Daughter of Silence

by Morris West

  ‘Where did you get the money?’

  ‘Belloni lent it to me.’

  ‘What interest did he charge you?’

  ‘None at all.’

  ‘Was he always as generous as that?’

  Carrese dropped his eyes, hesitated, and then mumbled his answer: ‘I – I don’t know. He was to me, anyway. I – I was his number two in the Partisans.’

  ‘Do you understand that by answering some of the questions I am going to put to you, you may do yourself harm?’

  The witness looked up and then straightened himself as if to meet a destiny long deferred. His voice took on a new, firmer tone. ‘I – I understand that.’

  ‘Why have you agreed to give evidence?’

  ‘I talked to Father Bonifacio. He told me …’ His mouth trembled and it seemed for a moment as if he were about to break down.

  Rienzi checked him sharply: ‘Told you what?’

  ‘That it wasn’t enough to be sorry. I had to make amends.’

  ‘A tardy wisdom,’ commented Rienzi drily, ‘which I hope may commend itself to this court.’ His silence challenged them for a moment, then he went on, more quietly: ‘Ignazio Carrese, I want you to take your mind back to a day in 1944. It was a Saturday, I believe.’

  As if anxious to purge himself as swiftly as possible, the witness stumbled on, lapsing occasionally into the raw country dialect. ‘That’s right, it was a Saturday night. We were all at the hide-out in the hills…me…the other boys. We were waiting for Belloni. When he got in, we saw he was hopping mad. He had that crazy look he used to get when someone crossed him. He said: “That’s it! Nobody slaps Belloni and gets away with it! There’s a job tomorrow, a big job!”’

  ‘Did he tell you what this big job was?’

  ‘Yes, he did.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘He said…he said …’ Beads of sweat broke out on his lined forehead and he wiped them away with a grubby handkerchief.

  Rienzi pressed him, firmly. ‘What did he say?’

  He said: ‘It’s the Moschetti bitch. Her husband’s a bloody Fascist and she’s no better. She’s got to go!’

  There was a low moan from the dock and all heads were turned to see Anna Albertini swaying in her chair, eyes closed, her face chalk-white.

  Rienzi’s words rang across the court like a pistol crack: ‘Control yourself, Anna.’

  There was a gasp of surprise in the court.

  The President looked up, startled and displeased, but the effect on Anna Albertini was instantaneous. She opened her eyes, sat bolt upright and steadied herself on the edge of the dock. She said in a low voice: ‘I’m sorry. I’ll be all right now.’

  Rienzi turned back to his witness. ‘Belloni said: “Her husband’s a bloody Fascist and she’s no better.” Did you understand what he meant?’

  The old peasant seemed to shrink again and his voice lapsed into a low undertone. ‘Sure. Everybody knew. He’d been trying to get her to sleep with him for weeks, but she wouldn’t have him.’

  ‘He was prepared to kill her for that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Didn’t any of you protest?’

  ‘Sure! Sure!’ He tried with feeble animation to justify himself. ‘I tried…and a couple of the others…but Belloni did the same thing as always – he pulled out a gun and said: “You know the rules. You do as you’re told or you get shot. Take your pick.”’

  ‘And the next day,’ said Rienzi softly, ‘you killed the mother of Anna Albertini?’

  ‘We didn’t kill her! Belloni did. We…we just went along like we had to.’

  There was a long rigid silence in the court. All eyes were turned to the shabby, stooping countryman on the stand. Then, as if by common impulse, they turned to the girl, who sat like a stone woman, staring sightlessly into the distance. Very calmly, Rienzi took up his examination again. ‘Will you tell us, please, how the killing took place?’

  The old peasant took a deep breath and began struggling through the last revelation. ‘It was Sunday night…we…we all went along to the Moschetti house. We found Agnese Moschetti with the girl….’

  ‘This girl?’ Rienzi’s outflung hand pointed to Anna Albertini.

  ‘Yes…she was only a kid then, of course – eight or nine, I think. We – we held her, while Belloni took the mother into the bedroom. The kid screamed and kicked like a wild thing until we heard the shots…. Then…then she stopped…didn’t say another word, just stood there, staring…staring like she was dead….’ His voice broke and the last words – came tumbling out of him in tearful agony: ‘Oh God, I’m sorry! But I couldn’t stop it…I couldn’t!’ He buried his face in his gnarled hands and sobbed uncontrollably while Anna Albertini sat motionless, caught in the old, cataleptic horror.

  Slowly Rienzi walked back to his desk and picked up the piece of masonry which he had shown to Fra Bonifacio. He held it out to the old peasant, who stared at it dumbly.

  ‘Have you ever seen this before?’

  Carrese nodded, unable to speak.

  Rienzi pressed him quietly: ‘Can you read?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Will you please read the words written on this stone?’

  Carrese turned away, his face contorted. ‘Please…please, don’t ask me.’

  Rienzi shrugged and turned to face the President. ‘With the permission of the court, I shall read them. They are simple words, gentlemen, scratched deep with a piece of tin. They are weathered by sixteen years of wind and rain, but they are still legible. They say: “Belloni, one day I will kill you!”’ He handed the stone to the President, who glanced at it briefly, then passed it down for the scrutiny of his colleagues.

  Slack and exhausted, Rienzi stood in the clear space before the judges’ rostrum. He waited while the stone was passed from hand to hand, then he took it back and crossed the court to the prosecution table. He laid the stone down in front of the Public Minister and announced: ‘I should like the prosecution to read the words, too: words written by a child of eight the day after her mother’s death, three days before a kindly relative came and took her away to live in Florence.’ His voice rose on a note of sharp anger. ‘They prove his case! Premeditation! Premeditation by a child of eight, who saw her mother raped and murdered by a hero of the Partisans! I am finished with this witness, Mr President.’

  The countryman shuffled back to his place in the hushed court. The President scribbled a note on his pad and passed it down to his senior assistant. Then he said, in a flat, tired voice: ‘Call your next witness, please, Mr Rienzi.’

  ‘I call Mr Peter Landon!’ After the dramatic testimony of Carrese, Landon felt that his own entrance was an anticlimax; but his appearance and the English sound of his name caused a buzz of comment in the court. He took the stand, assented to the oath and identified himself. Rienzi elaborated a moment on his qualifications and appointments, and then asked the court to accept him as an expert witness of equal status with Galuzzi.

  As if to detract even further from the dramatic impact of the previous testimony, Rienzi then called on the Clerk of the Court to re-read the transcript of Professor Galuzzi’s testimony. The Clerk shuffled his papers, coughed, adjusted his spectacles, and then read, parrot-fashion, the long, definitive passages. While they were being read, the crowd shifted and stirred uneasily. Landon threw a cautious glance at Rienzi, but there was no response from the pale, drawn face and the bleak inquisitor’s eyes. When the Clerk had finished the transcript, Rienzi thanked him formally and then began to interrogate Landon: ‘You would agree, Mr Landon, with Professor Galuzzi’s definitions?’

  ‘I would – yes.’

  ‘You would agree, in general terms, that psychic traumas reveal themselves in various forms of mental infirmity, often long after the event which has caused them?’

  ‘In general terms – yes.’

  ‘You heard the testimony of the last witness. You heard how this accused, as a child of eight, was witness to the brutal circumstances o
f her mother’s rape and murder. You would agree that this would be sufficient to cause a psychic wound of the gravest possible kind?’

  ‘I would.’

  ‘Mr Landon, how would you define the word “obsession”?’

  ‘In psychiatric terms, it means a persistent or recurrent idea, usually strongly tinged with emotion and frequently involving an urge towards some form of action, the whole mental situation being pathological in character.’

  ‘“Pathological” meaning, in this case, diseased or infirm?’

  ‘That’s correct.’

  ‘Could you make your definition a little clearer to the court?’

  ‘Well, some patients have obsessions of guilt, so that they are prepared to accuse themselves of crimes they had never committed. Others are obsessed by unreasonable anxieties, so that they will not cross a street for fear of being killed. There are some people who will go round the house twenty times at night to assure themselves that the doors and windows are locked. This, too, is an obsessive condition.’

  ‘Is this condition curable?’

  ‘Sometimes it can be alleviated by analysis, which reveals to the patient the roots of his disorder. Sometimes, however, the idea and the emotional pattern become so fixed as to be incurable – except perhaps by that type of surgery known as pre-frontal lobotomy.’

  ‘From your examination of the accused and from the evidence elicited in this court, would you say she was the victim of an obsessive condition?’

  ‘Undoubtedly.’

  ‘Which began with the psychic shock inflicted on her by her mother’s death?’

  ‘Yes. Her failure to consummate marriage, for instance, is an obsessional symptom directly associated with the violence done to her mother.’

  ‘Now, Mr Landon, I want you to be very clear on the import of my next question. I want the court to be clear on it, too, lest I should seem to be leading this witness away from fact and into a domain of speculation. This is, I hasten to assure the President, no part of my intention. The testimony of Dr Galuzzi raised the crucial question of moral sense and moral responsibility. I should like to be more specific on this point.’ He turned to Landon and asked with great deliberation: ‘Does the obsession which we have been discussing – the fixed idea, the fixed emotional pattern – deprive the patient of moral responsibility? Does it diminish this responsibility so that the patient cannot help what he does, but is compelled to it by forces outside his control?’

  It was a loaded issue and Landon knew it. He took time to digest the question and his answer was studiously exact. ‘Modem psychology points to many states in which the subject is or seems to be deprived of responsibility for his actions, or in which his moral sense and therefore his moral responsibility are diminished. However, it must be said that such states are not yet matters of legal definition, and the patient who commits a criminal act may still be amenable to the law as it is now framed.’

  ‘Would you say that the infirmity of the accused would diminish her moral responsibility?’

  ‘Most certainly.’

  ‘Would it retard in any fashion her growth as a person?’

  ‘It’s elementary, I think. The human psyche develops, as the body does, by organic growth, environmental influence and education. Its development may be inhibited by bodily infirmity, by trauma or maleducation.’

  ‘And, as in the case of the body, one psychic function may be inhibited while all the others are normal?’

  ‘That’s true. A brilliant mathematician, for instance, may have the emotional responses of a child.’

  ‘Would it be true to say, Mr Landon, that in certain psychic shocks, not only is normal growth inhibited, but the sufferer is left, shall we say, fixed and anchored at the moment when the shock took place?’

  ‘This is one mode of obsession – not an uncommon one.’

  An act committed under such an obsession would, therefore, have the same moral character, the same emotional pattern, as if it were committed at the time of the first shock?

  Landon frowned and pursed his lips. ‘It might. You must not ask me to go further than that. One could only establish the fact by long, controlled clinical analysis.’

  ‘But you would admit at least the possibility?’

  ‘Any psychiatrist must admit that much.’

  ‘Remembering what happened to Anna Albertini, remembering the evidence of her later incapacity, remembering your own clinical examinations, would you admit the possibility in her case?’

  ‘One could not discount it.’

  ‘Let us be clear on this, Mr Landon. You admit, without any doubt, grave shock, grave psychic damage?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘You admit an obsessional state with diminished moral responsibility?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You admit at least the possibility that the murder of Gianbattista Belloni might have, in the mind of the accused, the same character as if it had taken place immediately after her mother’s death?’

  ‘On this point I am not prepared to go further than I have gone already.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Landon.’ Rienzi turned away. ‘The defence rests at this point, Mr President.’

  ‘The witness may step down.’

  Although they had planned the questionnaire together, Landon had the uneasy feeling that Rienzi had mistimed it and treated it in a fashion altogether too casual. To the spectators also, it was a tame, almost pathetic conclusion. The storm which Rienzi had seemed to promise them had blown out in a single squall. Landon said as much to Ascolini, but the old man shook his white mane and muttered testily: ‘It is not you who are trying the case but the fellows on the rostrum. The boy did well. He gave them their moment of drama – then a draught of cool reason. Besides, there is more to come. Listen!’

  The tall, hawk-faced Prosecutor had taken the floor and, in grave, measured tones, was addressing the judges: ‘Mr President, gentlemen of the court, no one has been more deeply moved than I by the evidence of the defence. No one has greater sympathy than I for the burden which has lain, all these years, on the shoulders of this unfortunate young woman. But …’ An orator’s pause, well-timed and pregnant with admonition. ‘But I must take my stand, as you, the members of the judiciary, must take yours, on the law. The law is a wall between order and chaos. There is a sense in which the law is more important than justice. Suspend the law – as it was suspended in this country for too many years – and you let in violence and disorder of every kind. Try to bend the law even in favour of the deserving, try to modify it because of your own sympathies, and you create a precedent for new and greater crimes; you say that violent revenge is lawful, that political assassination is allowable; you bring back to this country the vendetta, in which a tradition of murder is handed down from generation to generation. You dare not do this! On the evidence submitted to you, you must convict this woman. The crime itself is proven beyond a shadow of a doubt; premeditation is proven – sixteen years of premeditation, the record of which was written first on a cemetery stone and then in the blood of Gianbattista Belloni. Much has been said in this court of the dubious character of this man. We challenge none of it. But we take our stand on the most primitive principle of the law: that murder, for whatever motive, is an immoral and illegal act. You may, at your discretion, consider a merciful punishment for the unfortunate girl who stands in the dock. But you must recognize her crime for what it is – wilful and premeditated murder I I am the servant of the law, gentlemen, as you are. I need say no more than this – I submit that you cannot do less.’

  It was so simply done that one almost missed the talent behind it: the nice judgment, the meticulous timing, the actor’s verve and the gambler’s shrewdness that made him refuse even to skirmish round the outer edge of his phalanx. Sympathy might run against him, but the currents of interest, precedent and judicial responsibility ran strongly in his favour. He had a pat case, and a gratuitous plea for leniency would dent it not at all. He sat down, sober and a t
rifle smug, as the President called Carlo Rienzi to present his plea and summation.

  Carlo got up slowly, twitching his gown up on his shoulders and gathering himself for the final moments of his first forensic adventure. He glanced briefly at Anna Albertini and then, in quiet, persuasive fashion, addressed himself to the judges: ‘Mr President, gentlemen of the court, my learned friend has spoken to you of the law. To hear him, you would believe that the law is something fixed, immutable, beyond dispute or interpretation. This is not so. The law is a body of traditions, precedents and ordinances, some good, some bad, but all dedicated in principle, if not in fact, to the security of the subject, the maintenance of public order and the dispensation of moral justice. Sometimes these ends accord with one another. Sometimes they are in contradiction, so that justice may be ill served while order is most securely maintained. Sometimes the ordinance is too simple, sometimes it is too detailed, so that there is always need for gloss and annotation and the conflict of opinions to arrive at its true intent. The decalogue says bluntly: “Thou shalt not kill”. Is this the end of it? You know it is not. You put a uniform on a man’s back and a gun in his hands and you say: “It is a holy and blessed thing to kill for one’s country”, and you pin a medal on his chest when he does it. Let us be clear on this issue, gentlemen. The law is an instrument and not an end. It is not, and never can be, a perfect instrument of justice.

  ‘It is not merely the law which is imperfect. There is imperfection also in its ministers – the police and the judiciary. If these fail in their duty, if their power is perverted, as it was perverted during the war in San Stefano, so that evil men flourish and the innocent are left defenceless, what then? If, at the moment when Belloni dragged this girl’s mother away to be raped, Anna Albertini had shot him dead, would you then have charged her with murder? No! You would have commended her as a brave child defending her mother’s honour. You might even have pinned on her breast the medal which a grateful country gave to Gianbattista Belloni!

  ‘I do not say this, Mr President, to claim for the defence a ground of argument outside the law. I say it in affirmation of a principle to which great jurists in this country and elsewhere have subscribed: that it is the duty of a court not merely to uphold the law, but to ensure that the greatest justice possible is done within its imperfect framework.