by Morris West
By the time they had finished their tour they were hot, dusty and panting for a drink. Ninette suggested that they stop at a small roadside restaurant on the way to Siena, which was half eating-house, half rustic wine-shop and, by reputation, a rendezvous for country lovers. They parked the car by the roadside and as they entered the shaded courtyard they saw, five seconds too late, that Valeria Rienzi was seated with a male companion at one of the little marble tables. Landon saw Ninette flush and stiffen, and at the same moment Valeria waved them to her table. There was no option but to be polite. Valeria presented her companion: ‘Peter, I should like you to meet a friend of mine, Basilio Lazzaro. Basilio, this is Peter Landon. You know Ninette, of course, Basilio?’
‘Of course. We’re old friends,’ said Lazzaro smoothly. ‘And it’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr Landon.’
Ninette said nothing. Valeria watched her with feline amusement while Lazzaro and Landon measured each other and decided on instant dislike. There was a stiff little pause and then Valeria said: ‘I was trying to telephone you this morning, Peter. I wanted to see you for a little while tomorrow.’
‘I’ve been out most of today,’ said Landon awkwardly. ‘And I’m not quite sure what goes on tomorrow.’
‘May I telephone you then? It is rather important.’
There was nothing to do but to agree. Landon and Ninette disengaged themselves as quickly as possible, took their drinks in silence and hurried back to the car. After a while, Ninette said, irritably: ‘I told you, Peter, didn’t I? She has interest in you and she will not give it up without a fight.’
‘It seemed to me,’ said Landon tardy, ‘that Basilio what’s-his-name had interests in you.’
And there, brusquely, the conversation ended. A small chill wind scurried across the countryside and then dropped. For all their love they could not find words to reassure each other and they drove back to Siena, moody and withdrawn, while the grey dusk settled on the olive groves and the sad funereal cypresses.
In every love-affair, however precipitate, there are moments when the swift, intuitive communion is broken, when the man and the woman are thrust back into that loneliness which first disposed them to each other. The vision that each has of the other is too perfect, the balance of interest is too precarious to sustain the smallest defect or the mildest shock of disappointment. Their first surrender appears so complete that neither can admit the reserves that still exist. They are so tender that they cannot believe themselves intolerant. The resentments flare swiftly into lovers’ quarrels. There are anger, separation and withdrawal into privacy which presently becomes intolerable and drives them back, more needy than before, into each other’s company.
This is the true anatomy of love: simple and patent to those who have survived it, but complex and painful to those who, like Ninette and Landon, had still to undergo the dissection.
They did not quarrel that night but were reserved with each other. Ninette’s jealousy of Valeria Rienzi seemed to Landon petty, childish and contradictory, small compliment to a man who was prepared to sign a marriage contract at the drop of a lace handkerchief. It was Ninette who urged him back into alliance with Rienzi. It was she who had persuaded him that these people had need of his friendship. If now she regretted the decision, there was no good reason to make him pay for it.
For her part, she demanded reassurance, indulgence for her whim. She needed, as women do, a partnership in the apparent folly of the love-game. She resented his raillery as much as his sour disinclination.
There was only one remedy: throw away the book, forget the words and turn to kisses. But they both sheered away from this simplicity. They were afraid of each other that night. They talked contrariwise; they knew that the truth was only a step away – the big Florentine bed with its shadowy drapes and long memories of other loves. Neither of them was innocent of passion, neither lacked experience or inclination, but both of them felt, without being able to put it into words, that the disciplines of continence promised better for them both than the intemperate surrender of other days. It was a folly perhaps. Life is too short to waste so much of it in sterile anger. But everything in love is a folly and they parted, only half-reconciled, with the hope that things would be better in the morning.
CHAPTER FOUR
AT TEN-THIRTY the following day Professor Emilio Galuzzi sat in private consultation with his English colleague. There was a subtle change in his manner as if, without witnesses, he were prepared to expose himself more freely to one of the esoteric brotherhood of medicine. He began with a personal apologia.
‘You will agree with me, I think, Landon, that we are still the pioneers of an inexact science. Our methods are often fumbling and awkward. Our definitions are sometimes inaccurate. We have had great masters – Freud, Jung, Adler and all the rest – but we know that even their most illuminating researches have often been inhibited by a too dogmatic adherence to unproven hypothesis. For myself, I would like to say that I am an eclectic. I like to reserve to myself the right of choice when one or other of the masters seems to point a clearer way to the truth. From what I have read of your work, I believe that you have a similar attitude.’
‘That’s true enough.’ Landon nodded agreement. ‘I think it’s true of all sciences that the great leaps of discovery have been made by bold speculators whose very errors have served in the end to elicit another fraction of the truth. The science of the mind is still inexact, but we’ve come a long way from Bedlam and the primitive notions of diabolical possession or divine madness.’
‘Good.’ Galuzzi seemed relieved. ‘From this point we can begin to co-operate.’ He shrugged and made a small, fastidious gesture. ‘I have been too often bedevilled by colleagues who seem to think that they hold in their hands the answer to the ultimate riddle of the human mind. We cannot afford to be so arrogant. We are neither gods nor soothsayers. So…we come to our patient, this Anna Albertini. I was with her for several hours yesterday. I made a tape-recording of our interview which I should like you to hear. Before we do, however, I should like to make clear to you a point of criminal law as it is presently framed in this country. We have, like you, the normal plea of insanity, whose definition approximates very closely to that currently in use in British courts. We have also another plea, less clearly defined, which is called “semi-infermità mentale”, or partial mental infirmity. At one end of the scale this definition wears a little of the colour of the American plea of “uncontrollable impulse”. At the other, it rests on an acceptance of the principle that certain mental states do diminish the legal responsibility of the individual without entirely destroying it. Do I make myself clear?’
‘Admirably,’ said Landon with a smile. ‘I shouldn’t like to face you in court without a well-prepared brief.’
‘Rienzi will be facing me,’ said Galuzzi drily, ‘and I am guessing that this is the ground on which he will have to stand.’
‘You rule out insanity altogether?’
‘I do.’ His answer was quite emphatic. ‘When you have seen the girl I think you will agree with me. I believe that by all the legal norms the girl is quite sane. I see no evidence of mania, schizophrenia or paranoid tendencies. There is no amnesia, no evidence of hysteria. There is some residual shock, but she sleeps calmly, eats normally, takes singularly good care of herself, and seems to accept her situation with reasoned resignation. There is trauma, of course, associated with her mother’s death. There is also obsession, reduced but not wholly eliminated by the cathartic effect of the act of revenge. Their degrees and ramifications will need much longer exploration.’
‘Do they constitute mental infirmity under the Italian definition?’
Galuzzi laughed and threw out his arms in Latin exuberance. ‘Ah! Now we come to the core of it! We are all in difficulty here. The definition is unclear. And too often the judicial mind in this country reacts very strongly against any suggestion that a person legally sane is not fully responsible for his actions. On this point, Landon, you k
now as well as I that the development of mental science and the evolution of the law do not march at the same pace. Often it is a matter of advocacy to swing the bench to a favourable decision. Often justice is inhibited by the lack of definition in the codex. This is a service that men like you and I can render to the law: to make our findings so clear that they cannot fail to be accepted as a basis for future legislation. But in this case we have to accept the situation as it exists. The best we can do is explore the mind of the accused and determine as clearly as we can the limit of her legal responsibility. Now, before we hear the tape…you tell me you have not seen this girl?’
‘Not yet. Rienzi saw her and gave me a somewhat colourful description.’
Galuzzi chuckled. ‘I shouldn’t blame him too much for that. I am older than he is but I confess I, too, was curiously impressed. She has a quite extraordinary beauty, an almost nun-like charm. They dress them like nuns, too, in San Gimignano – drunks, thieves, abortionists and the little whores who sell themselves on street comers. But this one! You could paint an aureole around her head and put her on a pedestal in the church. Anyway, let’s listen to her.’
He crossed to the desk and switched on the recorder and a few seconds later Landon was immersed in the dialogue.
Galuzzi’s voice took on the cool, informal tone of the trained analyst. The girl’s voice was pleasantly pitched, but remote and indifferent; neither dull nor bored, but strangely dissociated, like that of an actor speaking through a Greek mask.
‘You understand, Anna, that I’m a doctor and that I’m here to help you?’
‘Yes, I understand.’
‘Tell me, did you sleep well last night?’
‘Very well, thank you.’
‘You weren’t afraid?’
‘No. I was very tired because of all the questions. But nobody was unkind to me. I wasn’t afraid.’
‘How old are you, Anna?’
‘Twenty-four.’
‘How long have you been married?’
‘Four years.’
‘What sort of a house do you live in?’
‘It’s not a house. It’s an apartment. It’s not very big, but it was enough for Luigi and me.’
‘How old is Luigi?’
‘Twenty-six.’
‘What did you do after you were married?’
‘What everyone else does. I cleaned the house and did the shopping and looked after Luigi.’
‘This was in Florence?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you have any friends in Florence?’
‘Luigi had friends from work, and he had his family. I didn’t know anyone there.’
‘Didn’t you feel lonely?’
‘No.’
‘Was Luigi good to you?’
‘Yes. He used to get angry with me sometimes but he was good to me.’
‘Why did he get angry?’
‘He used to say I didn’t love him like I should.’
‘And did you?’
‘Underneath I did.’
‘Underneath what?’
‘Inside me. You know, in my head. In my heart.’
‘Did you tell Luigi that?’
‘Yes. But it didn’t stop him getting angry.’
‘Why?’
‘Because he used to say it wasn’t enough. Married people did things to show they loved each other.’
‘Did you know what he meant?’
‘Oh yes.’
‘But you didn’t want to do them?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘I thought he would hurt me.’
‘What else did you think?’
‘I thought about his gun.’
‘Tell me about the gun.’
‘He used to take it to work with him every night. That was his job. He had to guard the factory at night. In the morning, when he came home, he would put it away in the drawer of the bureau.’
‘Were you afraid of it?’
‘Only when I dreamed about it. In the daytime I used to take it out and hold it in my hand and look at it. It was cold and hard.’
‘What did you dream about the gun?’
‘That Luigi was holding it in his hand and pointing it at my mother. Then it wasn’t Luigi. It was someone else. I couldn’t see his face, but I knew it was Belloni. Then I would try to get to him, but I couldn’t, and I would wake up.’
‘Belloni was the man you killed?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Why did you kill him?’
‘He shot my mother.’
‘Tell me about that, Anna.’
‘I’d rather not talk about it. It’s over now. Belloni’s dead.’
‘Does it frighten you to think about it?’
‘No, I just don’t want to talk about it.’
‘All right. Then tell me about your father.’
‘I don’t remember much about him. He went away in the Army when I was five. Then we heard he was killed. Mother cried a lot. Then she got over it. She moved me into her room and I slept with her.’
‘Until the Germans came to the village?’
‘No, all the time.’
‘When the Germans were there, did you still sleep with her?’
‘Yes. She used to lock the bedroom door at night.’
‘Where did you go to school?’
‘In San Stefano with the Brown Sisters.’
‘What did they teach you?’
‘Reading and writing and figures. And the Catechism.’
‘In the Catechism, Anna, doesn’t it say that it’s wrong to kill anybody?’
‘Yes.’
‘But you killed Belloni. Wasn’t that a sin?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘Don’t you care?’
‘I never thought about it that way. All I knew was I had to kill him because he killed my mother.’
‘Did you know it all the time?’
‘Yes.’
‘How did you know it?’
‘I just knew. When I woke up in the morning, when I cooked the dinner or washed the floor or went out shopping, I knew all the time.’
‘How did you make up your mind to kill him?’
‘It was the gun.’
‘But you told me the gun was there all the time. Luigi would take it to work at night and put it in the bureau drawer in the morning. You told me you used to take it out and look at it. Why did you wait all that time?’
‘Because it was different. On that morning, Luigi didn’t put the gun in the drawer. He emptied his pockets and left the gun on the table beside the bed. When he was asleep I took it and went to San Stefano and killed Belloni…. Please, can we stop for a while?’
‘Of course.’
Galuzzi got up and switched off the machine. Then he turned to Landon, who was sitting at the desk scribbling notes on the back of an envelope.
‘Well, Landon, that’s the first part of it. What do you think so far?’
‘So far, it’s almost classically simple. Shock and trauma caused by the circumstances of her mother’s death; the child’s incapacity to master the situation, and a consequent blocking of the ego-function; hence the obsession, the nightmares, the sexual incompetence, the transference of symbols.’ He shrugged and grinned. ‘That’s talking off the cuff, of course. I shouldn’t commit myself so quickly. One interesting point is the emergence of the vestigial primitive conscience from beneath the overlay of convent education – violence must be purged by violence. It’s the archaic attempt to master a situation beyond control by the usual means. You see it again in the acceptance of a magical moment like the discovery of the gun exposed on the table, as a motive for the final act of vengeance. But I’m reading you lectures, Professor. You know all this as well as I do.’
Galuzzi nodded, and said soberly: ‘As you say, my friend, it is almost a text-book case. We shall dig further, of course, and we shall come sooner or later to a description of what we are at present refused – the moment of the mother�
�s death. I have no doubt that we shall discover many more complexities than are revealed to us in this first discussion. But even if our first guesses are confirmed, even if we present ourselves with a classic set of symptoms and a perfect pathology of traumatic psychosis, where do we stand then?’
‘We’re back on the coda,’ said Landon grimly: ‘the nature and the determining factors of human responsibility. The old moralists had a point, you know, when they refused to surrender too easily the doctrine of free-will.’
Galuzzi nodded and embellished the theme in his pedantic fashion: ‘My point exactly, Landon. I cannot believe the determinists who say that there is no real responsibility and that every human act is an inevitable consequence of a thousand others, like a ball bouncing off an unseen wall. The question we have to answer, the question the court will demand to be answered, is whether there remains in this girl enough of free-will, enough of intelligence, to judge the nature of her action and to have been able to choose against it.’
Landon shrugged helplessly. ‘Who answers that one, except God Almighty?’
‘And yet,’ said Galuzzi sombrely, ‘every time we set up a court we arrogate to ourselves a divine function, the exercise of the power of life, death and ultimate judgment. Times are when I stand in the witness box and tremble for my own sanity. Do you want to hear any more or would you rather see the girl first?’
‘I’d like to see her with you,’ said Landon. ‘You can ask the questions, I’ll just listen. It’s hard enough to conduct an investigation in one’s own language without trying to read the colours into another.’
‘Let me buy you lunch and a bottle of wine,’ said Emilio Galuzzi. ‘I think we may have a difficult afternoon.’
Dusk was declining over the old city when Landon returned to the Pensione della Fontana. He felt tired and dispirited, oppressed by the memory of the grim prison and the faces of the unfortunates confined there.
The interview with Anna Albertini had been long and tedious and, for all Galuzzi’s skill and Landon’s prompting, they had not been able to induce her to reveal anything about the circumstances of her mother’s death or her own participation in it. Landon himself had felt frustrated by having to watch another professional in control of a familiar operation.
