Most of the time, it wins and makes me do stupid things, even though I know perfectly well that they are stupid things. Like going to the office on a day when I could go somewhere else and read a book, listen to a record, see a film in one of those cinemas where they have morning shows.
So I would go to my office, but it wasn’t eight yet: too early to get sucked back into the vortex of the work ethic. So I thought I’d take a stroll, maybe as far as the sea. I could have breakfast in one of those bars I liked on the seafront.
I could have a nice smoke.
No, not that.
Stupid idea to quit smoking, I thought as I headed towards the Corso Vittorio Emmanuele.
I’d almost reached the ruins of the Teatro Margherita, which was endlessly in the process of restoration, when I saw a vaguely familiar face coming towards me. I screwed up my eyes – I never wore glasses except to go to the cinema or to drive a car – and saw that the man was giving me a kind of smile and raising his arm to greet me.
“Guido!”
“Emilio?”
Emilio Ranieri. We hadn’t seen each other for fifteen years. Maybe more. We came level with each other, and after a moment’s hesitation he embraced me. After another moment’s hesitation I responded to his embrace.
Emilio Ranieri had been my classmate at secondary school, and then we’d been at university together for two or three years. He’d quit before graduating, to become a journalist. He’d started out at a radio station in Tuscany and then was hired by L’Unita, where he’d stayed until the paper shut down.
Every now and again I’d hear something about him from mutual friends, though less and less as the years went by. In the mythical period of my life that straddled the end of the Seventies and the beginning of the Eighties, Emilio had been one of my very few real friends. Then he’d vanished, and in a way I’d vanished too.
“Guido. How nice to see you. Damn it, you’re just the same, except for a bit less hair.”
He wasn’t the same. He still had all his hair but it was completely white. There were lines at the corners of his eyes that looked as if they’d been carved in leather: harsh and painful, they seemed to me. Even his smile looked different somehow. There was something scared, defeated, about it.
But it was nice to see him. In fact, I was really pleased. My friend Emilio.
“Yes, it is nice to see you. What are you doing in Bari?”
“I work here now.”
“What do you mean: you work here?”
“I was unemployed after they closed L’Unita. Then I heard they were looking for people here in Bari to join the editorial staff of ANSA, so I applied and they hired me. The way things are these days, I think I was lucky.”
“You mean you’re back here for good?”
“If they don’t throw me out. Not impossible, but I’ll try to behave.”
While Emilio was talking, I felt a very strange, painful mixture of contentment, anger and melancholy. I’d suddenly realized something I’d been keeping carefully hidden from myself: it was a long time since I’d had a friend.
Maybe that’s normal, when you get to your forties. Everyone has their own affairs – family, children, separations, careers, lovers – and friendship is a luxury you can’t afford. Maybe real friendship is a luxury after you’re twenty.
Or maybe I’m talking bullshit. The fact remains, at that moment I came to the painful realization that I no longer had any friends.
But I was glad Emilio was here with me, glad the trial had been postponed, glad I’d decided to take an hour off.
“Let’s go and have a coffee.”
“Let’s go,” he said, again with that scared smile, which looked so incongruous on the face of a man who’d been in charge of crowd control for the Young Communists when they were fighting the fascists on the one hand and the independent trade unions on the other.
We sat down in a little bar on the edge of the old town. I had a cappuccino and a croissant, Emilio just coffee. After drinking it he lit an MS. He’d been smoking MSs since high school. They weren’t like Margherita’s ultra-slim, ultra-light cigarettes, which were easy to give up. They were a piece of history, a prism for the emotions, a kind of time machine.
When I said no thanks, with a simple gesture of the hand, almost pushing away the packet Emilio had offered me, I noted a kind of disappointment in my friend’s face.
Smoking together, I knew well, had always had a special meaning. Like a ritual of friendship.
We talked casually for a while, saying the kind of things you say to re-establish contact when a lot of time has passed, the kind of things you say to find your way again in a terrain that has become unfamiliar.
And so, casually, I asked him about his wife – I’d never met her, all I knew was that Emilio had got married six or seven years earlier, to a colleague in Rome – the usual, commonplace question you ask when you’re about forty.
“Are you separated or are you still holding on?”
As I asked the question, I felt a chill descend. Even before Emilio had replied, even before I’d finished saying the words, which were out now and which I couldn’t retract.
“Lucia’s dead.”
The scene turned black and white. Silent and deafening. And suddenly devoid of meaning.
A sentence of Fitzgerald’s came into my mind, though I couldn’t remember it exactly. In the dark night of the soul, it’s always three in the morning.
It got mixed up with fragments of a non-existent conversation in my head, which was running on empty. When did she die? Why? Oh, her name was Lucia. That’s nice. It’s a lovely name, Lucia. I’m sorry. How old was she? Was she beautiful? How are you, Emilio? My condolences. We have to move on. Why didn’t anyone tell me? But who was there to tell me? Who?
Oh shit, shit, shit.
“She got ill and died in three months.”
Emilio’s voice was calm, almost toneless. As I looked at him in silence, not knowing what to say, he told me his story, and Lucia’s. A woman of thirty-four who one day in April went to her doctor to get the results of some tests, and found out her time was almost over. Even though she still had so many things to do. Important things, like having a baby.
“You know, Guido, when something like that happens you think about so many things. And what you think about most is all the time you wasted. You think of the walks you never took, the times you didn’t make love, the times you lied. The times you measured out your emotions like so much small change. I know it’s corny, but you wish you could go back in time and tell her how much you love her, you think about all the times you didn’t tell her and should have. In other words, always. It’s not just that you don’t want her to die. It’s the fact that you wish the time hadn’t been wasted like that.”
He was speaking in the present tense. Because his time had been wasted.
He told me everything, calmly. As if he wanted to exhaust the subject. He told me how she’d changed, in those few weeks, how her face had grown smaller, her arms thinner, her hands weaker.
I was silent, thinking that I’d never before in my life witnessed grief in such a terrible, clear, pure form.
Such a desperate form.
Then it was time to say goodbye.
We stood up from the table and took a few steps together. Emilio seemed calm. I wasn’t. He took out his wallet, rummaged in it for a bit, and took something out. It was a ticket from a coin laundromat, the kind that were starting to spring up in the city, with yellow signs and an American name. He wrote his phone number on it and gave it to me, and I handed him one of my stupid business cards. He told me to call him. In any case, he’d call me.
He seemed calm, but his eyes were somewhere else.
I let it ring three, four, five, six times. With every ring the urgency grew, and the anxiety. I was about to press the button to end the call, and try on the mobile, when from the other end I heard Margherita’s voice.
“Yes?”
An offhand tone, the t
one of someone who’s leaving home to go to work. I was silent for a few moments, because suddenly I didn’t know what to say, and I had a lump in my throat.
“Who is that?”
“Me.”
“Oh. I was just on my way out, you caught me at the door. What is it? Are you in Lecce?”
“I wanted to tell you…”
“What?”
“I wanted to tell you…”
“Guido, what is it? Are you all right? Has something happened?” There was a slight note of alarm in her voice now.
“No, no. Nothing’s happened. I didn’t go to Lecce, the trial’s been postponed.”
I broke off, but this time she didn’t ask anything. She waited in silence.
“Margherita” – as I spoke, I realized I never called her by her name – “you remember that time you sent me a message on my mobile.. .”
She didn’t let me finish. “I remember. I wrote that meeting you was one of the most wonderful things that had ever happened to me. It wasn’t true. It was the most wonderful.”
“I wanted to tell you the same thing. Well, not exactly the same. .. but I wanted to tell you that I can’t explain it to you now…” I was stammering.
“Guido, I love you. As I’ve never loved anyone in my life.”
I stopped stammering. “Thank you.”
“Thank you? You’re a strange guy, Guerrieri.”
“It’s true. Shall we eat out tonight?”
“Your treat?”
“Yes. Bye.”
“Bye. See you tonight.”
She hung up. I was standing on the corner of the Corso Vittorio Emmanuele and the Via Sparano. The shops were opening, trucks were unloading goods, people were walking with their heads down.
Thank you, I said again, to myself, and went on my way.
15
The next morning I went straight from home to the courthouse, for a trial. The charge: living off immoral earnings.
My client was a former model and porn film actress, accused of organizing a prostitution ring. She and two other women were the go-betweens for the girls and their clients. She used the telephone and the Internet and took a commission on all completed transactions. She herself serviced a few very select, very wealthy clients. She didn’t run a brothel or anything like that. She simply connected supply with demand. The girls worked from home, nobody was exploited, nobody got hurt.
With a commitment surely worthy of a better cause, the Public Prosecutor’s department and the police had spent months investigating this dangerous organization. They’d staked out the girls’ apartments, and picked up the clients on the way out. More than that, they’d intercepted phone calls and e-mails.
By the end of the investigation, the three organizers were in custody. According to the charge, the very clear social danger represented by the three accused, their ability to make confident use, for the purposes of their criminal activities, of the most sophisticated tools of modern technology (mobile phones, Internet, etc.) and their inclination to repeat this antisocial behaviour makes it essential to impose on them the severest form of custodial sentence, in other words imprisonment.
Nadia had been in prison for two months, then under house arrest for another two months, and then she’d been released. In the early stages of the case, she’d been defended by a colleague of mine, but then she’d come to me, without explaining why she wanted to change lawyers.
She was an elegant, intelligent woman. That morning I had to plead her case using the shortened procedure, in other words, before the judge from the preliminary hearing.
Virtually the only evidence against her came from the telephone and e-mail intercepts. Based on these intercepts it was obvious that Nadia and her two friends had – according to the charges – organized, coordinated and managed an unspecified but undoubtedly large number of women dedicated to prostitution, acting as intermediaries between the said women and their clients and receiving for such services, and more generally for the logistical support provided to this illicit traffic, a percentage of the prostitutes’ income of between ten and twenty per cent… and so on, and so forth.
Reading the papers carefully, I’d realized that there was an error in the procedure for authorizing the intercepts. I was basing my whole case on that procedural error. If the judge upheld me, the intercepts were inadmissible, and there was hardly any evidence against my client. Certainly not enough for a conviction.
When the clerk of the court read out her name and Nadia said she was present, the judge looked at her and was unable to conceal a hint of surprise. With her anthracite-grey tailored suit, her white blouse, her impeccable, sober make-up, the last thing she looked like was a whore. Anyone entering the court and seeing her sitting there, next to me, surrounded by copies of the file, would have thought she was a lawyer. Only much, much prettier than most.
Once the formalities had been dealt with, the judge gave the public prosecutor the floor. He was a scruffylooking young magistrate, deputizing for the prosecutor who’d carried out the investigations, and he made no attempt to conceal his boredom. I didn’t feel very well disposed towards him.
He said that the defendant’s guilt emerged clearly from the documents produced at the trial, that a complete reconstruction of the acts committed and the responsibility for them was already contained in the order of application for a custodial sentence, and that the appropriate penalty in such an undoubtedly serious case was three years’ imprisonment and a fine of 2500 euros. End of speech.
When Nadia heard that request, she half closed her eyes for a second and shook her head, as if dismissing an annoying thought. The judge gave me the floor.
“Your Honour. We could easily base our defence on merit, examining the results of the investigation point by point and demonstrating that they in no way prove that the defendant has benefited from, or even aided and abetted, another person’s prostitution.”
That wasn’t true. If you examined the results of the investigation point by point it was very clear that Nadia had indeed “organized, coordinated and managed an unspecified but undoubtedly large number of women dedicated to prostitution”. Exactly.
But we lawyers have a conditioned reflex. Whatever the circumstances, our client is innocent, and that’s it. We can’t help ourselves.
“But the task of a defence counsel,” I went on, “is also that of identifying and pointing out to the judge every aspect of the case, which, from the point of view of the investigation, allows him to save time and reach a decision quickly.”
And I explained how he could reach a decision quickly and save time. I explained that the intercepts were inadmissible, because there had been no grounds at all for the orders authorizing them. In the case of orders authorizing intercepts, the fact that there are no grounds is an irremediable error. If these intercepts were unusable, I said – and they were unusable – it was not even possible to look at them, and there was nothing against my client except a mountain of conjecture, and so on, and so forth. As I spoke, the judge leafed through the file.
When I finished, he retired to his chamber and stayed there almost an hour. Then he came out and read out his acquittal, which included the formula: The case is without foundation.
Bravo, Guerrieri, I said to myself as the judge was reading. Then I made a friendly gesture of farewell to him – we lawyers always make friendly gestures of farewell to judges who acquit our clients – and walked out of the courtroom with Nadia.
Her cheeks were flushed, like someone who’s been in a very stuffy environment, or someone who’s overexcited. She took out a packet of Marlboro Gold, lit one with a Zippo lighter, and took a couple of greedy puffs.
“Thank you,” she said.
I nodded, modestly. But I was very pleased.
She told me she would come to my office in the afternoon. To pay. Then she looked me in the eyes for a few seconds, and asked if she could tell me something. Of course, I replied.
“You’re a very good lawyer, as far a
s I can tell. But there’s something more. In my line of work, I’ve learned a lot about men, and I think I can recognize the decent ones. On the very rare occasions when I meet them. I had two other lawyers before you. Both of them asked me – how should I put this? – for a supplement to their fee, right there in the office, with the door locked. I suppose they thought it was normal, after all I’m just a whore, so…”
She took a deep drag on her cigarette. I didn’t know what to say.
“So nothing. You, on the other hand, apart from getting me acquitted, have treated me with respect. And that’s something I won’t forget. When I come to the office I’ll bring you a book. Apart from the money, obviously.”
Then she shook my hand and left.
I decided to go and have a coffee, or whatever. I felt light-headed, like after an exam at university. Or, indeed, after winning a case.
As I was walking along the corridor leading to the bar, I saw Dellisanti ahead of me, in the middle of a group of trainees, young lawyers and secretaries. We hadn’t spoken since his phone call to my office.
My first impulse was to turn on my heels, leave the courthouse, and have my coffee in some bar outside. To avoid an encounter. I even slowed down, and had almost come to a halt when I heard these words quite distinctly, in my head: “Are you losing it completely? Are you afraid of that windbag and his band of flunkeys? You’ll have your coffee wherever you like and that lot can go fuck themselves.” The exact words. It sometimes happens.
So I started walking quickly again, passed Dellisanti and his entourage, pretending not to see them, and walked into the bar.
They joined me at the counter as I was ordering a fresh orange juice.
“Hello, Guerrieri.” As friendly as a python.
I turned, as if I’d only just become aware of their presence.
“Oh, hello, Dellisanti.”
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