Temporary Perfections

by Gianrico Carofiglio

  The civil service test involved three written examinations: civil law, criminal law, and administrative law. The order in which the tests were administered was assigned randomly each year.

  That year, the first exam was on administrative law. That was a subject I knew absolutely nothing about, and so I withdrew from the civil service exam after three hours, renouncing my secret and irrational hopes. The sliding door that leads to the world of adulthood wasn’t destined to open for me just then, so I went to sit in the waiting room. I would remain in that waiting room for quite some time to come.

  There have been times, in the years since, when I’ve wondered what my life would have been like if, by some fluke, I had passed that exam.

  I would have left Bari. I might have become a different person, and I might never have returned home. That’s what happened to Andrea Colaianni, who passed the exam; he moved far away and became a prosecuting magistrate, but in time he was forced to rein in his dreams of changing the world, for real, on his own.

  Sergio Carofiglio didn’t pass. He wanted to become a magistrate even more than Colaianni did, if that was possible, but he failed the written exams. He sat for the exams a second time, and then even a third, the maximum number the law allowed. We were no longer close by the time I heard that he had failed the third and final time, but I stopped to think about the devastating feelings of defeat and failure he must have experienced. Then he met a girl whose father was a manufacturer from the Veneto region, got married, and went to live somewhere around Rovigo, where he worked for his father-in-law and drowned his bitterness and broken dreams in the northern fog. Or maybe that’s just how I imagined it; maybe he’s actually rich and happy. Maybe not becoming a magistrate was the best thing that ever happened to him.

  I stayed in Rome, after withdrawing from the civil service exam. My room in the pensione was paid up for three nights, that is, for the entire period of the written examinations. And so, while my friends were struggling with criminal law and civil law, I enjoyed, to my own surprise, the most wonderful Roman holiday of my life. With nothing I had to do and nowhere I had to be, I strolled for hours, bought half-price books, stretched out comfortably on the park benches in Villa Borghese, read, and even wrote. I wrote horrifying poems that, fortunately, have been lost over the years. On the Spanish Steps, I made friends with two overweight American girls. We went out for pizza together, but I politely declined an invitation to continue the evening back in their apartment, because I thought I’d glimpsed a conspiratorial glance passing between them. Reckoning that they tipped the scales at one hundred seventy-five to two hundred pounds each, I decided that, as the saying goes, to trust is good, but not to trust is better.

  The world was teeming with endless possibilities in that warm and unexpected Roman February, as I teetered between the no-longer of my life as a child and the not-yet of my life as a man. It was a brief, euphoric, temporary moment in time. It was wonderful to stand, poised, in that moment. And only what is temporary can be perfect.

  I remembered these things during the course of an hour that, by some strange alchemy, seemed as timeless and sweet as the days I had enjoyed twenty years earlier. I had the irrational, exhilarating sensation that the tape was about to rewind, and that I was about to be offered a new beginning. I felt a shiver, a vibration. It was beautiful.

  Then it dawned on me that it was ten o’clock, and I realized that if I didn’t get moving I’d be late. I turned and walked briskly back toward Piazza dei Tribunali.

  3.

  When you argue before the Court of Cassation, the first thing you do is rent a black robe.

  The dress code of Italy’s highest court requires that all lawyers wear a black robe, but—except for lawyers who practice in Rome—almost no one actually owns one. And so you have to rent one, as if you were acting in a play or attending a Carnival masquerade party.

  As usual, there was a short line at the robe rental room. I looked around in search of familiar faces, but there was no one I knew. Instead, standing in line ahead of me was a guy who was, to judge from his appearance, the product of repeated, passionate couplings between close blood relatives. His eyebrows were very bushy and jet black. His hair was dyed an unnatural blond with red highlights. He had a jaw that jutted out in front of him, and he was wearing a forest green jacket that looked vaguely Tyrolean in style. I imagined his mug shot in the newspaper under the headline “Police Break Up Ring of Child Molesters,” or proudly posing on a political campaign poster alongside a virulently racist slogan.

  I took my rented robe and forced myself to refrain from sniffing it; doing so would have resulted in suffering a queasy sense of disgust for the rest of the morning. As usual, I mused for a few seconds about how many lawyers had worn it before me and the stories they could tell. Then, also as usual, I told myself to quit indulging in clichés, and I walked toward the court chambers.

  My case was one of the first. A mere half hour after the hearing began, it was my turn.

  It only took the reporting advocate a few minutes to summarize the history of the case, explaining the reasoning behind the guilty verdict and then the grounds for my appeal.

  The defendant was the youngest son of a well-known and respected professional in Bari. At the time of his arrest, nearly eight years earlier, he was twenty-one years old, attending law school without much to show for it. He was much more successful as a cocaine dealer. Anyone in certain circles who occasionally wanted or needed some coke—and sometimes other substances—knew his name and number. As a dealer, he was careful, punctual, and reliable. He made home deliveries, so his wealthy customers weren’t obliged to do anything as vulgar as traveling around the city in search of a drug dealer.

  At a certain point, when everyone knew his name and what he was up to, the Carabinieri noticed him, too. They tapped his cell phones and followed him for a few weeks and then, when the time was right, they searched his apartment and garage. It was in the garage that they found almost half a kilo of excellent Venezuelan cocaine. At first, he tried to defend himself by saying that the drugs weren’t his, that everyone else in the building had access to his garage, and that the coke could have belonged to anyone. Then they confronted him with the recordings of the phone calls, and at last he decided, on the advice of his lawyer—me—to avail himself of his right to remain silent. It was a classic case—any further statements could have been used against him.

  After a few months of preventive detention he was placed under house arrest, and a little more than a year after his initial arrest he was released, with the requirement that he remain a resident of the area and show up regularly to sign a register. The trial proceeded at the usual slow pace, and the defense theory, all other chatter aside, was based on a claim that the phone taps were not legitimate evidence. If that objection had been accepted, the prosecution would have had a much weaker case.

  I had raised the issue of the legality of the phone taps in the first criminal trial. But the objection had been dismissed, and the court had sentenced my client to ten years’ imprisonment and a huge fine. I had raised the issue of the lawfulness of the recordings in our first appeal. The appeals court had once again dismissed the argument, but at least the sentence had been reduced.

  I appealed to the Court of Cassation based on the illegality of those phone taps, and that morning I was there in my final attempt to keep my client—who had in the meantime found a real job and a girlfriend and was now the father of a young child—from serving a substantial prison sentence, even after various amnesties, early releases, and so on. In supreme court sessions, normally there’s no audience. The chambers have an abstract solemnity, and—most important—the discussion involves only points of law: The kinds of brutal facts discussed in criminal trials are nowhere to be found in the hushed environment of the supreme court.

  In other words, you might expect the outcome and the setting to be devoid of the emotional edge typical of standard criminal trials.

  That’s not tru
e, though, for one very simple reason.

  When a case is appealed to the highest court, you’re very close to the end of the judicial process. One of the possible outcomes of an appeal is for the court to deny the appeal. And if the Court of Cassation denies an appeal in a case involving a prison sentence, it’s likely that your client’s next step will be to surrender to the prison system and begin serving his time.

  That means a case before this court is hardly an abstract exercise; the seriousness of the outcome transforms the rarefied atmosphere of the chambers and the hearing into a dramatic foreshadowing of things that are anything but rarefied, and frequently frightening.

  The advocate general called for the dismissal of my appeal. He spoke briefly, but it was evident that he had studied the facts of the case, which isn’t always true. He made a strong argument against the basis of my appeal, and I thought that if I had been one of the justices, I would have found him persuasive and I would have ruled against the appellant.

  Then the chief justice addressed me, saying, “Counselor, the panel of judges has read your appeal as well as your brief. Your point of view has been set forth quite clearly. Therefore, in oral argument, I’d ask you to stick to the fundamental aspects of the law or to matters that were not treated in the appeal or the brief.”

  Very courteous and very clear. Please be quick, refrain from repeating the things we already know, and above all, don’t waste the court’s time.

  “Thank you, sir. I’ll try to be concise.”

  I was quite concise. I went back over the reasons why I believed those wiretaps should be excluded as evidence, and the verdict should be overturned, and in a little more than five minutes, I was done. The chief justice thanked me for having kept my promise to be brief, courteously told me I was free to go, and called the next case. The decision would be announced that afternoon. In the Court of Cassation, the judges hear oral arguments for all the appeals first, and then they retire for deliberations. They emerge, sometimes quite late in the day, and read all the decisions, one after the other. Usually, they read them to an empty courtroom because no one wants to wait for hours and hours in the hallways, surrounded by unsettling marble statues, amidst the echo of lost footsteps. For lawyers, especially those like me who are only in town for the day, this is how it works: You ask one of the clerks to inform you of the decision in your case, and you hand him a folded sheet of paper with your cell phone number written on it, folded around a twenty Euro bill.

  Then you leave the court building, and from that moment on, every time your cell phone rings, your stomach lurches, because it might be the clerk, calling to inform you of the verdict in a chilly, bureaucratic tone.

  It happened while I was in the airport; the plane was already boarding, and I was about to turn off my phone.

  “Counselor Guerrieri?”

  “Yes?”

  “The court’s verdict on your appeal is in. The appeal was denied, court costs to be paid by the appellant. Good evening.”

  “Good evening,” I said, though only my cell phone heard me—the clerk had already hung up, and was already phoning someone else to dispense his own personal verdict for a (modest) fee.

  On the plane, I tried to read, but couldn’t. I thought about having to tell my client that in just a few days he would be walking into a prison and staying there for many years. The prospect of that conversation put me in a grim mood of sadness mixed with a brooding sense of humiliation.

  I know. He was a drug dealer, a criminal, and if they hadn’t caught him, he might have gone on selling drugs and profiting from them. But in the years between his arrest and the verdict, he’d become another person. It struck me as intolerable that the past should just leap up, in the form of a cruel, clear-cut verdict, and wreak havoc like that.

  I thought it was a travesty for this to happen so many years after the fact, and it seemed even more senseless because there was no one to blame.

  With these thoughts racing through my mind, I dropped off into a troubled sleep. When I opened my eyes again, the lights of the city were looming close.

  4.

  When I got home I called my client and did my best to ignore the heavy silence that slowly solidified between us, once I’d given him the news. I tried to ignore the human life that was being torn to pieces in that silence. I hung up and thought that I was getting too old for this kind of work.

  Then I attempted to throw together a dinner out of what I had in my fridge, but instead I basically drained almost an entire bottle of 29-proof Primitivo wine. I slept only fitfully and the whole weekend was a slow, dull, exhausting trudge. On Saturday I went to the movies, but I picked the wrong film, and I exited into a relentless drizzle. It rained all day and was still raining on Sunday, which I spent at home, reading, but I picked the wrong books, too. The highlight of the day was watching a couple of Happy Days reruns on a satellite channel.

  When I got up on Monday morning and looked out my window, I saw some rays of sun poking through the remaining clouds. I was happy the weekend was over.

  I spent the whole morning at the courthouse, dealing with insignificant hearings and running around to various clerks’ offices.

  In the afternoon I went over to the office. My new office. I’d been working there for more than four months, but every time I pushed open the heavy burglar-proof door the architect had insisted on installing, I felt the same sense of bewilderment. And each time I asked myself the same thing: Where the hell am I? And then: Why on earth did I leave my old, small, comfortable office to move into this alien, antiseptic place, reeking of plastic, leather, and wood?

  In reality, there had been a number of excellent reasons for the move. First of all, Maria Teresa had finally earned her law degree and asked to continue on at the firm, moving up from secretary to apprentice lawyer. I hired a gentleman in his sixties, named Pasquale Macina, to take over Maria Teresa’s secretarial duties. He had worked for many years for an elderly colleague of mine who had recently passed away.

  Around the same time, a law professor friend of mine asked me to hire his daughter. She had finished school and passed the bar, but she wanted to become a criminal lawyer. She’d practiced civil law in her father’s office, and it wasn’t to her taste.

  Consuelo had been adopted from Peru. She has a dark, chubby face, with cheeks that at first sight give her a faintly comical appearance—she looks a little like a hamster. If you meet her gaze at certain times, however, you realize that funny is not the right word at all, to describe her. When Consuelo’s dark eyes stop smiling, they transmit a very straightforward message: The only way to get me to stop fighting is to kill me.

  I hired her, which meant that in just a few months, the law firm grew from a staff of two to a crowd of four, shoehorned into a work space that had been small to begin with, but which then was completely untenable.

  So I looked for a new office. I found a large apartment in the old part of town, very nice indeed, but it would have to be completely renovated, from top to bottom. I liked doing renovations more or less as much as I liked going to the proctologist. I found an architect who considered himself an artist and didn’t want to bother listening to the trivial opinions of his client or waste time quibbling over such silly questions as the cost of materials or furniture, or his own fee.

  The work took three long months. I should have been satisfied, but I just couldn’t get used to the new space. I couldn’t see myself as the kind of professional who had this kind of office. Before I had an office like mine, if I walked into an office like mine, I always assumed the owner was a clueless asshole. Now I was the clueless asshole, and I was having a hard time getting used to it.

  I shut the heavy armored door, said good afternoon to Pasquale, said good afternoon to Maria Teresa, said good afternoon to Consuelo, and went to hide in my office. I turned on my computer, and in a few seconds the screen displayed my calendar with the appointments for that afternoon, three of them. The first was with a surveying engineer who worke
d for the city zoning office and had the unfortunate habit of demanding tips in order to move projects off his desk. Technically, this is known as extortion, and it’s a pretty serious crime. The financial police had conducted a search of the engineer’s office, and now he was in a state of complete panic, convinced—not without reason—that a warrant would be issued for his arrest any minute. The second appointment was with the wife of an old client of mine, a professional burglar, who had been arrested for what seemed like the thousandth time. My last appointment of the day was with my fellow lawyer Sabino Fornelli and his clients, to discuss the case that he had been unwilling to tell me about over the phone.

  I met with the surveying engineer and then the burglar’s wife, with Consuelo in attendance. Every time I introduce her, my clients look a little baffled.

  “This is my colleague, Consuelo Favia, who will be handling this case with me.”

  Colleague?

  Every client’s face asks the same question. So I spell it out for them, saying, “Counselor Consuelo Favia, a lawyer who’s been working with me for several months now. We’ll be handling your case together.”

  Their astonishment is understandable, and it’s not racism, per se. It’s just that in Bari, and in Italy in general, people still don’t expect a young woman with dark brown skin and Andean features to be a lawyer.

  The surveying engineer wore a watch that he could never have afforded on his salary and a charcoal gray suit over a black t-shirt, like a playboy running out the clock, and he was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. He kept saying that he hadn’t done anything wrong, that at the very most he’d accepted a few tips and small gifts. They were given spontaneously, he insisted. Come on, who turns down a gift? Was he to be arrested for that? He wasn’t going to be arrested, was he?