Honor Bound:

by Raffaele Sollecito

  "Come by the bar later on and we'll see." With that, she headed home to change her clothes.

  Tozzetto was already feeling like a third wheel, and he wasn't enthusiastic about tagging along to Le Chic. But I didn't want to go alone—I'd never set foot inside before and it wasn't the kind of place that I frequented. So I offered to buy him a drink.

  Tozzetto said he wanted to call two other friends and go out with them instead. I wouldn't take no for answer. In the end, I paid for everyone.

  The bar was dark and poky, and the customers were not my kind of people. It belonged to a Congolese immigrant named Diya Lumumba, whom everyone knew as Patrick. His crowd was transient—foreigners, musicians, people passing through for reasons both good and maybe not so good. Amanda had been introduced to Patrick through an Algerian named Juve, who also worked at Le Chic. From what Amanda told me, Juve was the kind of guy who latched onto every girl in sight. She gave me no reason to feel any better about being there.

  The place was crowded, but we found a couch to squeeze onto. As the last of Tozzetto's friends sat down, a lever on the side of the couch suddenly fell with a clunk—just as Amanda walked up to greet us. Her face fell and her mood changed immediately. She looked around furtively, clearly worried that her boss would blame her in some way for breaking the furniture. So I sprang up and offered to fix it. For several minutes I struggled with the lever on my hands and knees and eventually screwed it back into place. To my surprise, the entire bar broke out in spontaneous applause. For a moment I felt embarrassed, but then I saw Amanda beaming and it dawned on me I might actually have a chance with her.

  "Do you want to go for a walk or something after you finish your shift?" I asked.

  She smiled and said she would.

  My friends took that as their cue to leave, and I was left staring at the ceiling and wondering how to pass the time until she was free. Eventually I wandered over to the bar and chatted with Patrick, who was perfectly amiable. I'm not a big drinker and didn't want another beer, so I ordered a tonic water and waited until well after midnight.

  Perugia was full of foreign students, and a lot of my fellow Italians saw the women as easy targets—good for a quick roll in the hay, or a discreet affair on the side, with a built-in guarantee that sooner or later they would head back where they came from. But that wasn't at all how I felt. I'm too dreamily romantic to think of using women that way. For me, it's always been true love or nothing. Given my overprotected childhood and my introverted personality, "nothing" had been the prevailing story line to that point—for which my friends teased me incessantly. When I came back from a year abroad in Munich, in 2006, they laughed that I was the first person in the history of the Erasmus student-exchange program to leave home a virgin and come back still a virgin.

  I'd only had one girlfriend before Amanda, another transplant from my home region of Apulia, on the Adriatic coast. We met at a birthday party a few months after I returned to Perugia from. Germany. Neither of us knew entirely what we were doing—she was as inexperienced as I—but we muddled our way through our first time, both rather pleased to have got it out of the way. The relationship was short-lived; when my grandmother died, a month after we started seeing each other, I headed home for the funeral and broke up with her before I returned. Getting into a serious relationship was the last thing on my mind—I didn't have the headspace for it. I was happier focusing on my studies and kickboxing and thinking about my future.

  Now that graduation was upon me, I was planning to leave Perugia for good in a few weeks. Foremost in my mind was the pressure I was feeling from my father to apply for a nine-month internship at a prestigious university in Milan. He was planning to take me there as soon as we'd celebrated my graduation. We talked about it incessantly, usually several times a day. As he knew, I was more interested in enrolling in a master's degree program in Ireland, and working toward my dream of becoming a video-game designer. But my father, a doctor specializing in urology and my only living parent, was both highly protective and a difficult man to say no to. So I agreed to apply to Milan. The last thing I wanted was to start one of my family's notoriously melodramatic fights, which some of my relatives seemed to thrive on but which always left me feeling debilitated. I did want to make my father proud; that much was important to me. But figuring out how to please him while also establishing my independence was a skill I had yet to master.

  I can now say, looking back, that meeting Amanda was a glorious escape from these concerns. She was an accomplished student, like me, but also quite unlike anyone I had ever met. As she told me on the walk we took after she finished her shift at Le Chic, she was a third-year student at Seattle's University of Washington and was studying German as well as Italian. So we had another language in common. She, like me, was the child of divorced parents, and she too was close to her family—stepparents, step siblings, and all. She had arrived in Perugia a month earlier and found a room in a house just outside the city walls, which she shared with two Italian women at the beginning of their legal careers and a young English student named Meredith Kercher.

  Meredith had, in fact, accompanied Amanda to the concert but left at the interval, just before Amanda and I set eyes on each other. If Meredith had stayed, chances are we would never have started talking and things would have worked out very differently.

  * * *

  Our walk seemed to last for hours. We strolled down Corso Baglioni toward the piazza where we shared our first kiss. We admired the views and talked about our families and exchanged many more kisses until we were too cold to continue. I asked Amanda if she wanted me to walk her home, or if she'd like to come back to my place to watch a movie.

  I wasn't expecting her to accept my invitation; it's just one of those questions that Italian men feel compelled to ask.

  "Okay," she answered, "I can come to your house."

  Her answer took me completely by surprise. Where I was brought up, in the traditional-minded Italian South, women who say yes on the first date are regarded as suspect, and men are warned against getting involved with them. But Amanda didn't seem to be one of those girls. She was gentle and genuine, and even my bafflement couldn't mask how thrilled I was that the night was turning out so well.

  "Aren't you afraid to be out with me?" I asked. How is it that you trust me?

  "I don't know," she said, "but I trust you." el lien she took me by the hand and smiled, and my heart melted. The lightning bolt had hit its target.

  * * *

  I took Amanda back to my one-room apartment on Corso Garibaldi, just a few steps away from the University for Foreigners. At night, the area attracted drug dealers and street bums, but they mostly kept to themselves and were easy to avoid; for all the subsequent talk about this being a brutta zona, a bad neighborhood, it never struck me as particularly dangerous. I showed Amanda around and invited her to plop down on the bed while I loaded a film on my computer. 01 course, by the time I settled in next to her, all thoughts of the movie were quickly forgotten and we pulled each other's clothes off before the opening credits finished rolling.

  When I woke up the next morning, Amanda still had her arms wrapped tightly around me. I remember feeling safe and warm in a way I hadn't since I was a little kid. We related in a sweet, almost childlike way, maybe because we didn't share a native language. I helped her with her Italian, she corrected my English, we found common ground in German, and everything felt fresh and new. Amanda brought me back to my childhood, a time of purity and carefree abandon long since overshadowed by family disputes and reversals of fortune, none worse than the death of my mother in 2005. It was as if Amanda had found an old dresser, dusted it off, and opened a drawer full of toys and beautiful objects that had been locked away for a long time.

  Did I fall hard for her? Absolutely. Did she feel as strongly about me? No, but as we first got to know each other, I preferred not to let that trouble me. I was floating high in a pristine, azure sky, and 1 just wanted to keep floating.


  * * *

  1 didn't know what I should tell my family about Amanda, so for a day or two I said nothing at all. I knew I wouldn't be able to hold back for long because my father called several times a day and he would have sniffed out any real reticence in about two minutes flat. Besides, we were in the habit of discussing everything, even the most intimate parts of our lives. That's a Southern Italian thing; families in my part of the world are all over each other's business and treat everyone's ups and downs as their own. But we Sollecitos had also developed a special bond because of my mother's sudden death. She and my father had been divorced for years, but once she was gone, he went into protective overdrive with me and my older sister, Vanessa. We didn't always welcome his intrusions and fought bitterly with him from time to time. Vanessa would sometimes cut off communication for weeks or months and insist on going her own way, but not me. I kept right on talking, no matter what.

  By the time I did talk about Amanda, she and I were more or less inseparable. We shopped together, cooked together, strolled around the town's center, and unfailingly slept at my apartment every night.

  We were apart only when she had to go to class or I had an appointment with my thesis director. Such instant closeness felt right to me. We didn't have a plan; we just took care of each other and lived in the moment. I would climb in the shower and help her get clean, and afterward I would comb out the knots in her long, straight hair.

  When I told my father about this, he said I treated her more like a doll than a girlfriend, and he had a point. I did not have much experience being in a relationship, but playing with dolls was something that came naturally. When 1 was a kid, Vanessa was not remotely interested in her Barbie collection—she was too much of a tomboy—so I played with them instead. I was an unusual child that way. Barbie and I went on adventures together, faced down monsters, and had our romantic moments. A little odd, I will admit. But as a child I had a limitless imagination and didn't see much difference between Barbies and super heroes and the fantasy characters I encountered in video games.

  Papa was not hugely enthusiastic about Amanda, but neither was he entirely negative. He was touched that I had found someone who made me happy, but he also wanted to make sure I was getting on with my work. "You need to finish your thesis," he admonished, and, remember, you're going to Milan." I had not forgotten. Vanessa, being Vanessa, was much blunter. "What do you think you are doing?" she railed. "You're going crazy for someone who is going to go back to America, and you'll never see her again."

  She would keep up a similar barrage against Amanda for the next four years.

  * * *

  I visited Amanda's house at number 7 Via della Pergola the day after I met her and went back twice more over the next week. It was just a few minutes' walk from me, down Corso Garibaldi to Piazza Grimana and the University for Foreigners, then around a corner to the left where the city walls gave way to a large ravine and a dramatic vista. The house felt a little isolated, perched on the edge of the wilderness across the street from a large city parking lot. Inside, though, it was a typical student dwelling, filled with books and computers and cheap furniture. Everyone went about their business and talked mostly when they ran into each other. "The four women occupied the upper floor of the house; downstairs were four male students, who were quite a bit rowdier and kept pot plants in one of' their bathrooms.

  Laura and Filomena, Amanda's Italian roommates, welcomed me warmly, and we often chatted together in our native language. Once or twice, I brought food and cooked them lunch. Laura was the more cynical of the two, all skin and bones and nervous energy and ear piercings; I remember her wondering aloud whether love and sex could really coexist. Could a man be relied upon to commit to a relationship, she asked, or was it better to look for a friend with benefits? I didn't have a whole lot to say on the subject and suspected she was poking fun, however gently, at the way Amanda and I were joined at the hip. Piccioncini was how she later characterized us in court. Little lovebirds.

  Amanda and Meredith, meanwhile, talked in English—at a speed I couldn't have kept up with even if I tried. Still, I didn't get much of an impression of Meredith the few times I saw her at the apartment. She was well-mannered but a little distant, as English people can often be. The one time I offered her food, she had already eaten and politely turned it down. I noticed one day that she was wearing men's jeans, and she told me they belonged to a boyfriend she had left behind at home. I found that oddly endearing.

  Mostly, I craved time alone with Amanda, and for that reason we were much more often at my house. My father reminded me that when I first moved to Perugia, he and my stepmother, Mara, and I had toured some of the hill towns in the area. "Why don't you take Amanda to some of the same places?" he suggested.

  Right, a date, I thought. I was more than happy to take him up on the suggestion. A month earlier, I had bought a brand-new black Audi A3, half of it an early graduation present from my father and the other half paid out of the rental income I received from my mother's estate. I was proud of my new car and loved the idea of touring Amanda around in it. Our first stop was to be Assisi, the spiritual home of St. Francis.

  This was maybe three or four days into our relationship. The night before we left, I noticed she was chatting on Facebook with an American friend. I asked who he was. Right away, she explained that she, like Meredith, had left behind a boyfriend when she came to Italy. His name was David Johnsrud, known as D.J., and they were still in regular contact. In fact, they chatted or e-mailed almost every day. D.J. was spending his junior year in China, and given the distance, it hadn't made sense for them to stay together as a couple.

  I could tell just by looking at Amanda that she was still attached to him. Even though we'd known each other only a few days, I had fallen for her—and it hurt.

  "But we're no longer together, Raffaele," she said.

  I had no reason to doubt her, but I also knew she wasn't over him and wasn't able to give her heart fully to me. As the conversation went on, I learned she had just bought a ticket to China to visit D.J. later in the year, and my suspicions were confirmed.

  If I felt crushed, I was not about to admit it. So I met a nice girl, I told myself, and we had fun for a few days. Whatever. It not as though she was the love of my life. So what if I was just some guy to keep her company and nothing more? We had some nice moments together, but this wasn't exactly the romance of the century. If its finished, I'll get over it.

  At least, that's what I told myself.

  I took her to Assisi anyway. The decision wasn't destined to win the respect of my friends or family, but I followed through just the same.

  If an Italian man feels there's more than one other person in a relationship, then his pride should—in theory—lead him to turn his back and say good-bye. Right away. I was brought up to believe that a strong sense of belonging is at the heart of all relationships. It's absolute commitment, or nothing. If the woman is looking over her shoulder or thinking about someone else, it's tantamount to cheating. For the man to stay with her is to be branded a cuckold or a fool—which is exactly how my friends saw me.

  But I knew that my days with Amanda were numbered, one way or another, and I was having far too much fun to give her up so soon. I decided I'd take it day by day and felt comfortable with that approach. If you don't live while you can, I thought, what's the point?

  In Assisi, I took particular pleasure in visiting St. Francis's tomb, which had been closed when I was there with my parents. Amanda and I strolled around, ate pizza, and bought incense. A perfect day out.

  Back in Perugia, we settled into long, carefree evenings watching movies and listening to music. Sometimes I'd work on my thesis, while Amanda strummed her guitar and sang Beatles songs or did her yoga stretches on the floor. We made elaborate dinners. When I didn't know how to cook something, I would call my father's house to get the recipe. Amanda called herself my sous-chef. We were both Harry Potter fans and read to each other from the German ed
ition of the first book, which Amanda brought round to my house. Bizarrely, it became a significant piece of evidence at trial. Harry Potter tend der Stein der Weisen.

  The days began to blend into each other. We went to bed a lot, but neither of us slept well. I wasn't used to having a woman in my bed and woke up several times a night. Amanda tended to be up at 5:00 a.m. every morning, which she chalked up to the aftereffects of jet lag. So our time together felt a little restless and blurry. That did no harm to our romance, but it was lousy preparation for witnesses in a murder case.

  * * *

  October 31 was the first day since our meeting that Amanda and I spent almost completely apart. In the morning I was invited to a friend's graduation ceremony, and I went to another friend's house for much of the afternoon. Amanda had class, then focused on her plans for Halloween, a big deal for Perugia's foreign students, though it meant nothing to us Italians. She and I did not meet up until late afternoon, at which point she drew cat whiskers on her face in makeup and, knowing my passion for Japanese comics, scrawled an abstract design on me. I didn't feel like going out, so I worked on my thesis while Amanda walked over to Le Chic to meet up with some of her friends there. She had hoped to spend the evening with Meredith, but Meredith's British girlfriends didn't like her—they found her too unrestrained in the way she acted and talked and burst into song whenever she felt like it—and Meredith never responded to her text suggesting they meet.