by John Carlin
Pittini offered to take him in her small car but he always insisted on walking. It took him fifteen minutes, always with a pack on his back in which he carried his protruding running blades. He made no attempt to hide his condition, as he did with most of his social set in South Africa. There was a childlike quality to the people of the town, and a kindness that suggested no one was trying to judge him or to take his measure in the way they did elsewhere.
Once at the sports complex he would sit on a bench and quietly change his walking prostheses for his blades. Some of the time his coach, Ampie Louw, would be there with him, but if he was not, Pistorius asked Pittini, whom he enjoyed calling his ‘babysitter’, to record his running times.
‘Most days a small group of kids came along to watch and he was always nice to them,’ Pittini said. ‘He would smile and say “Ciao, come stai?” (“Hello, how are you?”) and sign autographs and take pictures with them. But he was always far more focused than other athletes, including some from South Africa who also came to train here. He would say, “The track is my office. I am here to work.” He did not allow pictures or videos to be taken and I remember once he got very angry with a woman who was standing by the track smoking a cigarette. It was surprising to see him explode like that, but then I thought it would have been strange if he did not from time to time. Always to be so sweet and polite would not have been natural.’
The training, so intense he often bled as Pittini recalled, lasted an hour and a half and then he returned to the hotel for lunch. The menu at the Hotel Wily was vast, as was the hotel’s dining space, which could seat 580 people, but he always stuck to the same modest fare: salad with chicken breast. For dinner it would be more chicken breast, accompanied by vegetable soup. ‘He did eat pasta and chocolate cake, but very, very rarely. Usually when he was a in a bad mood,’ Pittini said.
In the afternoons he would train for an hour in the gym then go back to his room and Skype with friends, or play video games or watch movies using a video projector he had brought along with his luggage. ‘He was a lone wolf,’ Pittini said. ‘Other foreign athletes would come out with me at night to a party or a bar but he almost always stayed in his room.’
The disciplined lone wolf was the man Pittini got to know, but she became aware that there was an entirely different side to his personality. From photographs he showed her and conversations they had she was able to paint a picture of the fast life he led back home in South Africa after the running season was over.
*
In Gemona he walked everywhere, in South Africa he drove flashy cars; in Gemona the people he mixed with were devoid of all pretensions, in South Africa his social set strove to ape the glamor of Hollywood or Cannes – men with gold chains and Mr Universe muscles, women in bandage dresses, stiletto heels and year-round orange tans. It was a world where everybody was on stage, perpetually on display, not so much conversing as performing, where the most valued social currency was to be seen in the company of the best-looking or most ostentatiously wealthy men and women, where leering males hunted for casual sex, where the chatter, the squealing and giggles were all about who was dating who, where intense whispered debates were held about who was wearing the tackiest dress in the room.
Afraid of crime as he was, Pistorius had the comfort of knowing that here the bad guys were on his side. Some of the men whose company he kept on his visits to Johannesburg nightclubs with names like The VIP Room or Taboo were either known or suspected gangsters. One of his pals, Kenny Kunene, had been jailed for six years for fraud. Another, a Johannesburg multimillionaire called Craig Lipschitz, who always had four bodyguards around him, ran a tow-truck business – the South African press always referred to him as ‘the tow-truck baron’ – and had been involved in a savage brawl in 2008 in which, according to media reports, a nightclub bouncer was repeatedly stabbed. But there were more poseurs and parvenus than hardened criminals in the social scene Pistorius frequented, spoilt rich kids or small-time TV personalities who would enjoy the frisson of nudging each other and saying, ‘Look, there’s the guy they say ordered that gangland killing last week,’ or, ‘Is it true that so-and-so just bought his girlfriend a yellow Lamborghini?’
Pistorius also knew, to his secret delight, that there was no one they chattered about more than him, invariably in fawning terms. He was good-looking, he was a snappy dresser and, even if he was not as rich as some of the crooks or colorful characters he knew, he was rich enough. Above all, he had something money could not buy. He was a genuine superstar, in South Africa and abroad, in whose glow the beautiful girls and powerful men all wished to bathe. They did not register, as Pittini had, that at night when he went to bed he took off his legs and stood barely five foot on his knobbly stumps. They saw him as he wished to be seen. He was – like them, only more so – in an adolescent world where everybody strove to cover up their fragility by earning the approval of their peers through crassly obvious material display, where promiscuity was rampant, and being regarded as cool was the highest accolade.
Pittini described the women in the pictures that he showed her as ‘Barbies’; many of the men, for all their efforts at sophistication, looked to her like cheap hustlers.
Pistorius succumbed to the allure of such individuals in Italy, too, when he was away from Gemona. Typical of the hangers-on who sought his company back in Johannesburg was an Italian called Federico Russo, from the Adriatic city of Trieste. Russo’s mischievous self-confidence had procured him access to the masters of the nightclub scene in the fashion city of Milan, where his credibility was enhanced by describing himself as the celebrated Blade Runner’s Italian agent. In the wide-eyed South African, eager to be welcomed into the hip Milanese elite, he saw an opportunity to make money. Steered along by Russo, Pistorius took part in a music video and received invitations to appear in low-brow, high-ratings Italian TV programs. In return for big sums of money, Pistorius appeared in a ‘dance-with-the-stars’ show where, before a live audience, on a vast stage bathed in blue, he performed a tango with a bleached blonde in a low-cut, black sequined dress. Another time he flew to a Pacific island to take part in a reality TV show called L’Isola dei Famosi, the island of the famous, where celebrities competed with each other to see which one of them could get by best in the tropical wild.
Anna Pittini found his participation in such shows silly, she said, and also disappointing because she felt they presented an image of her friend that did not do justice to what she regarded as the intrinsic nobility of his character. The frivolous side of him corresponded to the glimpses she had caught of his arrested emotional development, the teenage stews she saw him get into over Samatha Taylor five thousand miles away in South Africa. Pistorius phoned Samantha continually from Gemona, either jealously checking on her movements or complaining about how lonely he felt without her. The bad moods Pittini spoke of when he took solace in pasta and chocolate cake were the result not of a poor day’s work on the running track, but of his long-distance squabbles with Samantha, whom he would describe earnestly to Pittini as ‘the one’ – which she was, until he met Reeva Steenkamp.
But for the most part he was at peace in Gemona, a sanctuary he so craved from the storm of his celebrity life that once he drove four hours through the night after a race meeting in Austria, arriving at the Hotel Wily at three in the morning. In Gemona there was no pressure on him to disguise his insecurities behind elaborate masquerades. Pittini interpreted his stays in her town as an opportunity for him to escape the disruption and play-acting that defined so much of his life. In contrast with nouveau riche Johannesburg or the Milanese beau monde, Gemona was a town whose inhabitants were not impressed by appearances. They had lived through a devastating earthquake, they carried in them the hard-won wisdom of a nation that had seen the rise and fall of mighty empires, they had no time for fops or idlers. Decency, respect and hard work were the yardsticks by which people were measured there. Pistorius could play that part, too.
‘The Oscar I got to kn
ow was the opposite of a prima donna,’ Pittini said. ‘Once he bumped his artificial leg on a door and tore his trousers. After joking, “Imagine how painful this would have been if I had had a real leg,” he asked me if I would get him a needle and thread. He mended the tear himself. The same thing when it came to washing his clothes. He went to the laundry, put his things in the washing machine, waited there for an hour along with other ordinary people from the town and then he folded the clothes neatly himself. He never ironed his clothes, he just hung them up. I never saw him complain about small stuff. He was never demanding with me and always expressed his gratitude for the things I did to help him.’
The people of Gemona saw those qualities in him and loved him for them. They also felt proud to be associated with him, in testimony to which they painted a colorful mural of him in Lycra running uniform and blades on a prominent street corner. At the entrance to the Hotel stood a large poster of him on which he had written a message of thanks.
‘Here he was like another member of the family,’ Luisella Goi, the Hotel Wily’s manager, said, ‘always smiling and gentle and polite, but also very playful. He would hug me and my children. One day in the garden he picked me up and I was dangling in his arms with my feet in the air. He loved being with my one-year-old daughter, loved playing with her and sitting down and spoon-feeding her.’
The Goi family gave him the run of the hotel. He was in and out of the kitchen at all hours, had the contents of the fridge at his disposal, as if he were in his own home. When the kitchen was busy preparing the industrial quantities of meals the restaurant served, he would sometimes join in, taking special pleasure in the patient task of making the little potato and pasta balls known as gnocchi. ‘He said he was so glad we taught him to make gnocchi because doing so brought him peace,’ Luisella said.
He had his meals in the big hotel dining room, almost always sitting alone. ‘He was quiet and you could see he did not want to be disturbed,’ said Luisella. ‘Everywhere else he went he was probably bothered all the time, but here people let him be. Maybe it is because we are too busy working all the time or maybe it is because of our ignorance, but we did not treat him in this town as if he were a big celebrity.’ Except for one memorable evening when he arrived back in Gemona after winning a big race and the people in the restaurant stood up and applauded, to which he responded by going from table to table to shake everybody’s hands.
Town residents who spent time with Pistorius spoke warmly of him. A middle-aged single mother called Marisa once gave him a ride in her small car from Venice airport to Gemona. They chatted non-stop during the hour-long journey. ‘When we were approaching Gemona he said, “Look, your sweet town,” and I melted,’ Marisa recalled in halting English. ‘For me he was not a campione, he was just a nice young man. Una persona stupenda. He liked us here because we treated him like a normal person and he could be himself. I think for a person like him who is accustomed to people trying to use him in different ways it was very calming to be here.’
The fact was, though, that the town did use him. It was the idea of the mayor, Paulo Urbani, to recruit him to promote Gemona’s image. And yet, talking to Urbani, the sense was that while the head drove him in his initial calculations, the relationship between the two men ended up being heartfelt.
In the foyer of the town hall, built in the Venetian manner in 1502, there was a photograph on the wall of Mayor Urbani with the president of Italy, and another one next to it, the same size, with the mayor and Pistorius. In the mayor’s office, on his desk, stood a framed picture of the two of them smiling. This was ten months after he had been charged with the murder of Reeva Steenkamp.
‘It was easy to love him,’ said Urbani, a bearish, handsome man in his forties. ‘He was a simple person who became perfectly adapted to our community. He never complained about anything and he was molto cortese. He always jumped to open the door for my wife. It was easy to talk to him and he was curious about everything here, the food, the culture, the football. He spoke of the many places he had been and I was surprised that he traveled alone in the world, with his disability. I found him old in his behavior and was surprised he was so mature for his age.’
Nothing had prepared Urbani or the rest of Pistorius’s friends in Gemona for what happened on the morning of February 14, 2013.
Pittini was the first person in town to hear the news. ‘Peet van Zyl phoned. It was 6.30 in the morning. I asked him why he was calling me so early,’ Pittini said. ‘He told me, “Something’s happened to Oscar.” I thought, a car accident. He died in a crash. “No,” Peet said. “No car accident. He shot Reeva. She’s dead.” I nearly fainted.’
Urbani nearly fainted, too. ‘It was a terrible shock to me and a terrible shock to our community. Some people’s first reaction was that it was a bad joke. We had adopted him as one of us and we could not believe it. It was impossible. That was not the person we knew.’
Urbani followed the bail proceedings closely the next week and on the morning of the day the verdict was delivered he went to the cathedral to pray that Pistorius would be set free. ‘It was painful to see Oscar in court. He was the image of desolation. It made me think of people who lost family members in the earthquake here. But it was all made worse by the false news, the steroids, and the claims that he had bought a house in Gemona that he had not told the tax authorities about. All lies.’
Urbani stuck by his friend, but some people of his acquaintance, and many more far and wide, did not. For Gemona’s mayor this offered a sad reflection on human nature. ‘The greater the rise, the bigger the idol, and when he makes an error and falls, the greater the monster he has to become. When things go well, everyone cheers and you are a hero; when things go wrong, the invidiosi, the envious ones, emerge and now they have the strong voice and they celebrate his failure. I even had some political rivals using him to attack me. How low can you get?’
Urbani had no regrets about having invited him into the Gemona fold. Not politically – he was re-elected with 78 per cent of the vote in May 2014 – and not personally either. He made no apologies for keeping the photographs of Pistorius on display in the town hall.
‘Oscar is a friend and I will support him. I cannot deny the friendship. If the judge says he did it on purpose I cannot deny that either, but there is a principle of loyalty and of gratitude here. We will follow the trial with passion in Gemona. If the judge says he is guilty, I will take down the pictures. We must show respect for the law. But if he is found innocent, it will be a day of joy for him and for our community.’
Pittini said that the mayor’s sentiments expressed the majority view in the town. ‘Many people asked me to send Oscar messages of support after the shooting. They said no one is perfect, everyone can mess up badly in life, we must be forgiving. One woman said to me, “I am a mother and a mother can really understand a mistake,” and she started crying. She had not even met him.’
One person who had met him was Flavio Frigè, a fifty-year-old man with a beard and a ponytail who had lost an arm and a leg in an industrial accident when he was seventeen and wore prostheses on both amputated limbs.
‘Being disabled myself, it was very important for me that people around the world should see him do those incredible things,’ said Flavio, a lively minded man who showed no sign of resentment or even self-consciouness about his condition. ‘I felt validated by him. For thirty-three years I have battled to make a life for myself, and I think I have done well, but he gave me something more. Oscar made disability visible. He made me proud.’
Flavio met his hero and found him to be, as he had hoped, un bravo regazzo, a great guy. He was ‘una persona molto buona, un ragazzo molto disponibile, gentilissimo,’ Flavio said.
His first reaction to the news of the shooting was incredulity, he said. ‘I could not believe it. I did not want to. And then, when it sank in, I felt a huge sadness for the ragazza, that girl, Reeva. Huge! Then I felt his sorrow and I wanted to see him again and hug him. I still do.
The Oscar I knew, it is impossible he would do such a thing. But I will not judge. Only he knows what happened. I only hope he will be found innocent of murder, though for him the punishment is permanent.’
However great the battle had been for Pistorius to conquer his disability and triumph, Flavio said, it was nothing compared to the test he would face now. ‘Losing an arm, a leg, is one thing,’ Flavio said. ‘Losing the woman you love and losing her in such a way . . . so hard. And on top of that, being a famous public figure obliged to take the scorn and the shame of the world . . . No, no. The challenge of the body can be overcome. You fight. You battle. I know it. It can be done. But far, far deeper and more painful is the suffering of the soul. What do you do with that? Nothing. You can never make amends and the sorrow will never go away.’
12
Not one, but all Mankind’s epitome.
JOHN DRYDEN, ABSALOM AND ACHITOPHEL
THE GENTLENESS of Gemona magnified Pistorius’s sense of South Africa’s dangers. Sometimes, strolling from the Hotel Wily to the running track, he caught himself worrying about the safety of his relatives back home, in particular his sister Aimée. When they walked the city streets of South Africa, they did so warily, alert to the possibility of criminal assault. In that they were no different from the majority of white people, or the better-off black citizens, who signposted their economic ascent in the years after Mandela came to power by adopting the previously whites-only habit of traveling in the relative safety of their cars distances that in New York, Paris or London people would cover on foot.
The high crime rate in South Africa was a function of its economy and demographics. The large black and white middle class lived surrounded by an ocean of poverty. Twelve million people out of a total population of fifty million provided inviting targets for the malevolent or the desperate among the impoverished majority, generating a pool of willing recruits to the country’s large web of criminal networks.