The Twenty Days of Turin

by Giorgio de Maria

  Giuffrida hadn’t stopped observing me. Though it betrayed his nervousness, he still managed to form a friendly expression, a knowing smile that seemed to say: You’re starting to figure things out, huh?

  Thus far, I could only speculate broadly. The voices had given up a few slivers of truth, but overall, my view of the phenomenon wasn’t exactly clear. Of course, I had started to rule out that these were the “voices of the dead” or, as Giuffrida first guessed, radio hams in the mood for a prank. But I still didn’t see a connection between these events and the heart of my research. What did any of this have to do with the massacres?

  In the series of tape-plays that followed, I noticed a curious enrichment of the language. Adjectives had emerged, sentences were expressed in more sophisticated syntax, and the anonymous statements, the short-lived spurts of vision, had been replaced by narratives that were at times highly imaginative—as if these entities were in competition among themselves over who could best describe the view in front of them. The creature that had spoken about hills and open sky was now overtaken by a new voice, which butted in to describe the spectacle of a garden filled with trees and flowers. This was met with a cry of rage. A third voice, delicate and suggestive, interrupted, then lingered to describe the beauty of an enchanted castle with its towering spires and fantastic maidens who stood by the windows stroking their long hair. “That’s what I spy!” the voice concluded, in a cutting, almost superior, tone. The catalogue of seamy urban views had practically vanished. The odd introvert remained in the background who accused fate of shortchanging him with unsatisfactory surroundings: cracked walls damp with piss, atrocious rolling garage doors, garbage bins standing in corners of a yard. And in those voices there was a gloomy desire for vengeance, a deathly yearning to stretch out their thirst for liquid. I heard a voice that said: “I spy colossal camphor trees; and there are sugar palms which, when lacerated, furnish a sweet and inebriating liquor; and farther ahead I spy superb betel palms that buckle from the weight of their clusters of ripe nuts; and still farther than that I spy beautiful mangosteen plants, each as tall as a cherry tree, whose fruit, as big as oranges, are the tenderest and most delicious in all the world; and I spy areca palms with huge leaves and gambier vines and gutta-percha trees and caoutchouc vines . . .” I heard a sigh of regret, a long, “OOOOH!” like a disbelieving lament. “You’re lying!” a voice shouted. “Well, come and see if you don’t believe me!” Then a new, defiant voice took over: “And I spy an islet three hundred and fifty meters long, shaded by beautiful sago palms and durians, defended at its eastern tip by an old but still sturdy Dayak fort, built with planks and poles of teak, a wood as hard as iron which can sustain fire from a cannon of no small caliber . . .” “LIAR!” “I only report what I see!”

  “Sounds like Kipling to me,” I told Giuffrida.

  “Myself, I’d say it’s Salgari . . . The Pirates of Malaysia, perhaps?” he clarified with a trembling smile.

  Now it seemed that the imagination of those creatures had hit the limit of their capabilities. One spoke yet about an endless ocean, about vessels navigating its horizon; then came a reference to some kind of Islamic paradise populated by houris in see-through veils . . . There was more metallic cursing, and then the visionary competition came to an exhausted halt. A long silence took over. I heard a hollow droning like you’d get by pressing a conch to your ear. Out of that lull, that resonant cavity, a voice arose—gritty, quarrelsome, in a timbre that was now more metallic than ever, which made me think of the scourging voice of General Bixio as Lieutenant Abba recalled it in his memoirs.

  “I think I’ll just take this ‘tropical island’ off your hands!”

  “And I’ll come and boot you out of your little fortress!”

  “Boot me out? We’ll be the judge of that!”

  “Then see how long you last, whelp!”

  A string of hasty challenges from more places seemed to unite into a singular, communal desire: unseating anyone who boasted about alluring panoramas from his scrap of paradise and taking his place. After that, the voices lingered in discussion on the best way to give substance to that threat. The tone was dry and precise now.

  “I spy a few things moving in front of me that I can bring to smite you with!”

  “They won’t be moving much longer! There’s not much life in them left to suck!”

  “Using them as swords or maces sounds fine enough to me!”

  “Affirmative! We’ll have to check that they’re good and solid first.”

  “No objections there!”

  “We’ll test them first against the sidewalks.”

  “Whosoever useth the stone to kill shall himself as a stone be used . . .”

  “On that we can all agree!”

  “Let’s choose when to commence hostilities.”

  “July the second! And we’ll clash only by night!”

  “Challenge accepted! From July the second we shall do battle, and it shall be our battle!”

  “Yes, we shall do battle! Challenge accepted!”

  And then there was a scream. A terrible scream, followed by more screams, which resounded like echoes. I’d lost all doubt that these were war cries and not just “telepathic messages,” as perhaps I’d thought until now.

  “It’s the screams Segre the attorney heard!” I exclaimed, looking at Giuffrida.

  “And they were recorded on the ninth of May, at two o’clock in the morning; the time matches up,” he pointed out, and stopped the tape.

  “So finally we have the evidence.”

  “Evidence we have to keep very well hidden.”

  “And why’s that?”

  “No one would enjoy hearing exactly how those entities regarded us.”

  “What you mean is . . . I can’t talk about it . . . in my book?” I asked in a modest, deflated voice.

  “For sure you can talk about it . . . But many people will wonder why you hadn’t spoken about it ten years ago. Their awareness at the time wasn’t very different from the present; I suppose you also must’ve seen those footprints in the asphalt, the flower beds . . . and the places they led back to if you followed them.”

  Yes, I’d seen them—and I’d seen other things too! And so I lowered my head in silence and bit my lip, as if Giuffrida’s words had wounded me, stripped me of my mask.

  “But now . . .” I stammered, “now we know what the motives were . . . We know the why behind those murders.”

  “Motives in our own image and likeness,” said Giuffrida, ejecting the cassette from the player and slipping it into a pouch. I was about to say something else, perhaps another try at self-­justification, when I saw him suddenly freeze like he was listening out for something. I barely had enough time to ask, “What . . . ?” before he seized me by the wrist and made me stay quiet. Gauguin had hurled himself against the door, barking; he seemed ready to scrape it with his claws. Then, after reaching the height of his rage, he suddenly fell back, his tail low, as if he were informed by an invisible fear.

  “Keep still!” Giuffrida commanded. “There must be someone in the garden . . . I don’t know who it is; usually thieves are far too scared of the dog to think about visiting me.”

  Listening, I couldn’t tell if Gauguin’s barks might’ve alternated between anger and terror, like a basset hound in front of a cat on the defensive. Then he settled down; a long, drawn-out growl vanished into a whimper, and he went back to crouching. “I think it would be better if I accompanied you back to wherever you parked your car,” said Giuffrida, noticing that I’d turned pale.

  “Do you happen to own a gun?” I asked.

  “I don’t like firearms. Having Gauguin around is enough to defend us, if there’s any need for that.”

  He put the dog on a leash and led him all the way to the door. I followed behind cautiously, waiting for him to take the first peek into the garden. “It doesn’t look to me like anyone’s there,” he said, sounding relieved. “Maybe it was a fox, or a weasel . . .”


  I went and saw for myself, but I spotted nothing in the moonlight but a few scattered shrubs, a small tree and the statue of Diana gleaming white in front of them. I asked Giuffrida why he kept the statue and he replied that he’d bought it because it cost next to nothing. It was carved by a craftsman specializing in graveyard sculptures, and a bit of kitsch didn’t hurt the overall environment: a touch of bad taste to give more standing to the valuable works.

  We reached the car. Giuffrida shook my hand, gently, as he’d done when I’d arrived. I noticed that Gauguin was trembling and looking anxious. I didn’t linger to ask my host if we’d meet up again. I could guess his answer only too well: he was the one with the information, and any plans he had for it were entirely his decision. I thanked Giuffrida, gave the dog a quick pat and drove off down the hill.

  A car was following me.

  VIII.

  THE HEADLINES

  I’D GOTTEN A LETTER from Ballarin in Venice, sent shortly after his return. Despite my friend’s certainty that Turin now held me in chains like Prometheus bound to his rock, I eagerly considered his invitation to pack my bags and meet up with him. Ballarin explained that, dead city for dead city, in the Most Serene Republic the eyes and ears could at least have their fill, even if Marghera stank to high heaven. My artistic sense had to take certain perks into account, however ephemeral they were. Why leave off a decision indefinitely when it would only bring me advantages? This was all very kind coming from a friend. I replied that, for now, my work at the company was the only thing I had to survive on: if I ever saw a chance to get a job in his neck of the woods, I would’ve sprung on it immediately. Of course, I omitted the essentials; my recorder wasn’t like his flute—a hippogriff that could be ridden at will, taking off into the air!

  And I knew this well, especially after I’d made my visit to Giuffrida. Even the comforts of Bach’s sarabands and certain adagios by Vivaldi and Albinoni—which for better or for worse I’d always been able to perform and find relative peace in—were now lost to me. Any beauty their musical phrases once had could no longer move me. They felt strange and hollow, as if my memory of the slurping noise I’d heard at Giuffrida’s house were acting retrospectively to drain me of pleasure. I felt run-down and bitter: I placed my hands on the instrument without any certainty and breathed out foolishly like someone puffing into a blowgun. I even tried to set aside the classics and throw myself into a punkish mode with noisy items chosen out of my kitchenware. Yet the battering of saucepans with ladles, the furious grating rhythm of knives being whetted, only made my inner condition worse: there was an endless surfeit of anguish and desolation that I couldn’t expel.

  I had an ugly dream. I dreamed that a bunch of young archaeologists digging around Volterra had discovered bas-reliefs revealing that the great poet Virgil had actually been an ostrich. The sculptures dated back to the Augustan period. The anonymous artist depicted the poet in various positions: standing upright with his long neck almost vertical and his tiny head and beak animated by two eyes that shone with intelligence; in another panel, you saw him running through the Imperial Palace and flapping his wings, among Pretorian guards with their weapons on display. This was followed by a group scene: “AVGVSTVS IMPERATOR” . . . “QVINTVS HORATIVS FLACCVS” . . . “PVBLIVS VIRGILIVS MARO STRVTHIOCAMELVS” . . . “PVBLIVS OVIDIVS NASO,” and next to them certain palace advisors. These revelations had touched the whole world and strengthened the case of those who believe that a sublime soul can reside even in the body of an animal.

  The dream cast a sinister light on my recorder; it made me think of the pipes played by the shepherds who chitchatted in Virgil’s Bucolics. I broke the instrument in half and threw it out the window. My dream vision of bas-reliefs had me scared. I’d seen them passing in front of my eyes, barely a hand’s-breadth away; then, just as close, they hid themselves inside me so I could no longer see them but feel them. Their presence within me prevented examining what lay behind them; they had become the lid of a sarcophagus where all my richness was stowed away. Yet someone could very well have dug an underground tunnel to come and sap me dry.

  In this mood of hesitation and self-doubt, I left the house at eight in the morning to go to work. Sometime around six in the evening I went to the public library to peruse old newspapers in the archives, which spoke of events I would’ve paid a fortune to forget. “IS THIS STILL THE CITY OF GRAMSCI AND GOBETTI?” read a headline in La Stampa. And elsewhere: “AN ERUPTION OF VIOLENCE”—“WAVE OF SENSELESS FURY SWEEPS ACROSS TURIN”—“SITUATION NOW CRITICAL”—“A DISTRESSING MYSTERY” . . . These were newspaper articles from the middle of July, when it was no longer possible to talk about scattered crimes, albeit with certain features in common, but genuine barefaced massacres. “If we were still dealing with a few attacks, even the frightening ones which happened on Corso Stati Uniti and in Piazza Carlo Felice, we could at least think it was the work of a madman; and this might have brought us some relief, both for our faith in wider humanity and knowing it wasn’t politically charged,” a police functionary told the press. “But when, as in this case, the madness has a collective quality and implications that may be ideological . . .”

  Meanwhile, the Gazzetta del Popolo reported, “The festive atmosphere of summer seems to have fled in the wake of these massacres, a nightmare which our city, already plagued by mass insomnia, cannot easily take its mind from. The shopping arcade of Galleria Subalpina is flooded with the sound of shuffling crowds . . . There is a register for signed condolences, guarded by four officers, with a large bow of black crepe pinned to the flag just above the table. People flock to add words of support to these mortuary records which, for lack of more white space, are taken to the Town Hall. Some children believe that those papers are where grown-ups write down their wish-list for the holidays. It’s difficult—impossible, even—to explain to them what they’re seeing.”

  In the retail areas, most of all in the clothing stores, business stagnated painfully: “The mannequins, young and beautiful, smile with plastic faces at a sad, shriveled crowd . . .” And then came a message from the President of the Republic: “The horrendous bloodbaths which have sown death throughout Turin, a city dear to us indeed, leave our nation appalled by their monstrous savagery, by their magnitude and by the brutish recklessness with which they are carried out. Somewhere in this tragic chain of terrorist acts, there’s a link that must be broken at all costs to safeguard the life and freedom of our citizens. It is up to the forces of democratic order; it’s up to the court authorities, before whom lie a number of complaints against the incitement of terrorist acts, to give the rule of law back to the sovereign people who demand it. It’s up to all citizens to support the efforts of justice and the forces of democratic order in the defense of life against this murderous violence. To you, Mr. Prime Minister, and to you, the Honorable Minister of the Interior, I express my highest solidarity for the action this government is undertaking in order to clamp down relentlessly on these criminal acts fixed on upsetting the free and democratic direction of our country. I wish to pass on the most heartfelt of condolences, on behalf of the Republic and myself, to the families of the victims.”

  Public opinion called for the punishment of the culprits and whoever may have incited them. Even the Church authorities demanded it: they certainly didn’t look kindly on the suspicion, which was then nastily spreading, that the killers were being unleashed at nighttime from the Little House of Divine Providence. Whoever they were, they had nothing to do with the unfortunate guests of the house, who were in fact fully conscientious creatures. If they were evil, it at least wasn’t by nature, but from the instigation of deviant ideologies . . . And people would do well to throw aside their misgivings about the Library, one of the few benevolent institutions, if not the only one, born in the midst of a society that had lost nearly all its moral sense!

  On July the sixteenth of that year, a thirty-six-year-old man named Antonio Mangiaferri was arrested by a police unit at h
is house, a ramshackle dwelling on Via Barbaroux. The charges against him were based on the testimony of a tram driver who had seen him in Piazza Cavour behaving in a way that left no doubts. His height measured at six feet and two inches. He had a patchy history of delinquency. He had drifted from one job to another, either out of restlessness or from being regularly fired due to his rebellious nature. He read pamphlets inciting subversion. He nursed ambitions of becoming an actor which he hadn’t managed to fulfill, except some bit parts in minor films that circulated around the fringes.

  Mangiaferri’s arrest finally allowed editors to splash their front pages with an image of “the monster himself.” And he truly was a monster, with his vacant look, his long chin, his prognathic jawbone, a scar on his right cheek, a deep horizontal furrow cutting across his face—and huge hands that could’ve played lawn bowls with watermelons.

  Everyone agreed that the witness could be counted on as a sensible, trustworthy person and a man of few words. “Angelo has a heart of gold,” his brother said. “If he went to the police, to the carabinieri, to report a thing like that, you can be absolutely sure of what he says. I can say personally that he’s had a photographic memory since he was a kid. For years, we helped our parents who ran a dry cleaner’s. Angelo always remembered absolutely everything: the customers’ names, their addresses. There was never a risk he was wrong. He could recognize—with one glance—all the garments that got given in for dry cleaning. And if you don’t believe me, go and ask my mother, Francesca Moroni; she’s ­seventy-four years old and she lives with my sister . . .”