You had been in the courtroom now for really quite some time. The accused man’s wife was still a mere yard or two away, restlessly talking to whoever would pay her any attention—a strained, distraught voice piteously rising and falling. The answers the men were giving seemed to betray a perceptible irritation. Were they finding it burdensome to support the woman in her view of the case, not given time to express an independent opinion? Were they contradicting what she was saying? Studying the movements of their faces and hands, I found it impossible to tell. Who were they discussing now? The men had raised their eyes from the woman’s upturned face and were looking across towards me standing still by the door. At the mere thought of what they might or might not be saying, I found myself starting to redden. Then one of the men walked casually over.
‘Lei è il marito della ragazza qui dentro?’
Not understanding a word he said, I shrugged my shoulders and showed him the palms of my hands.
‘Io non comprendo.’
‘You are the—married with the—girl there inside?’
The man hadn’t asked it aggressively at all. No, rather he was asking me an all-too-pertinent question about what relation there might be between us. But I would hardly have known how to explain in English, so shook my head in a vain attempt to deflect the man’s curiosity.
‘Un amico.’
The man appeared surprised.
‘Ah, il fidanzato?’
I made no reply.
‘Fiancé?’ he asked, pronouncing the word accurately in French.
I hesitated, racking my brains for what else I could say, then nodded.
‘Ah sì, il fidanzato della ragazza,’ the man said, and seemed satisfied.
Had you ever dreamed of such a thing? Five years before, not long after we started sleeping together, you had missed a cycle.
‘What if I’m pregnant?’ you asked me below the blue Alhambra.
‘Of course if you are, we can always get married.’
And we had continued on into the Italia café, for a plate of their homemade minestrone, you explaining how soon you could be sure.
Not that it made me your fiancé, of course, but what else could be said that wouldn’t require fluent Italian and far more perspective, far more perspective altogether? Now the journalist or advocate had turned and was heading towards the small conclave of his colleagues, attended by the wife of the accused.
‘Il fidanzato della ragazza,’ he repeated.
There were nods and smiles of comprehension, even a few sympathetic glances in my direction, now the man sounded as though he were arguing with the distraught woman. Perhaps he was telling her that she should think what it must be like for him, that young English boy over there, to have a wife-to-be violated by a stranger. The woman grew mournfully agitated at what the man appeared to have said. It must have been some contrary viewpoint he was putting to the woman. My convenient lie had clearly contributed to her distress. A helpless anger suddenly overwhelmed me—still standing there, eyes half-focused on a patch of the yellow marble wall. Then the courtroom door opened and there you reappeared with the usher following closely behind you.
Hardly had I managed to exchange glances with my ‘fidanzata’ than the court official was gesturing towards the room out of which you had emerged: ‘Di qua.’
I entered a large high-ceilinged room, panelled in reddish-brown wood. To the left was a group of judges seated in a row behind a raised dais and bench. Before this judicial panel, a lower stage stretched into the floor. On it, two wooden chairs were placed. There were rows of benches for the public, down on the lower level. The accused man sat forward on his seat in the front row, a guard on one side and his lawyer on the other. I was invited towards one of the isolated chairs before the bench.
Above the tribunal of judges, at present in conversation with a woman leaning forward at the bench, a large mural dominated the room. It must have been one of those commissions the fascist authorities went in for to give the impression they were creating a new renaissance in Italian culture. They were to make Mussolini into the semblance of a condottiero art patron—borrowing some of the caché that had accrued to the Mexican muralists and the Depression’s WPA projects into the bargain. It was painted mainly in reddish browns, far too like that reddish clay earth, and managing to appear both shrill and muddy. The subject of the painting was Cain and Abel, its composition clearly indebted to Goya’s picture of the two men fighting with cudgels; here the semi-nude figures with exaggerated muscles were struggling in a murky sunset. The mural had been painted in an extremely free hand. The outlines of the combatants, though drawn with mannerist distortions, were blurring into each other and into the background, an indistinct rocky landscape where the two dusty bodies grappled on forever.
The woman descended from the bench and occupied the vacant chair. She couldn’t have been much older than twenty-five, but seemed so, in professional woman’s jacket and skirt with a white silk blouse. Her freshly washed hair was drawn tightly back behind her head, and held in place with a discreet navy blue ribbon tied into a bow. She had a thin transparent plastic envelope on her lap. The judge in the middle uttered something to the woman. So she must be the court’s English interpreter.
‘Are you English, Richard?’
‘Yes.’
‘Were you born on 13 March 1952?’
‘No,’ I said, not thinking that it mattered much. ‘It was the 18th of February, 1953.’
The woman seemed slightly flustered by these trivial differences. She was relaying them without question to the panel of judges.
‘Were you with Miss Young, Mary Jane, on Friday the 19th of September 1975?’
‘Yes, I was.’
‘And did you witness what happened early on the morning of the day following?’
‘Yes, I did.’
‘Where did the … what happened this night … occur?’
‘In a car.’
Again the woman appeared uncomfortable, with a slight flush about her features. She was lowering her eyes to the documents placed neatly on her lap.
‘Will you please tell this tribunal what car it was?’
‘Ford Escort—dirty beige.’
Then some more unintelligible words passed between the translator and the panel of judges.
‘Where were you in the car while this happens?’
Now the translator was blushing as she asked the question.
‘Lying on the back seat.’
‘Please tells us all you saw.’
‘It was raining, and he had a small gun, a black automatic pistol, and he was holding it in his right hand, pointing the muzzle over the driving seat towards me. He’d climbed across onto the passenger seat, and that’s where he did it—while I was lying in the back—and when I moved he waved the gun and shouted at me not to …’
The translator was taking notes, she didn’t look up while I spoke, or so much as glance at me when turning towards the judicial bench and reproducing in Italian, I supposed, exactly what had been said. The young woman was having difficulties, and kept stopping as if in search of a word, or ruffled for some other reason, then would glance down at her papers, cough and start again. When she finished, the president requested her to ask another question.
‘Can you see the man who menaced you and committed that crime here in this room?’
He was sitting there: his roughly-shaven oblong face, hair in thick strands swept back from the hairline, his small mouth turned up at the edges, the dimple in his chin, a fixed, mask-like smile on his narrow lips, a smile without a history.
‘Yes. Yes, I can.’
The accused man’s lawyer stood up and spoke to the president of the court. The president, in turn, said a phrase to the young translator.
‘Did you … from this man … receive at all any payment?’
We’r
e standing in a doorway. It’s the mechanics’ office on that petrol station’s puddle-covered forecourt. The man wants to know if we have any money to pay for the lift to Como. Perhaps he means to rob us. For safety, for safety one of us has said that we don’t. It’ll be needed for the train tickets to Paris and the Channel ferry anyway. Then come the words exchanged at gunpoint in a car parked on the hard shoulder, pitch dark outside, windscreen wiper blades beating back and forth, sluicing the rain off its flooded glass.
‘Amore, Amore!’
‘A Como, per favore!’ you urge.
‘Amore prima, amore!’ He is waving his gun. ‘Como dopo …’
‘He’s going to kill us,’ I hear you whisper. Then to the man you insist—
‘Como prima, per favore, prima Como.’
‘Amore, amore,’ he repeats.
‘Shall I try to get the gun?’
‘Tu: zitto! … Silenzio!’
He’s snatching at your blouse. It has started to tear at the buttons. There’s a brooch pinned above your breasts. I begin to edge towards the nearside door.
‘Sta giù! Giù!’ he yells. ‘Sta giù!’
The man is shaking his automatic pistol in the dark, jabbing downwards with it, meaning lie down on the back seat floor and shut up.
‘Apri! Subito!’
He is having trouble with the brooch’s fiddly fastening.
‘Don’t do a thing,’ you whisper to me. ‘I think it’s our best chance.’
The man named Cesare Moretti is unzipping your jeans, lowering himself on to you now.
‘He could kill us after … Just be ready to run for it.’
The man’s grunting now as again I try to slide as silently as possible towards the car door handle, but once again he shouts: ‘Non muovere! Tu, silenzio!’
Tensed and passive, you let the car roof float above you, concentrating on his tie. You’re wondering could you use it to strangle him with.
I’m thinking: this is how we die. We aren’t going to grow old. Suddenly it seems such a pity. I hadn’t expected life to be this short. Yes, it’s a shame. In the back, lying down, I’m praying to the God that half an hour before I would have argued wasn’t there. Oh Jesus, just to do the best thing. Help us to get out of this alive. Now the man is straining to finish. Will there be a momentary chance to get away? He’s panting, panting, and he comes.
Can he really be intending to drive us into Como?
‘No,’ you say, you don’t want to now. Cesare Moretti’s hand with the pistol in it has dropped back down to his side as he clambers off you. I open the door and step out into the downpour, keeping as low as possible; but the man simply gets out too, leaving his pistol on the dashboard, and lifts up the car boot lid. I grab the rucksacks and step away into darkness, onto the reddish muddy earth of the road’s verge. There are deep cracks in it from the long summer heat. They’re beginning to soften, to melt at the edges. Pulling your clothes around yourself, you climb out as quickly from the car, and now this man, to our astonishment, our relief, has gone back round to the left hand side, ducked in, and is driving away. It’s then we see the number-plate.
‘Remember that,’ you call out, standing in the soaking uncut verge, watching as his taillights blur into the stormy distance. But now the car’s turned, its headlight arcing, and driven back down the wrong side of the carriageway. You throw yourself into the soaking wet grass of the shallow embankment falling away from this side of the road.
‘He’s coming back to kill us!’ you’re shouting, droplets glistening on your face. Saying nothing as we lay there, the smell of long dry foliage and moisture in my nostrils, my eyes turn towards you lying prone beside me, feeling so close to death, sensing us alive there in the rain.
When the headlights disappear and there’s no more engine noise, we begin to run down the hard shoulder into the dark. The rain pummelling our faces has cooled the September air. At the first car to appear, we step out into the beams waving our arms to make the driver stop. But it continues through the downpour as if we aren’t even there. This is obviously far too dangerous. We should try to find an emergency phone. And I’m sure I pressed the button for police, but there it is, pulling up beside us, a breakdown truck with a crane.
So now I’m here—it dawned on me as I sat there before the young woman interpreter—to corroborate your innocence? Moretti’s defence is that we made some kind of financial arrangement? That what had happened amounted to a payment in kind?
‘No, we didn’t,’ I said.
‘You paid no money to this man?’ the translator was asking.
‘No. We did not.’ More conversation ensued between the judges on the bench. At last, the English translator, evidently relieved, turned back to me and said,
‘Are there any other details you remember and want to tell this court?’
‘No,’ I said, my mind a blank, ‘I don’t think so.’
The interpreter conveyed this response to the judges and reported their reply.
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘You are finished.’
But I didn’t appear to understand.
‘You are finished,’ she repeated.
Beckoned to by the interpreter, the usher stepped forward and made to lead me back towards the courtroom door.
‘Thank you,’ I said, in the direction of the judges, stepping outside with barely a glance at the curious smile of the man sitting there in his chains.
Outside, the usher explained we were welcome to stay until the trial was over.
‘You wait the verdict?’
‘No,’ you were saying, ‘we have to get back to England.’
Here once more were the lawyers, the advocates or journalists, and staring hard was the accused man’s wife, but dejected-looking now, as if her anger and frustration had spent itself in those tirades. She stood silent in her helplessness as we were escorted away. And then there came over me the sensation of a vast burden lifting while we were being led from that corridor outside the courtroom, out of the lives of Moretti and his wife; it seemed that the woman with the orthopedic shoe might even have envied us. There we were, free to go, relieved from the consequences of whatever it was her husband did or didn’t do on the night he came home in the small hours of that distant September night.
‘You have expenses?’ the court usher asked.
‘Yes,’ you said, ‘we need them for the train back.’
The usher took a look at the summons documents, then led us along another series of corridors and down in a lift to the Tribunale di Milano’s accounting section. At the grille we received the various travel expenses and daily allowances in Lira. As you handed me the money for safekeeping, an unwanted thought struck home: the judges had asked if we received any payment, and no, we hadn’t … or at least not until now. You were doubtless thinking no such thing, and, of course, that thought, and all the others, remained entirely unexpressed.
The usher was guiding us back up to the main atrium and the entrance doors.
‘Buon viaggio!’ he said, and vanished back into the Palazzo della Giustizia, as we descended its precipitous steps down into the chilly air.
Not far from Piazza Duomo and Milan’s famous porcupine cathedral, we re-circulated a part of the expenses on a lunch of something or other.
‘Did they ask you if we were given any payment?’
‘Presumably he couldn’t claim he didn’t do it once we appeared,’ you said, ‘so he changed his defence to a payment in kind—or something like that.’
‘Perhaps he went away to change his plea … or his line of defence.’
‘Maybe,’ you said. ‘But I don’t really want to talk about it anymore.’
You didn’t want to talk about it. There and then, in the hope that time would do its work, we enveloped ourselves in the silence of what was meant to be forgetting—like the flash of white
sails on the Ijselmeer, that stripe of light on Solent Water, our September in the rain and trial at the Court of Milan were locked inside as if forever. I couldn’t take responsibility for the damage caused, for there was no one there to acknowledge the gesture; I couldn’t distinguish that gesture from being actually responsible for the hurt, when all the time trying to act as if nothing had happened. The flashes of memory and inexplicable blanks tangled up inside me, like the thin brown tape snagging out of a snarled cassette. They formed a knot of shame and guilt for something that, I now begin to see, had been done to me too. They left me, as it seemed back then, with nothing more to say.
Even now, trying to look back, to recall what happened after we went down the steps from the court building, it’s still almost impossible to conjure up anything else of our brief visit to Milan. We must have returned to the hotel and collected our luggage, and definitely walked back to the Central Station taking exactly the same avenues down which we had come. Perhaps it was approaching the station this first time that I noticed the oddly Italianized name Giorgio Stephenson carved around the roofline of its over-decorated façade.
Again under the enormous vault of the booking hall, we agreed that there was money enough from the expenses to book couchettes for our night’s journey back across Europe. With an hour and a half to spare, we ate a hasty dinner in a restaurant by Via Scarlatti. Then there will have been just time enough to make it back to the right platform and into our seats before the express pulled out across the maze of lines and points beyond that fascist station’s high glass arch. Under gantries past its signal box we trundled, off towards Domodossola, the Swiss border, Paris, a stormy crossing, and an English winter.
CHAPTER 15
‘Come on, let’s go and look round the old places …’
You were dressed for a walk in September, stepping from the college flat’s living room where a ruffled sofa bed had been made up under the window.
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