September in the Rain

by Peter Robinson

  Seated amongst the tables of lunching businessmen, we had just started guessing what the menu had to offer when the door swung open and an old man came in. He was dressed in the style of the 40s or thereabouts with an outsized black corduroy jacket, white shirt and a soft, loosely knotted bow tie. Extremely thin hair was swept back from his forehead to make separate stripes across an otherwise shiny pate. He had a large waxed moustache—a modest parody of Nietzsche’s. From behind the bar, where he was evidently welcome, the old man produced a jazz guitar with a raised bridge and f-holes in the sound box. Putting the short strap over his head, he supported the instrument high on his broad chest and paunch, a bit like Django Reinhardt, the guitar neck lifted above his left shoulder.

  As he sauntered between the tables, this antique musician beautifully picked out and improvised tunes with casually struck combinations of arpeggios and strums. This was surely Santa Lucia. Pursing his lips and wrinkling his forehead expressively as he concentrated on the hands’ techniques, he was playing variations on popular songs. Some of the diners clearly recognized snatches as he moved between them. ‘Dimmi quando, quando, quando …’ A couple were humming and crooning the phrases. They offered the guitarist a small paper note. ‘Nel blu, dipinto di blu, felice di stare lassù …’ Others there had pressed on the old man a handful of coins, which he deftly pocketed with barely a break in the recital.

  Our soup arrived. It was made of pasta and beans, and piping hot. Tunes the musician played were inviting the diners to remember moments of the fleeting loves they shared. It must have been their gesturing hands and unintelligible Italian that set us at a distance from the workaday restaurant trade of shoppers and businessmen. You had your head down over the soup bowl, tipping the plate slightly towards yourself as you spooned up the liquid.

  At a table not far away a scrawny fellow with bloodshot eyes was receiving a large white envelope from a sweating, overweight man. As the thin man muttered a phrase, the fatter one grew flushed and subservient. The thin man, his mouth set in an expression of aggressive intent, contemptuously snatched the package. He calculated its contents, flicking through the loose ends of notes, then turned it over to check none were folded.

  ‘Did you see that?’

  The Mafioso-like character was standing up and leaving the other to push his plate away and slump back in the chair. The waiter came and started saying something that sounded like ‘carne’, but we almost seemed to disgust him by ordering a cappuccino and asking for the bill.

  Paying and leaving the restaurant, we continued along the windy Viale Ascoli Piceno towards Piazzale Lodi. But what could have left such a restless feeling in the heart? What was it that seemed so uninviting in the city? It might have been the bare trees rising, their branches intertwined, along the wide paved-over central reservations. They divided the two carriageways of the avenue, its heavy traffic jostling for space between lines of parked cars on which the dust and grime had settled. More cars were parked around the narrow tree trunks at every angle, and in every piece of possible space. They looked completely abandoned there.

  Here were the balconies with parapets, high-sided grey façades of apartments caked in smut to above head height. Traces of a foggy morning remained still on the air. The thick light made it seem like early evening, though it couldn’t have been much later than two in the afternoon. Deep shadows gathered between cars under the trees; others edged out from the angles of pavement and apartment block frontages. Policemen armed with short-barreled automatic machine pistols were standing guard outside the banks. Bits of packaging and newspaper leaves came gusting over the crumbling road surfaces.

  Posters for films currently showing were pasted up on fences and patches of wall. Most of them seemed to be for porno cinemas. Next to a bit of graffiti that read ‘Titti ti amo’ was an advert for Ferita d’amore. The blown-up stilled frame showed a half-dressed girl cut off above the knee. You saw that one and instantly turned your head away. Small black squares were sticking across the places where the girl’s nipples would be, and these served to enhance the sense of something tormenting and forbidden: a fully clothed man with slicked-back hair was penetrating her, pushing her against a glass executive boardroom table. The girl was arching her back away from him, her neck curved even further, with a look on the uplifted profile that might have been agony or ecstasy. I glanced at it again, half-ashamed, as we went by, trying vainly to decipher the actress’s inscrutable face.

  Not far down on the right from the Piazzale we found the Hotel Lodi, its entrance set into a grimy apartment block façade. The lobby had the air of a shabby, poky-looking place, but Roger the part-time theatrical agent had assured you that its prices were affordable.

  ‘Una camera per due?’

  The woman on the desk, after taking the passports and having the register signed, led us upstairs to a dully painted but unexpectedly spacious and dust-free room. As soon as we were left alone, you said you’d better try and catch up on some of that lost sleep. Later we might try to find a pizza. While you were showering off the twenty-four hours of travelling and preparing yourself for a nap, I opened the yellow canvas gas-mask bag pressed into service for carrying books. It was French Army surplus—a native-speaker assistant at a local grammar school whom Alice was occasionally seeing at university left it in her room one evening, and never returned to retrieve it. Since she didn’t want the poor-looking thing, she passed it on to me. It would serve as a book bag all through my Courtauld years.

  Inside the satchel was an envelope containing a few sheets of typed, headed paper. The first of the documents was in Italian. It consisted of the official summons from il Presidente del Tribunale di Milano, with a black official stamp on it dated 28 Nov 1975. A second document explained what it said.

  (translation)

  WRIT OF SUMMONS

  The Chief Judge of the Court of Milan, Italy -- 2nd sect. hereby orders all competent writ-servers to summon, charging all expenses on the Public Treasury, the person mentioned below to appear before the said Court at the hearing of the 28th day of January, 1976, at 9 a.m., to be examined in the criminal proceedings instituted against:

  Cesare Moretti, under custody charged with assault (Art. 519, Penal Code) and private violence (Art. 610, Penal Code) Milan, 27/11/75

  The Chief Judge: sgd.

  The Court Clerk: sgd.

  A true abstract. Milan 28/11/75

  sgd. -- Court Clerk

  Person to be summoned

  1) YOUNG, Mary Jane, born Lyme Regis on 8/1/54, residing at Belle Vue House, Paddington, London;

  2) ENGLISH, Richard, born on 14/2/52, residing (illegible)

  ____________________________________

  A true translation. Rome, 18/12/75

  The Translator

  (Renzo Arzeni)

  This was how we had found out your assailant was in custody. The squadra volante at Como must have arrested him after noting down wrongly the dates of birth, and, as the translator’s parenthesis indicated, mangling my home address. And what exactly did ‘Private violence’ mean? It was a literal translation of the Italian document’s ‘violenza privata’. The word in the dictionary was ‘stupro’: we were going to attend ‘un processo per stupro’. So would we have to be asked about our private lives?

  Beyond the window, dusk was already falling on Corso Lodi. The sky was invisible, cut out by apartment blocks beyond the avenue’s tree-lined central reserve. The leaf-less branches were heaving up and down in a strong wind. A woman, her head turned, leaned into the gusts, and then disappeared beyond the frame. A man stood waiting to cross the road. A car was pulling up, its window wound down, words exchanged; the doorways of shops seemed made for such encounters. Across the street those niches were deserted, but, further, a shop-girl had come out of the small electrical suppliers and, with the aid of a long pole, was lowering its grille for the night. A city was like this: glimpses of stre
ets and bars, people getting off a tram, cars abandoned and vandalized. Some kids were playing five-a-side football beneath the trees, indifferent to the cold and wind; their pitch was dead earth, kicked to bone-hardness by innumerable passersby.

  Attached to the translation sheet, a covering note had been stapled:

  URGENT

  Italian Embassy 14 Three Kings Yard,

  London N.1.

  London, 2nd January 1976.

  218

  Dear Madam,

  The Italian Ministry of Justice has asked this Embassy to forward to you the enclosed Writ of Summons to appear before the Court of Milan on the 28th January 1976 at 9 a.m. to be examined in the criminal proceedings instituted against Cesare Moretti, who is at present under custody charged with assault and violence.

  Should you decide to appear as witness in the penal proceedings (appearance is not compulsory) you will be paid: a) cost 2nd class return rail ticket; b) lire 1.400 (about one pound) for each day of the journey; c) lire 2.500 (about Lst. 1.70) for each day you are required to stay there.

  Please acknowledge receipt informing if you intend to appear before said Court.

  Yours faithfully,

  (G.Titone)

  Assist. to Labour and Social Affairs Councillor

  Mrs. Young, Mary Jane

  Belle Vue House, Paddington,

  London W2.

  All along the walls of the Corso Lodi were innumerable election posters, pasted across one another like papier mâché, some with the hammer and sickle on them, many in shreds, the promises of yesterday already waste paper. At this distance, overlapping and interrupting each other’s messages, they looked like a street-art collage. Over the top of them, and at eye level everywhere else, many more informal slogans had been daubed and sprayed. There was a mash up of what must be political parties: PCI, PSI, PR, DC, MSI, CGIL, CISL and UIL. The word ‘LOTTA’ was used all over the place. ‘Boia chi molla’ said one. Round about it somebody had painted a row of those little backward-facing swastikas. There were other slogans, both printed and painted, that seemed to be attacking the terrorist groups, the Brigate rosse—the ones who were to kidnap and murder Aldo Moro just a couple of years later.

  But now Corso Lodi was dark and still. You were lying fast asleep. Perhaps we would venture out towards the centre when you woke. I glanced down at the papers on my lap to check again the expenses that we could claim after the trial. ‘Mrs. Young, Mary Jane’ … and it suddenly struck me that the girl who lay not far away, evenly breathing now in the low double bed had been addressed by the Italian Government as if she were, in fact, a married woman.

  The Tribunale di Milano, unlike the central railway station, was built in the style of 1930s futurist modernism: a blank pale grey stone frontage cut into with tall, narrow slots of windows. We walked the few hundreds of yards back along Corso Lodi past the Porta Romana to where it intersected with the Viale Piave and there it was, on the opposite side of the square, the Palazzo della Giustizia with the Tribunale inside. It was approached by a high and steep flight of steps. Our eyes were obliged to lift skywards as we climbed towards its bleakly imposing façade.

  Inside the entrance was a small, green-painted wooden cubicle. After glancing at the summons documents pushed under its glass screen, the custodian explained indifferently, waving his hands, where we were to go. His words emerged too rapidly to catch, and nor did I know how to ask him to say them again—but this time more slowly, please. The custodian’s casual manner didn’t appear at all encouraging. We were meant to be somewhere to the left and on a higher floor; that was what his hands had seemed to say. Stairs led to a balcony around the entrance atrium with a thick marble parapet. The vast interior height of the room was emphasized by occasional appearances of men at a distance in dark suits.

  An official-looking person emerged from an office.

  ‘Dov’è questo … processo, per favore?’

  The man shook his head firmly, meaning either that he couldn’t make out the words in my accent, wouldn’t help us anyway, or that he didn’t know. A number of people shrugged similarly before someone raised a finger towards the ceiling.

  ‘Terzo piano!’

  After emerging from the lift, we had only stood there a moment, exchanging guesses, looking confusedly around as if for inspiration, when a man in a black uniform came up and spoke.

  ‘You English?’ he asked. ‘What you want?’

  The man took one glance at the documents and led us down a corridor, past closed doors and towards a blank yellow marble wall. Here the passageway branched off to left and right, widening into an anteroom. It was merely a larger corridor. A small crowd of men and women were gathering there. The man, who must have been an usher, disappeared into an inner room through a polished wooden door.

  ‘Hope he’s telling them we’ve arrived.’

  Placing ourselves by the door, against the wall, we vainly tried to become inconspicuous. There was a commotion beginning at the corner where the corridor widened. Two carabinieri in parade uniforms were escorting a prisoner to trial.

  You needed just one look to recognize the man from four months before. He was not wearing handcuffs, but heavy chains with links that hung down from his wrists. He’d grown taller and larger in memory. Coming from his prison cell, between the two guards, badly shaven, Cesare Moretti appeared shrunken, pale, deprived of any dignity.

  From the little crowd outside the court, there came a small, poorly dressed woman, walking with a limp towards the defendant being led into the courtroom. She was shouting something at him; the man was interrupting her in that same brittle voice. One of the guards detached himself from the advancing group and attempted to hold her at bay.

  Then this must be his wife.

  The accused had a wife who was lame. You glanced around at me in a rapid acknowledgement of the fact. Then I remembered the World Cup football. This person might even be some boy’s father, you could picture him kicking the ball to a child on waste ground between apartment blocks by railway lines—like those down which our train had rolled through the outskirts of Milan. The man’s imaginary son was wearing an Inter shirt and trying to kick the ball, but it slithered off his toe at a crazy angle.

  All through that autumn, the days shortening from September, while I was starting at the Courtauld, you were working at the Home, Alice throwing herself into teaching practice, all through that autumn, Cesare Moretti had been waiting in custody for this trial.

  No sooner had he caught sight of the crowd around the door to the court, than the accused man stopped in his tracks. He had certainly recognized us. There was no doubt about it; there was clear surprise on his face. He suddenly swung round and spoke to someone else standing by him—his lawyer perhaps. They hadn’t expected to have to deal with prosecution witnesses. The advocate was murmuring something to one of the guards, the carabinieri with their silver bomb cap badges. Now all four of them were turning round and disappearing in the direction from which they had come. His wife had been trying to speak with her husband—whose presence plainly upset her. She continued to cry and yell at him. He was telling her to shut up, and had asked the guards to remove him. Then the accused man’s relative found herself alone in that milling crowd once more.

  ‘Do you think he told her he was innocent?’ you whispered.

  ‘And his lawyer, for that matter.’

  ‘Because he didn’t expect to see us?’

  ‘Maybe it’s so we don’t see him,’ you wondered, and then, to yourself—

  ‘It was though. It is.’

  The accused man’s wife had limped back to where the journalists and advocates stood talking. The sight of her husband had badly unsettled her. She was accosting anyone who’d stay and listen. It must have been her view of the case she was stating, moving from one to another as they listened or rebuffed her. She needed to wear non-matching shoes with
different thickness of sole. One of them retained the caliper. She was dressed in an outfit of blue, grey and black, like mourning, clothes that made her seem older than perhaps she was. Her hair was a mousy colour, plenty of salt and pepper in it, and perm’d, perhaps for the occasion, into stiff close waves. The woman might even have been Cesare Moretti’s mother. For a moment she reminded me of Gran back at the National.

  Her dark eyes were fixed upon us, and now, to your evident alarm, she was crossing the marble corridor. We were standing a little apart, against the yellow wall, beside the courtroom door. The woman stepped up extremely close to you, cornering you against the doorframe’s edge. A sequence of rapid-flowing words poured from her mouth, directed at your presence there. Though we didn’t understand what she was saying, it wasn’t at all hard to catch her drift.

  ‘Stop it!’ I tried to shout. ‘Stop it! Get away!’

  But the woman would not be stopped. You were shaking with tears, your head lowered to withstand the shrill tirade. There was swearing and insults—Dio, puttana, marito, and, as I pushed myself between you and the woman, the words schifosa, dolore, and perché? perché? There was some incomprehensible wailing, a lament against fortune in the form of two unwanted foreign witnesses. Would she never stop?

  Jostled, and receiving no answer to her impassioned questions, the accused man’s wife suddenly turned and hobbled away. Someone behind her must have shouted that she should leave those two alone. Had the presence of these witnesses borne in upon her the possibility that her husband might not have been telling the truth? Who was guilty? Had that girl trapped her man, that girl, the whore, trapped him into whatever really happened?

  Now, still staring towards you, she was haranguing her listeners, begging patience of the men and women by the courtroom entrance. You were still wiping your eyes, trying to recompose yourself, when the usher appeared from the courtroom and guided you towards its heavy wooden door. I began to follow, but the official’s hand-gesture plainly indicated that I was to stay outside.