CAMARADERIE AND CLASS COMPANIONSHIP. I think of Giampiero Parboni Arquati, the notorious “Carlo,” who pulled out at the last minute, so that his life miraculously avoided being incinerated over the course of a few seconds, in the space of a phone call and by virtue of a decision made while rocking back and forth on his heels, in the narrow hallway where, in bourgeois apartments, the telephone was located. To veer away by a couple of degrees from the route that Angelo and Subdued had charted meant winding up a great distance from those two men alongside whom he had originally set out. Just as in a math problem, you need only get a single figure wrong to wind up with an answer that is wrong by fabulous quantities, likewise even the smallest shift can contribute to great changes in the fates of many people, including the victims, who might not have met the same fate if the makeup of the team of kidnappers had been different. Perhaps they would both have survived, or they might just as easily have both died. It often happens that someone’s life is saved by a mere mistake.
I want to examine another of Angelo’s buddies, Damiano Sovena. Damiano was a fair-haired young man with freckles. Back then he seemed big and strapping and strong, though not as big as the famous Cubbone, and he would later play American football, in Italy, of course. How tall and strong men are, and how old they look, is something that even those who know them well often have a hard time gauging, those who see them every day: in fact, their wives buy them shirts two sizes too big, their children describe them as old when they’re only forty. And it must, in fact, be forty years since I last saw Damiano. It was strange that a guy like him should have been able to stir in others, simultaneously or in extremely rapid succession, both fondness and fear. He was always cheerful, extroverted, and jovial, but later this cheerfulness of his would swell into something so expansive that it became brutal. His friendliness would overflow into violent forms of behavior, it was impossible to wriggle free of one of his hugs, and he would squeeze you harder and harder, as if he wanted to strangle you. His infectious laughter would suddenly veer into something much more menacing. Like the character played by Joe Pesci in Goodfellas, it was never clear whether his way of kidding around was benevolent or was instead the prelude to an explosion.
One time we were in a bus on our way to the playing fields and he was standing in the aisle laughing and joking with some younger students, junior high school age, already dressed in soccer uniforms. Back then it was fashionable to wear as part of the uniform the jerseys of the Serie A clubs, but not the Championship jersey, instead the more unusual jersey that the team wore during the European Cup games, and among those teams the Inter jersey was especially popular, white with black-and-blue cuffs and collar, and a diagonal stripe across the chest—the stripe, too, of course, black and blue, running from left shoulder to right hip. These soccer outfits were so cool-looking and sought after that it didn’t matter at all whether they corresponded to the team you rooted for (for that matter, it would have been impossible to find eleven kids who all rooted for the same team), and there was none of the fierce sense of soccer identity you have nowadays: whoever wore one of those jerseys was very proud of it anyway.
Damiano, sinking down on his knees to brace as the bus took a curve, was in fact surrounded by kids dressed in that precious jersey, all of them brand new, and with his usual playful, exaggerated tone of voice, he was complimenting them—really nice this new Inter Coppa jersey. Then he wanted to feel the fabric, so he asked one of the kids to stand up, but the kid wasn’t fast enough getting to his feet so, still chuckling, Damiano grabbed him by the shirt and yanked him up so brusquely that he tore the kid’s collar. “Oh, I’m so sorry!” he exclaimed, but then, instead of letting go of the terrified little player, continuing to hold him up by the lapels, he calmly, almost methodically, began unstitching the diagonal black-and-blue stripe running across the boy’s chest, except this painstaking work was starting to draw out because the stitching was really strong, so at a certain point Damiano, fed up, just yanked on it with all his might, which wound up tearing the whole front of the jersey.
The little boy burst into tears. And Damiano, taking him by the chin and delicately lifting the boy’s face toward his own, said: “Hey, hey . . . don’t worry. I’ll buy you a brand-new one.”
I NEVER HEARD ANYTHING more about him; only that a few years later he was wounded, shot with a handgun, in Piazza Euclide.
Of the three men guilty of the CR/M, this book talks a little bit about Angelo. The second was a psychopath without any moral brakes or inhibitions. The third was a natural born killer.
LET’S FOLLOW THEM from their bad behavior in school to the kidnapping and then the murder: a progressive graduation from level to level and an extension into the domain of serious crime of their “roughhousing and troublemaking.” These are selfish, impulsive, dishonest boys, they tend to grab what they want, indifferent as to whether or not they have any right to do so. They can turn violent if hindered, or even if they aren’t. By no means worried about the consequences of their actions. Disapproval or the prospect of punishment don’t frighten them beforehand from committing their misdeeds, nor do they chasten them in the aftermath. Instead of acting as a deterrent, punishment if anything seems to encourage them, or to leave them cold, indifferent, at the very outside to exacerbate their resentment. More than hostile out of any principle, they seem to be utterly insensible to their fellow humans, they seem to struggle to acknowledge any specific identity, likewise with ideas, feelings, or rights, while others’ suffering, even when it was they who caused it, simply doesn’t concern them. In contrast with genuine sadists, they don’t seem to take pleasure in the pain of others in any direct manner, but instead observe it as a “distance effect,” a secondary phenomenon. They tend to act impersonally, and they consider the harm they do on the order of an inevitable natural occurrence that requires no explanation. If other people mean so little to them, why should they feel any remorse for the damage inflicted? If anything, a little astonishment and a hint of annoyance, at the way others exaggerate their objections, their protests, their chagrin, their demands for reparations. The suffering always appears to them as something disorderly, grating, and excessive. Concern and remorse can only spring from an ability to empathize, to identify with others, a faculty for imagination, for projecting oneself into the world, something that they do not possess. We may suppose that when they go to the movies they have a hard time understanding why the audience is so afraid, or weeps, or takes passionate interest in the stories they see projected on the screen, and so they are bored to death or, perhaps, they just snicker into their sleeves at the sight of all that mawkish sentimentalism. They have eliminated from their way of thought any cause-and-effect relationship. They live with only one objective: self-affirmation. They have this impression of the world: a place that is fully available to them, nothing is out of the question, nothing is forbidden. If you want to do something, only the will to do it is required. Because they don’t feel loved, they do not fear that anyone might withdraw or refuse their love as a consequence of their bad behavior. Behind them and before them is a void. The truth leaves them cold, it bores them. They have little interest in being honest, and they have a hard time recognizing the actual difference that exists between honesty and dishonesty. And it is rare, exceedingly rare for them to feel even a twinge of guilt.
IF AT FIRST, the CR/M seemed incomprehensible, so vast was its scale and so indecipherable its root cause, little by little people began to understand it, to sense it as something familiar, and most important of all, in line with the times. The odious crime was metabolized and canonized in its form of unrivaled horror, and as a result it came to be considered an event that was by no means extraordinary, but rather, within the ordinary course of things: people might express astonishment both that it hadn’t happened before and that this kind of thing didn’t happen more often. Like every ritual, that schema, in its way, so classical (privileged young men who torture and abuse young working-class women, rich males again
st poor females), demanded to be re-experienced, reinterpreted, emulated. Once a case is closed and the culprit incarcerated, there will always be someone else out on the street ready to strike, if the reasons the crime was committed in the first place still apply. That means that in a certain sense the case is still open, it can recur, there can always be another such case, identical or merely similar, and after that another and yet another . . . Which is even more so if the crime was gratuitous, as the CR/M was, in fact. Indeed, how can you eradicate the root causes of an event, to prevent it from happening again, if there really were no root causes, properly speaking? How can you take steps, what antidote can be readied? The more gratuitous the evil, the more likely it is to persist. You can never be certain it won’t repeat itself. In fact, repetition seems to belong to its nature: that which has no foundation cannot in any way be revoked or given the lie.
THE CR/M IS NOT ONLY A PRODUCT of its time, but a producer—of times, of course, of history, of concepts, of ways of life. Nothing after it remained the same as before. To some degree, it was an event that had been expected: people knew that it could happen, in spite of the fact that no one expected it, and despite what that sounds like, it’s not a logical fumble. In those days, people knew perfectly well that unthinkable things would happen: they knew it, but they didn’t know exactly what. Of course, the worst things imaginable, the most absurd, the most unheard of: and therefore, to the letter, people expect that something will happen that they don’t expect. Reality, the future, these things are unpredictable. Perhaps they always have been and always will be, but I have the impression that in 1975 they were more so.
(THE ETYMOLOGY OF THE ITALIAN WORD for rape, “stupro,” indicates something that causes stupor, astonishment, something that one wasn’t expecting . . .)
10
THE CR/M IS STRUCTURED like a fable, and it possesses a fable’s deceptive simplicity. Two young women are lured into a house in the forest . . .
A chain of happenstance guides the transition from one stage to the next, almost a slippage, a slow drift.
The sessions of sexual abuse and torture are based on the principle, typically, of intensified repetition, like that seen in Hans Christian Andersen’s The Tinderbox, where the nightmarish dogs that guard the treasure have progressively larger eyes, bigger and bigger—first as big as saucers, then as big as mill wheels, and finally as big as the Round Tower of Copenhagen; the violence is graduated in a progressive crescendo, to put the victim’s endurance to the test, her body put through its paces like an engine on a test bench, jolted and beaten, crushed, dislocated. The abstract impulse of the torturer who wishes to penetrate through his victim to the point where that body will stop resisting: the body bruised, wounded, ripped open as if trying to find something inside it.
The recourse to violence and the rite of submission, however ferocious, may appear as a game that will sooner or later come to an end, whereupon they can take off the uniforms of brute and slave girl and everyone can return home—but no, let’s get serious. Only death can free the act of its foolish sexual patina, from the idea that it was all just dumb show, playacting, a distasteful back-and-forth. In gang rapes, at a certain point, there comes a pause in which the actors no longer know what to do: they can’t go back, but they can’t continue along in the same direction, either. Sexual gratification, if that was really what they were going in search of, can be obtained in just a few minutes—but then what?
During the CR/M, there were these long intervals in which the situation was stalled. As if it had been enchanted. Just as in a fable.
A PROTRACTED DYING, infinitely repeatable. The tortures inflicted serially upon the victims of the CR/M induce the illusion that the afflicted body is able to resuscitate each time, after every blow.
And then a sort of pseudodeath . . . there . . . maybe it’s done . . . for long moments it seems that the body has stopped breathing . . . but then, instead, it breathes. The chest resumes rising and falling, bubbles of air and blood ooze out of the nostrils. It’s supernatural. The clubbings, the injection of disgusting liquids, the head knocked against sharp corners, none of it has had the desired effect. Death won’t come, and so they continue to inflict punishment. Death arrives, finally, almost unlooked for, so that the murderers’ grotesque claim becomes a hair more plausible, the claim that they repeated over and over during the trial hearings and the appeals, that they believed that the girls, there, in the car trunk, were alive. In a certain sense, it might even be true that they believed it, in the light of their overall delirium: if they weren’t dead after the treatment they’d been given, then they never would die. Let’s be clear, however: not because they ever intended to kill them. Far from it! They did their best to kill them, but then, when they were finally, really dead (or, rather, when one of them was dead and the other pretended to be), it had long since become unthinkable either that they could die or that they could remain alive. In that repetitive game, no one really dies, no one can die. The coyote is bound to emerge for the hundredth time from the canyon into which he has fallen.
Bruised and battered, but alive.
Between the real corpse and the fake one who starts shouting from inside the car trunk, there really isn’t all that much difference. You might say, as in Schrödinger’s well-known paradox, that they are simultaneously alive and dead.
The difference lies in an index of probability. The murderous acts are somehow candid, as if they entailed no consequences. For that matter, what could be more childish than to park a car with the victims in the trunk and go to get a gelato? A gelato? With two dead bodies in the trunk? The only thing that could be less believable than that would be if they thought they were still alive—as in fact the defendants maintained—but even then, even if you have two bloodied girls on the brink of death in the trunk of your car—what the hell, a nice gelato is just what you need. A snack. Among the many expressions coined and publicized by the press, which became grimly proverbial, none seems to fit the protagonists of these merry excursions better than “compagni di merende,” literally, snackmates. A term that blends a slightly vulgar playfulness, friendship, immaturity—and ferocity. And then there’s the prod of hunger, the need for “something sweet,” the same urge that overheated, sweaty children felt after a soccer match with their friends, as they ran to Mamma to beg for the snacks advertised on TV. Years later, when he killed again, Angelo would devote just as much care to the making of sandwiches to slake his hunger as he would to the murder of a mother and her daughter. It’s true, there is an art of making panini. A pity to waste them after making them. It was said of another famous murderer that, after killing two kids, “he ate their hamburgers.” Actually, it turns out, he ate their apple pie. Just one more reason to sentence him to death.
I HAVE BEFORE my eyes a famous image, in which a name is carved into a girl’s chest with the point of a knife. Blood sprays from every letter. It’s from The Last House on the Left, a film I will never tire of coming back to.
Locking two girls in a car trunk is something that the maniacs in the film The Last House on the Left did three years before the CR/M: that’s how they transported the girls they raped from the city to the countryside, from New York to Connecticut—whereas Angelo and his accomplice were taking them back to the city, from Monte Circeo to Rome. That film has pursued me, obsessed me for years, just as it has obsessed the people who shot it and acted in it. It was originally supposed to be called Sex Crime of the Century, or else Night of Vengeance. At first it had been conceived and written as a porn film, then someone noticed that the sex scenes were superfluous, and that observation proved to be starkly accurate, because when you mix together eros and violence, to create an exciting blend, the eros acts as a fuse but then it becomes unnecessary, while the violence turns out to be more than sufficient. Violence is more logical, it has more narrative consistency. A succession of sex acts just gets boring.
AS IN THE CR/M, all that was needed to eroticize a scenario destined to acco
mmodate torture and death was the simple premise: two attractive young women, alone (one of them is turning seventeen that very day, and Dad and Mom are baking a birthday cake for her, with her name, Mary, written on it in icing, with lots of little hearts), two attractive young women, alone, at the mercy of a gang of perverts. What could the gang do with them? Rape them, the mind runs straight to that predictable consequence. Sexual abuse hovers over any girl who ventures to become independent, autonomous. The same punishment will be visited on both the naïve girl and the seductive one. Therefore, when the girls fall into the trap, the spectator ritualistically finds himself saying: “Well, you asked for it.” But then the story moves on from that point: rape is merely a passage, and not even an especially obligatory one; in this story, the rapists almost seem to be engaging in it against their will . . .
I saw it with my father at the Empire cinema, one August afternoon, and the place was air-conditioned. There were three of us in the theater, my father, me, and a third spectator, and when the movie was over and the lights came up, the other man walked past us on his way to the exit. As he went by, he raised his eyebrows and assured us that “all’s well that ends well.” Just a few moments earlier, the father of the girl who had been tortured and murdered had cut the rapist’s torso in half with a chain saw, spattering blood all over the sheriff, who had finally burst into the house in the very last scene, shouting: “John! For God’s sake, don’t!”
WHEN HE WAS A BOY, the director of the film had been forbidden to watch movies and shows, listen to music, or even play. And this is the result of that puritan upbringing.
IT WAS IN THOSE YEARS that the love generation made way for the hate generation.
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