Set Me Free

by Salvatore Striano

  ‘So I should decline Carminati’s kind offer?’ I ask, all refined, with a little sneer for the benefit of our band of rebels. I’m only asking so I can hear them roar their assent. We truly are a team.

  Just for an instant, I see myself back in the Quartieri, with the Hotheads. Once again, I feel the heat of our unity in victory and in danger, the strong connection that comes from a sense of belonging, that tight-knit quality that makes the group even stronger when facing an enemy. But back then it was something nasty uniting us: trafficking, violence, the dangerous fervour of cocaine. Now it’s the pure spirit of theatre. Now we’re invincible.

  And we’re supposed to put ourselves in the hands of someone else? Someone who’ll manage us however he likes, and could screw us over any moment? No way. We’ll show him.

  I’m all fired up like a victor in battle who fought off the enemy. I realise my blood hasn’t flowed this fast in my veins for many, many months.

  And that very night I find I have company.

  For some reason I wake up in the dead of the night. Perhaps a premonition has put me on alert, or there is some movement in the shadows of my cell. It’s the hour before dawn, when ghosts roam freely through the dark. And there he is, leaning against the wall. He has long, wavy brown hair, with a crown resting on top. His regal robes are dirty, as though they’ve been spattered with mud. He’s cleaning under his fingernail with a dagger. Then he hears me sit up in bed and he fixes his eyes on me.

  ‘So foul and fair a day I have not seen,’ he whispers.

  My first thought is: You didn’t get to see too many days at all, you bastard. My second: Of course. I ought to have been expecting a visit from him for a while now. He’s the worst of all the bad guys. Traitor to his friends; murderer. So arrogant, so defiant, so eager to believe the prophecies that suit him. I’m not one to laugh at suffering, but I really love it when his time comes, at the end of the play. When everything comes to a head and the moral of the tale is revealed in all its purity: sooner or later, all the evil you do in the world has repercussions. It’s a strong message for someone who is in prison accounting for his past.

  ‘Macbeth,’ I hiss. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Methought I heard a voice cry, “Sleep no more! Macbeth doth murther Sleep,”—the innocent Sleep; Sleep, that knits up the ravell’d sleave of care—’

  ‘I was actually sleeping just fine,’ I say, cutting him off. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘Every minute of his being thrusts against my near’st of life,’ Macbeth raises his dagger, producing a flash of lightning from the small amount of light coming through the window, and I realise that it’s my own rage I see before me.

  This is what I know best: defiance. War.

  I think back on Carminati’s provocation, and my response. I hear the cries of the theatre company guys as they rally around Cosimo and me, shouting their ‘no’ and closing ranks against the enemy. In my mind’s eye I re-watch our duel from the previous afternoon. The adrenaline comes rushing through my veins again, like a drug, or a poison.

  The taste of war is in my mouth once more, with its metallic tang, as though I’ve run my tongue over Macbeth’s bloodstained dagger. He stares at me, he’s a man who has never stopped fighting. He’s got the same crazed eyes that the guys in the Hotheads used to have.

  ‘I’m going to hold up that jewellery shop,’ I can hear a friend say, off in the distance, one dull afternoon that would change his life. ‘Who’s coming with me?’

  ‘We don’t rob people here in the Quartieri. Forget it.’ My reply echoes around the room, as it did back then.

  ‘The owner’s not from the Quartieri. He’s a piece of shit and we know it and we have to rob him.’

  I see it all unfold, the way it was recounted to me afterwards. The friend and Rocky going into the shop, the jeweller’s reaction, the gun firing, the busted knees, and then another robbery, and another…eighteen years in jail. That’s what criminals are like: he could quit anytime; he’s like a gambler. But instead he figures if he places another bet, he’ll win again. And of course he doesn’t.

  I lost, too. I could have won. But I didn’t know when to stop.

  ‘Be these juggling fiends no more believed, that palter with us in a double sense.’ Macbeth is following the flow of my thoughts, just as the witches read his.

  Each of us has a prophecy for our own lives. The witches are those neighbours, town councillors or local bigots who warn you what will happen if you behave a certain way. And you think you can scoff at their prophecies and interpret them in your own favour. You think you can escape the consequences of what you’re doing. You think you already know how it’s going to be and that you hold no responsibility for what happens. But instead you’re writing your own future. The script that you’re following is dragging you onwards until the last bitter page, until the very end. Only you have the power to change the direction of the plot. But you don’t do it.

  I see myself in prison back at fourteen years of age, my first time in jail. I was on edge, as I always am when I have to read a new situation, and the counsellor, who was about twice my age, handed me a joint and she and I smoked it together. I still remember my mother’s fury when she came to see me and discovered I wasn’t frightened. I remember how she acted all crazy and shouted to the guards: ‘Don’t treat him like this. Tie him up, scare him, do something to him! He’s too relaxed. It frightens me to see my son like this.’ The guards laughed, but she was right. It wasn’t good to be relaxed in a place like that. I should have been worried, or better, terrified. It’s not normal to be in prison at fourteen years of age. If you don’t realise this, then that’s the road you could end up on. Like Macbeth, you might be under the illusion that you’ll get away with it, and you’ll go from one evil deed to the next, from one vendetta to the next. From one war to the next.

  And war is a habit that’s not easy to kick.

  ‘Go away,’ I tell Macbeth. He looks bewildered. He’s me as I used to be. The criminal going from one mistake to the next. Why am I driving him out? Why am I renouncing myself? Have I grown tired of wars? I’ve never pulled back from one before.

  ‘I’m tired of unjust wars.’ I make the effort to think about Carminati without rancour. I reason with myself, and try to understand why I should only have pity for someone like him. He sees prisoners banding together to form a united group, and he thinks only according to his own categories: he thinks we’re Camorristi, Mafiosi, and that we’re forming a gang to take away his power. While we are indeed strong and united, it is only in our emotion, in the joy we get from the theatre.

  ‘We’re guilty of emotional association,’ I say to Macbeth, smiling, ‘but unlike Mafia association, that’s not yet a crime.’

  A twisted grin appears on the ghost’s white face, like that of a man who recognises he’s been defeated. He knows he’ll never be saved because he has laid out his own destiny in a jigsaw puzzle of mistakes. He never knew how to forgive himself, or how to accept forgiveness. But I do. I can be saved.

  As I think about this, the ghost raises his hand in a farewell gesture.

  ‘To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow’—the monologue I memorised so easily resounds in my head—

  Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

  To the last syllable of recorded time;

  And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

  The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

  Life’s but a walking shadow; a poor player,

  That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

  And then is heard no more. It is a tale

  Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury

  Signifying nothing.

  And Macbeth slowly disappears.

  I lie back down with a heavy heart. Shakespeare is like that: he interrogates you, he slaps you around, he sets the world out in front of you, shining a big bright light on it that you can’t ignore. And he almost chases you down in his eagerness to make
you understand.

  If we’re going to talk about my sins, past and present, I’d have preferred to have Hamlet come and visit me. How many Hamlets have I known back in the Quartieri? How many fathers murdered, and not always by the Camorra. In Naples you don’t only worry about not dying, you have to be careful how you die. When you’re killed in a duel between two feuding gangs, there’s no shortage of flowers at the cemetery: you’re a god in a way you never were in life, because you died with honour. But if you’re killed for being an infame, because of a tip-off, or the betrayal of a friend, then everyone abandons you, because slowly, the truth that cost you your life convinces even your own family that you didn’t deserve to live.

  You die twice. After the tragedy and the tears, after the wailing and the despair, the voice of the neighbourhood begins to tell another story, one where you’re an infame, and that if you hadn’t been a traitor you wouldn’t have died. Eventually, it’s not even worth the trouble of taking flowers to the cemetery for you. As a reaction to all this, your son ends up becoming another Hamlet…How many sons are there in Naples who can’t decide whether or not they should avenge their father? Will they kill me, or won’t they, these sons wonder.

  And how many Romeos, how many Juliets? My goodness, so many! ‘What do you mean you went to the movies with our enemy’s daughter?’ ‘What the fuck do I care? You lot make me sick.’ And how many Antonios, wanting to unseat a brother to grab his power, have I met in the Camorra? And then there are the women, Shakespeare’s women—Macbeth’s wife, Caesar’s wife, Hamlet’s mother. When her son confronts her about her crimes she accuses him: ‘What are you on? Are you doing cocaine? Are you high? What’s all this talk?’ She calls her son’s mental health into question, tries to feed the monsters in Hamlet’s head rather than face up to her own. How many women like her have I known? Women who put the thought of war into men’s heads, like the mothers and wives of friends of mine, who were the drivers of their criminal acts. The mothers in Shakespeare are almost never positive, whereas the daughters and lovers are: they’re capable of sacrificing themselves for love. Sometimes, it’s for the love of an indecisive prince who has fallen prey to his nightmares, who wavers about in desperation: to command or not to command, to repent or not to repent, to fight or not to fight…never to decide. In the Quartieri, Hamlet is afraid of everybody.

  We’re the kings of contraband, and they call us bosses, Mafiosi, Camorristi, but they could just as well call us Macbeth, Hamlet, Antonio. Shakespeare had seen this stuff over and over again. This is why he can help a criminal open his eyes. He opened my eyes to the only options I’ve ever had: run for my life, take the oath and join their ranks, or turn and face them head-on. In other words, you can run away from it all, you can go over to the enemy’s side, or you can attack. I never went over to the enemy’s side and perhaps this is the only reason I got through it all alive.

  That and because theatre has taught me to understand and to forgive.

  It’s at this point that sleep comes.

  In the end it turns out that I’m not the one who has to give Carminati the group’s reply: before he and his sidekicks reappear in the kitchen during food delivery time, a European conference on prisons, held at Rebibbia itself, gives us the chance to meet up in the same room as delegations from all the other sections of the prison. And what do you know, in the front line at the conference is our very own ‘political’ prisoner, the guy who’s studied. Cosimo takes the initiative and walks up to him.

  ‘You got something to say to me?’ he asks. I’m watching them from a short distance, but I can hear what they’re saying and I’m ready to intervene if need be. They stare at each other like cowboys preparing for a duel.

  ‘Didn’t your mates pass on what I said?’ Carminati replies.

  ‘Don’t send me any more messages.’ Cosimo doesn’t beat around the bush. ‘We don’t want anything to do with people like you.’

  Carminati squares his shoulders and opens his mouth to reply, but Cosimo freezes him on the spot: ‘We know all about what you lot are doing in here,’ he adds. ‘We don’t like you as a man, and we don’t like your politics. You need to leave us alone otherwise we will come down and split your head open.’

  Carminati looks around him and his eyes meet mine. I can read a question on his face: How much do these guys know? And he’s well aware that we have the warden’s trust.

  We already know what’s going to come out in the newspapers in just a few weeks’ time: that he and his gang have transformed section G8 of the prison into an oasis of freedom and illegality: drugs, parties, mobile phones, corruption…But in maximum security, where we are, it’s all school, theatre and gardening. We’re even set up for university study now—guys can get a degree in here. We run a call centre: we administer all the fines that are given in Rome, and we also look after the Telecom Italia information line: when people phone up, we’re the ones telling them where to find a pharmacy that’s open, or the nearest bar. The man giving out that information is doing it from inside a prison. That’s the way forward. Not carrying on your own business interests and your own wars in prison, but taking justice and forgiveness to the outside. No Macbeth, with all his ambition, will be our leader; no Richard III, with all his bitterness. Like Richard, Carminati has decided ‘to prove a villain, and hate the idle pleasures of these days’. But for us, those pleasures are what will save us.

  ‘What are you looking at?’ Carminati growls at me. ‘Are you the one coming to split my head open?’

  At this point the old Sasà would reply: ‘I don’t have to wait. I’ll split your head open right now, just to confirm that there’s nothing inside it.’ And the old Sasà would be more than ready to move from words to actions. But that would mean starting a war.

  I don’t move a muscle, and I hold my rage at bay. I call to my aid, to lend me some words, a man whose greatness many do not understand.

  ‘Had you rather Caesar were living, and die all slaves, than that Caesar were dead, to live all freemen?’ I ask, stepping away from the wall and straightening up. ‘As Caesar loved me, I weep for him; as he was fortunate, I rejoice at it; as he was valiant, I honour him: but, as he was ambitious, I slew him.’

  According to Dante, Brutus was a murderer, a traitor. According to Shakespeare, he was a brave man who did what had to be done. I’m with Shakespeare. If I can avoid it, I will, but like Brutus, I will do what has to be done.

  I look around, hoping the message has got through: to Carminati, to his men, to everyone else. If someone threatens our project, we’ll defend ourselves.

  ‘Who is here so vile that will not love his country? If any, speak, for him have I offended,’ I add, casting my eyes around the room. After a moment of silence, one of the prisoners starts to clap. And then another, and another. Soon the applause is thunderous. It’s a vote of confidence in us. The people have declared victory, and have done so in the name of theatre.

  I smile, even at Carminati, who’s looking at me in astonishment. He knows he has lost, and I know that he won’t be making any more advances towards us.

  I give my audience a slight nod as the applause dies down.

  This is without doubt the best way I’ve ever found to prevent a war from starting.

  11

  ‘Since thou dost give me pains, Let me remember thee what thou hast promised, Which is not yet performed me.’

  Ariel in The Tempest

  Act I, Scene II

  You’re wrong, dear Samuel. There’s nothing funny about unhappiness.

  I put the book down, annoyed. Today is one of those days when I disagree with Beckett. He was recommended to me by Bennett, who is a huge fan. I didn’t like Waiting for Godot, but he persuaded me to try again with Endgame.

  ‘Beckett is a genius,’ he told me. ‘He’s not easy at first, but once you understand him, he’ll open up your mind.’

  ‘Beckett doesn’t open up a thing,’ I replied. ‘Beckett’s doing a life sentence.’

  I�
��m even more convinced of this now I’m reading Endgame. Beckett’s locked up in his cell—which contains another cell, and another one again, like a set of Chinese boxes—telling the same story over and over because it’s the only one he’s got. He repeats something to you until you understand that that’s the way it is, and it couldn’t be any other way, and then he turns it all around so that in reality it can’t be that way, and yet it is. He’s like someone who’s banging himself back and forth from one wall of his cell to the other, endlessly. Some days it hurts physically to read him.

  And yet I read and re-read him because he’s also doing me good: he’s showing me the absurdity of life and the traps of my mind. He’s making me see how stupid I’ve been. His writing contains my past self, and reading it is like locking yourself in a dark room to reflect.

  Except that I’ve been in a dark room for a pretty long time now—isn’t it about time I came out? I pick up my copy of The Tempest, almost with relief. If Beckett is the black box that helps you understand why the plane crashed, Shakespeare’s the one who shows you the plane as it’s falling and explains to you, as though in a dream, that you have the capacity to change direction. If Beckett closes a door behind me so that I can reflect, Shakespeare shows me a thousand doors, explains which one I came through and must never open again, and then gives me the chance to choose between the others.

  Freedom. It’s a word that continues to hurt. The doors will never open for me.

  I close the book, feeling uneasy. Luckily, it’s time to head down—today I’m on the team in the kitchen again, checking that the meat’s the right colour. But I’m nervous and distracted. I barely even say hello to Gaetano as I pass him. He’s offended, and I feel guilty: Manners, Sasà. It’s hardly Gaetano’s fault you’ve had an argument with Beckett. Downstairs I come upon another of the regular prisoners, a face I’ve seen before. I offer him my hand, determined to snap myself out of this dark mood and be polite.

  But when he takes my hand he grips it and doesn’t let go. He continues holding it so tight that he’s trembling. What’s happening to him? I take a better look at him.