“But I love Massimo. I love your mother. I wasn’t told, you must believe me. Nobody told me.” To Giacomo’s astonishment, Helen flings her arms around the young man, hugging him to her. He resists for no more than a second, then lets himself be held, returns the embrace. He is at least a head taller than Helen. Giacomo sees them together: the man’s brown arms against Helen’s dress, her fine pale hair pressed up against his chest, and is unexpectedly jealous, when the young man’s eyes meet his. He looks away, with a sense of shame he doesn’t understand. He isn’t to blame. But someone must always be to blame, he thinks, isn’t that what the young man just said? It’s natural to blame someone.
They are about to leave when a teenage girl runs from the house and presses a jar of olives into Helen’s hands.
“She’d want you to have these,” she says.
7
Once she’s checked no one is waiting outside the house, Helen asks Giacomo to drop her at the edge of the square. “I’ll call you later this evening,” she says. “There’s something I have to sort out.” Giacomo seems happy with this. It makes such a change to have someone doing what I want, she thinks. She’s always imagined Giacomo would be the last person to be manoeuvred into doing things he didn’t want for someone else. Does he love her? she wonders. Does she love him?
She lets herself into the flat, kicking her shoes off, unzipping her dress as she closes the door behind her. Her first thought is to take it off, to free herself of the shroud-like dress, to let her skin breathe. She drops the dress to the floor, pushing it into the corner with her bare foot. She stands there in her bra and knickers, forcing her elbows far enough back for her to feel the strain, then lifting her hair away from her neck and letting it fall.
Silence. How odd though to find the empty flat so full, so airless. She’s spent so much time in it alone these past few years, with Federico increasingly absorbed by his work. She’s resented it, she’s felt betrayed by Federico; her rival has been a cabinet of files, a schedule of meetings that left him no time for anything else, a sense of duty that made her feel shallow and inconsequential. She’s been alone so much here it ought to feel no different. But now, as she walks from hall to kitchen to living room to bathroom, aching in every limb, it’s worse than it’s ever been. As though room after room of silence were itself a sort of presence so dense she can hardly push her way through it.
Don Giusini sits down at the table without being asked. Helen has pulled on a skirt and T-shirt and is barefoot behind the kitchen counter, making tea for them both. He is waiting for her to finish, not speaking. She can sense him looking round the room, at the pictures and the books, at the blackboard with OLIVES written on it in Federico’s hand, looking at her, in the same slow way, as though it is only by looking carefully at everything that he can reach an understanding of it. He held her hand at the door with both his hands, and she let him, wondering if it would help, if he possessed some healing power. I’m so fragile, she thinks, resenting him a little, so needy; I’ll take my help from any source that’s offered. But she hasn’t done him justice, she sees that now. What he does, as she has learnt to say from American TV, is calm. Don Giusini does calm. The sheaf of papers from Giulia’s desk is now slipped into the drawer of her desk, some of it still unread. She isn’t ready yet, but she will be soon. She carries the teapot across to the table.
“Milk or lemon?” she says, then corrects herself. “No, I’m sorry, it’ll have to be lemon. I don’t have any milk.”
He smiles. His front teeth are chipped and slightly crooked, she notices; his parents couldn’t have had the money to have them fixed.
“In that case, lemon. And sugar. Sugar. I have a sweet tooth.”
She pours the tea out, fetches a lemon from the fridge, and sugar. The knife she uses to slice the lemon is Federico’s.
“I didn’t know you existed three days ago,” she says, discomfited by the silence. “And now here we are together in my kitchen. Drinking tea.”
He smiles more broadly. For a moment she wonders if he is making fun of her.
“Together in your kitchen,” he says, looking round. “To talk about Federico.”
She doesn’t know what to say. What she wants to do is listen.
“I spoke too soon this morning,” he says. “I was cruel, my words were cruel, but I wanted to be heard. You didn’t know me; you might have sent me away. I didn’t want that.”
“I understand,” she says, waiting.
“Federico met me at a conference some months ago. It was a small thing, a handful of people against the war. I suppose you could say that Federico was the star.” Don Giusini looks at her to see if this makes sense. When she nods, he carries on. “I was a little in awe of him and also, to be honest, a little distrustful, but that soon passed. He helped us see what needed to be done because he understood his world. As we did ours. But Federico’s world was also their world, the war makers’ world. He helped us see what might be effective and what not.” He pauses. “And then we met again, the two of us alone, sometimes in Rome but more often in my home. It was easier for him to travel than for me. My parish is in the Abruzzi, near Teramo, and one weekend he came without warning to my house. He was tired, I thought he wanted a place to rest, no more than that. A refuge. But I was wrong. He wanted to confess.”
“I didn’t know,” she says.
“He told me straight away that he had played a part in the death of a man in Turin. Almost thirty years ago now. It happened when he was stealing money from a bank for what they called the struggle. Someone else was arrested. They knew it was Federico, but no one said. He let the other man go to jail for him.” He looks at her, puzzled. “You were there – not at the bank raid, I know that, but in Italy at that time – this will make sense to you in a way it can’t to me.” He spreads his hands out in despair. “I wasn’t born when it happened. It isn’t my place to judge, but I’m a human being, I can’t not judge. I listen and try to understand. I try not to judge. I do my best, Signora Di Stasi. Helen. May I call you Helen? What Federico told me shocked me, because I couldn’t understand. He tried to explain how it was, but I had the sense that he didn’t understand either. Not any longer. But that didn’t stop him judging himself. He couldn’t forgive. He didn’t seem to want my forgiveness, in a way. I wasn’t sure what he wanted. He wanted to talk. He’d done other things at that time, he said, and told no one.”
“He could have talked to me,” says Helen.
“He couldn’t do that, I don’t think. Not after so long.” Don Giusini stirs sugar into his tea. “He could have talked to you then, perhaps, after it had happened, but he didn’t. I think he was scared at first, that you might not love him, or talk to someone else. And then he was too ashamed to talk to you. He’d lied to you for so long. I think perhaps he was most ashamed that he’d lied.”
“He never said a word about it. Or anything else. He didn’t tell me everything, I didn’t expect that.”
“Silence is also lying.”
“I know it is,” she says. She sips at her tea. “This morning. You said he was dying.”
“Yes. He told me some time ago. He said he had spoken to no one else. He’d only found out a few days earlier, although he’d suspected something for some time. He had a tumour in his brain, in his frontal lobe. He’d been suffering from headaches. You’ll have noticed?”
With tears in her eyes, Helen nods once more. “I thought he was working too hard. I didn’t realise.”
“He found out three months ago. He was told he had four, maybe five months to live. The tumour was fast-growing, inoperable. It was beginning to affect his behaviour; it would continue to do so, unpredictably. To remove it they would have had to remove a part of his brain. He would have been a vegetable.”
“It’s a mercy he died the way he did, then,” says Helen. She is fighting back her anger with Federico, his reticence. His deceit. So this was the illness. He spoke to his parents, to Giulia and Fausto. Why not to her? Because there w
as that wall of – what was that word he’d used? Babble.
“And so he knew that in any case he was going to die,” says Don Giusini in a soft, cautious voice that alarms Helen. “And that gave him freedom–”
“What do you mean?” she says, startled.
“He had a plan.”
“What kind of plan?”
“He wrote it all down, he told me. He had started to make notes for his speech for the conference before he had the news about his tumour. He’d wanted to shake them up, in a gentle way at first, to make them think. The conference wasn’t really about reconstruction after the war, he told me, whatever people thought. At first he’d wanted to talk about what peace might mean. He’d wanted to surprise them, lead them somewhere new. And then he learnt that he would outlive the conference by what? A matter of weeks? Two months at best. And so he changed his mind.”
“Is what he wrote called Juggernaut?”
“You know about it?”
“Yes. I think I’ve read some. The first part, before he knew.” She is silent for a moment. “And then other bits. A later part, I think it must be. After he’d been told.”
“He never showed me what he had done,” says Don Giusini. “Not all of it, anyway. He would read sections to me, but he said it was a work in progress, it would never be finished except with his death.”
“He was right. He told his parents about it as well, you know. His mother, anyway.”
“Yes, he told me that he’d spoken to them. He would have spoken to you as well, before the end. He promised me that.”
“The end?”
“I said that he came to confess to a crime,” Don Giusini says.
“I should be, I know,” says Helen, still thinking about Turin, “but I’m not surprised he let someone down like that. They thought they had a right to do anything. I should say ‘we’. I was there, after all. We thought we could take the world into our own hands. We had no respect for anyone who got in our way.”
“You don’t understand. That wasn’t the crime he confessed to.”
“I’m sorry?”
She watches Don Giusini stand up and walk around the room, staring at the floor as though he has lost something. After a moment, during which she finds herself wanting to reach out and grab him to make him stop, he sits down beside her. He is very young, his face is smooth. There are traces of acne around his mouth, beneath the fine beard.
“He wanted my approval, my absolution I suppose, for something he still hadn’t done.”
8
Turin, 1978
One day, just after lunch, Giacomo met Helen off the tram. She’d finished her morning’s teaching at Fiat and was on her way home. It was a fine day, one of those spring days that felt like summer, although there was still snow high on the mountains outside the city and out of the sun the air was cold, even bitter. He took her arm and frog-marched her off, ignoring her protests. He wouldn’t say where he was taking her. Helen had a scarf on but her coat was open; Giacomo was wearing the parka he’d been wearing when he came back from South America, and a T-shirt ragged at the neck, and jeans; he looked the way he had done then, his hair had grown a little, he hadn’t shaved for a day or two. After a few paces, he stopped and they both laughed. There was something about his manner that intrigued her; he was the way he’d been at first: playful, charming. He pulled a bar of chocolate out of his pocket and broke some off for her; it was the kind she liked; milk with hazelnuts. He knew that, things like that; Giacomo was always observant, attentive to detail. He seemed to know more about her than Federico did, she thought, her foibles, her preferences. In the cinema he would let her sit beside the aisle, something Federico never did until she reminded him that otherwise she’d panic. Federico still had to ask her if she wanted sugar in her coffee, or added long-life milk – the only kind they could find – which was worse. I’m sorry, he’d say, as she poured it away. I always forget you don’t like it; and she would think, how can you always forget? Giacomo never does.
She should have found this attractive. Perhaps, deep down, she did. But, however much she told herself they were party tricks, like remembering which court card someone had chosen from a pack, Giacomo’s awareness of what she wanted or didn’t want, his awareness of her, upset her and left her on edge. It made her wary, as though there would be a price she would have to pay one day for this attention.
They walked for a few moments, not speaking. Then Giacomo said, in a teasing way: “I’ve got something to show you.”
She stopped. “What do you mean?”
“It’s nothing forbidden,” he said. “Don’t worry.”
“I’m not worried, Giacomo. I’m just in no mood for games.”
He took the ends of her scarf and tied them together, pulling her in towards him until their faces almost touched, she could smell the chocolate on his breath. If he’d pulled any tighter, she might have choked. She thought he was going to kiss her, and she’d have let him; but he moved away.
“It isn’t a game,” he said, in a quieter voice. “It’s important. Well, maybe not important. But, well, significant. I think you’ll like it.” He was pleading, almost pathetic. She wanted to laugh. Is there any difference between important and significant? As if the first were my word and the second his? Perhaps they would never have the same language.
“All right, all right,” she said. “But let me go. I won’t run away.”
They stopped at the corner of a street she didn’t recognise, in the university quarter, not far from the department where he worked with Federico. “Close your eyes now,” he said. She did. She let him lead her twenty, thirty yards; her heart was beating absurdly, she felt like a child in thrall to an older, more dangerous child. “Keep them closed,” he whispered. “Trust me.” They were in the shade of the buildings; the air was colder, she began to shiver. She heard him turn a key and open a door. “Come on,” he said, coaxing. He guided her up steps, and then more steps, closing the door behind them. The temperature dropped once again. His hand was strong and warm around hers. “You can open them now. Just for a minute.”
She was in an enormous room, bare, decorated in a formal way, some sort of entrance hall. There was scaffolding on the far side. Giacomo took her across the marble floor to a lift. “Close them again,” he said. She held her breath as the lift went up. It took far longer than she’d expected. He led her out of the lift and into a biting, unexpected wind. “Open them,” he said, and she did.
She could see the city of Turin laid out beneath her, the roofs of the old centre, the station with the mesh and tangle of rails out to the rest of Italy and Europe, the tramline to the factories, the dull grey ribbon of the river, the parks; the city’s layers, one on the other, nothing quite concealed however concerted the effort, nothing quite whole; and beyond it all the broken bowl of mountain, its summits frilled white with snow, where the cold air started. Giacomo pointed the sights out to her, one by one, Superga, Mirafiori, Palazzo Reale, the Duomo, the Chapel of the Holy Shroud. He didn’t need to; she knew where she was. She was equal to him, she thought, pulling her coat around her. I live here too. He pointed down to the streets filled with traffic, the headlights on by now, to the people, tiny, mysterious, banal, about their business.
“Tempted?” he said, with a grin, sweeping his arm towards the horizon. “It’s all yours. If you want it enough.”
“Don’t be stupid. How did you do it?” she said.
“Do what?”
“Get us into this place. Get the key. It’s always been closed, ever since I got here.”
He put his arm round her shoulders.
“Friends.”
“That’s a very Italian answer. I thought you hated all that. Favours. I thought you said no favour came free.”
“Don’t complain. You know how much you wanted to come up here and now you have. Be grateful, Helen. Learn to be grateful.” Leaning out, he waved his other arm towards the street below. “Just look at the people. This is the point at
which we’re supposed to say they resemble ants, right?”
She laughed. That was the problem with Giacomo, that he had the power to amuse her. “Well, they do, a little. Less organised perhaps.”
“Look, you see that woman there,” he said, pointing. “The fat one with the shopping trolley and the fur coat.”
“Not really.”
“Use your imagination, Helen! Say yes.”
She laughed. “Yes.”
“What would you say if I told you it was all her fault?”
“If all what was her fault?”
“Oh everything. War, death, torture, everything. All the injustice, all the cruelty.” He squeezed her tighter. “All the bloodshed.”
“I’d think you were mad.”
“But suppose it was true,” he said, the pleading tone back in his voice. “All the world’s evil concentrated into that one small figure there. And you had a gun. What would you do?”
“I’d miss,” she said. “Obviously. I can’t aim for toffee.”
“So, you’d shoot?”
“Don’t be silly. Of course I wouldn’t.”
“But how could you justify not shooting?”
“Because you can’t just shoot people. That’s how.”
Giacomo moved away from her. “There’s a story I read,” he said, “I don’t remember who wrote it. About a perfect world, without injustice or suffering, it’s fairly vague about the economic details of course, it would have to be, but there’s a sense of harmony and balance, it’s just what anyone would want. A bit too mediaeval for my taste, but a perfect world in practically every aspect. There’s only one snag.” He paused, one eyebrow raised. She did what he expected. She asked:
“Which is?”
The View From the Tower Page 21