The View From the Tower

by Charles Lambert

  “So, is that what Juggernaut’s all about, do you think?” she says, nodding towards the laptop.

  “You should ask Giulia,” Giacomo says.

  Helen laughs, without humour. “I suppose I should.” She pushes her hands through her hair. “I’m going to lie down for a while,” she says but doesn’t move.

  “Do you want me to come with you?” he says, his tone hesitant, hopeful. She’s never seen him like this, unsure of himself with her. She doesn’t know how to deal with it.

  “No,” she says. “You can answer the phone for me, though. Say I’m sleeping.” She pauses. “I think you should call Yvonne as well. I feel very bad about her.”

  “I followed you once, you know,” says Helen an hour or so later, after she has slept more deeply than she’d expected or could have hoped. “When we were all living in Turin.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. One afternoon. I was looking at shoes in a shop and I saw you come out of a bar a few yards away from me and walk off towards the station. I was going to call out to you when something stopped me, some impulse – I don’t know what it was, embarrassment? shame? curiosity, probably – and I thought, I’ll see where he’s going. It was quite exciting, actually. I remember thinking this must be one of the reasons people do it, the thrill of it. It seemed to justify itself. Then you met up with two other men. I followed you all into a part of Turin I didn’t really know, out towards the cemetery. There was no one else around but us. I was sure you’d turn round and see me and I wouldn’t know what to do. Then you went in through a gate. I waited to see if you came out, but you didn’t. After about twenty minutes I walked over to the gate and looked in. And that was it really. You’d disappeared. I didn’t wait any longer. By the time I got back to the flat I felt as though the whole thing hadn’t really happened.”

  “Did you tell Federico?”

  Helen shakes her head. “God, no. I’ve never told anyone. It was such a foolish thing to do really, but it didn’t seem to be then. It seemed almost normal. You were doing it, weren’t you? Following people around, suspecting people. It was that talk about patience that made me think of it, I suppose.”

  She closes her eyes. “You don’t remember, do you? Federico wasn’t home when I got back, but you were in the kitchen. I must have shown how startled I felt, how caught out, because you took me by both hands and kissed me. It was the way you did it, the way you looked into my eyes. You saw me, I thought. You know exactly what I’ve done. ‘You look as though you’ve seen a ghost,’ you said.”

  Helen doesn’t say what happened next. She doesn’t say that she was taking off her coat when Giacomo came up behind her to help, lifting it off her shoulders. She doesn’t say that she let herself flop back into him, be lifted until she felt his beard against her neck, and then his lips. That she turned round slowly, her coat sliding off to the floor, and kissed him, then pulled back while he raised an eyebrow and gave her a rueful smile, as if to say, Are you sure? and she nodded, also smiling, and kissed him again, pulling his head towards hers. His hands easing round to the zip of her jeans and pulling it down as she moved her hips away a little to give him room, not breaking the kiss, pushing her mouth against his, her arms around his neck, her hands behind him, groping the air like someone about to drown. He knew what he was doing, he’d done it before. She doesn’t remind Giacomo of the way she breathed in sharply, then bit the inside of his lower lip, not hard, as his fingers slipped down inside her panties and he pushed her against the wall and she fell away from him, her head thrown back as he slipped to his knees and started to tongue her, slow and hard. She doesn’t say that she clenched her fists in his hair and moved his head with them the way she liked it, the way she moved his head only two days ago, in the hotel room, with Federico dead. She doesn’t say that what she feels most strongly as this scene returns to her, other than a flush of sexual excitement she can hardly bear, is shame.

  “I didn’t tell anyone, you know,” she says. She can’t tell what he remembers. It’s better that way, she thinks.

  “No,” says Giacomo. “I don’t expect you did. Neither did I.”

  They are silent for a moment. Then Giacomo stands up and paces round the room, pushing his hair away from his forehead with both hands. When a mobile rings out, they both jump.

  “It’s mine,” said Giacomo. “Relax.” He takes the phone into the hall, where he can’t be heard. It’s Yvonne, thinks Helen, wondering where the hell he is. But Helen is wrong. When he comes back a few minutes later, he is smiling and shaking his head.

  “I don’t believe it. That was your father-in-law. He says he needs to talk to me. I can’t imagine why, unless he wants to tell me off about being here with you.”

  “He’s coming to the flat?”

  “No. We’re meeting at the hotel in half an hour. You can come if you like. That’ll give him a surprise.”

  Helen pulls a face. “No,” she says. “There are things I need to do.”

  “I’ll call you later then?”

  “Yes. Do that.” When he glances at her, quizzically, she frowns. “I mean it,” she says. “Don’t let me down.”

  As soon as Giacomo has left, Helen goes into the bathroom and turns on the shower, adjusting the temperature of the water until it is almost cold. She takes off her clothes and steps into the cabinet with a sharp intake of breath as the jets hit her skin, then stands and lets her head take the force of it, enjoying the respite from the water’s chill as the hair flattens slowly out and seals to her neck and shoulders like a cap. Lifting it from her face, she takes the sponge and soaks it beneath the jets, then squirts shower gel onto it and wipes herself down, her arms and shoulders and breasts, until her skin feels smooth. She lets the water carry away the scented foam, her eyes closed, her head tilted backwards so that the water is beating against her face, thinking, for the first time that day, of nothing. It is only when she steps from the shower and reaches for a towel that the image of Federico returns to her, as though she has stepped back into the world. She thinks of his rapid nervous fingers as he unbuttoned and buttoned her blouse, impatient, almost clumsy, the way he sometimes had of looking into Helen’s eyes at the oddest moments, as if for reassurance.

  Her body still damp, she puts on the robe that is hanging behind the door and walks across the wooden floor into the kitchen. She opens the fridge door and takes out a bottle of white wine, opening it and reaching for a glass. She carries them through to the living room. Putting them down on a small table beside the sofa, she crosses to the window, cautiously moving the light curtain that covers it until she can see down into the square. There seems to be no one there, other than a handful of tourists, people going about their business. The bar is open, as always, two small tables on the pavement outside. No TV vans, no cars of journalists, as far as she can tell. No one seems interested in her. She opens the window a little, to let in some air. She can hear the insect-like drone from above of a helicopter, another one or the same as the one she’s been hearing for days, as though it were following her every move.

  Stepping away from the window, Helen calls Giacomo, suddenly needing to hear him, but his phone is turned to voicemail. She hesitates before speaking, says “It’s me,” then ends the call. How she hates these things. Of course he will have turned it off, he’ll be with Fausto. In a fit of irritation with herself for having called, she throws the phone onto the sofa, where it bounces on a cushion before falling to the floor. Oh God, she thinks, it’s broken now. She picks it up, calls Giulia’s landline without quite knowing what she’ll say, relieved as it rings out to see that the phone still works, even more relieved when Giulia fails to answer. The woman will be about her business, as ever. She stares at her own house phone, silent, its calls being filtered for her protection. Giacomo closed the shutters and windows before leaving, against the heat. In the half-darkness, the flat has never seemed so empty. She sits down on the sofa, then snuggles into a corner, her arms around her knees, like someone waiting
, and afraid.

  Half an hour later, she wakes up with a start, her head full of confused images she can’t quite grasp, Giulia and Federico, and Martha in a driver’s uniform, her mad grey hair spilling out of her cap. She dresses, then goes through the drawer in which Federico kept his odds and ends, boarding cards, foreign coins, out-of-date passports. This is where he’ll have put the key to his parents’ flat. Two can play at this game, she thinks. She finds three bunches, a spare set for the car, a set she recognises as belonging to their weekend place down the coast and the third, on a simple ring, composed of a large key for an outer door, a security key and a Yale.

  She is slipping them into her jacket pocket when her fingers touch the visiting card the magistrate gave her. She sits down with the telephone beside her, and dials the number on it. Let’s see what Giulia will make of this, she thinks, imagining a bored man in a room somewhere perking up and turning on his recording equipment.

  “This is Helen Di Stasi,” she says, when the call is answered. “I have an apology to make.”

  5

  Turin, 1978

  Giacomo left the flat at the beginning of February. He had a new girlfriend, a dark-haired, rather sombre woman from Florence called Stefania, who also worked in some undefined way at the faculty. Stefania had asked him to move in with her, and he’d bundled his books and clothes into his rucksack and disappeared from their lives as swiftly as he’d arrived, like a bird that had entered by one window and left by another. Helen missed him, and resented his absence. She was eager for news of the faculty, and of Giacomo, eager to learn more about Stefania, whom she’d met for no more than half an hour and wasn’t sure she liked. But Federico had no gift, or inclination, for gossip. He was out most of the day; after dinner, which he prepared, they’d read together or go down below the flat for an ice cream. She was lonely, it struck her. After her lessons were over and she’d eaten some lunch in the flat, or a sandwich in a nearby bar, she took to walking around the centre in the afternoon, window-shopping, imagining different lives for herself, hanging around the shelves of the English bookshop in the hope that someone might strike up a conversation, startled and hostile if anyone did. That was when she’d spotted Giacomo in the street and followed him, and then he’d followed her, back to the flat and made love to her, only to disappear a second time, leaving his mark on her, she felt, the way a tomcat might have done. He left her feeling excited, and soiled. She’d never betrayed anyone before. She was glad he hardly ever came round to the flat any more. Sometimes she wondered what it must be like for Giacomo to work with Federico every day, in the same small room, and know what he’d done. It occurred to her once that he might have told Federico. Isn’t that what men did together? Share their trophies? The awful thing was that she could imagine Giacomo telling him, perhaps as an act of bravado, as though she didn’t matter, but not Federico’s reaction. She had no idea what he might do. She told Miriam one evening in the pub; she’d drunk too much. Miriam laughed. “You don’t need to worry about that,” she said. “Better to have two irons in the fire than one.” She giggled. “Especially if they’re pokers.” Helen wished she hadn’t told her.

  Later that week, Helen was half-asleep at the kitchen table with her teaching books strewn about her when Federico brought both Giacomo and Stefania home. He had a spit-roast chicken and potatoes from the tavola calda at the corner, like their first night together in the flat, when she and Federico had been alone. Giacomo had wine; Stefania a tiramisu she’d made herself; it looked as though the evening had been planned. Helen pushed her books to one side, uncomfortable, letting herself be kissed by all three of them as she struggled to wake up properly. By the end of the evening, when they were all quite drunk and talking, as always, about what she called, in letters home, “the Italian situation”, she’d managed to relax enough to take a liking to Stefania, and even feel a little sorry for her. It couldn’t be easy to be in love with Giacomo, she thought. She wondered how many other women he’d fucked in kitchens when their boyfriends were out. She had a twinge of jealousy, not of Stefania, but of these other women he might have had.

  Helen was shopping for food one afternoon soon after that, when a crackling voice came over the supermarket loudspeaker system. She never listened to these voices; she could rarely understand them through the interference and, when she did, they were calling people who worked there to the telephone. She stood in the queue to pay for her bread and wine and onions, working out what they would cost and counting out the money, as the voice droned on. The message was longer than usual. Before it was over, the woman at the till stood up and slammed the cash drawer shut with a bitter laugh, and an “I-told-you-so” toss of the head. Helen mumbled something, her basket in her hand, as the woman scooped up her handbag from beneath the till. She looked at Helen with a disbelieving air.

  “Non hai capito niente?” she said. “Hanno rapito Moro.”

  “Cosa?” What hadn’t she understood? What or who was Moro? Raped? Did rapito mean raped?

  The woman gave an exasperated sigh and began to unbutton her overall. Her purple top beneath was shot with silver threads, the kind of top Helen might have expected to see in a disco. She was old enough to be Helen’s mother.

  “Sciopero,” she said. “Capisci sciopero?”

  Of course Helen understood sciopero. She heard the word every day at Fiat; she saw it in banner headlines at newsstands and taped onto tram stops to general exasperation; the personnel manager who’d prepared her contract had said that people on sciopero should be shot. Sciopero was strike.

  Looking around, she saw the other customers abandon their baskets and trolleys and walk towards the doors. The scene reminded her of a Fifties sci-fi film, one of those alien take-overs in Middle America; an invasion of colonising implants triggered by a recorded voice, their host bodies snatched and carted away. Only her foreignness or ignorance of the language had saved her. Still, she hurried to join the others, to blend in among them, invisible, as they wound among the shelves and filled the aisles and streamed towards the exits.

  Half an hour later, the entire city seemed to have come to a halt. Helen went home and waited for Federico. In the meantime she looked up rapito in her dictionary and found that it did mean rape, but in the old sense, as in rape of the Sabine women: kidnapped. But who or what was Moro? Her dictionary said “Moor”, but also “dark”.

  When Federico burst in, she’d been back at the flat for over an hour, unable to concentrate on anything, wishing they had a television, listening to the radio without understanding more than a few words at a time, as though she’d just arrived. So many names that meant nothing to her, so many acronyms, so much anger. Federico had a newspaper, literally hot off the press; his hands had blurred the headline. He threw it on the table. “It’s started,” he said. “Get your coat.”

  “What’s started? Who is this Moro man?”

  “Aldo Moro. He’s one of the top men in the Christian Democrats,” Federico said. He whistled, then picked up the paper and slapped it against the table. “It says here it was the Red Brigades.”

  “Oh my God,” said Helen, shocked. “They murdered his bodyguards.” She was looking at a black-bordered row of photographs, mug shots of young men, with their ranks and ages beside the names, the kind of faces she saw outside the Fiat gates every day.

  They spent the rest of the day with colleagues of Federico who had a television, watching interviews with Moro’s associates, members of the opposition, figures from the church and the three major unions, which had declared a general strike. Helen stared at Moro’s face for the first time; she’d never noticed him before. She still wasn’t sure who he was, nor why he mattered. What she saw was the face of a weary, cynical patrician, ascetic and long-suffering, clearly no fool; the face of a man who’d seen too much human weakness to be surprised; he looked more like a cardinal than a politician. The journalist announced that he was being held in a people’s prison. A prison run by the people, she thought. That’s
new, outside China. By the people, for the people. Which people? Who decides? She couldn’t understand the mood of those around her: exalted by what was happening, at moments almost jubilant; when there was anger or contempt, it seemed to be directed less at the kidnappers and murderers, as she saw them, than at the government. She didn’t have the confidence to question this; she questioned herself instead – perhaps she had missed something. Giacomo and Stefania weren’t there; she imagined them sitting in front of a different television, in another room, in the same inexplicable city.

  When she and Federico were in bed that night, unable to sleep, she asked him where he’d been that morning. He raised both hands in the air, letting his book fall to the sheet, and grinned. “It wasn’t me,” he said.

  Helen arrived at Fiat the next day to be told there was a letter waiting for her from the security office. It said she should no longer accept lifts from Fiat employees, who were regarded as particularly at risk in the current climate of political unrest. Fiat would not be held responsible for her should anything happen. The language was formal, opaque. She read it out to her students to make sure she’d understood. They laughed nervously and told her it was just a precaution. There was nothing to worry about, they said. When she showed it to Eduardo later that day, he sighed.

  “Why have they kidnapped Aldo Moro?” she asked him.

  He was on the point of answering, but stopped himself, then shrugged.

  “This is not your struggle,” he said. “You should go.”

  A few days later, Helen heard from Miriam about a Scottish woman she’d made friends with, a teacher from one of the language schools she’d dropped into when she’d first arrived, in search of work. The woman’s flatmate had been arrested, and was awaiting trial, for terrorism. The woman, whose name was Katy, had let herself into his bedroom and burnt the books and leaflets that might have incriminated him, badges with Che Guevara on them, Little Red Books, absurd things really, the trinkets of revolt. Then Katy was arrested too, for having lent her car to someone who had raided a bank. Federico and Helen tried to get into the police station to see her, but it was hopeless. Federico lost his temper, called the police fascists and dogs. He was dragged away, but released that afternoon. Stefania gave them the name of a feminist lawyer who said she’d do what she could. Federico promised her money, all the money that might be needed, and the lawyer had looked at him as if to say, Well yes, you surely don’t expect her to be released without money, while Helen wondered what he meant. They had no money. Katy, in the meantime, had denied all knowledge of the bank raid, as she would, whatever the truth might have been. Released without being charged, her hair cut short, she claimed to have been raped by the police. All the fun had been knocked out of her, all the desire; she flinched when anyone touched or tried to comfort her. She spoke about leaving, about going back to England, until things cooled down. Two days later, Stefania drove her to the station, then came back to Helen’s flat, unable to calm down. The Moro business scared her, she said. It was all too much, too soon. The kidnap was factional, divisive. There was no support for it among the masses. The masses didn’t care. Helen wondered how Stefania knew all this and what it meant to say too soon. Was that what it was, a question of timing? Stefania sat in Helen’s kitchen, hunched over the radio as if for warmth, listening to bulletins with scorn on her face.