The Twenty Days of Turin

by Giorgio de Maria

  “Giovanni hadn’t slept for a week and he couldn’t take any more. He had a weaker character than mine,” she said, her tone of voice suddenly normal. “He said he felt very tired but could never quite fall asleep . . . He spoke of a very deep lake . . . Instead of stones at the bottom of this lake, there were bas-reliefs.”

  “Was the lake dried out?”

  “Yes, it was a dry lake. That image was fixed in his mind: a lake with a very deep bottom. He said that even if the water came back, he wouldn’t be able to fully immerse himself . . . There wasn’t enough water . . . He felt that the bottom of his lake had suddenly been raised, as if someone, from below, had pushed it up . . . And that there was no real difference between the depth of the lake and anything else, not the city, not the asphalt, not this house . . .” Her accent turned dramatic mentioning the house. She wiped her eyes again and continued. “He couldn’t fall asleep because he couldn’t sink into the lake, and this even made him furious. He kicked the furniture! The chairs! And he used to be such a gentle person . . . Then eventually he calmed down, at least he seemed to calm down . . . ”

  I watched her spring up and pace across the room to and fro, clasping her hands in torment.

  “But you still slept, signorina?” I insinuated.

  “Yes, I slept, but I woke up often in the night and heard him in the next room fidgeting. His whole situation felt so . . . ­regrettable . . . Yes, it really did tear my heart! Sleeping pills couldn’t help him; they couldn’t lower the bottom of his lake. There was nothing that could lower it . . . I remember him talking about space, about room . . . He wanted room! He said that within him there was no room left, no more space to move, to turn around. He said something horrible as well: ‘Even if I wanted to kill myself, I wouldn’t find the space to die!’ ”

  “And then he went out that night.”

  “He left because he hoped that the streets, the squares, the avenues would restore something within him that had ­vanished . . . He thought that looking at the sky, the heavens . . .”

  She began to sob. I had to wait for her to calm down before asking about those bas-reliefs she had mentioned.

  “The bas-reliefs? Oh, I can’t remember well . . . He said that they were badly worn out . . . He seemed to recognize images of himself as a child and the faces of our mother and father . . . But then he wasn’t quite sure: they were too weather-beaten, too eroded . . .” She gave a long pause, sighing. “I had no idea what would happen later outside, why I didn’t try to hold him back when I saw him get dressed and make for the door. My place is here, in this house!” She said it proudly, with the tone of a vestal virgin.

  “And what happened after that?”

  “After? I don’t know. I wasn’t standing by the window to track him . . . He must have gone towards Corso Stati Uniti. I guess so, because they found him there the next day, next to a tree . . . I didn’t have the courage to go and identify him. Our uncle went and recognized him from a medallion around his neck. I really can’t understand what happened to him that night.” She sat down, gawking at me with moist, curious eyes, as if awaiting a response.

  “I think I might know,” I ventured to say.

  She tightened her corset, brought herself close enough for our knees to touch and seized me by the hand.

  “If you know, why don’t you tell me?” she said.

  “I know he left around two in the morning, dressed to the nines, because his family upbringing would never have allowed him to head out in pajamas, as it occurs to numerous others . . . ” She nodded eagerly. “And once he was outside, he came to Corso Castelfidardo, where he certainly found more people—other insomniacs like him. I don’t believe that your brother tried speaking to anyone. He wouldn’t have known what to say. No one spoke during that time.”

  “I know. He was a rather solitary person.”

  “He was obsessed by the dried-up lake, the bas-reliefs. He felt like he was being crushed by those images of stone and he was looking all around, searching for space. He was looking at houses, at treetops, at the stars . . .”

  “Poor Giovanni!”

  “Perhaps, watching the houses and the movement of the leaves, he tried to stir his imagination—who knows?—in an effort to loosen the grip of whatever was crushing him inside . . . That’s when he reached the flower bed where he found the monument.”

  “The monument to Vincenzo Vela?”

  “Indeed, yes. He must have stopped for a moment to look at it, unsure whether to proceed where the road curves or turn around into Corso Stati Uniti . . . His nose probably caught a strange vinegary smell, which at that time was fouling the air . . .”

  “It’s true, sometimes it came all the way here, even through the windows!”

  “But it’s likely he didn’t notice: the vinegar smell had become an almost natural occurrence, especially for anyone living in the city center. Perhaps he took a walk around the monument. Has he ever talked about that monument? “

  “No, but, well, yes! He mentioned it to me one day, half joking. It was to make me understand how his memory was starting to betray him because of insomnia. ‘Alda,’ he told me, ‘do you want to know something funny? I could swear the statues of Vincenzo Vela and Napoleon Bonaparte had swapped places. It isn’t Vela with his back turned on us, is it?’ No, I answered him, I’m sure it’s always been Napoleon’s back, or rather, the back of his armchair. He shrugged his shoulders and gave a sad smile. ‘Must be,’ he said.”

  “In that case, it’s likely that his torment was heightened looking at the monument. The gray figure of the sculptor and the white form of the dying Napoleon were very different from his bas-reliefs lying at the floor of a lake. They were sculpted in the round, and seemed almost alive by comparison. Prey to an inner anguish which had now reached its pinnacle, your brother made his way along Corso Stati Uniti. There must have been people on the street moving here and there, some crossing the road diagonally, others passing in straight lines. A few popped out from between parked cars, yawning and staggering: I can recall those nightly scenes well because I’d been there myself. There was something floating around, something ghostly. Your brother blended in with the rabble. Then, all of a sudden, I think he must have stopped.”

  “Next to the tree?”

  “I couldn’t say for sure, but certainly he stopped. His whole body must’ve stiffened. It might be that, hearing a noise behind him, the sound of footsteps, he still had the verve to turn around and see who was coming for him. But even if he saw, I don’t think he was astonished. None of those people were startled by what was going on. It was a natural occurrence, like insomnia, like the vinegar smell. And then the horrible thing arrived which slaughtered him, as we both know: grabbing him by the backs of his heels and slamming him hard against the trunk of a conker tree. Whoever witnessed the murder made certain they didn’t see anything. Was it fear? Indifference? And behind that silence, signorina, who’s hiding the mystery of the ‘Twenty Days’? It’s for this that we find ourselves here, to discuss it, to try to understand—”

  “Understand?” she shouted, shaking her head. “How could we—poor mortals—fathom the Lord’s inscrutable designs! We have sinned too much in pride, sinned with our hearts, with our senses, forgetting that spirituality . . .”

  She took away her hands and smiled at me softly. I sensed that she pitied me—pitied that I was still searching for truth with the limited means of the mind, when the way to reach it was so very different!

  II.

  THE NIGHT OF MAY THE EIGHTH

  THE ATTORNEY ANDREA SEGRE, as we’ll see, finds a place in our retrospective survey for reasons that are slightly complicated. His office and private residence are both located on Corso Galileo Ferraris, opposite the Gallery of Modern Art, on the second and third floors of an eigthteenth-century palace. It’s a well-aired, leafy setting, which old folk remember with nostalgia for the days when they could tread across the avenues and not find parked motorcars getting in the way. Away from the
boulevard, the property opens into a large residential area known locally as the “cottages,” a jumble of structures with their private gardens spread out aristocratically between them. You almost don’t notice the mixture of original styles and the by-products of the architectural imagination; at the discretion of their heights—two or three stories maximum—they very nearly blend into a single atmosphere of privilege. Cars are restricted here; only the “cottage” owners have the freedom to park.

  When I entered the attorney’s office, having made an appointment by phone, I was gripped with unease seeing the order that reigned in the room. A perfect arrangement of brown-spined books occupied three-quarters of the shelves in his library. In the remaining quarter there stood a Treccani encyclopedia, an entire set of Ricciardi’s Classics of Italian Literature, some Bibles and books with Hebrew titles. High culture in full battle array!

  I’d only just come from the Bergesio house, and the contrast was violent. Moreover, this wasn’t a situation where you could have a regular chat with someone, sitting in two armchairs. Segre dealt with me from the other side of a desk; his sage, professional look demanded respect. If I had come to see him about a legal matter, everything would have been different. But how would I open a discussion whose starting point might’ve been a fleeting memory in the mind of my interlocutor? I covered myself by notifying him that my visit wasn’t over any legal concerns, but I wanted it treated like a consultation—I had no plans to rob his precious time with chatter about a vague, dicey subject.

  Immediately I sensed him cheering up by his wry smile, coupled with a keen, incisive look, as if he’d guessed the reason for my visit. Of course, it was impossible that he’d guessed. How could he imagine that his name had reached my ears through a complex game of hearsay, leaking out from friends of journalists who remembered seeing him enter the editor’s office of a daily paper on the morning of May the ninth—rather shaken, it was said—to describe a strange nocturnal experience? He didn’t think he was the only one who’d witnessed it, and wanted it reported in the news. The papers didn’t run with it, but it was forever said that he’d insisted on carrying out a kind of private investigation in search of testimonies. Obtaining these, he’d return to the office—always in vain—after which he gave up and went back to his everyday life.

  Segre offered me a cigarette and lit it for me gladly, then put a pipe between his own teeth, having fiddled at length with the bowl.

  “Well, now?” he asked, looking down at me while his left hand stroked the hairs of a tousled, already graying beard. He had an aquiline nose, a slightly crooked one; it made him look like a hawk that had ruined its beak after nosediving badly into a mountain of rock.

  “I’m writing a book about the so-called ‘Twenty Days of Turin,’ ” I said, “and I’d like to speak to you to clarify a point.”

  He raised the pipe from his mouth and lowered his head, pressing chin to sternum. His lips drew back and his facial muscles tensed.

  “Yes, by all means tell,” he said in a strained voice.

  “I would be interested to find out some more about an event of which you were—how to put it?—an ear-witness. I’m referring to the night of May the eighth ten years ago, if I’m not mistaken on the date.”

  He raised his head and looked at me again without smiling.

  “And how would you know that I am—in your words—an ‘ear-witness,’ to something that would have happened so many years ago? Do allow me the question, out of simple curiosity.”

  I shrugged and arched my eyebrows, as if to let him know: ­Giving an explanation that would satisfy you could be a bit of a challenge.

  My answer seemed to relax him. He returned the pipe to his mouth and relit it.

  “I understand. In fact, I can’t claim to have made any thorough breakthroughs, dealing with such a hazy, uncertain matter. I’ve groped around for something to make it less intangible, but, as you well know, all my efforts were futile. I honestly can’t blame reporters for not giving weight to my words; even a serious and thorough attorney like me could be subject to short-term hallucinations—and I’m not ruling out that it was just a hallucination.”

  “An ear-hallucination,” I added.

  “Let’s call it what we like. If you have any familiarity with English ghost stories,* you’ll know that even ‘ear-hallucinations’ have a reputation around them: creaking chains, noblewomen moaning in castle towers. It’s an old and venerable tradition.”

  “Yes, but in ghost stories, the hallucinations are finally revealed to be well founded: the ghosts are there for real.”

  “In castles! But which castles do we have around here? Castello del Valentino at the Polytechnic campus? Here we have the automotive industry, we have the ethos of central-city Turin, we have the commonsense citizen who represents perhaps the solidest of our institutions . . . All of that would suffice to throw the most hardened army of specters into retreat!”

  “We also had . . . the Library,” I teased with a sneer.

  “Even the Library can be included in the ‘common sense’ category . . . There, it’s true, there have been some exaggerations, but—”

  Rrrr-ibbit! Rrrr-ibbit! the office phone croaked. Without taking his eyes away from me, Segre chuckled and picked up the receiver.

  I took a newspaper from his desk and began to read it: it’s always awkward listening to the conversations of others, especially in the midst of client-attorney privilege.

  Here, it felt Segre was trying on purpose to thwart me and slip out of our discussion. He spoke in a ringing voice, putting a special emphasis on legal terms like statement of defense and letter rogatory . . . Wallops of judicial realism, set to pulverize any speech I might have been assembling in my head. When he’d stopped talking to his client, he told me a vivid yarn in the spryest tone you could imagine. There was a poor husband who, coming home early, found his wife and his elderly father sauntering naked around the house—in front of his two-year-old daughter. Naturally, he demanded an explanation. So his wife sprang on him like a wildcat, shouting in his face: “What’s this? You really had no clue that Roberta wasn’t your daughter, and that your father wasn’t her granddad like you thought? But where have you been living this whole time?” Now they were trying to shift custody of the child to the legal father, citing the mother’s appalling behavior, and the case was in progress. Every day similar cases were happening, and it wasn’t even among the most extraordinary.

  “Small wonder too,” he added. “In this city, demons lurk under the ashes.”

  “And so they did ten years ago, it seems to me . . .”

  “Ten years ago, things looked different. It’s better today. And yet, the more things change . . .”

  “Would it surprise you, attorney,” I asked, weighing my words well, “if you happen to hear again, on one of these nights, what you heard on the night of May the eighth, before all those other frightening events happened?”

  He immediately noticed the little trap I had set him. Obviously he wasn’t expecting it, though he was the one who laid the scene with his allusions to hidden demons. But it was too late to fix my mistake. So I found him in front of me as I’d first seen him on entering his study: hard and professional. I feared our conversation would be cut short, but it wasn’t so.

  “I’d like to make some things clear now,” he said coldly. “The question you’ve posed to me is inappropriate. You’re asking me for a wholesale explanation of those events, forgetting that you—and not I—are the one planning to write a book on the Twenty Days. Hence it will fall on you, and not on me, to find the connections between this or that particular happening. Let’s suppose that, with effort, I managed to bring back an experience which appeared to me—I stress, appeared to me—as if it may have occurred in the past. Would you then consider me a helpful witness for your historical research? Fine, so long as you treat me purely as such. I don’t plan to make conjectures about the future. So what do you specifically want to know?”

  “A
description of your experience,” I said, guarding my tone.

  “That’s better. At least we understand each other. First, I might clarify that it wasn’t the night of May the eighth but the early hours of the ninth. Indeed so! It was two o’clock in the morning when it happened, right as I was getting ready for bed after working late. I was tired but still clearheaded enough to distinguish sleep from wakefulness. I’m sure then that it wasn’t a dream. As for those famous attacks of collective insomnia that struck the city that month, and were still in their early stages, I will say frankly that I’ve never suffered. Why? I don’t know how to answer that. Maybe because I’ve always traveled a lot due to my work. My character was too elusive to be grabbed by that kind of epidemic, it being so very localized. But let’s continue. I had just undressed, when suddenly . . .”

  He paused, looking down at me.

  “You know what usually happens in stories after the words, when suddenly . . . ?”

  I nodded. His sardonic look returned.

  “Something astonishing happens, without which the stories—”

  “Wouldn’t be stories,” I said.

  “Quite right, and there wouldn’t be much worth telling, but instead I will narrate it. I said this ten years ago to journalists who glanced at each other, looking, we might say, a bit perplexed. I said the same thing a second time in the company of certain people able to confirm my version of events, and they proved to be even more condescending. Naturally, there wasn’t a line in the papers about it, though I’m ready to bet that one of them must have heard what I, and others, heard that night . . .

  “In short, I was down to my underthings, on the floor above us, where I keep my bachelor pad, when, suddenly indeed, I heard a scream. What’s strange about hearing a scream coming from the street at two in the morning? A cry of terror might shake your every fiber and get you out on the balcony to see what’s going on. The trumpeting of an elephant, blaring in the city, could perhaps have a stronger effect, but we’re still in the province of acceptable things. This, however, was a very different affair. I had no words to describe the kind of scream I heard . . . Bestial? Inhuman? Yes, if anything, but that’s still being rather nonspecific. I’d describe it like a terrible war cry, with something dismal and metallic at the heart of it . . . It’s true. In fact, I didn’t believe it was a person or an animal: it had an inorganic quality. I’m not sure if I can express the idea to you.”