A Walk in the Dark

by Gianrico Carofiglio

  “So he doesn’t envisage treating you for the rest of your life?”

  “Of course not.”

  “When you’ve completely overcome your problems, you’ll be able to stop seeing him, is that right?”

  Martina finally turned to him, looking like a little girl who wonders why adults are so stupid. She didn’t answer, and he didn’t insist. There was no need. He’d got what he wanted. I’d have liked to smash his face, but he’d been good.

  Delissanti paused for a long time, to let the result he had obtained sink in. His face seemed expressionless. But if you looked closely, you caught a hint of something vaguely brutal and obscene.

  “Is it true that once, in the course of an argument at which a number of other people – your mutual friends – were present, Professor Scianatico lost his temper and said to you, and I quote, ‘You’re a compulsive liar, you’re unbalanced, you’re unreliable, you’re a danger to yourself and others’?” Delissanti’s tone was different now. He hammered home the words “compulsive liar”, “unbalanced”, “unreliable”, “danger”. Anyone listening with half an ear would have had the impression of a lawyer insulting a witness. Which, when you got down to it, was precisely what Delissanti was doing. An old, cheap trick, designed to provoke the witness into losing his or her cool. Sometimes it works.

  I was about to object, but at the last moment I held back. If I objected, I thought, it would be obvious I was afraid, and was thinking Martina wasn’t capable of answering and getting through the cross-examination. So I stayed in my seat and said nothing. In the few seconds that passed between Delissanti’s question and Martina’s answer, I felt the muscles of my legs tensing and my heart beating faster. The signs of a body that’s about to act by instinct and then is stopped by a command from the brain. Just like when you’re about to hit someone and then a flash of reason stops you.

  I was certain that Alessandra Mantovani had made the same mental journey. When I turned to her, I saw that she was shifting slightly in her seat, as if a moment earlier she had pushed herself to the edge, ready to stand up and object.

  Then Martina answered. “I think so. I think he said that kind of thing to me. More than once.”

  “What I want to know is if you remember a specific occasion on which these things were said in the presence of mutual friends. Do you remember?”

  “No, I don’t remember a specific occasion. I’m sure he said things like that to me. He said a lot of other things too. For example—”

  Delissanti interrupted her, in the curt, arrogant tone of someone addressing a subordinate who isn’t carrying out his orders correctly. “I’m not interested in the other things, Signorina. My question is whether you remember that particular quarrel, not—”

  “Your Honour, can we at least let the witness finish her answers? If counsel for the defence asks a question to understand the context in which certain words – extremely offensive words, by the way – were used, he cannot then arbitrarily limit this context to what he wants to hear, and censor the rest of the witness’s story. Apart from anything else, using an unacceptably intimidating tone.”

  Alesssandra was still on her feet when Delissanti rose in his turn, almost shouting.

  “Take care what you’re saying. I won’t allow a public prosecutor to address me in that tone and with such objections.”

  I don’t know how Alessandra managed to get a word in edgeways with all that ranting and raving, but she came out with a single sentence, as short, quick and deadly as a knife thrust.

  “No, Avvocato, you take care.” She said it in a tone that froze the blood. There was a violence in those hissed words that left everyone present dumbfounded, including me.

  At this point, Caldarola remembered he was the judge and that maybe he ought to intervene.

  “Please calm down, all of you. I don’t see the reason for this animosity and I’m asking you to stop it now. Let each person do his job and try to respect that of others. Have you any other questions, Avvocato Delissanti?”

  “No, Your Honour. I take note that the witness either can’t or won’t recall the episode to which I refer. Professor Scianatico can tell us the story, and so, above all, can the witnesses we have indicated on our list. That is all.”

  “Does the public prosecutor have anything to add to her previous examination?”

  “Yes, I have a couple of questions, the necessity for which has emerged as a result of the cross-examination.”

  Technically, it wasn’t necessary for her to say that. But it was a way of underlining that this extension of the plaintiff’s testimony – which was sure to be unfavourable to the defendant – was due to a mistake on the part of counsel for the defence. In other words, it wasn’t a gesture of reconciliation.

  “Dottoressa Fumai, would you like to tell us the other things the defendant said to you? To be more precise, the things you were about to tell us when you were interrupted.”

  Martina spoke about them, these other things. She spoke about the other humiliations, apart from the blows and the mental cruelty she had talked about before. Scianatico had told her she was a failure. Only one good thing had ever happened to her: she’d met him and he’d decided to take care of her. She was incapable of making decisions about her own life, and so she had to carry out his orders and his instructions on how to behave. She had to be disciplined, and to know her place.

  He’d told her she was a bitch, and bitches had to obey their masters.

  She told it all, and her voice wasn’t cracked or weak. But maybe it was worse. It was neutral, toneless, colourless. As if something had broken inside her again.

  Caldarola adjourned for three weeks and set out a kind of schedule for the trial. At the following hearing, we would have the other witnesses for the prosecution. Then the defendant would be examined. Finally, over the course of two hearings, we would have the witnesses for the defence, including the expert witness.

  I said goodbye to Alessandra Mantovani, and turned to the exit of the courtroom to follow Martina, who had left the witness stand and was just a few steps ahead of me. It was at that moment that I saw Sister Claudia. She was standing, leaning on the rail. She seemed lost in thought. Then I realized she was looking at Scianatico and Delissanti. She was looking at them in a way I’ll never forget, and catching that look I thought, without having any real control over my thoughts, that this was a woman who was capable of murder.

  It may seem incredible, but in the months before that afternoon, I’d found a kind of absurd equilibrium. He’d do – and make me do – those things. All I wanted was for it to end as quickly as possible. Then I’d leave the room and hide what had happened. I was a sad girl, I didn’t have friends, but I had Snoopy, and my little sister, and the books I got from school and read whenever I had a free moment. I don’t think my mother ever really noticed anything, until that day.

  After that rainy afternoon, I don’t know how, but I spoke to her. No, that’s not quite right. I tried to speak to her. I don’t remember what I said exactly. I’m sure I didn’t tell her everything that had happened. I think I was trying to see if I could speak to her, if she was prepared to listen to me – if she was prepared to help me.

  She wasn’t.

  As soon as she realized what I was talking about she got ver y angry. I was making up horrible things. I was a bad girl. Did I want to ruin our family, after all the sacrifices she’d made to keep it going? That was more or less what she said, and I didn’t say any more.

  A few days later, I came back from school and Snoopy wasn’t there. I looked for him in the yard, I looked for him outside, in the street. I asked everyone I met if they’d seen him, but nobody knew anything. If pain exists in its purest, most desperate form, I felt it that morning. If I think again about that moment, I see a silent, washed-out scene in black and white.

  That afternoon he called me into his bedroom and I didn’t go. He called me again, and I didn’t go. I was in the kitchen, on a chair, my arms around my knees. With
my eyes wide open, not seeing anything. I don’t think there are many feelings or emotions that go together as strongly as hate and fear. Then you act one way or the other depending on which is stronger. Fear. Or hate.

  He came to get me in the kitchen and dragged me to the bedroom. For the first time, I tried to resist. I don’t really know what I did. Maybe I tried to kick him or punch him. Or maybe I didn’t just freeze and let him do it. He was surprised, and furious. He hit me hard, as he raped me. Slaps and punches, in the face, on the head, in the ribs.

  And yet – strangely – when he’d finished I didn’t feel worse than the other times. Sure, I hurt all over, but I also felt a strange, fierce joy. I’d rebelled. Things would never be the same as before. He understood too, in his way.

  When my mother came home she saw the bruises on my face. I looked at her without saying anything, thinking she would ask me what had happened. Thinking that now, faced with the evidence, she would believe me and help.

  She turned away. She said something about making dinner, or something else she had to do.

  He opened a big bottle of beer and drank it all. At the end he gave a silent, obscene belch.

  27

  I was lying sprawled on the sofa in my apartment, waiting for Margherita to come home and call me upstairs for dinner. I liked the fact that, even though we were more or less living together, going up to her place in the evening was like being invited out. Even though it just meant walking up two floors. It made things less obvious. Not predictable.

  I was listening to Transformer by Lou Reed. The album that includes “Walk on the Wild Side”.

  Not a CD, but a genuine, original vinyl LP. With lots of crackles and pops.

  I’d bought it that afternoon, in my so-called lunch break. Whenever I had a lot to do, for example when I had an appointment early in the afternoon, I didn’t go back home for lunch. I’d go to one of the bars in the centre, where the bank clerks eat, and have a roll and a beer standing up. Then I’d take advantage of the break to visit a bookshop or record shop that didn’t close for lunch.

  That afternoon I’d ended up in a little shop run by a young man who played bass in a band: they played a kind of jazz rock, and were actually quite good. I’d heard them play several times, in the kinds of places I went to at night. The kinds of places where, in the last few years, I’d started to get the nasty feeling I was out of place.

  Playing jazz rock, or whatever it was, didn’t provide much of a living, though, especially as he and his band refused to play at weddings. So he sold records, though the hours he kept were very personal. There were days when he stayed closed without warning, others when he opened about eleven in the morning and stayed open without interruption until night time, when the place attracted some very strange, surreal people. The kind who made you wonder where they hid themselves during the day.

  Apart from new CDs, the shop also stocked a lot of old vinyl LPs, strictly second, third or fourth hand. That morning, on the LP shelf, I found an original American copy of Transformer, sealed in plastic. It was a record I’d never owned, though I’d had various cassettes with a few of the songs from it, and had lost or destroyed all of them.

  I’m one of the few people who still own a turntable in perfect working order, and I didn’t think I should let this record go. When I got to the cash desk – or rather when I got to the chair where the bass player was sitting reading Il mucchio selvaggio – and heard the price, I thought maybe I could let it go after all, buy a remastered version, and with what I had left over have a meal in a luxury restaurant.

  A throwback to my teenage years, when I didn’t have any money. Now I earned much more than I knew what to do with. So – without the bassist/cashier being remotely aware of this interior monologue – I took out the money, paid, got him to give me a bag, insisting on a used one, put in old Lou with his Frankenstein face, and left.

  I’d played the record through once, and was about to start the turntable again, put the needle back down and listen a second time, when Margherita called me and told me I could come up, she was prepared to feed me again tonight.

  She’d made beans and endives, in the old way, the country way. Bean purée, wild endives, red onions from Acquaviva, hard bread and, on a separate plate, fried peppers. The peasant my parents bought fruit, vegetables and fresh eggs from when I was a child would have said this was a real luxury.

  For me, there was also a bottle of Aglianico del Vulture.

  Only for me. Margherita doesn’t drink wine, or any alcohol. She’d been an alcoholic for many years before I met her, then she’d recovered and now she has no problem if someone drinks in her presence. “In ten days I have my first jump. Weather permitting.”

  She’d really gone and done the parachute course. She’d finished the theory and the physical preparation, and now she was getting ready to throw herself into empty space from a height of thirteen to sixteen hundred feet. While she talked, I tried to imagine it, and felt something like a hand clutching me in the pit of my stomach.

  She was still talking, but her voice grew distant, while my mind went whirling back to a spring afternoon many years before.

  There are three little boys on the sun roof of an eight-storey building. Surrounding this sun roof is a low parapet, and around that a ledge, more than three feet wide, almost like a footpath. Beyond that footpath, empty space. Terrible in its banality, with cats and shabby plants in the yard below.

  One of the boys – the one who’s best at football, has already smoked a few cigarettes, and can explain to the others what their willies are really for, apart from peeing – suggests a contest to test their courage.

  He challenges the other two to climb over the parapet and walk along the ledge all the way round the edge of the roof. He doesn’t just say it, he does it. He climbs over and starts walking fast, all the way round, and climbs back over to safety. Then the second boy tries. He takes the first steps hesitantly, then he too walks quickly and before long he too has finished.

  Now it’s the third boy’s turn. He’s afraid, but not that much. He doesn’t really fancy walking so close to empty space, but it doesn’t seem too dangerous to him. The other two have done it with no problems and so he can do it too, he thinks. As long as he keeps close to the parapet, just to be on the safe side.

  So he climbs over too, a little clumsily – he’s not very agile, certainly less so than the others – and starts to walk, looking at his two companions. He walks, running his hand along the inside of the parapet, as if for support. The one who’s good at football and knows all about the use of the willy, and so on, says that’s cheating. He has to take his hand away and walk in the middle of the ledge, not leaning over, as he’s doing. If not, it’s cheating, he repeats.

  So the boy takes his hand away, shifts a few inches closer to the edge, and takes a few steps. Short steps, looking at his feet. But looking at his feet he can’t help his eyes moving until they focus on a point all the way down there in the yard. It’s less than a hundred feet, but it’s like an abyss that can suck everything in. Where everything must end.

  The boy looks away and tries to move forward. But now the abyss has entered into him. At that precise moment, he realizes he’s going to die. Maybe not just then, maybe another time, but he is going to die.

  He understands what it means, with a sudden, absolute insight.

  So he grips the parapet and lowers his body, until he’s almost kneeling. As if to present less surface to the wind – in fact it’s only a light breeze – which might make him lose his balance.

  Now he’s almost hunched over that low wall with his back to the abyss, and he doesn’t have the courage to stand up again, not even enough to climb back over to the other side, and safety.

  His two friends are saying something, but he can’t hear themor rather, he can’t understand what they’re saying. But suddenly he starts to feel afraid of something else. That they’ll come closer and play a joke on him, like making a gesture as if to push hi
m, or climbing over again themselves to play some terrifying game.

  So he says Help me, Mummy, he says it under his breath, and he feels as if he wants to cry, very loud. Then, starting from his hunched position, he slowly clambers over the parapet, almost crawling, scratching his hands, grazing his knees and all that. If he stood up it would be easy to climb over, but he can’t stand up, he can’t run the risk of looking down again.

  Finally he’s back on the other side. The other two tease him and he lies, he tells them that as he was walking he twisted his ankle and that’s why he couldn’t go on, that’s why he climbed over in that ridiculous manner, like a cripple. And then when they leave – and even in the days that follow – he makes sure he limps, to convince them the story about twisting his ankle was true, not just an excuse to hide his fear. He limps for a whole week, and repeats the story – to his two friends and to himself – so many times that in the end he himself can’t tell what he made up from what really happened.

  Ever since, at recurring intervals, the boy has dreamed of climbing over the railing of a terrace and jumping off. Directly and without hesitation. Sometimes he dreams of jumping on the railing and walking along it like a kind of mad tightrope walker, certain not that he can do it, but that he’ll fall at any moment – which promptly happens. At other times, he dreams about his two friends making fun of him, and then he runs to the railing, places a hand on it, and vaults over it, while they look on in amazement and alarm.

  That’ll teach them to make fun of me, he thinks as he wakes up, gripped by an overwhelming sadness, because his childhood is over, and because he could have been so many things. So many things he’ll never be.