* * *
The next time Angela sees him, he doesn’t look well. The collar of his shirt is grubby. A button is missing, and he hasn’t shaved. Or been allowed to shave. She really doesn’t know. There is a toilet in a sort of closet behind a screen at the back of the room—she’d noticed it and looked away, embarrassed—but no sink.
She stands just inside the door holding the plate. It’s lamb, with peas and the first baby carrots, and she realizes that she wants him to say something, or at least smile at her. His smile is soft and although his eyes are dark and her father’s were blue, there’s something about them that is similar. There’s a new pad on the desk, and several more books about Marx and Lenin.
“I have to read them,” he says when he sees her looking at them.
He is sitting on the edge of the bed, his hands dangling between his knees as if he is too tired to do anything else with them.
“I have to read them to understand what I have done. For my trial.” He looks up at her, and it seems as if his face has sagged even more. As if the lines have deepened so they might cut into his flesh, carve his features away. “Did they teach you Lenin in school?” he asks.
Angela shakes her head. They didn’t, although she can remember Barbara’s father talking about him over Sunday lunch. “That which advances the revolution is moral!” he had shouted from the head of the table, his words slurred. Barbara’s mother had rolled her eyes. They had been eating beef and Angela can remember the spots of gravy that dotted the starched linen cloth as Professor Barelli waved his fork. “That which does not advance the revolution is immoral. Elegant!” Barbara’s father had thumped the table, making the plates rattle. “The truth is always elegant!” he had announced, reaching for the bottle. The wine had spilled, dribbling down the side of his glass. Barbara had kicked Angela under the table.
Angela pushes the books aside, knocking one onto the floor. She puts the food down and bends to retrieve the dog-eared paperback. Her hand closes over it, but all she can see is the old beret, the faded ribbons of the medals, the too-big bows and surging tide of flowers.
That evening, when she gets home, she tries hard to remember. She stands by the calendar that hangs on the kitchen wall and puts her finger on the box that is March 16. She presses so hard her nail leaves a tiny sickle moon. But it’s no good. Time has both slowed down and speeded up and she can’t sort out the days. Or maybe she can. She tells herself she remembers. That she’s sure of it. That on that Thursday, she and Antonio had breakfast together. That they sat at the little table and she rested her bare foot on his while they watched the sun finger the thyme and rosemary she is growing in the window box.
* * *
The next letter isn’t a letter, it’s a box. Quite a big one. Wrapped in brown paper, it will barely fit in her bag.
Several days have gone by. She has made meals on almost every one, but Antonio has taken them himself, so she has not had to go to Via Montalcini, which, honestly, is a relief. If she does not have to go into the apartment, if she does not have to wait while Antonio unlocks the door and then step inside that little room, which, although it has a fan of some kind, is hot and smells sour and close—if she doesn’t have to do that, she can almost forget why she’s making extra food. Why Antonio has asked her to go out and buy a razor, and a toothbrush, and a comb.
This time she is to arrive at the phone booth at eleven p.m. And although she’s only done it once before, the bus ride seems almost familiar. She gets off at the same stop with two other people, a couple. For a moment she’s terrified that they will walk in the same direction, that they will live in the house opposite the booth and stand and watch her, or, worse, want to use the phone. But they don’t. Holding each other’s arms, they laugh and run across the street and by the time the bus doors hiss close and it rumbles away, she’s alone.
The phone booth looks just the same. Even so Angela slows down. A block below it, she finds herself looking either way, peering into the gaps between the buildings and the shadows thrown by the trees. There are fifty thousand policemen and soldiers and carabinieri looking for Aldo Moro. She pulls her bag closer to her, as if a hand might reach out and snatch it. But nothing moves, and there’s no sound except her footsteps and the faint rustle of spring in new leaves.
Angela makes her pretend call. The phone box smells the same. The only thing that’s different is that someone’s written “Laura” and a phone number in blue magic marker on the back wall. She hangs up and places the box on the top of the telephone. Then she walks quickly away up the street, eager to put as much distance between her and it as possible, telling herself that whatever else she does, tonight she will not stop. She will not look back.
But she does. As she reaches the pillar and the edge of the wall, she can almost feel the shadows of the trees pulling her in, wrapping her in their darkness. She hesitates, then turns and rests her back against the wall again, feeling the stones finger her jacket and hair.
This time it’s five, or maybe seven, or eight, minutes before the woman comes. She’s walking faster, as if she doesn’t give a damn anymore about trying to look normal. She doesn’t even pause, never mind look both ways before she crosses the street. Instead she walks diagonally. There’s a desperation in her step, a slight stagger that makes Angela think she’s crying. A moment later, when she’s halfway across the road and caught in the glare of the streetlight, she reaches up and wipes her face with the back of her hand.
It’s warmer tonight. She isn’t wearing her green scarf, and her coat is unbuttoned, and Angela is certain, although it has not been very long, that she is bigger, that even in this short time the baby she carries inside her has grown. The woman pauses for a moment as she steps up onto the pavement. Then she shoves open the door and grabs the box on the top of the telephone with both hands. But this time she doesn’t whirl away or run. Instead she stands there as if she can’t move. Then, very slowly, she lifts the box and holds it against her face.
* * *
In Twenty Days They Killed a Leader, La Repubblica cries. The Destruction of a Man, writes Corriere della Sera. “If they had killed him, I could have understood more easily,” one of Aldo Moro’s colleagues says. “But not this.”
Yet again packages have been left in Genoa and Milan and Rome. Yet again newspapers have received telephone calls telling them where to find the latest communiqué, and the most recent letter. In this one Aldo Moro begs the government to bargain for his life—to exchange him for other political prisoners. He doesn’t say so, but everyone knows he means Renato Curcio and the others standing trial in Turin. “I am a political prisoner and am being subjected to a difficult political trial with a political outcome,” Aldo Moro writes. “Time passes fast. Any moment,” he warns, “could be too late.”
Angela tries not to read the headlines, or anything else, on her way to the apartment at Via Montalcini. And fails. She knows now that the box she delivered was a tape, a recorded message from Aldo Moro to his family. All the papers say so, although they will not say what it said. Not that it matters. It isn’t the words, she thinks, it’s the timbre and touch of his voice. The caress of that familiar sound. That’s what his wife and children crave.
Standing in the street, holding her basket, looking at the little printed words on the newspapers, she hears her father’s whistle. The aimless scattered pebbles of his tune that was not a tune at all, just the sound he made in the world. She never heard her mother’s voice. Or if she did, if there was a second, nothing more than the space of a heartbeat, when Annabeth spoke to her, she cannot, of course, remember it. But she is certain, nonetheless, that she would know it. That her mother’s voice is lodged in her like a splinter. Finally she pulls herself away and walks on. But all the way to Via Montalcini she feels a weight, the palm of her father’s hand, resting on the crown of her head.
Antonio has not said so in so many words, but Angela knows he’s worried. The police have knocked on either fifteen, or twenty, or fifty
thousand doors in Rome, depending on which report you want to believe. As time goes on the chances can only get greater that they will knock on one that will somehow lead them to Via Montalcini, and what the papers are now calling “the People’s Prison.” Last night Antonio told her to be careful of what she wears. That it should be as drab and as ordinary as possible. Don’t stand out. No pretty summer dress for the sudden surge of spring weather. Nothing brightly colored. Nothing memorable. If she meets anyone in the lobby or the street, she should be pleasant and smile. She should not walk too fast, or move too slowly.
Be ordinary.
Be one of many.
That is the best way to disappear.
He also told her not to take the same route, that she must do something slightly different every time she makes the trip. So it takes her longer to get to Via Montalcini than she should, and by the time she does get there the food is cold. There are no mouse sounds from the other room. The apartment feels abandoned. Antonio looks tired when he opens the door, and for an awful moment, as she steps inside, she thinks, Something terrible has happened. He’s choked, or had a heart attack. He’s dead. But it isn’t that. As she goes into the stuffy little room carrying the plate, the plastic knife and spoon shoved in her pocket, Angela sees that it isn’t that at all. Although a part of her thinks it might as well have been.
She hasn’t seen him for a quite a while and his color is horrible. Pallid. Aldo Moro’s cheeks have stretched downward, and he’s gray. All of him. His face is gray and his hands are gray and his shirt is dirty. His hair is disheveled, as if he’s been running his hands through it over and over, and although she knows they have allowed him a razor, he hasn’t shaved. But for all that, it’s his eyes that upset her most. The last time she was here, his smile didn’t reach his mouth. Now it doesn’t reach his eyes, either. They are as dull and still as stagnant water.
She glances over her shoulder. The door is ajar as usual, but she can’t see Antonio. She senses that he’s not standing guard out in the hall, but has gone somewhere else in the apartment. For the first time, she and Aldo Moro are alone together.
“I’ve brought parmigiana,” she says. “The first eggplants are in.” And tries to smile, the way she’s seen people smile when they are tempting children. But she has never had a child. It strikes her quite suddenly, standing there, that she has never had anyone, not really. Except her father and Antonio.
“If there’s something special. Something you’d like me to make.”
She’s afraid her voice is shaking. He looks up at her dully. There are papers scattered across the bed and on the floor. There’s no sign of the Lenin books. There are no books at all, just pages and pages of scrawled writing. He’s barefoot, and the room is closer and smells worse than usual, as if there might be something wrong with the toilet behind the makeshift screen.
“You have to keep your strength up,” she says. “You have to eat.”
He stands up, like a child obeying an order, and sways slightly, then looks at her, as if he’s just realized that he knows who she is, or has at least seen her before.
“I love my country,” he says suddenly. “But it apparently does not love me.”
“They love you.”
The words are out of Angela’s mouth before she even realizes she’s said them. He shakes his head. The smile plays around his mouth now, but it’s different, like a reflection, as if he’s angled a mirror down inside himself.
Angela glances at the door. It’s still ajar, and there’s still no sign of Antonio. She puts the plate on the table, rustling the papers, pushing a pad aside to cover her words.
“They love you,” she mutters. “Your family loves you.”
His face sharpens.
“You’ve seen them?” The question is a hiss, nothing more.
Angela takes the plastic knife and spoon out of her pocket. “Your daughter.” She breathes the words as she puts them down. “Your daughter loves you.”
Then she backs out of the room, her heart hammering as if she has just run the fastest mile of her life.
That night Antonio brings his shirt home. Angela washes it, standing at the kitchen sink, rubbing a bar of soap up and down the collar and the cuffs. She rinses it in the plastic bowl and watches the water swirl down the drain. Then she fills the bowl again and does it over. Finally the water runs clean. She finds a hanger and hangs the shirt up in the little bathroom. When she steps out, Antonio is sitting on the ratty old sofa they bought in the market for nothing because someone was going to throw it away. He sticks a foot out, in a mock gesture to trip her. She is supposed to stumble and land in his lap, but she doesn’t. Instead she stops and looks at him. He’s exhausted. His eyes are red rimmed.
“Why are you doing this?” she asks. She can hardly believe that the words are coming out of her mouth, but they are, and once they start they don’t stop. “What good is this doing? And you? I don’t care about the others. But you. Why? What is it for?”
Antonio looks up at her, and for a second she thinks he isn’t going to answer. Ask me no questions, I’ll tell you no lies. Or that he’s going to spout some revolutionary nonsense at her, quote one of the endless statements about the proletariat that the Brigate Rosse has been blurting and babbling and hammering everyone with for years. Or perhaps he’ll be like Professor Barelli and shout, and thump his fist to make himself right.
But he doesn’t. Instead he says, “You know why.” And Angela feels something inside of her crack.
“You can’t believe,” she shouts. “You can’t believe that doing this will bring him back!”
Antonio is looking at the television, but he isn’t seeing it. She knows that. She understands that instead of the endless parade of images—something about car racing and a fire—he’s seeing the building out beyond the Darsena with its narrow balcony and the laundry flying like flags from the rails. He’s seeing the view from the window of his nonno’s farm where the fields are now fallow and the pond overgrown with bullrushes. He’s hearing his father’s voice, telling him that university is pointless. And Piero’s telling him it isn’t. And his own telling them they must ask not only for bread, but for roses.
His hand is clutching, and letting go, and clutching again at the old maroon blanket that she keeps folded over the arm of the sofa. Angela kneels on the cushion beside him. Teetering, trying to keep her balance, she puts her arms around him. Antonio has done everything for her and there has been so little she has been able to do for him.
She holds his head against her shoulder. She presses her fingers into his beautiful black curls. She whispers something that is nothing at all, just a sound in the little room.
* * *
There Will Be No Secret Negotiations. The Trial of Aldo Moro has begun.
It’s badly printed and blurry and lying faceup on the desk, but he doesn’t seem to care. Today he is very angry. His voice quavers. Spittle hangs at the edge of his lips.
“They are saying”—he gestures at the newspaper page—“the government, my friends! Are saying that I was against negotiating for the release of Mario Sossi. They are saying that I didn’t agree to talk, and that I wouldn’t agree now. It’s a lie!” He looks at her. “It’s a lie. I told them we have to have a heart. We have to compromise. We have to learn to talk to one another or we are lost. It isn’t just bullets that kill people.” His dark eyes are swimming as his voice drops. “It’s silence. Refusing to speak. Sossi’s life—” His voice drivels off. “A man’s life,” he says a moment later, “is sacred. It’s God’s to give and take away. We have no power if we do not have humanity.”
He turns his back on her. Leaves her standing there, holding the plate.
“That’s what I told them,” he mutters. “Anything else is a lie.”
Antonio took his shirt the morning after she washed it. He’s wearing it now. Standing this close in the tiny room she can smell the soap, the same bar she used this morning in the bath. His shoulders heave, in anger or re
signation, she’s not sure.
“My family,” he says, and Angela feels her stomach tighten.
As usual the door isn’t quite closed, and also, as usual now, Antonio is not standing right outside. He seems to have decided she doesn’t need his protection, that she can be trusted to walk into a space the size of a broom closet and give a sixty-year-old man, who has no shoes or belt or anything but a pen and papers, a plate of food. She can see why. The mention of Mario Sossi’s name reminds her of the photographs she saw of him, of how small and inconsequential he looked in his prison. The same thing is happening to Aldo Moro. Once she had thought that Mara Cagol, the Red Brigades, made people disappear like smoke. Sparito nel nullo! Now she understands that it is not that simple. That they do not vanish all at once. Instead, in the shadow of the five-pointed star, they shrink. Shrivel like dying flowers until nothing is left but petals and dust.
“Have you seen them?” The whisper is desperate. As faint as the hiss of air seeping out of a balloon.
Angela shakes her head. She pushes aside a pen, a pad of paper, unlined and unmarked, its pages blank and white and empty, and sets down the plate. She has brought him a blue cloth napkin from the linen she packed up and carried away from Via Vittoria, and she is folding it and laying out the plastic spoon and knife the same way they do in the trattoria, when his hand closes over hers.
It takes her a moment to understand. He is pushing a scrap of paper into her palm. She doesn’t look up. She doesn’t meet his eyes as she shoves her hand into her pocket and backs out of the room.
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