The Twenty Days of Turin

by Giorgio de Maria

  “Well, yes!” a third player butted in. “Everyone’s always known the two of you were a couple of fossils!”

  “You’re gonna have it now—mark my word! Calling us fossils, indeed!”

  And then there was silence again. Only the sounds of coughing and clearing of throats seemed to have the right to free expression.

  Small wonder, then, that an institution like the Library found space to take root. It was presented as a good cause, created in the hope of encouraging people to be more open with one another. Its creators were little more than boys: perky, smiling youngsters, well groomed and well dressed, without a trace of facial hair. They looked designed to win people’s trust. And who wouldn’t trust a cheerful, articulate young man who came calling at your door, inviting you to chat with him about this and that, about the meaning of life, about all the hunger and suffering in the world? It’s true; it was whispered that dark forces acted behind them, national and international groups hungry for vengeance after certain recent defeats. But who could believe such things in front of polite young lads who always looked you in the eye and shook your hand?

  Their friendly chats ended with a humble invitation to collaborate in the establishment of a “library.” It would be based in a hospital ward at the St. Cottolengo Little House of Divine Providence, a space large enough to hold shelves and a comfortable reading room.

  “And what could I do to contribute to this?” their hosts would ask without hiding their astonishment at the proposal.

  “Well, you, buddy”—the you-buddys flowed naturally from their mouths—“you could contribute by coming over to read, or bringing your own manuscripts, which will be archived and numbered and go towards forming the reading material. We’re not interested in printed paper or books. There’s too much artifice in literature, even when it’s said to be spontaneous. We’re looking for true, authentic documents reflecting the real spirit of the people, the kinds of things we could rightly call popular subjects . . . Is it possible that you’ve never written a diary, a memoir, a confession of some problem that really worries you?”

  “Yes, now that I think about it, I could write something . . .”

  “Very well, why don’t you bring it along? There’s definitely someone who’ll read it and take an interest in your problems. We’ll make sure to put them in touch with you and you’ll become friends; you’ll both feel liberated. It’s an important thing we do, considering how hard it’s gotten for people to communicate these days.”

  The monetary charges for “collaboration” weren’t enough to deter eager patrons: three hundred lire for a chance to read, six hundred to know an author’s name, three thousand for the acceptance of a manuscript. All proceeds went to the sole and exclusive benefit of patients at the Little House of Divine Providence. “As you see, this is also a work of charity. We need funds to improve care for patients, many of whom have . . . special needs beyond society’s understanding . . . and rely on the hospital’s free and confidential services. Divine Providence isn’t an airy-fairy thing as we’re commonly led to believe. Why, without practical assistance, who knows how many earthquake victims would still be living in tents . . . ?”

  The optimism radiating from those youngsters, their wholesome energy which ran against the historical mood, was the factor that went straight to people’s hearts. “So when can things get started?” people asked them. “For the time being, we’re open only on Sundays, but as soon as the initiative gets rolling, we hope to stay open every day.” It’s easy to imagine what happened in those households where the young men’s proposal had been favorably received: whole families (each member often oblivious to the doings of the others) went rummaging in search of scrapbooks that might’ve been forsaken in a soggy cellar. An old notepad full of yellowed pages and frayed memories, suddenly rediscovered and held up briefly to the light, regained a life that no one could ever have questioned. It was read again frantically by those who had written it. They’d notice the amount of things that had happened since the last entry—and hence the need to update it, to buy fresh notebooks for adding new experiences. If the Library needed “true documents,” it hardly mattered much to dwell on the structure. The pen could scribble freely whatever the spirit dictated. And once it started, it was hard to stop! The prospect of “being read” quivered in the distance like an enchanting mirage—a mirage as real, nonetheless, as the “realities” that were written down. I will give myself to you, you will give yourself to me: on these very human foundations, the future exchange would happen. Anyone hesitant to write could always save that privilege for later, after reading in the Library what their neighbors had confided. If the weight of loneliness became unbearable, the way out was well indicated: “Whose name matches reference number [XY]?” The young man working tirelessly in the Library could reveal it, and the chance of establishing a correspondence was open at last.

  I stayed up into the evening to trawl through those manuscripts. Upstairs, the watchmen were beginning to yawn and give signs of agitation. One came down to ask if I’d be at it much longer. In my hands, I had a dossier where a seventy-year-old, concluding a long diary, confided his desire to possess an eighteen-year-old virgin the same age as his granddaughter. I read through some ardent passages: “My dear, my delectable little girl, I’m still keen and equipped, don’t you know? Every night at six, I go to Leopardi Park and sit myself on the bench that’s near the myrtle hedges. I know that sooner or later you’re going to read what I’ve written and accept my invitation. You’ll know me by the book I’m reading: The Heart of a Boy by Edmondo de Amicis. My little heart is all for you! Come hither, little girl . . .” I heard the laughter of the watchman and threw the confession back into the pile.

  The nature of the place where the Library was founded—a sanatorium rumored to harbor the pitiably deformed—had proven a lure to people with no desire at all for “regular human communication.” I remember the case of a man who was normal in every respect, in words, in reasoning, in the practice of his profession, but strayed from this “normalcy” in only one way: his inexplicable need to fill thousands of sheets of foolscap paper with seemingly meaningless words, phonemes close to wailing sounds, cries of fury and pain in relentless successions, fragments of sentences and pleas addressed to God-knows-whom. All of this was so well organized in his memory that nobody he lived with could move one sheet from the piles that were growing day by day. The absence of a single page (felt immediately by his ultra-sensitive antennae) was enough to send him into a frenzy. The Library might’ve seemed like a refuge for a man like that . . . Everything could be deposited into the Library: works that were slender or unnaturally bulky, sometimes with a disarming naïveté in a world of slyness. Masterpieces could appear by accident, but they were about as easy to track down as a particle of gold in a heap of gravel. There were manuscripts whose first hundred pages didn’t reveal any oddity, which then crumbled little by little into the depths of bottomless madness; or works that seemed normal at the beginning and end, but were pitted with fearful abysses further inward. Others, meanwhile, were conceived in a spirit of pure malice: pages and pages just to indicate, to a poor elderly woman without children or a husband, that her skin was the color of a lemon and her spine was warping—things she already knew well enough. The range was infinite: it had the variety and at the same time the wretchedness of things that can’t find harmony with Creation, but which still exist, and need someone to observe them, if only to recognize that it was another like himself who’d created them.

  When I came up from the storehouse I felt my stomach roiling. I returned the key to the watchmen and walked away with my head lowered, forgetting even to leave a tip. I slammed the door behind me. My research had barely begun and my ideas were still very muddled . . . Who knew if one day I could have returned to Segre the attorney and shown him those “interesting findings” that he would have been glad to hear about . . .

  IV.

  THE SECOND VICTIM

  IN A TEN
-YEAR-OLD EDITION (July 15) of the German weekly Der Spiegel, there’s a short article that’s worth another glance. It’s an interview with a married couple from Stuttgart who were passing through Turin in the early morning hours of July the third. The tone of the piece is only half serious: the interviewer doesn’t much seem to believe the couple’s story. Rudholf and Ruth Förster, for these were their names, had spent the afternoon of the previous day at the Galleria Sabauda and the Egyptian Museum. After a light meal at a pizzeria they went to bed at the Hotel Sitea at half-past nine. They’d counted on waking up very early and setting off for Florence the next morning. They still had images in their eyes of mummies and basalt statues from the museum. Ruth had never seen such things before. She recalled how she’d refused to have dinner at a rotisserie with her husband; the sight of a grilled chicken put to mind the shriveled arms of an Egyptian scribe preserved behind glass.

  During the night, there were strange noises in the hotel that kept them awake: the sounds of doors opening and closing over and over again, the shuffling of steps down the hallway. Rudholf snuck a glance through the door and recognized a man walking in pajamas as the hotel doorman. His cheeks were hollow, his eyes surrounded by blue circles. He clutched his arms behind his back and strained, giving out cries, like bellows, which seemed to say: “Oh, God, just to sleep!” He wasn’t the only one moving through the hall. There were four or five people, both men and women, all local people, perhaps hotel staff judging by appearances, stricken by the same madness. A woman in a very sheer blouse was making her way down the stairs.

  Prompted by the interviewer to continue the story, Ruth said this: “So Rudholf and I went to the window to see what was going on outside, and even there we noticed strange movements, a bit like what you’d see in a hospital, or a prison yard during the recess hour, the same unhappy resignation. There were people wearing day clothes too, but they were so shabbily dressed that you couldn’t distinguish them from the others. There was a uniformity that made your blood curdle . . . And to say how hot it was! Rudholf and I were drenched in sweat. The water was dribbling down from the tap. ‘Rudholf, if I were you,’ I told my husband, ‘I would get out of here now.’ He said, ‘Me too, Ruth!’ Having come to this, all that remained was to get dressed, pile everything into our bags and run like the devil to Piazza Carlo Felice where we’d parked the car.”

  “It was in Piazza Carlo Felice where you happened to see this . . . thing?”

  “Piazza Carlo Felice,” Rudholf interjected, “seemed to be the gathering spot for all those melancholy night-walkers. They’d form little clusters here and there but these soon fell apart as if their members had nothing to say to each other. Just as one cluster disbanded, another came together at a different part of the square, only to dissolve in turn. It was a kind of undulating motion; I don’t know how else to put it . . . I had a vague feeling of danger. When we reached the car that was parked by the arcades at the opposite end of the square—a beautiful square, well lit, with trees packed with leaves and jets of water spurting from a fountain—we were still filled with horror at being forced to move through that crowd; they seemed high on Valium, or God knows what kind of downers. To follow the road signs we had to drive right around the square, a heavy task with all those vagrants getting in our way . . . We’d already done a half turn when, right there in front of us, we saw an odd character emerge from the arcades . . . Very far-fetched . . . Isn’t that true, Ruth? He was gray-colored, stiff, with a severe expression, and there was something warlike about the way he moved. We hit the brakes to avoid hitting him and he went straight past us without bothering to look. We heard the sound of his heavy footsteps, like the clattering of a horse. These steps were vigorous and decisive; they made quite a difference to the shambling of the night-walkers who filled the square. We weren’t just scared, but surprised; we couldn’t believe how indifferent the vagrants were to his arrival . . . It seemed as if they were waiting for him, like they’d gathered there just to greet him. Ah, but that’s not how the meeting went! There was no big celebration! Nobody seemed to pay attention to him, and yet, and yet . . .”

  “And you, Frau Förster, what do you have to say?”

  “Well . . . I must admit that I was beginning to get scared at this point. What scared me over everything else was the transformation this character was undergoing. Bit by bit, his movements seemed to get more agile. He snatched the air like he was catching flies . . . And he brought himself ever closer to those people, striding over benches, trampling flower beds . . . But rather than back away, they looked at him without batting an eyelash, like they’d all become rag dolls . . . Then suddenly one of them was grabbed . . .”

  “And what happened then?”

  “Ah! We didn’t want to find out how that spectacle ended! I urged Rudholf to hit the accelerator, and, weaving through a daredevil obstacle course of vagrants, we got on the main road and swung straight for the hills. I didn’t turn back to look. I’d seen enough thrills to promise myself that I’d never go back to Turin!”

  So ended the interview. In the early hours of July the third, the very night Herrn und Frau Förster fled Turin, a thirty-seven-year-old woman, Rosaura Marchetti, was murdered in Piazza Carlo Felice in a way that closely resembled the killing of Bergesio. She too had her face smashed, two circular bruises around her ankles and deep bruises at the level of her midriff. With considerable force, two hands had grabbed her by the middle of her body and then—hoopla!—raised her high enough to take her by the ankles and spin her. The whirl ended with her ruthless obliteration against a solid mass. We should note that the “solid mass” into which Signora Marchetti was slammed was a monument this time, a memorial to children’s author Edmondo de Amicis. Anyone who went to Piazza Carlo Felice on the morning of July the third to observe the “scene of the crime” will remember the mustachioed face of the Piedmontese writer, jutting from a slab of marble, still fouled with blood and gray matter, gory splatters from the victim reaching high enough to lick at bas-reliefs of children and the naked feet of the muse positioned on top of the monument. Signora Marchetti’s death found possibly greater coverage in the daily papers than the demise of Bergesio. The parallels between the two crimes were immediately obvious: “A madman, a violent lunatic, prowls by night to assault our poor fellow citizens stricken by ­insomnia . . .” But who could that man be? From which madhouse had he broken out of? No sanatorium in Turin nor any other Italian city had any escaped inmates to report. Therefore, it could only be a case of insanity that had developed recently, and knowing this certainly didn’t smooth the work of investigators. What a moving article appeared in La Stampa to express the horror and outrage triggered by the episode! The pitiless murderer had committed an unforgivable disgrace to childhood in choosing exactly that monument, that symbol of good nature, as an outlet for his fury! This was an individual without heart, whose case called for swift and vigorous action, followed by an exemplary punishment!

  Unfortunately, certain obstacles that stood in justice’s way proved thornier than expected. The autopsy attributed Signora Marchetti’s death to the mashing of her brain, but there were unsettling questions about the dynamics of the murder, unique in the annals of criminology. Whose fingertips could have made the impressions found on the ankles and pelvis of the deceased? Who could have left such deep footprints in the flower beds of the park and the asphalt of the road? Human reason retreated in the face of such bewildering evidence!

  There remained an inquiry into the victim’s private life. Yet Signora Marchetti was a quiet homemaker, married, with two children (currently on exchange at a school in Switzerland). She didn’t appear to have had any lovers. Her husband owned an industrial dairy and hardly needed the trifles he would’ve inherited as her next of kin. No private drama in the background, then. True, a man had suddenly come forward claiming to know everything about the murder victim, to have read her diary cover to cover, where terrifying confessions were written. “In my view, she completely deserved
it!” he said at last. But when the commissioner asked him to be more specific, he could do nothing better than shrug his shoulders and mumble incoherently. Obviously, hot weather and insomnia were the real reasons for his meddling in the case; his pint-sized stature didn’t remotely match the presumed murderer’s profile.

  They ran into a more serious obstacle when it came to examining the witnesses who had undoubtedly seen the victim’s death. Anyone they found who was present in Piazza Carlo Felice at the time of the murder had no more to say than the people who were drifting along Corso Stati Uniti when Bergesio met his demise. Threats to arrest bystanders for withholding testimony came to no use. Whoever was there hadn’t seen it, or if they had seen it, their visions of the carnage were too confusing. It was insomnia that had veiled the event; memories were clouded with fatigue and everything that had happened was permanently lost to absentmindedness. Until it came to questioning everyday citizens, legal threats, as always, remained a weapon in the arsenal of justice. But when the “upholders of law and order,” the judges (and, it’s said, even the president of the Court of Appeals), suddenly found themselves, not as examiners, but among the ­witnesses—and still couldn’t provide the investigation with any valid leads—­authorities became more willing to try the soft approach. They stooped to sweet-talk and flattery just to get a half-reliable answer they could work with. A reward of thirty million lire—with the guarantee of anonymity—was offered to anyone who finally came forward. It was no use. Only one clue was worth poring over: the places chosen by the murderer to carry out his feats. Corso Stati Uniti and Piazza Carlo Felice belonged to the “historic” zone of the city. As it later emerged much more clearly, those who committed murders in this way seemed to seek out distinctive areas deeply rooted in Turinese tradition. And it was just there, in those areas, where the greatest influx of restless citizens took place. What was the connection? Could all the facts investigators had gathered be helpful somehow?