.U.R.; now that there are three boys, there is talk of reaching out to Nadia, the girlfriend from the Empire.
On Monday, however, “Carlo” has some studying to do, with a university classmate, after which he has to attend a mathematical analysis class, which means he’ll miss the date, leaving Angelo and Subdued to go alone; there, they will find that there are also only two girls, the same ones who came to Il Fungo for that aperitif, since once again Nadia couldn’t come, as she was feeling unwell. So Nadia twice narrowly misses a bitter fate, the first time going off to shriek on the roller coasters of Lunapark at E.U.R. with her girlfriends, the second time because of painful menstrual cramps. “Carlo” remains on the sidelines of the story, though he continually brushes against it, intersecting it, given that that same evening of Monday, September 29 (a date that a few years earlier the pop group Equipe 84 had made memorable, with the first major hit written by Lucio Battisti), while the two girls were already being held prisoner in the villa at Monte Circeo (though “Carlo” doesn’t know this . . .), he joins one of the murderers, Subdued, who had returned to Rome, on the street downstairs from his apartment, and together they go to pay a call on the third, the Legionnaire, who has not yet entered directly into the mechanics of the crime—he tells them that he is tired and doesn’t feel like going out. The next day, the usual routine for “Carlo”: that is, studying, class, more studying (with what remains a less-than-ironclad alibi, still sufficient to convince the investigators), but, once night falls, who does he go to meet, outside the Rocci bar at the corner of Via Nomentana and Via di Santa Costanza, around midnight? Angelo. That’s right, none other. On foot. “Carlo” tells him to get in the car and together they drive around aimlessly for a couple of hours, and in that time, his friend and classmate never once makes any reference to the fact that he has just returned from Monte Circeo with two young women, swathed in plastic wrap, in the trunk of the car. First of all, the two young men are starving, so they go to the café at the metro station on Piazza Euclide, to eat a couple of sandwiches, then they go to ogle the prostitutes on Via Veneto, and from there to Viale Pola, where Angelo wants to ring his friend’s buzzer, outside whose building they parked the Fiat 127 a few hours earlier, but “Carlo” dissuades him from it. And so the person who first turned the handle that set the engine of kidnapping and murder running, and who through the various phases of the crime managed to meet in person all three of the kidnappers and murderers, gets off scot-free.
OCTOBER 1, 1975. As soon as day dawns, the investigators go in search of the mysterious location where the two girls were tortured and beaten. The fragmentary information provided by D.C. (“We were already close to Via Pontina . . . on the left was a hotel with a red sign . . . we turned down a road that was only partially paved . . .”) was enough to send the Carabinieri outside Rome, beyond Latina, to Monte Circeo, and after searching the most sparsely inhabited areas for hours and hours, they were able to identify a villa in Punta Rossa at four in the afternoon, a place that they decided might well match the description provided by the surviving victim. A French window overlooking the garden stood wide open, but there were no signs of breaking and entering. At last, they decide to go in. The house is a mess, and the Carabinieri find traces of blood in the parlor, along with clumsy attempts to clean it up; most important of all, there are spattered bloodstains on the wall next to the phone. Only a few minutes have passed since the investigators first set foot inside the villa at Monte Circeo, and the officers are already starting to gather evidence of the crimes that were committed there (according to the verdict: murder and attempted murder, with the aggravating factors of manifest intention of concealment of the crime, abject motives, the tortures and cruelty brought to bear, the relative defenselessness of the victims, the abuse of the obligations of hospitality; and after that, abduction and rape; last of all, illegal possession and carrying of a firearm), when the owner and her son rush into the villa, namely and respectively, the Legionnaire’s mother and brother. They both declare to the officers that they had read about the murder committed at Monte Circeo in that morning’s edition of Il Messaggero, but that that was not the reason they urgently left Rome to come to the villa. “I had some things to take care of in the house,” the woman claims: the villa had been left in a mess after a weekend spent there the week before.
Even though, and again it is the Legionnaire’s mother who makes the statement, along the way to Monte Circeo, she had begun to feel a twinge of apprehension when she stopped to purchase another newspaper, Momento-Sera, and saw a photo of Angelo published there, next to an article about “serious violent crimes” at Monte Circeo; this reawakened the suspicion that her son might have lent his house keys to Angelo, despite the fact that he had absolutely been forbidden to have any interactions with that individual.
Her other son, too, who had precipitously accompanied his mother there, had also felt a “faint doubt,” along with the need to make sure that “everything was shipshape” at the house.
WHETHER THEY THOUGHT the family villa was perfectly shipshape or a complete mess, it’s impossible that either the Legionnaire’s mother or his brother that morning could possibly have read any news about the crime. It had been discovered too late at night, when Il Messaggero was already printed and ready to ship to the newsstands. Eh, these are the contradictions, the frayed nerves, the stuttering argumentation of those who hardly expected to stumble into a police questioning session and therefore hadn’t had the time to stitch together the facts on the ground with a basic logical thread. They both stubbornly denied having spoken on the phone with the wanted young man or having any idea of his whereabouts, a young man who since that day never ceased to be a person wanted by the police and the subject of relentless pursuit.
BUT LET US NOW TRACK BACK to a few days earlier, that is, to that notorious Monday, September 29, 1975, outside the Ambassade cinema. It was supposed to be a normal date, boys and girls going out together. But since that’s not at all what was going on, let’s skip right over the so-what-should-we-do, the where-should-we-go, the to-the-movies? the deceitful suggestion, “Let’s go to Lavinio, to Carlo’s house, and he’ll catch up with us later.” Instead let’s leap straight to the villa at Monte Circeo. It’s an isolated place and the road to reach it is so inaccessible that to get there the young people in the car were forced to stop more than once to ask directions.
IT WAS ABOUT SIX IN THE EVENING, and the girls had promised they’d be home early. Angelo opened the door with a key he pretended to have found near the front gate. The young men couldn’t find their way around the house very successfully, though they’d been there before, and couldn’t even find the light switches. There were a few preliminary come-ons but the girls refused to take their clothes off. They claimed they were still virgins, and that they wanted to go home now. So one of the two young men pulled out a gun and threatened them: “We’re in the Marse
ille gang! We’ve got all the police on our tail, they’re hunting for us high and low!” and added that soon their boss would be joining them—Jacques, a terrifying guy. The girls, frightened, insisted that they wanted to be taken back to Rome. Whereupon the two boys grabbed them and shoved them into a bathroom, shutting the door and locking it.
A little while later, the one I’m calling Subdued went back to his home in Rome, to have dinner with his parents, after which he drove around town with his friends, between the QT and Piazzale delle Muse, as I described at the beginning of the book, before heading back to Monte Circeo. Angelo had told the girls that his friend had gone to get some sleep. He let R.L. out of the bathroom, then brought her back completely naked, asked D.C. to come out of the bathroom, and locked R.L. back inside. He dragged the girl to a bedroom and threatened her, “Se strilli, ti addobbo”—literally, “If you yell, I’ll deck you out.” “Addobbare,” or “deck” as in “deck the halls,” or decorate, is a neo-Romanesco term, a late addition to Rome’s dialect and already largely obsolete, almost invariably used as a threat: “Guarda che t’addobbo”—“Look out or I’ll deck you out,” often with a further specification, “come ’n arbero de Natale,” literally, “like a Christmas tree,” meaning “I’ll beat you black and blue.” After which, Angelo made her strip naked and forced her to take his penis in her mouth. It was in that context that, either to frighten her or else, according to him, to establish an atmosphere of reciprocal trust, he invented the lie that he had helped to pull off the Bulgari kidnapping, which had taken place a few months earlier.
The Catholic School Page 59
