The View From the Tower

by Charles Lambert

  Helen couldn’t believe that Katy had been involved, but the man who told her what had happened, a colleague from the school she’d bumped into while shopping at the same supermarket as before, said she shouldn’t be so sure. Someone else she’d heard about, but not met, an older man from another language school, had simply disappeared, the colleague told her. No one’s immune, he said, as though the spores of violence were in the air and could settle on anyone. She felt as though what she’d seen at first as simple numbers was breaking up and taking physical form in some way she couldn’t understand, becoming faces, names, affections. By now there were people she knew on both sides of the barriers, wherever they were drawn. A woman in the grocer’s said the government was holding Moro prisoner in a cellar near where she lived, and nobody seemed surprised, as though any absurdity were permissible.

  She woke one morning with the face of Moro in her dream, his drawn sad face, weary with suffering and disbelief. She wanted to say this can’t be right, but wasn’t sure who would listen. She didn’t mention the dream to Federico. That was the day the papers had photographs of the man in his shirt-sleeves, brutalised, the Red Brigades symbol at his back, as proof that he was still alive. There was the face she had dreamed, on every front page in Italy.

  A week after that, she found herself on a demonstration against police brutality, shouting out slogans with the best of them.

  When Giacomo and Stefania dropped in one evening, she told him she thought the whole business was shameful. Federico and Stefania had left the kitchen to talk about work; they were sitting in the room that Giacomo had used, now Federico’s study. Helen and Giacomo had opened the final bottle of wine. “I don’t see why the government can’t just buy them off,” she said, pouring it into their tumblers. “To save his life. They could always deny it later.”

  “All right, Helen. Let me tell you something you don’t know. Nobody in Italy wants Aldo Moro alive, except his wife and children. The people who’ve kidnapped him probably care more about his state of health than the people in his own party. Nothing would suit them better than to have him dead. He’s a liability, Helen.”

  “You don’t know that,” she said, but she knew he’d won. It wasn’t just knowing more, though that was part of it. It was the fact that he knew what he knew, no more no less. She thought his sort of clarity was despicable if what he knew was wrong, but she wasn’t sure it was. Nothing she thought made her feel better, or less confused. “He wouldn’t have been running the party if they hadn’t thought he was the right man.”

  “Don’t be naïve, Helen.”

  “Why is any opinion that isn’t yours naïve?” She was angry, but also elated. Arguing with Giacomo wasn’t like arguing with Federico, who listened to her and then corrected some small error, so that by the end of it she’d forget what her point had been. Giacomo was broad strokes, theatre.

  “Well, obviously,” he said, with a taunting grin. “Because it isn’t mine.”

  “And what is your opinion?”

  “About what?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “About Aldo Moro?”

  “You want to know my opinion?” He made the word sound opportunistic. “All right, I’ll tell you. My opinion is that Aldo Moro isn’t a man at all, not in any meaningful way. He isn’t anything. Come on, you’ve read Barthes. He’s an empty signifier, a box you can change the label on to suit whatever you put into it, or whatever you want the buyer to think might be in it. He’s a martyr, so stick on the martyr label, he’s the man who invented the historic compromise, so call him a statesman. He’s a builder of bridges, a saint, a sinner, a strategist, a bargaining counter, a corpse. He’s whatever you want. That’s what makes this kidnapping so fascinating in its way, and so ambivalent.”

  “And Moro the man? The husband? The father?”

  “Is insignificant. Like you. Like me. You don’t really think we matter, do you?” He paused to light a cigarette. “Life goes on, Helen.” For a moment, as he held the smoke deep in his lungs, his face looked tragic, another expression that suited it. “They’ll have to kill him, of course.”

  6

  After she has made her phone call, Helen leaves the flat. Her car, a yellow Smart, is parked on the Lungotevere. The last time she drove, it strikes her as she pulls out into the traffic, Federico was at work. He’d asked her to bring him some files he’d left on his desk at home, just over a week ago now. She’d been angry; she couldn’t understand why he hadn’t sent someone over to pick them up. He couldn’t do that, he’d explained, the files weren’t strictly connected with the ministry. It would have been an abuse of his position to occupy the time of someone employed by the state on a personal matter. She’d have liked to say she was busy, her life was too full, but she’d been watching a DVD Martin had lent her, of Buster Keaton shorts; she’d been curled up on the sofa with a bottle of iced tea and some imported ginger nuts. She hates driving through the centre of Rome, she’d resented every minute of it. She wonders now, with something like rage, why she didn’t open the files and look inside. The thought never arose, as though nothing they might have contained could provide her with fuel to melt the iciness that Federico’s distance, Federico’s mission, had created within her. As though she had no right to know, or care; her role was to fetch and carry, and open the wine for the world as it passed through his life, to which she was a mere accessory. Or maybe Giulia was right, she’s never really cared about Federico’s work. She’s let herself be sidelined so easily these past few years. All it took was a word from Federico that something wouldn’t interest her and she’d nod and turn elsewhere for her entertainment; over-priced packets of biscuits she had to hide in her desk drawers, CSI, silent comedy. Giacomo. When, all the time, she might have had the answer to her questions in four green A4 files, flung on the seat beside her. If she had cared to look.

  She lets her speed be dictated by the cars around her, shoulders hunched forward as though she were carrying a secret parcel on her lap. Her eyes are fixed on the car in front of her, a pale green Panda, as she goes with the flow along the Lungotevere towards Ponte Milvio. The car is moving faster now, the set-back arches of Ponte Milvio to her left, lights glinting from the hill beyond, Fleming no more than fifteen minutes away if the traffic doesn’t get any worse. She’ll soon be there. For a moment, she asks herself what she expects to find, assuming the flat is empty. If it isn’t, she’ll have to face Giulia. She’d turn back if she could and drive home, but by the time she’s almost reached the bridge and that’s possible she’s changed her mind again. She feels the nagging onset of a headache. The Panda has been replaced by a group of teenagers on scooters, hilarious and unpredictable, helmet straps swinging as they swerve together and then apart. She’d better concentrate. The scooters pull off as she slows down and swings round to the right. Moments later she’s crossing the Tiber, then turning right and heading up into Fleming.

  She hates this part of Rome, its Sixties apartment blocks squatting like toads on the sides of the hill and narrow, winding roads lined with expensive cars. Federico used to say he’d rather die than live here, surrounded by its smug monocultural values, though not when his parents were within earshot. And so she’s reminded again.

  Five minutes later, she finds a place to park and pulls up fifty yards from their building. From the car, she calls her in-laws’ landline once again, her nails tapping out their impatient tune on the steering wheel as the call tone rings out, unanswered. Fausto, she supposes, is still with Giacomo; the risk is Giulia. Shifting her jacket, she takes the bunch of keys from the pocket, slipping them onto her finger by the ring and clasping them to her palm as though they need to be hidden, or protected. She doesn’t want to have to stand in the street and draw attention to herself by searching for them.

  The foyer is empty. She waits for the lift, staring as she always does at the printed mural, an eighteenth century scene of the Tiber, bucolic, blown up to fit the wall. A row of large-leaved plants, overwatered and yellowing
, stands by her side in a cast-iron trough.

  The flat is dark, the shutters wound down against the summer heat. Helen goes straight to Giulia’s room, at the end of the corridor. The top of the desk is empty apart from a laptop, which Helen turns on, and a fax. She waits for the laptop to boot up, her hands on the polished green leather surface, looking at the door and then around the walls, at the bookcases and photographs, framed in black, of Giulia and famous people she’s known or met. Khrushchev. Picasso. Jimmy Carter and his wife. Popes. Wojtyla. Luciani. How odd, she thinks, that Italians always call Popes by their surnames, as though they were butchers. Others she doesn’t recognise. Giulia is in all of them, never smiling, except on one with Federico, when he was made a Cavaliere del Lavoro. This is the only photograph of Federico. She was thrilled to bits, you could see that. Helen was there as well, behind him and his parents, slightly turned away from the lens, as though she’d been on her way to somewhere else.

  Giulia’s laptop is running Windows 95. Giulia is famously dismissive of technology, but she’s clearly become attached to this small laptop, some years old now and surprisingly heavy as Helen adjusts it a little to suit her position. She opens Word. The documents have names that mean nothing to her, dates she doesn’t know. Some of the files are so small she wonders what they might contain. She clicks on one, at random, and finds herself staring at a blank page. She tries another file, with the same result. Juggernaut, she thinks. The empty file of Juggernaut. Of course. What did Giacomo say about someone cancelling what the file contained out of ignorance? Giulia doesn’t know how to delete files. She imagines the stiff old woman, sitting there with her finger on the delete button, patiently watching her son’s words being eaten away.

  She pulls open the central drawer. Scissors, a stapler, a bottle of correction fluid, some drawing pins in a small glass jar. A stack of cards with Giulia’s name and Senato della Repubblica written underneath. She opens one of the side drawers. This is full of files: green A4 files like the ones Helen ferried across Rome. She lifts out the top one to find that it contains clippings from newspapers, as does the one below. Beneath this file is a stack of paper sheets attached by a paper clip. She catches her breath when she sees Federico’s characteristic use of Courier. She picks the stack up and begins to read.

  The first mention of the Juggernaut was in the journal of Odoric. “At every yearly feast of the idol, the king and queen, and the multitude of the people, and all the pilgrims assemble themselves, and placing the idol in a most stately and rich chariot, they carry him out of their temple with songs, and with all kind of musical harmony, and a great company of virgins go procession-wise singing before him. Many pilgrims also put themselves under the chariot wheels: and all they over whom the chariot runneth are crushed in pieces, and divided asunder in the midst, and slain right out. Yea, and in doing this, they think themselves to die most holily and securely, in the service of their god.”

  Juggernaut is any literal or metaphorical force regarded as unstoppable; any force that will crush all in its path. If you Google the word, you’ll find it’s associated with something incapable, in the final resort, of listening to what lies beneath it. But the word itself comes from the Sanskrit term Jagannatha, “Lord of the universe”, one of the names of Krishna.

  There’s a class of words known as antagonyms, words that mean both themselves and their opposites. Overlook is one of these words, as is anabasis, or cleave. Juggernaut is also a kind of antagonym, not only destructive, but also a force for the good; not only the image of Krishna, beneath whose wheels his acolytes crush themselves, but also the name of Krishna, lord protector of the world. Juggernaut is both power and sacrifice.

  Maybe nothing exists without self-contradiction. Peace-keeping missions. Friendly fire. Sacrifice itself is a word that unsettles. It’s a word that asks us questions we aren’t prepared to answer. Still, it’s not to be denigrated, the afterlife of the martyr.

  Helen’s hands are shaking as she reads. Can this really be what he was writing for the conference? It isn’t Federico’s style at all. She turns over a couple of pages and reads again.

  not all to feel guilty about. I used to think I’d confess to Giacomo that he was jailed in my place, that one word from me, one gesture, and he’d have been released. But I didn’t have the courage. And then, when I did have the courage, I saw that it would deprive him of what he most valued, his notoriety. It would turn him into a victim, even worse, my victim. I never told Helen for the same reason; she always needed an excuse to respect Giacomo. My father knew; he’d never have fought for Giacomo’s pardon otherwise. That’s when my father stopped worshipping me. He thinks it was before, when I was on the other side, but it wasn’t. He respected me then.

  And now I’ve told my mother what I intend to do, in a moment’s weakness, because I was scared, and I know she assumes, because what other explanation can there be, that I’m delirious, insane. She thinks it’s the illness talking, not her son. Perhaps it is.

  How many secrets are there, she wonders, appalled. Is it true that I need an excuse to respect Giacomo? What did he mean by that? Often she’s felt more respect for Giacomo than for Federico. She’s respected his flair and energy, the largesse of him, seen them as implicit criticism of Federico’s cautious, scrupulous approach to life. She’s seen him as bountiful and Federico as penny-pinching. She’s continued to desire him after her desire for Federico dwindled to almost nothing.

  And this talk of illness. What illness?

  She turns to another page.

  days, I look at Helen as she talks to me and I see her lips moving and she might be laughing or anxious or angry about something. And I want to tell her what I feel but I have no words for it that she’ll understand. Because I don’t trust her anymore, or she doesn’t trust me. I can’t tell which came first. We no longer have the words. We babble to each other.

  When you say you trust someone what you’re saying is that you share a language, you have a language in common and can use it, not always or even necessarily to tell the truth, because even within trust there are secrets, but to be with that person, as much to commune as to communicate. Conversely, the loss of trust is the loss of that language you share. You watch the other person speak, you watch the movement of their lips, with love perhaps, with bemusement, with anger or irritation. But who or what that person is or believes or needs is beyond you, mysterious, and finally less than mysterious; without interest. It’s like an aphasia of the soul. After a while you cease to listen to the noise the person makes. But I can’t believe that this should be the case with Helen.

  And if it is, how far am I responsible? How far is my silence responsible? Speaking to Martin the other night I almost told him, but something stopped me. Respect for Helen? Perhaps. I’m filled with doubt. Besides, Martin

  This is the worst, Helen thinks, this is the worst since he died. It can’t get any worse than now. But to have him speak to her like this and to have no way of saying that she is sorry, and that she doesn’t understand, and that whatever he might have told her she would have heard if she’d known. If she’d only known. This is the worst.

  7

  Giacomo and Fausto are sitting in the bar of the hotel, while Yvonne sulks in their air-conditioned room on the fifth floor, “Please Do Not Disturb” in five languages, including Arabic and Japanese, dangling from the door. Giacomo hadn’t expected to find her there and suggested she go back to Paris alone, not only because he doesn’t want to leave Rome, or Helen, but to see if she will actually go without being taken. She’s a hopeless traveller, or pretends to be, constantly losing small articles of clothing and needing them to be retrieved, always without the right amount of change in the appropriate currency; although the Euro, bless its otherwise unlovely heart, has put paid to that, at least between Paris and Rome. But she shrugged and pouted and said he only wanted to get rid of her.