The Second Day of the Renaissance

by Timothy Williams

Anna placed a finger on his lips and Trotti reluctantly smiled. Then she pushed her godfather into the driver’s seat. A few guests were leaving the hotel, but nobody seemed to be taking any notice of Trotti and his newly married goddaughter.

  “Go to Bologna,” she said, kissed him on the forehead and watched as Trotti turned on the powerful engine. She did not wave.

  He pulled out of the parking lot. A last glance in the mirror and he saw Anna holding her hand to her mouth.)

  Trotti appreciated the assisted steering. He enjoyed the way the car responded to his touch. The driving seat was comfortable. The music reminded him of the years when Pioppi sang in the church choir.

  After twenty minutes, the sun disappeared behind clouds and it started to rain.

  A Volkswagen Golf?

  Trotti switched on the headlights in the gathering gloom while the car’s single wiper beat a relentless rhythm. He made good time despite the rain that grew heavier and bounced off the road’s surface. Taking the ring road around Viterbo, he continued northwards towards Lake Bolsena.

  He should not have drunk the coffee. He no longer felt sick, but he needed to stop. After a long ascent, Trotti reached a village in the hills. It was almost lost in the low clouds.

  Trotti had left his Bancomat credit card in Rome along with his wallet and his glasses. All he now had were the few thousand lire that Magagna had given him at the AGIP station.

  He parked the car in a wet piazza and ran to a small bar. After the heating inside the car, the mountain air was cold.

  As Trotti entered, a bell rang somewhere and the barman seemed taken aback to have a customer. Above his head, a silent television gave the early afternoon news.

  The Pope, visibly old and trembling, was blessing the crowds before St. Peter’s.

  A deer’s head looked down glassily at Trotti from the wall and a lethargic fish swam in a glaucous tank. Humorous postcards punctuated a long, cracked mirror.

  “Not from these parts?” the barman asked pleasantly. There was a mole on his nose. He was smoking.

  “Milan.”

  “All that fog?” The barman laughed, amused by his own wit. “Sooner you than me.”

  Trotti moved away from the bar to a bare wooden table. With a smile lingering on the crumpled face, the barman smoked placidly while watching the rain from behind his coffee machine.

  Trotti drank mineral water served in a chipped glass and ate a stale panino of tomatoes and mozzarella, but without any pleasure. He was in a hurry to get back on the road.

  Trotti glanced at the broadsheet that lay scattered across the table top.

  The front page of Sera Romana.

  With a cold shock of surprise, he recognized the photograph of himself, looking younger and healthier. A photo that had been taken when he set up the child abuse unit.

  Retired policeman last person to see murdered American woman. A ring of student call girls in Lazio. Police keeping the body for further analysis.

  Trotti grunted on reading that he had been a highly respected policeman. Highly respected and pioneering.

  The article added little new information—other than that the retired Commissario Trotti was now in Bracciano for the wedding of a close relative.

  “Arrivederci!”

  “Arrivederci,” the barman responded, surprised by the sudden departure and by Trotti’s generous tip, all the money from his pocket.

  Trotti walked hurriedly back to the car, almost unaware of the cold rain. He climbed into the driving seat.

  “They know my movements, the bastards.”

  Trotti’s hand was trembling as he placed the key in the ignition. The wheels screeched on the wet tarmac and the rented Fiat pulled away from the misty piazza.

  74: Tube

  Trotti drove fast and did not stop again for over an hour. Half an hour after San Quirico, with the car cruising downhill, the lowering clouds finally began to draw back and a watery sun made its appearance.

  The Volkswagen.

  Trotti had noticed it before, on the Viterbo ring road.

  His eyes returned to the mirror at regular intervals—at a crossroads or when pulling out of a town. The car was always there, about a kilometer back, traveling to the left, on the crest of the road.

  A Golf, too far behind for Trotti to read the plates.

  It disappeared at Quinciano and Trotti laughed aloud.

  In a poor imitation of a Neapolitan accent, Trotti said, “Thank your friend and his charming young bride. How else d’you think I knew where to find you?”

  Trotti laughed, and it was then that he remembered Lakshmi’s tape. He retrieved it from the folder on the seat beside him and fed it into the car’s tape deck.

  I arrived in Trento in October, 1967.

  I was totally lost. Turin and my family were behind me. My old life was behind me. I had no idea where I was heading—just the feeling there was no turning back.

  I was twenty-one years old, once married, the father of a little boy and now divorced. I had worked in Germany and I had worked in London.

  Trento was a revelation—and a joy.

  I found myself surrounded by exciting, intelligent people. They spoke of St. Thomas and Plato and Marx. Their learning came from books, while mine came from the Turks in Frankfurt and the Jamaicans in London, from the capitalist machine. I was interested in Weber and Protestantism and the trade union movement. I’d had firsthand experience of emigration, of the problems of the Turks, the West Indians and the Southerners working at Fiat in Turin.

  For the first time in my life, I found people who were genuinely interested in what I had to stay.

  Trento was a heady place to be in 1967.

  I enrolled at the university and began preparing a degree in sociology.

  We were all so motivated! Young, innocent and convinced that if you looked hard enough, there was an answer to all life’s questions.

  We read late into the night, we exchanged ideas in the lecture halls and in the beer cellars of that peaceful Alpine town. History was on our side. We knew we were preparing the Counter Counter-Reformation.

  Then 1968.

  Italy was unprepared for 1968. The students rioted in Paris, and suddenly in Italy the status quo—the accepted dogma of postwar reconstruction and the Italian miracle—was threatened by the revolution, by our revolution. We were working like ants to change society. We were not going to miss our appointment with history.

  My ex-wife in Turin had remarried and she no longer needed money. I was economically free and I felt that Trento could change the world.

  Trento—and Lotta Continua—radically changed me.

  For some reason, I was perceived as the intellectual of the party—we were all intellectuals, we were all clocking up full marks in our sociology and psychology and politics examinations at the university.

  Some companions asked me to produce the weekly newspaper. It was a challenge I could rise to—more satisfying than putting down rails at Notting Hill underground, where the slightest slip of your foot could turn you into frazzled bacon.

  I produced and edited the paper and it was a huge success.

  Before long, friends were contributing what little money they had and as much time as they could spare. The weekly paper became a daily. Before long it was being distributed outside our Alpine city. Within a couple of months it was being read in Cagliari and Brindisi.

  I was doing something I enjoyed. Something that satisfied my need to produce, my need to feel useful, my deep-felt need for recognition.

  I was happy and fulfilled. But no longer was I aware of my happiness than it began to elude me—just as three years earlier, the happiness of our honeymoon in Capri had turned into the nightmare of sharing a run-down flat with a histrionic wife and a bawling, shitting baby.

  “Those comrades who hope to bring about the Rev
olution should not belong to any political party. A party constrains you and demands you should conform to all its incoherencies. You become a perfect pupil, quoting Marx and Mao but you lose your own vision, your own interpretation, your own humanity, your own part of God. In the end, you become an apparatchik and you lose your very soul.”

  Understandably, that didn’t go down too well with the party.

  Lotta Continua was becoming a machine, a bureaucratic machine. The more it bureaucratized, the more I was called into question. The party didn’t like the cheap necklace I wore—two hundred lira from the local Upim supermarket. They didn’t like my long hair. Above all, they didn’t like my smoking illegal substances and my temerity at not hiding the fact.

  I knew the protestant north of Europe. For all the revolutionary cant, for all the utopia, Lotta Continua was Latin and parochial—good little Catholics marching to the revolutionary catechism. Like hypocritical priests, they said I was not concerned with the good of the working class. They said I was unreliable, that I set a poor example of party discipline. And while Lotta Continua was growing more regimented and military in its outlook, I was turning westward to English and American models of the revolution: sex, drugs and rock and roll.

  I helped Lotta Continua organize a rock concert in Milan. An underground group from New York. At the last moment, Lotta Continua’s politburo was afraid it’d turn into an Italian Woodstock, with people blown out of their minds and women showing bare chests and sharing free love.

  Lotta Continua gave a couple of hundred free tickets for me and my friends on the understanding I would behave myself. I immediately went to the stadium and handed them out.

  There was a riot.

  My most recent girlfriend had gone off to Paris, I was feeling miserable and when the police turned up, I was looking for trouble. I was doing a lot of Tai Chi at the time and was very fit.

  The police arrived in their vans and charged us with batons. Lotta Continua, but also a lot of the dross of Milan, small-time delinquents from the hinterland around Milan. This was before the days of the P.38, at a time when police-baiting was still fun, when it was still a point of honor to spend a night or two in a cell. In the worst of cases, your parents would turn up to bail you out.

  That evening, I managed to throw a few cobbles at the Celere without getting arrested. I hid behind a tree. A couple of my companions were caught and bundled off, but I was safe behind my tree.

  The police withdrew, and when I turned round, I was surprised to see a girl standing behind me.

  One of the two companions was her boyfriend. Together we went to the Questura and we waited for his release until four in the morning. The police released everybody except him.

  Lia Guerra was sixteen years old. I took her home and we made love.

  That was the beginning of my troubled love affair with Lia. It was also the beginning of the end of my troubled love affair with Lotta Continua. The party, in its moralizing and bigoted conformity, decided my behavior was immoral—I was sleeping with a child.

  I was banished to Palermo. It was supposed to be a punishment, but Lia came with me.

  I had lost one love and, for a time at least, I had found true love.

  It took me several years to realize Lia Guerra was incapable of loving anybody.

  Not me, not herself.

  75: Let It Be

  There was a short hissing in the car and the tape stopped. Then it started again as the spools whirred and reversed their movement.

  I could no longer believe a revolution would change the world.

  And I couldn’t bear the anti-American obsession. It was as if Timothy Leary and Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin had never existed. Lotta Continua was so puritanical, so rigid. I had reached the stage where I couldn’t give a toss about Lenin or Marx or Mao Tse-tung. I was more concerned with the Stones and the Beatles—and like the Beatles, I’d got interested in meditation. I was nearly thirty years old, and the heady philosophy of the University of Trento had become a new doctrine that had spilled over from the Alps and poured down the Peninsula.

  I could no longer go along with any of it. I saw things differently. The answers to life had to come from within, not without.

  From the individual, not from the party.

  I was in love with Lia, but that only made me more dissatisfied. Somehow I could never give the woman I loved what she wanted. I disappointed her, and although we spent nearly five years living under the same roof, we never belonged to each other. We were never really close.

  In her eyes, we were good friends and after a while, we slept in separate beds.

  By the mid-seventies, I was smoking a lot of grass. I’d done speed, I’d done cocaine—in fact, I’d done virtually everything—but it was dope that helped me tick over. I just couldn’t stand the priggishness of my companions anymore, and dope seemed the only way I could turn their strident voices down.

  I stuck with Lotta Continua for as long as I could—but after 1976, I took nothing seriously.

  Sex, drugs and rock and roll. Well, at least drugs and rock and roll.

  The final break with my past, with politics, with Lotta Continua, with my bureaucratic comrades—and above all—with my desire to set the world to rights came in 1978 when Aldo Moro was kidnapped.

  The country was paralyzed. Hundreds of kilometers to the south, a politician had been kidnapped, but throughout Italy, anybody and everybody could be a terrorist and a murderer.

  A little girl was kidnapped in the quiet university city where my father was now working as city architect. For some reason that was never made clear, the police believed I was involved in the child’s disappearance. Perhaps it was my hair and the Upim necklace that frightened the forces of order.

  It is quite possible I knew more about the little girl than I revealed to the police. It is certain I was promptly arrested and interrogated in the Questura.

  That’s when a man called Piero Trotti, a sweaty policeman with a nasal accent, threw me in jail for a couple of nights.

  Two nights that were to change my life.

  76: Tim

  Another thirty kilometers to Siena, and Trotti thought he heard a buzzing noise. It came from within the car and it sounded like a telephone.

  He fiddled with the radio, but the sound continued. He ejected the cassette from its slot and the Fiat swerved off the road. The car behind honked angrily. Trotti hastily pulled into a lay-by, beneath a leafless chestnut tree and turned off the engine.

  The buzzing continued.

  He rummaged in the glove compartment in front of the passenger seat. The ringing continued.

  Piero Trotti unbuckled his belt and, leaning forward, ran his hand under the seat. Then, as he slid his fingers beneath the passenger seat, they met a light object that moved.

  The object was blinking.

  Pisanelli’s blue mobile phone.

  Trotti had a loathing of gadgets; he was not mechanically minded, and even something as simple as bicycle gears were, for him, baffling.

  He pushed the green button with an icon of a receiver.

  “Piero?”

  Surprised by the nearness of the voice, he replied, “Trotti here.”

  “Thank God you’re answering.”

  “Answering what?”

  “Trotti, I’ve been trying to call you for over an hour.”

  “Didn’t hear anything.”

  “Where are you? Put the phone to your mouth, I can’t hear you properly. And pull out the aerial.”

  Trotti did as he was told; the voice became clearer.

  “Where are you?”

  “Where do you think, Magagna? I’m in Pisanelli’s hired car, in the driver’s seat and I’m speaking to you over the phone.”

  “What road are you on?”

  “North.”

  “Heading where?”
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  “Florence and then Bologna.”

  “You’re on the autostrada?”

  Trotti said, “I suppose Pisa wants the car back?”

  “You were thinking of keeping both the car and the telephone?”

  “Nice car,” Trotti remarked.

  “You’re going to your daughter’s place?”

  “I don’t have any money.”

  “You don’t need any money—Pisanelli tells me the tank’s full. For the honeymoon that was. Your goddaughter likes you a lot more than is good for her. I suppose you’re delighted to be the subject of the first quarrel of their married life.”

  “Pisanelli would never be able to drive the car with his stiff leg. What happened to Portano?”

  “What made you do that to Portano, Trotti?”

  “Do what?”

  “You struck him in the balls. He’s seriously hurt.”

  “The accent got on my nerves.”

  “I didn’t realize you were so violent—not with people stronger than you.”

  “What’s Portano going to do?”

  “Kill you.”

  “He knows I’m going to Bologna?”

  “Nobody was imagining you were running away to Rome.” There was a pause, the sound of muffled talking. “Pisanelli says there should be some cash in the trunk—in one of the bags.”

  “Pisanelli hasn’t left for his honeymoon?”

  “When you’ve got all his wife’s clothes? Trotti, there should be an electric cable beneath the driver’s seat. Plug it into the phone and put the other end into the lighter socket. That way you can recharge the telephone—and I can call you back later.”

  “What’s Portano going to do?”

  “Don’t worry about Portano. Get to Bologna—and leave the phone on. I’ll be calling you later. I don’t want you getting hurt.”

  “Good of you to keep an eye on me.”

  “It’s not Portano you’ve got to worry about, Trotti,” Magagna said tersely.

  “What do you want me to worry about?”

  “Pisanelli’s marriage.”

  77: Trotti