IN MINIATURE, I understood all that, I understood life, work, contacts, I understood Milan, I understood myself and others when, one evening many years ago, I was invited to a dinner party with a number of journalists or editors and publishing executives, or perhaps they belonged to other equivalent professional categories: thirty years later, I can hardly remember, but I do remember that they were capable people, enterprising, reasonably likable. A girlfriend of mine had invited me along with a fairly sociable intention, “I want you to get to know them,” and maybe it would prove useful to be introduced to them. Useful? Why? For my career. What career? My literary career, which was still just beginning.
Unfortunately, with me, that sort of intention rarely works out, and nothing interesting has ever resulted from arranged meetings, or hardly ever: whereas chance encounters, random fleeting involuntary interactions have brought me the benediction of my life.
I still remember just one thing about that evening out in a fashionable restaurant in Milan, and it’s not who the people were that I had just met and dined with, as they neither entered nor remained part of my life any more than I entered theirs, and who probably now occupy positions even more prestigious than the ones that they, still young, already occupied back then, but I do clearly recall a detail that fell toward the end of the dinner when, not having thus far taken a particularly active role in the conversation and having heard one of my tablemates mention that he had a passion for sailing, and owned a boat, and took it to sea regularly, I tried to dive into the flow of chatter for a few exchanges, at least to offer a tidbit of satisfaction to my friend and the way she had “been so keen to get me to know them,” etc., because by now she was losing hope that I would jibe with her friends, so I tossed out something along the lines of, “Oh, oh, I like to sail myself . . . I competed in regattas aboard a Flying Dutchman, when I was a boy . . . and once I was even shipwrecked . . .,” and I told a couple of anecdotes from the time. Anyone who’s ever gone to sea, maybe even just in the summer, without necessarily being this great navigator, has it as part of their personal baggage: magnificent inlets, that one time they lost the anchor, tremendous southwesterly gales, blows to the head by a swinging boom, a man overboard, the radio out of commission, some beautiful girl in the boat moored alongside, and so on. I displayed a disproportionate enthusiasm for sailing, well out of scale to my actual experience, I overstated it a bit, but unless I overstate things, if I don’t exaggerate, if I fail to attribute importance with excited words to any given subject, I have the impression that nothing has any importance.
By so doing, in any case, I earned myself an invitation to go out on their boat.
“Well then, if you’d care to, why don’t you come out with us sometime for a sail?”
“Certainly! That would be wonderful,” I replied with slightly ginned-up enthusiasm that was, nevertheless, heartfelt, because the idea of leaving Milan—where I was then spending the better part of my time—and going down to Liguria to face the challenge of the winter sea, the icy spray, the black waves, in the company of experienced people with a genuine, serious passion for it, excited me, it really excited me, here was a fine opportunity, one I didn’t want to miss, and my friend flashed a satisfied smile as if her plan of introducing me to those acquaintances of hers had finally worked out, even though it didn’t seem to point to any assignments, no sign of a job on the horizon or even any articles to write for newspapers or magazines, just a promise of a sail on the open sea, but you know what they say, one thing leads to another, socializing can lead to opportunities, there are people in this country who’ve risen to the rank of president or chairman of something and it all started out over a Ping-Pong table. And so my enthusiastic acceptance of the invitation to go out for a sail on a certain date met with benediction in the form of broad smiles; except that, when the guy who had invited me out on his sailboat, or to be perfectly frank, on whose sailboat I had actually invited myself, pulled out his datebook to see when might be a good time, the first slot he had open (as far as I was concerned, anytime was fine, the next day, or that coming Saturday, or the one after that . . .), was a little later on, his weekends were pretty busy for a while . . .
“So listen, how would March thirteenth work for you? Do you have anything planned that day?” he asked, with the typical Milanese drawl, the protracted, teeth-clenched e in the word “bene,” turning it into “beeene.” “Is that fiiiine for you? Are you freeee that daaaay?”
He’d invited me for a sail in mid-March.
This was in November.
That means he had every weekend already spoken for, for the coming four months.
Anyway, I told him yes.
THE PROBLEM WITH HAVING THE WORLD within your grasp, without limits and without repercussions, is that you can develop a sense of omnipotence, whereby every act, even destructive ones, can be taken to its ultimate conclusion and then withdrawn, leaving the person who committed the act untouched. Weaned but still a virgin. Ready to give it another shot. Like an amazing rubber band, a little bit of money can catapult you into the middle of the most vivid experiences but then yank you back before the consequences begin to make themselves felt. In other words, a person can labor under the illusion that they are free to do almost anything, or even, in fact, anything at all. Money is supposed to protect you, even if you leap off the diving board into an empty swimming pool, like a cushion of air.
It’s fun to be rich and out of control.
This explains at least in part the character of the youthful protagonists of this story in the era in which it takes place. On the one hand, they had grown up, as people once said, coddled in excelsior: spoiled by their families, attending private school, with young foreign ladies as their nannies. Protected from any impact, swaddled in precautions designed to insure them against any wound as they encountered the tiny hindrances of life. And thanks to this miraculous immunity, they could push into the opposite extreme, into the realm of danger and violence, convinced that they’d always get away with it. Every new provocation expanded the horizon of their liberty, marking a new, distant point. So distant that, once they’d returned to home base, to the trusted hideouts of the little villas of the QT, they were convinced they were well out of reach, untouchable by the consequences of their actions. Indeed, that these actions could not possibly have, by their very nature, any consequences whatever.
They grew up with the deep-seated certainty that they had the right to do anything.
1
A STROLL. WHY, YES! Let’s go take a nice stroll! Why, is there such a thing as a horrible one?
There, the evening stroll before dinner. The thing that I found most incomprehensible when I was a boy, when it was my parents going out for that stroll, during the period of rehabilitation that followed my father’s heart attack; and around five, later in the evening during the summertime, the couple (and they were hardly elderly, they were much younger than I am now! My mother was still ravishing . . . no dogs to take out for a walk . . .) would go out for a hike through the quarter—three quarters of an hour, an hour or so. What’s the purpose of it, I’d wonder, this wander through the narrow streets of the QT, always turning at the same intersections, skirting around apartment houses, measured from the ground floor to the washhouses on top with the engineer’s professional eye a thousand times over, the ivy, the imposing front gates, the little balconies with their iron railings, the majestic entrances that give a building such prestige . . . and at a certain point along the way, as if the two of them had suddenly realized they had ventured too far, it was time to begin their anabasis, their trek home, making turns at right angles a couple of times and taking parallel streets in order to avoid retracing their exact paths on the way back, and finally finding themselves back at the base, in front of the last doorway on the little uphill section of Via Tarvisio—with a slight heaving in my father’s respiration, and the well-earned approach of the evening meal. Why do they do it? What on earth can they have discovered during their
walk? Aside from the aspect of improved health for the heart-attack survivor, which gave a melancholy tinge to the whole exercise, I couldn’t see the point. Perhaps it helped to strengthen my parents’ relationship, maybe they talked as they walked along arm in arm, in fact, I know they did; it was a custom in the neighborhood, a sign of affection in the QT.
SINCE YESTERDAY, January 17, 2007, I’ve moved my meager belongings, two suitcases and my computer, and now I sleep in a ground-floor apartment on Via Tolmino, facing the apartment house where a former student at SLM, Angelo, once lived. Three days ago, he was found guilty in criminal court of murdering two women, a mother and a daughter. I was in the same class as his younger brother, Salvatore. This date marks my return, after more than twenty years, to live in the QT. The TV broadcast close-ups of Angelo’s face, now horribly obese, upon which there floated, as always, a faint smile, while his bulbous eyes rolled and darted incessantly, without ever coming to a stop on any person present in the hall of justice; in the newspapers appeared statements by him that were every bit as mocking and sarcastic, about how the two victims hadn’t been able to understand just how much of a “sentimental guy” he really was, and that the two poor women “just hadn’t known how to handle him,” otherwise “things might have ended differently,” in other words, not in a double homicide. If my teenage memories don’t mislead me, this was the exact same building, the one I’m looking at now, whose two symmetrical wings must have been repainted recently in two different hues of yellow, one slightly pinkish, the other more of an acid hue. From the windows, I can see cars driving up and down Via Tolmino, or turning up the hill onto Via Gradisca, and occasionally a motorcyclist who takes advantage of the empty, straight street to race through the gears. Truly peaceful, Via Tolmino. It always has been.
My soul, too, after months of raging tempests, is more serene. Or perhaps we should say, not serene, but suspended. I am therefore in the right condition to try to understand what it is that’s so special about this quarter, to the casual eye so nondescript, so anonymous. What is it that my parents saw here, at the end of their late-afternoon promenades? And why was it here, of all places, in the QT, in those years, that the greatest and most concentrated number of gratuitous murders, political attacks and ambushes, premeditated killings and accidental killings, manhunts, and reprisals took place? It was on this borderland that bellicose young men converged from every other quarter in Rome, from all walks of life, of every political ideology. You might say that a place like this, precisely because of its neutrality, was a perfect place to fight. And to kill.
OVER SOME OF THE TREE-LINED STREETS of this urban checkerboard, such as Via Volsinio or Via Benaco, for example, lours the perennial shadow of foliage that has never been cut back, from trees that have grown until their branches meet and intertwine on high, forming a roof of greenery, beneath which it is lovely to zip along on a scooter at the height of summer—something for that matter that is not uncommon in Rome, where the trees of the city’s streets are abandoned to their own devices, as if in some magical forest, until they attain monstrous sizes and shapes, sending chills down your back, until the clock strikes the x hour and, as if to punish them for their luxuriant growth, they are pruned down to mere stumps, perhaps because that means doing the job “once and for all,” or else, with some weak botanical justification, sawed off just above the base, while instead it is obvious that the job has the unmistakable flavor of a reprisal. The Parks Department takes action in an intimidatory and exemplary fashion, like the police under some oppressive regime, and one fine day the green tunnel is simply gone, and the streets find themselves barren, stripped naked under the glare of a sun they haven’t seen in years and, just like that—surprise!—you can see the pale façades of the buildings again, and even the windows on those façades with railings and art nouveau decorations whose very existence had been kept a secret, and whose inhabitants no longer even dared to look out them, thrust back into their apartments by the branches’ menacing proliferation. The sheer power of nature . . . until the chain saws of the city’s botanical dogcatchers come riding to the rescue.
After they’ve come through, two rows of sawn-off stumps protrude from the sidewalks. Institutionalized neglect in Rome, in fact, manifests itself in one of these two extreme forms: either nothing is done, or else it’s a massacre.
A further surreal effect burst loose yesterday evening on Via Benaco, as I was walking along, hands clasped behind my back, pondering who I ought to put in the next scene and how to give that person shape, and as I thought, I slowly entered the gallery of greenery, whereupon, raising my eyes, I realized that I had stepped into that famous painting by Magritte: under the vault of foliage it was already dark night, the bright yellow streetlamps casting shadows, a gloomy silence like some provincial city—while overhead, above the branches, you could still glimpse clear and luminous the sky of Rome, crisscrossed by darting swallows.
High above, there was still daylight.
On the ground, darkest night.
Sort of like in this story. Divided by a line where opposites meet, even though the canvas is the same, and so is the instant. Even the protagonists are the same, whether they act in the darkness or in the light of day. There, it is as if the light itself produces the darkness, as if its splendor engenders the darkness, and I’m certain that this contradiction in terms has some meaning of its own, that’s right, that it is prosperity itself that engenders malaise. I can’t find this meaning, I can’t find it on my own, I have to reach out to my memory and my imagination for help. You might say to me, what help are you looking for, whose help are you asking for, in that case? Whose help, if you are still the one, who remembers and invents. But the memory and the imagination aren’t mine, I’m not really me, the forces that come to my aid as often as not also abandon me. If they really were mine, they’d do as I say, wouldn’t they? Like a hand that reaches out to grasp a glass. Hand, grab that glass, and my hand grabs it. Lift it to my mouth. Tip it . . .
A thirst-slaking gulp of water.
I have no choice, though, but to hope that memory and imagination come to visit me, and I cannot expect anything certain, maneuverable, from them. I have begun to suspect that these are not two separate, distinct forces, recollection and fantasy, but rather a single force, and that the words come from the same spring, they are neither true nor are they false, neither authentic nor invented, there is just one voice that recounts and reasons, and I have no option but to listen to it. Trustingly.
TRAGEDY IS NOTHING other than this, then: to show the other side of things, places, and people, revealing a reality considered impossible, which is instead the possibility of a different reality. The same scene suddenly turns into a dark and unsettling world, even though it mirrors the world we already knew and which seemed, if not festive, at least innocuous. Remaining identical to its former self, that world is turned inside out. In just the same way that, after the first crime, the CR/M, from one day to the next my quarter became an antiquarter, a sinister shadow of the quarter it had once been. No one had ever noticed that they were living on the edge of a swamp: neat rows of tidy apartment houses, small balconies bursting with flowers, palm trees extending high over the enclosure walls, sheathed in Virginia creeper, pedestrians who greet each other as they cross paths . . . all suddenly become dark and trembling, uneasy profiles, pale silhouettes on the black surface of the stagnant water. The images of the QT remained the same, only now they were tinged with a leaden hue and caressed by the quavering of the reflections on the water, unreal even though they replicate reality with maniacal exactitude, perhaps with excessive exactitude, just the way in fact a maniac would do, a lunatic, the way madmen act out their pantomimes, betrayed only by the faint, chilling tremor that stirs beneath the surface of their otherwise letter-perfect imitations. Something like a solar eclipse, a reality that has been drained of color and stripped naked, a treacherous world: that is what the QT became in the days following the rape/murder.
A
LL ALONG CORSO TRIESTE, instead of the doormen from the Marche region that used to populate the neighborhood, Sinhalese doormen now poke their heads out to toss bucketfuls of mop water into the street, broad and docile faces topped with locks of gleaming hair, yellowish eyes, and skin pockmarked by acne. In the buckets, the water is tinged with the grime from the travertine staircases.
Many of the small villas behind Giulio Cesare High School, along the small streets reduced to jungle habitat by the uncontrolled growth of trees and plants, seem partially abandoned. Shutters fastened, front yards piled high with detritus . . .
PALAZZINE. Apartment houses.
They are normally five stories tall, built very close to one another. Someone once described them as “boxes with a lid”: their lids are the elevated penthouse structures that have transformed washhouses and common areas into inhabitable apartments. The old shared terraces over which cement awnings once stood have since been filled in with walls and windows, erected in violation of the building code, but long since consecrated as official dwellings by successive waves of regulatory amnesties. If you look up, you can still make out the shapes of the compartments that once held water tanks and washhouses, now visible in the structure of the penthouse apartments that incorporated them.
The Catholic School Page 72
