by Amanda Knox
I gave her a puzzled look.
She smiled encouragingly and bent her knees to show me. “You see?” she asked.
I squatted, and the women stared at me. Unlike at the questura, these guards were at least kind. They seemed almost like two distant aunts, looking at me with sympathy and speaking to me softly, knowing that what they were asking was excruciatingly humiliating.
Naked and crouching, cringing with shame, I held on to the knowledge that I would be released as soon as I could clear up the misunderstanding with the police. A few hours or maybe a day or two. No more than three—and for sure in a special holding cell, not in the real prison. I saw myself striding out of the gate in my hiking boots, book bag over my shoulder, Mom walking beside me, holding my hand.
“Now cough,” Lupa said.
“What?” I asked, puzzled.
“Cough.” She faked a cough. I imitated her.
“Good,” Lupa said. “Here you go.”
She handed me back my clothes, and I got dressed. But I was still shoeless. “Che taglia di scarpe porti?” she asked, pointing at my feet—“What size do you wear?”
“Porto una trenta-nove,” I said softly—“I wear a thirty-nine.”
“Go and look in the nuns’ closet for something,” Lupa told Cinema.
The female ward at Capanne had a chaplain and five nuns, who ministered to the inmates six days a week, filling in where the Italian government fell short—which included clothing us, since it turned out there weren’t uniforms. The nuns kept a cabinet of donated apparel that they gave prisoners as needed—most of it worn out and poorly fitting.
Lupa pulled a lumpy, black plastic garbage bag out of a large bin and dropped it in front of me. It clanged against the floor. I dug down beneath the coarse, gray wool blanket folded on top and found a metal bowl and plate, a spoon and a fork, a plastic cup, a toothbrush and toothpaste, a plastic bag of gigantic feminine hygiene pads, a single roll of rough, brown toilet paper, and two sponges—one for scrubbing myself in the shower and the other for dishes. “Your provisions,” Lupa said.
I choked at the back of my throat. I was holding a sack of the only things the government thought were essential to my life. I was in prison, and alone.
At that point, I gave myself as strong a pep talk as I could muster. This is temporary—a stupid bureaucratic system that can’t be bent. Like a roller-coaster ride that I’ve accidentally gotten on and can’t get off until it’s looped completely around. This is my own fault. I caused the confusion. Now I have to try to straighten it out.
Tears streamed down my cheeks.
“Whoa! No, no. Be brave. You’re okay,” Lupa said.
Cinema came back carrying a worn pair of rust-colored cloth slippers, which I squeezed on over my socks.
“Those work okay,” Lupa said, nodding approvingly. She held my upper arm, I gripped the garbage bag, and Cinema opened the door to the main hall. I walked out in a stranger’s discarded house shoes.
Vice-Comandante Argirò, whom I’d met just before my strip search, was waiting. He was a thin man, probably in his fifties, with a large hooked nose that took up most of his droopy face and a hunchback that jutted out between his shoulder blades. He spoke his name loudly and slowly. “Ar-gi-rò,” he’d said. “Capi-sci l’i-taliano?” Did I understand Italian? I nodded. “Bene,” he said, picking up speed. “Sono vice-comandante. Capisci?”
“Sì,” I said. Yes, I understood that he was a vice-commander and guessed that meant he was the second-highest person in charge of the prison.
When I’d first been brought inside from the squad car, I’d seen Raffaele through a barred glass window, locked in a hallway near the prison entrance. He was wearing his gray faux fur–lined jacket and was pacing back and forth, his head down. It was the first time since we’d been separated that I’d seen more than his feet. He didn’t look at me. I’d wondered if he hated me.
Raffaele and I hadn’t been together long, but I’d believed I knew him well. Now I felt I didn’t know him at all.
I wondered why he was being kept here, what the police thought he knew, what the bureaucratic reasons were for his presence at the prison. I didn’t know what was going on in Raffaele’s head, but I imagined that he was as scared as I was. I couldn’t imagine why he had betrayed me, but I wondered if he had been just as confused as I had been under interrogation, had lost faith in his own memories as well. Now I wonder if he realized then, unlike me, how serious our situation was.
I couldn’t catch his eye before I was led away.
The next step was getting my mug shot taken. I was told to sit in a chair bolted to the wall and to look straight ahead into a big, black metal box, like the camera they use at the Washington Department of Motor Vehicles. In the second before they made the picture, it dawned on me that I wasn’t supposed to smile for the camera. Later I was struck by how lost, how frazzled I appeared. My hair was wild. My skin was ghostly pale. My eyes were blank with exhaustion.
Argirò stared at the hickey on my neck, but said nothing. “Follow me, miss,” he said finally.
Agente Lupa took my upper arm again and guided me forward. Argirò fit the large, gold key in his hand into the lock of a bulletproof glass door reinforced with a row of metal bars on either side. All the doors looked the same—and they were all impenetrable without a key. He went in ahead of us, holding the door open until we’d gone through, then closing and locking it behind us.
We walked through a series of dingy cream-colored hallways. Argirò unlocked each barred door as we went. Even in my daze, I noticed that none of the doors had knobs. The vice-comandante used his keys as handles.
I was inside the women’s ward. Incredibly, as I went deeper and deeper into the cage, I didn’t have the urge to escape.
Argirò led us up a narrow stairwell to il primo piano—“the second floor” (what we call the first floor is known in Europe as the ground floor)—and tapped the key he was holding against the barred door. On the other side, a female guard used her own gold key to unlock the door and usher us into the infirmary. With a patient’s table in the middle of the floor, it was the first vaguely familiar-looking room I’d been in since walking into the prison. The doctor, an older man in a lab coat, his hair dyed dark, was sitting behind his desk. He looked down at the folder in front of him and up at me. “Name?” he asked.
“Amanda Knox. K-n-o-x.”
“Do you have allergies, illnesses, diseases?”
“No,” I replied.
“Well, we’ll need to do blood work anyway,” he said. Just then I felt a sharp pinch from the back of my head. The nurse had snuck around me and plucked a hair from my scalp. I started to turn and glare at her, but instead asked the doctor, “Blood work? For what?”
“For diseases,” he said. “Sign this. For the tests.” He pushed a document and a pen in front of me, and I signed it. “How do you feel?”
“Worried,” I said. “Worried and confused.”
I shrank down in my seat.
“Confused?” he asked.
“I feel terrible about what happened at the police office. No one was listening to me,” I said. Tears sprang to my eyes again.
“Hold up there, now,” Argirò said.
“Wouldn’t listen to you?” the doctor asked.
“I was hit on the head, twice,” I said.
The doctor gestured to the nurse, who parted my hair and looked at my scalp.
“Not hard,” I said. “It just startled me. And scared me.”
“I’ve heard similar things about the police from other prisoners,” the guard standing in the background said.
Their sympathy gave me the wrongheaded idea that the prison officials were distinct and distant from the police.
“Do you need anything to sleep?” the doctor asked.
I didn’t know what he meant, because the idea of taking a sleeping pill was as foreign to me as being handcuffed. “No,” I said. “I’m really tired already.”
The doctor nodded to Argirò and the guards, and Lupa gently grabbed my upper arm, helping me to stand up. “Thank you,” I said to the doctor.
I bristled at Lupa’s touch, filled with resentment over being held on to like this. Did they think I might spontaneously do something horrible? But I forced myself to relax in her grip—I didn’t want my anger and anxiety to be misread. From the start I tried to make it clear that their clasping my arm was unnecessary. The whole time I was at Capanne, I always spoke calmly and moved slowly, deliberately. When an agente grasped my arm, I imagined my arm shrinking until her fingers could encircle it without coming into contact with my skin. The assumption that I needed to be restrained like this made me furious. I didn’t belong in a place where it was necessary to restrict people’s movement by holding their biceps or handcuffing them because they might attack without warning. I didn’t belong in prison.
Argirò led our procession up to il secondo piano—the third floor. “You’re not to speak to anyone except the guards,” he said. “No one but the guards.” I guess he said it twice to make sure I got it. But who else could I have spoken to? There was no one else around. A tall, thin, red-haired female guard opened the next locked door. This hallway was lined with closed metal doors. I could hear the sounds of TVs and women’s voices as we walked down the hall, but I saw no one until we came to the end. A pair of eyes peered out from the viewing window in the last door on the right.
The guard stepped forward and unlocked the last door on the left. Argirò went in first. He pointed at the TV, sitting on top of a gray metal box, opposite two beds. The TV was wrapped in brown paper and taped up, like a package waiting to be mailed. “Don’t touch this,” he said. “Don’t you even try.”
He must have been used to people who were much less compliant than I was. It wouldn’t have occurred to me to disobey him. I felt oddly small, like Alice in Wonderland, when everything around her was so much bigger.
The bed looked as uninviting as you’d expect in a prison, with its yellow foam mattress on an orange metal frame pocked with black spots where the paint had chipped off. Two ugly burnt-orange metal cabinets were bolted into the wall—to hold clothes, I guessed.
“Take everything out of the garbage bag,” the female guard said. “If you need anything call, ‘Agente.’ ”
“Am I allowed to make a phone call?” In movies, prisoners are allowed one phone call.
Until that moment it hadn’t occurred to me to ask. I needed to hear Mom’s voice more than I’d ever needed anything in my whole life.
The guard looked at me like I’d asked for caviar and Prosecco.
I spread the thin blanket on the sheetless bed and lay down on the rough wool. I curled in on myself as the door clunked shut. “Stay here,” the guard said, as if I had an option, and left.
With that, there was nothing left for me to do. I’d been at the beck and call of the police for five days and under their absolute control for nearly twenty-four hours. Being left alone was all I’d wanted during my interrogation. Now that I was, I was helpless and angry and terrified.
Now all I wanted was Mom. She had to be in Perugia by now, but I felt as far from her as I could ever be. I was sure she was freaking out about me, but there was nothing I could do. I wondered how she’d even find out where I was, what had happened to me. A horrible thought flitted through my mind: What if she thinks I’m dead? That I’ve been killed, too? Like Meredith.
I began to weep. Alone, I didn’t even try to hold back.
My cell had its own bathroom and kitchen—two equal-size spaces together measuring about eleven feet by four feet and separated by a thick glass door. You had to go through the kitchen, just a long aluminum sink with an aluminum counter, to get to the bathroom, where the standard European fixtures—a sink, bidet, toilet, and shower—were lined up in a row.
Later, while I was sitting on the toilet, the redheaded guard came by and watched me through the peephole. So there was no privacy at all, then.
When I returned to the main part of the cell, someone passed a plastic plate through the barred door’s single opening. Canned tuna, cut-up raw fennel, and rice smothered in tomato sauce. I had no appetite. I picked at the rice, which tasted comfortingly like the Uncle Ben’s I was used to at home. I couldn’t eat anything else.
I tucked myself back into the fetal position on top of the bed. A little while later, an agente walked by and closed the metal door over the bars. I thought, I’m being sealed into a tomb. Too claustrophobic and panicked to look in that direction, I rolled onto my other side to stare out the barred window into the dark.
Then I sobbed until I finally fell into a fitful sleep.
Chapter 13
November 7, 2007
I’m not religious. I don’t believe in miracles. I’m not sure what I think about God.
But the nun who visited me on my first full day in prison had an extraordinary effect on me. She was about eighty and wore a full habit, pale gray from head to toe.
She stuck both her hands through the bars of my cell and, grasping mine, told me, “Dio sa tutto. Ti aiuterà a trovare la risposta.”
Even though she uttered words I’d probably never have said in any language, I understood: “God knows everything. He will help you find the answer.”
I had been alone in my cell, bent over a piece of white paper, a pen in hand, trying desperately to sort out the scraps of scrambled memories from the night of Meredith’s murder, when the nun arrived. I had to remember exactly what I’d done the night of November 1. Could the police be right? Did I have amnesia? As the sister was leaving, she wished me buona fortuna—good luck. She smiled.
From the moment Meredith’s body was discovered, I’d been searching the police’s—and then the guards’—faces, silently pleading for reassurance that we were working together. But it was this nun with watery blue eyes, thinning gray eyebrows, and nearly translucent skin who gave me the strength to reconnect with myself.
Argirò had said this seclusion was to protect me from other prisoners—that it was standard procedure for people like me, people without a criminal record—but they were doing more than just keeping me separate. In forbidding me from watching TV or reading, in prohibiting me from contacting the people I loved and needed most, in not offering me a lawyer, and in leaving me alone with nothing but my own jumbled thoughts, they were maintaining my ignorance and must have been trying to control me, to push me to reveal why or how Meredith had died.
But I had nothing more to tell them. I was desolate. My scratchy wool blanket didn’t stop the November chill from seeping bone deep. I lay on my bed crying, trying to soothe myself by softly singing the Beatles song “Let It Be,” over and over.
I sat up when Agente Lupa came by my cell with another agente to check on me. “Come stai?” she asked.
I tried to answer, to say, “I’m okay,” but I couldn’t stop the surge of tears. Lupa asked her colleague to unlock the door and came inside. She squatted in front of me and took my cold hands in her large ones and rubbed them. “You have to stay strong,” she said. “Everything will be figured out soon.”
Then she hugged me like a mother does her distraught five-year-old. I buried my face in her shoulder and, in an explosion of emotion, bawled, as loudly as if I were screaming. I so desperately needed my mom that I took comfort from a stranger.
I ached to see my mother. A day had passed since she was supposed to have arrived, since I’d been out of contact. I could no longer fathom where she might be. I only knew that she must be trying to see me. She would get to me eventually. If only it had been sooner.
Six days ago I believed that I could, and should, cope with Meredith’s murder by myself. But everything had broken down so quickly. I was sure that if I’d asked for Mom’s help sooner, I wouldn’t have felt so trapped and alone during my interrogation. I could have stopped it. If my mom, my lifeline, had been ready to jump to my defense on the other side of the door, I’d be staying with her now, not in prison
by myself.
Lupa held me until my crying grew weak. “Do you need anything?” she asked.
“No,” I whimpered. “Thank you.”
When Lupa had gone, I returned to my scribbled memories about the evening of the murder. At the questura, when the police demanded I give them an hour-by-hour accounting of what Raffaele and I had done that night, I couldn’t perfectly remember. We’d watched Amélie, eaten dinner, smoked pot, had sex, fallen asleep. But in what order? And what else? What had we talked about?
And then, right after the nun had left, detail after detail suddenly came back to me.
I read a chapter in Harry Potter.
We watched a movie.
We cooked dinner.
We smoked a joint.
Raffaele and I had sex.
And then I went to sleep.
What I’d said during my interrogation was wrong. I was never at the villa. I’d tried to believe what the police had said and had literally conjured that up. It wasn’t real. That’s not what happened. I hadn’t witnessed anything terrible after all. I thought, Oh, thank God! I felt such a massive wave of relief.
I quickly wrote at the top of the page: “To the person who must know this.”
Unlike my first memoriale, this one expressed less doubt and more certainty about where I’d been the night Meredith was killed. I rushed to get it down, so excited to finally be able to make sense of my memories for myself, and to be able to explain myself to the police. It read:
Oh my God! I’m freaking out a bit now because I talked to a nun and I finally remember. It can’t be a coincidence. I remember what I was doing with Raffaele at the time of the murder of my friend! We are both innocent! This is why: After dinner Raffaele began washing the dishes in the kitchen and I was giving him a back massage while he was doing it. It’s something we do for one another when someone is cleaning dishes, because it makes cleaning better. I remember now that it was AFTER dinner that we smoked marijuana and while we smoked I began by saying that he shouldn’t worry about the sink. He was upset because the sink was broken but it was new and I told him to not worry about it because it was only a little bad thing that had happened, and that little bad things are nothing to worry about. We began to talk more about what kind of people we were. We talked about how I’m more easy-going and less organized than he is, and how he is very organized because of the time he spent in Germany. It was during this conversation that Raffaele told me about his past. How he had a horrible experience with drugs and alcohol. He told me that he drove his friends to a concert and that they were using cocaine, marijuana, he was drinking rum, and how, after the concert, when he was driving his passed-out friends home, how he had realized what a bad thing he had done and had decided to change. He told me about how in the past he dyed his hair yellow and another time when he was young had cut designs in his hair. He used to wear earrings. He did this because when he was young he played video games and watched Sailor Moon, a Japanese girl cartoon, and so he wasn’t a popular kid at school. People made fun of him. I told him about how in high school I had been unpopular as well, because the people in my school thought I was a lesbian. We talked about his friends, how they hadn’t changed from drug-using video game players, and how he was sad for them. We talked about his mother, how she had died and how he felt guilty because he had left her alone before she died. He told me that before she died she told him she wanted to die because she was alone and had nothing to live for. I told Raffaele that wasn’t his fault that his mother was depressed and wanted to die. I told him he did the right thing by going to school. I told him that life is full of choices, and those choices aren’t necessarily between good and bad. There are options between what is best and what is not, and all we have to do is do what we think is best. I told him that mistakes teach us to be better people, and so he shouldn’t feel nervous about going to Milan to study, because he felt he needed to be nearer to his friends who hadn’t changed and he felt needed him. But I told him he had to be true to himself. It was a very long conversation but it did happen and it must have happened at the time of Meredith’s murder, so to clarify, this is what happened.