I’m sorry, she thinks and almost says, her dry lips moving to accommodate the words. I’m sorry, Federico. But there is no excuse; she has left it too late. Giacomo’s hand is unbearably heavy, but to move it off her knee would lend it more weight than it already has. They were neither of them enough for her, she realises, and now there is only one of them left it is like having no one at all. She thinks of the flat the two men shared in Turin, of what she’d seen there, the list of names, the tick beside Eduardo Cotugno’s name, the passport. What did they do together in that flat, what plots did they contrive, the two of them? Their two, identical rooms like the closed language of twins, so that she has never known which was which. Because it only occurred to her months later, when Giacomo was in jail and she was already married and she’d come across the postcard Giacomo had sent them from South America, that the desk might have belonged to either of them, they had both learnt to be tidy during their national service as soldiers. All she had had to go on was the handwriting on the list. And she had never been able to tell their handwriting apart. But by that time, it was too late. She’d made her choice.
Before they left the flat, Helen had checked her email. But she’d also opened Federico’s. As she’d expected, there were over a hundred new messages. Amazon. Harvard. Alitalia. Government stuff. She scrolled down to four days earlier, and saw that among the first unopened messages was one that had been sent by Federico to himself. The subject was ‘final thoughts’. She called Giacomo over. The timeline said: 31/05/2004 19.47. She clicked to open it.
It wasn’t that long. She read the first paragraph.
What I don’t understand is how can you be what you are and yet still be the opposite of what you are. There’s a poem by Robespierre I read years ago, at university, and didn’t appreciate at the time, where he says that the worst thing that can happen to a just man is to realise, the moment before he dies, how much he’s hated by those for whom he has given his life. Is this what will happen to me, to realise this?
6
Giacomo can’t remember the last demonstration he took part in as a civilian, although perhaps civilian isn’t the word he wants. As no one. Normally, he’d be linking arms with other stars and starlets of the radical protest industry, fringe politicians, philosophers, actresses, performance artists, writers. He’d join in for half an hour, his assistants would have told the press, the television cameras, because there is still this lingering respect for intellectuals, in France at least, as personalities at least. What was the expression Topino Bianco had used in that fucking article? Ageing enfant terrible. There’d be an interview of some sort and then the usual round of goodbyes and kisses until the next time. Each would give, in his or her own way, what he or she had to give.
Today, though, he finds himself under the banner of a magazine so poorly edited, so insignificant, it has to be paid for through the proceeds of some illicit slush fund, a tax loss, some anxious benefactor buoying it up with conscience money. Because it surely can’t pay for itself. How anachronistic to see these people gathered beneath the handmade placards and swash of cotton sagging with the weight of its own painted slogan, touching in its naïveté: NO MORE IFS AND NO MORE BUTS. As though there could be a world without ifs and buts. As though the world weren’t being re-invented daily through, at best, prevarication and doubt, at worst, mendacity. They might as well all have joined hands to sing “Imagine”. And yet, despite or perhaps because of all this, he is happy to be here. He is happy to be anonymous, at least for now, and to have his arms linked on one side with Helen, who’s been ignoring him for the past hour, and on the other with some girl he’s just met, no more than twenty, a girl who had never heard of him before this morning and now adores him. He is happy to be introduced to Don Giusini, who recognised him, and shook his hand in a rather solemn judgemental way that amused Giacomo, because they were all in the same business in the end, the business of making up stories that made up the world, and there is no moral higher ground. He is happy to find himself caught behind Martha Weinberg, a woman he has never met before today although she also knew him, by name and reputation, and was cool with him, but impressed. She’ll be asking me for an article before the day is out, he thinks. He is happy to have slept with Helen, and to have been left by Yvonne, happy that Stefania is already flying from wherever she has been towards him, ready to allow him what she’s called a seventh chance. Already the idea that he and Helen might be able, after all these years, to live together as a couple strikes him as foolish; he can barely remember having thought of it. How fickle the heart is, he says to himself, the pressure of the girl’s hand warm and vital on his arm. Life, he says to himself, is endless with possibilities.
“You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?” Helen’s face is flushed, she seems to be as cheerful as he is and, thank God, she’s caught some sun. She looks like a girl in her neat little cotton dress, like a schoolgirl, he thinks. She’s always had that quality of innocence about her. People used to think she was cold; Giacomo was convinced that this was what had made her so appealing to Federico. She seemed unavailable, that was her strength. That must have been what appealed to Federico, he thinks now. Federico always wanted his own space, as people say these days. My space. Your space. His or her space. What was that Leibniz term? That’s the one: windowless monads. All at once he recalls that parable – Buddhist, is it? He should ask Don Giusini – about the difference between heaven and hell. In both places people sit round a table with chopsticks that are longer than their arms and bowls of food. In hell they try to feed themselves, and fail. In heaven they feed one another. He’s always liked this kind of thing. Parables. Stories that make up the world. And now there is this story Helen has made up, about her mother-in-law. Which might be true, he’ll give her that, but to what end? She surely doesn’t want the woman arrested for the murder of her own son? What good would that do?
“Yes,” he says, before she can ask him what he’s thinking about. “I’d forgotten what fun it was to be lost in a crowd.”
“How many of us are there, would you say? I’m hopeless at guessing.”
He looks around him, at the loose knots of people, young and old, families with pushchairs and dogs, red flags and rainbow flags and kaffiyahs wrapped around the most unlikely heads. They must be somewhere in the middle of the march, he supposes. They’re moving slowly, unhurriedly, down Via Cavour, on their way to Piazza Venezia. Far in front, already on Via dei Fori Imperiali, what looks from here like a solid mass of protestors, placards bobbing above their heads, is turning right. Behind them, the crowd is equally dense. Dance music comes from a decorated float a hundred yards to their back, fifty yards ahead of them a line of men plays pipes. The roads that lead to Monti and the Colosseum are cordoned off by police, two rows deep, blue armoured vans behind them, but the mood is festive, an air of picnic, thinks Giacomo, smiling at a group of children with painted faces, a Labrador with a rainbow-coloured scarf knotted like a cape to its collar. The march around Futuri Prossimi is loose and informal, they might have been tourists. If the shops weren’t boarded up he’d buy a souvenir.
“Hundreds of thousands,” says Giacomo.
“Multiply the number the ministry says by a factor of three,” says the girl on his left. “That usually gives you a rough idea.”
“A factor of ten,” barks Martha. A man at the side of the road has put down a rucksack and is taking photographs of them with his mobile. “Fuck off,” she shouts, “Vaffanculo,” then turns to the rest of them as the man slips the mobile back into his pocket and walks away. “Did you see that? Who does that jerk think he is?”
“CIA,” says Giacomo. “Bound to be. You can tell from the baseball cap worn backwards.”
“You’re like everyone else. You think being anti-American is funny,” says Martha. “What about your own shit? Can’t you smell that?” What a humourless bitch she is, thinks Giacomo, and smiles.
“I wish Martin could be here with us,” says Martha.
; “I don’t think that would have happened,” Helen says. “Demonstrations aren’t his style. I’d be happy to know he was at home.”
Giacomo glances at Helen, who looks thoughtful, almost sad. She’s thinking about Federico, he supposes, and is himself stirred by sadness. I loved him as much as I’ve loved anyone, he thinks, and that wasn’t enough to save either of us. He’s better off dead. What a mess we’ve made of everything though. Perhaps I should do what he wanted to do, whatever that was, something pure and significant, unambiguous. Some necessary death.
They are turning onto Via dei Fori Imperiali when a thin woman with too much white-blonde hair, a woman he vaguely recognises, breaks through the cordon of police to approach them, holding a microphone to her chest as if to conceal it. She is followed by a man in a T-shirt and cargo shorts and a floppy white hat, with a camera on his shoulder. Giacomo is the first to notice and steps forward, undecided whether to fend her off or play his usual role, mediate, explicate, be both available and aloof, dance along the knife edge of his charm. He is starting to smile when he realises that the woman isn’t interested in him, though he knows her now as someone who’s worked in Paris for Italian television. No, no. She doesn’t want him at all. She wants to speak to Helen. He turns towards her, his initial instinct to protect her. But Helen doesn’t seem to need to be protected. After glancing at Don Giusini, who nods, she meets the woman halfway. Giacomo moves in close, in case he is needed. Behind the cameraman, three carabinieri detach themselves from the line of armed men along the pavement and cross to the group. The woman is holding the microphone to Helen’s face. Judging from her expression, she expects to be rebuffed, but Helen is smiling. “Ciao, bella,” she says, as if she’s bumped into an old friend at a party. Startled, the woman asks her if she’d mind answering a few questions. “Certainly,” says Helen. “Why not?” The woman turns to the cameraman, nods, begins to speak.
“Signora Di Stasi. This is your first public appearance since the tragic death of your husband four days ago. Why have you chosen to interrupt your silence on this particular occasion, a political demonstration against the government and its closest ally, especially in view of the president’s visit?”
Helen moves closer to the camera. “Because my husband would himself have been on this demonstration, which is not merely political but humanitarian, which is not against the government and its allies, but against an illegal war. He was firmly opposed to the military occupation of Iraq. He would have taken part in this demonstration as a citizen, not as a representative of the government.” She stares into the lens. Her voice is clear and cold. “The least I can do, to honour his memory, his life and his work, is be here to represent him,” she says. She was ready for this, thinks Giacomo, with admiration. The girl beside him whispers in his ear, “She’s wonderful,” and all he can do is acquiesce. Martha Weinberg is clapping her hands behind Helen, thumping the air, whooping with joy. She breaks into a little dance, like a child pretending to be Tonto. She’s got more than she expected, far more than she hoped for.
“After the brutal, politically motivated murder of your husband, there has been talk of a state funeral.”
“I don’t know where that talk came from. I’ve said nothing about a state funeral. And I wasn’t aware that the motivation behind the murder had been established. I spoke to the magistrate only this morning, and he made it clear that all possibilities remained open. No one knows who killed my husband. No one knows why. Only the murderer.” The woman is glancing anxiously around, uncertain whether to encourage Helen to expand on this, then speaks again, her tone tinged with panic. You can see she’s torn, thinks Giacomo. She’d like to hector Helen, who is nothing, a nobody, a widow, and foreign to boot, bully her into toeing whatever party line has been established; but she doesn’t dare, because Federico counted. At the same time, she’s terrified what Helen might say next.
“Your husband was a senior public servant. He died in the service of the state. Why do you feel it inappropriate of the state to recognise his assassination, officially? Surely he deserves a state funeral?”
Helen is about to speak when Giacomo sees two men elbow to the front of the small crowd that has formed around the interview, pushing the squealing journalist back towards the cameraman, who stumbles under the weight of his equipment and almost falls. As the carabinieri step in, whether to protect or restrain Helen isn’t clear, the two men move off. Helen turns to Giacomo, hisses Do something, for God’s sake. Don’t let them get away. Giacomo walks, slowly at first and then in an odd half-run, in the direction the men must have chosen. The small crowd that has gathered around the thrill of the microphone and the camera now breaks up to let Giacomo through. He feels both excited and absurd as he dodges among these people, who don’t seem to know what he’s doing, nor why, who don’t appear to have recognised him. He is running now against the flow of the march, breathless but with a sense of purpose he hasn’t experienced in years. He sees a flash of T-shirt and tattooed bicep, and pushes on, elbowing his way through knots of demonstrators, until he is blocked by a line of police. They are moving to surround him, closing in. He tries to push them out of the way. They hold him by the shoulders, by the arms, but he twists round, his shirt coming out of his trousers, stumbling over his feet, and begins to shout. “Witness this police brutality. This is how fascist regimes begin. Remember Guantanamo!” He is dragged away, screaming “Collusion!”, and pushed into a van. He grins at the others already seated along the sides of the van’s interior, tucking his shirt back into his waistband. Some of the buttons have been ripped off. Excellent. He’ll sue. He’s never felt better. If only he had Federico with him now, he thinks, everything would be possible. He wants to punch the air, and would do if he weren’t so breathless and didn’t have a fleeting memory of Martha doing precisely that five minutes earlier. “I know who you are,” says a teenage girl with orange dreadlocks sitting opposite him. “You were on the news last night. You’re that dead man’s friend.” She sighs. “It’s your generation’s fault we’re in this fucking mess.”
Giacomo wants to hug her. “You couldn’t be more right!” he says.
7
Martin watches Alina whenever she turns her eyes away from him, watches her walk across to the window and adjust the blind, watches her as she folds the top sheet back to smooth out any creases that might have formed beneath his legs. He is oddly unembarrassed when she checks his catheter, oddly because he doesn’t see her as a nurse, or not primarily. He’d say that he saw her as an angel if he believed in angels and could say this without sounding mawkish. He doesn’t know how, but he sensed her touching his legs as he lay, unconscious, on the pavement. He remembers her cool hands on his skin. He sees her as a woman.
He’s asked her questions about herself, less out of curiosity than to begin to know her voice by heart, although he’s been curious too, how could he not be? He just doesn’t want to hear about any indignities she may have suffered, he wants to protect himself from that. He isn’t being a coward; he’s convinced that by protecting himself he will protect her too. I’ve fallen in love, he says to himself, how unexpected. How unexpected the behaviour of the heart. At first he was worried that whoever had tried to kill him might come back to finish the job they botched. But he doesn’t think that now. He’s seen, and spoken to, Helen, who’ll have spoken to Mura by now and who knows who else. If he thought there was any risk, he’d send Alina home.
He’s asked her to turn on the television and to raise his head a little so that he can watch the demonstration. It’s being filmed from a helicopter, one of the many helicopters Martin can hear from his bed. The number of marchers, as ever, is a matter of opinion, although half a million wouldn’t be far off, thinks Martin, doing the usual sums from the figures provided. She’s sitting beside him, her slim hand on the bed.
They have cameras on the ground as well. Watching them move across the faces of the demonstrators, he sees a man he recognises but can’t place for a moment. Bald,
heavily built, tattoos visible on his arm. It takes him a couple of seconds to realise it’s Picotti’s son, the one who led him out to Ostia. Now that’s a surprise, he thinks, he’s not the anti-war type. But, of course, he needn’t be in agreement to be there; there are other reasons. Picotti’s son. Keeping it in the family, that’s what his father said. The camera moves on, in search of news.
As the screen goes back to aerial shots, he wonders if he’d have gone on the march himself. He’s tempted to think he would, but doesn’t know with whom. At a pinch, he supposes he’d have gone with Federico, assuming Federico would have taken part. What do you think of this bloody war? he asked Alina when she turned the set on and the first few images passed across the screen. She shrugged. There is always war, she said. Not always, he said, not everywhere. She smiled at that and said, “Take me some place there is no war, Martin Frame. We can make ourselves comfortable and wait for it to arrive.” It was the way she first used his surname that made him understand what he felt for her, he doesn’t know how else to explain it. As though he’s been taken on whole, without reservations. He lies here, his neck beginning to ache a little from the effort of holding this awkward position, and repeats it to himself, in his head, his own name made fresh. Martin Frame. He asked her where she came from and she named a town in Ukraine he’d visited once, in another lifetime, on what he’d thought of then as official business. He was about to say, Yes, I know the place, but didn’t. She’d have asked to know what he was doing there and he didn’t want to have to lie to her.
When Helen appears on the screen, his eyes are half-closed; he might have missed her if Alina hadn’t called out. Your friend! From this morning! But no, he’d have heard her voice and recognised that. How angry she looks, he thinks, and how determined, as though she’s been waiting for this moment. Perhaps she has. They are all there. Would you credit it? Giacomo, that priest chappy, Don Giusini. He even knows the woman interviewing her, a dreadful creature without an ounce of talent, the ex-mistress of some under-secretary, a compromise choice to appease the right. Someone who’s never been slow to run to the aid of the victor, as the saying goes. Helen is listening to what she says with a look of disdain. She shakes her head. She answers. Martin smiles, then pulls a face of surprised approval. She’s giving as good as she gets. Better. He’s about to ask Alina to put another pillow under his head when Helen’s face changes, she looks as though she’s been slapped by a hard invisible hand. Just as abruptly, it disappears and the screen shows a sweep of heads and banners and then sky and the programme is interrupted for a handful of seconds, but not before Martin hears Helen cry, in English. Do something, for God’s sake. And then they are watching the march from the helicopter again, the camera drifting from group to group. It all looks so thin from above, people scattered into small informal groups, it might as well be a garden party. The commentator doesn’t mention Helen, nor Federico; the interview might as well not have taken place. What on earth could have happened? he wonders.
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