This lasted only a few seconds, then the door was flung open—a glimpse of grass, a pleasant field—and three other men came in, closing the door behind them, and the first man, the man in charge, was Arturo Manoia. There he was with his glasses—the glasses of a rapist or of a civil servant—which he kept pushing up with his thumb even when they had not slipped down, I noticed that he was doing the same thing there, while standing up and active and occupied, and his gaze, almost invisible due to the reflected light and to his incessantly shifting, lusterless eyes (the color of milky coffee), as if he found it hard to keep them still for more than a few seconds, or else could not stand for people to be able to examine them. I recognized him at once, I had just spent a whole unforgettable evening with him and he didn't look very much younger, so it must have been a recent video or else he was one of those men who don't age and who, unlike his wife, don't change either, there he was with his invasive, too-long chin, perhaps not long enough to be termed prognathous, but still meriting the word bazzone. And there he was, with his evident readiness to take revenge. The moment I met him, I thought he would be likely to lash out without the slightest provocation or on the slightest pretext or even with no need for either, that he was an irascible man, although he would doubtless be considered, instead, as measured, because he would almost never give vent to that anger. But I had also thought that on the few occasions when his rage did surface, it would doubtless be terrifying and best not witnessed. And now, having said goodbye to him and seen the last of him in person, there, unexpectedly, at the end of the night, I was about to witness one of his attacks of rage on screen. It was almost, it seemed to me, a curse and I knew this as soon as I saw him, in suit and tie, come in through the door of the cowshed. I prepared myself, I told myself that, whatever happened, I would not look away or cover my eyes. I wanted to show Tupra that I had toughened up during our late-night session or had created inside myself an antidote to his poison, or at least some resistance.
The music didn't stop when the three newcomers arrived, they didn't even turn down the volume, and so I heard little of what Manoia was saying to the bound man and understood still less, he seemed to me to be speaking with an exaggerated southern accent or else mixing dialect and Italian. I could tell, though, that he was speaking to him proudly, indignantly, scornfully—his wounding voice raised in anger now—waving his hands around and giving the man the occasional smack across the face as if this were simply another gesture made in passing, a way of underlining each reproof, almost involuntary or as if he were barely aware of what he was doing, which is a sure sign that the person being slapped is now worthless and has become a mere thing. The other man answered as best he could, and he was definitely speaking in dialect, because I couldn't understand a word, he managed only truncated sentences, constantly interrupted by the swift ceaseless flow of words from Manoia, I tried not to look too much at the prisoner, the less I perceived him as an individual, the less it would matter to me what happened to him in the end, because something horrible was about to happen, that much was certain, the situation demanded it and, besides, the scene was part of that specially chosen and edited DVD of embarrassing or downright vile episodes, but I did look at him despite myself, out of habit, he was a plump man, with a small mouth and a large head, short, curly, straw-colored hair, bulging eyes, and the weather-beaten skin of a small landowner who still walks his own fields, well-dressed in a country way, and about forty or so years old. Finally, Manoia's cascade of words ceased—but not his rage—or else he made a brief pause, and then I did understand what he said: 'Tappategli la bocca,' he ordered his henchmen, although it sounded more like 'Dabbadegli la bogga,' with unvoiced consonants converted into voiced, or perhaps I understood this a posteriori from the images, when I saw how the man with the pistol and the man with the shotgun stuffed two wads of cloth into the man's mouth, one after the other, I don't know how there was room, and on top of that placed a large strip of adhesive tape, from ear to ear, so that he couldn't cough freely as he needed to, his face grew red and inflamed, his eyes seemed, for a moment, about to pop out of their sockets, his cheeks puffed up like boils, the henchmen used red-and-white checked cloths, perhaps napkins from a trattoria, and the ends stuck out above and below the tape, what could he have done that was so very terrible or so grave, had he been an informer like Del Real, had he betrayed someone, lost his nerve, failed, fled, fallen asleep, he did not seem like a mere enemy, although he could well have been, perhaps someone had died because of him, some agent from the Sismi who wasn't due to die, always assuming Manoia belonged to the Sismi. Manoia then took an object out of his jacket pocket, I couldn't see what it was, something short, a small penknife, a teaspoon, a sharp metal file, a pencil. 'Adesso vedrai,' he said, 'Now you'll see,' and those words I did hear clearly despite the music. The seated man's head was at the same height as Manoia's chest and arms. Manoia moved closer, only a couple of steps, and with whatever he was holding in his hand he made two rapid movements over the man's face, the gesture of an old-fashioned dentist preparing to pull out a tooth by main force, first one, then the other, and he did pull them out, he really did, by the roots, but not the man's teeth, he sliced them out the way someone uses a dessert knife to cut out the stone from a peach half, or the seeds from a watermelon, or walnuts from their shells after the initial struggle to open them, and then I had to close mine, despite my earlier resolution, what else could I do, but I tried not to cover them with my hand so that Tupra might think that I had kept them open, while Zappulla kept singing and I caught only the occasional word, 'sfortunate,' 'mangiare,' 'cerco,' 'soffro,' 'senza capire,' 'malate,' 'unhappy,' 'eat,' 'I seek,' 'I suffer,' 'without understanding,' 'sick,' not enough to make any sense of them, although one can always give meaning to anything, unhappy the empty sockets of my eyes, they force me to eat napkins or cloths, I seek to save myself and I suffer mutilations, without understanding the cruelty of these sick beasts . . . 'E quando son le feste di Natale,' that didn't help in the least even though it was the longest phrase my ears had caught, because I could still hear the inhuman snorts of incredulity and despair and pain, but no screams, there could be no shouts with those checked cloths stuffed in his mouth, but at least I couldn't see, which was something, even though I was trying to make Reresby believe the opposite and possibly succeeding.
And in short, I was afraid ('O that I could forget what I have been or not remember what I must be now'). Afraid of Manoia and afraid of Tupra and also vaguely afraid of myself, because I was mixed up with them ('Yes, O that I could not remember what I must be now'). Tupra used the remote control to freeze the image, he had inoculated me with the last drop of his poison and through the eyes too, as indicated by its etymology. I knew he had stopped the film because I could no longer hear the sound. I opened my eyes, I dared to look, fortunately the film was frozen at a moment when Manoia's back was covering the face of the now blind man.
'You've seen enough,' said Tupra, 'although the scene isn't over yet: our friend heaps further insults on his victim and then slits his throat, but I'll spare you that—there's a lot of blood—just as he could have spared that man, I mean, why make someone suffer like that when you're going to kill him anyway, and only a few seconds later?' He said this in a tone of genuine perplexity and horror, and as if he had given much thought to that 'why' but never managed to get beyond it. 'I don't understand it, do you, Jack? Do you understand it, Jack?'
I had fallen silent, I preferred not to say a word for a few moments because I was afraid that if I spoke, I would crumble and my voice would shake, and I might even cry, and I couldn't let that happen under any circumstances, I wouldn't allow myself to do so in that place and at that time. I clenched my jaw and kept it clenched, and finally I felt sufficiently composed to respond with what I intended to be an imitation of sarcasm:
'You should have asked him. You missed an opportunity there. You had all night to find out.' This seemed to disconcert him slightly, he obviously hadn't been expec
ting such a response. I went on: 'Perhaps when he did that first thing he didn't know he was going to kill him. Maybe he hadn't yet decided. Sometimes a first punishment isn't enough to satisfy one's fury and you have to go still further. Perhaps he had no option but to kill him. For some people even that isn't enough, and they try to kill the person twice, to vainly try and kill the already dead. They mutilate the corpse or profane the tomb— they even regret having killed him because they can't now kill him again. It happened a lot during our Civil War. It happens now with ETA, for whom once isn't enough.' Then I went back to my first question: 'But why ask me, he's your friend, you should have asked him.'
Tupra lit another cigarette, I heard the sound of the lighter, I had still not turned around to face him. He stopped the DVD, got up, removed the disk, stood in front of me, holding it delicately between his fingers, and said:
'Certainly not, Manoia doesn't even know I have this video, he hasn't a clue. Well, he'll assume I have something on him, but he won't know what. And it would never occur to him that it would be this. Anyway, as you can see, I very likely saved that imbecile Garza's life. Instead of getting angry with me, you should be grateful that I took charge of his punishment, to use your word. He would never have gotten away scot-free, that's for sure.'
I had known for some time now where he was heading. 'I had to do it in order to avoid a greater evil, or so I believed; I killed one so that ten would not be killed, ten so that a hundred would not fall, a hundred in order to save a thousand,' and so on, ad infinitum, the old excuse that so many would spend centuries preparing and elaborating in their Christian and non-Christian tombs, waiting for the Judgment that never comes, and many still believe in that Judgment at the hour of their departing, certainly almost all murderers and instigators of murder throughout history. However, I wasn't concerned so much with heaping more blame on him as with holding myself together, which I was managing only with difficulty, how I would love to have appeared completely indifferent. And so I asked him a genuine question, that is, one I would have wanted to ask him anyway, when I was more myself.
'If he assumes you have something on him and you've got something like that, how come you were pussyfooting around him all evening? It looked like you were trying to placate him, not making any demands. According to what you've just told me, these videos are used above all to make it easier to wheedle concessions out of people, to blackmail them, but my impression was that you were having a hard time persuading him to do whatever it was you were trying to persuade him to do, or getting out of him what you wanted.'
Tupra looked at me in a slightly amused, slightly irritated way. I had still not moved from the ottoman, and so he was looking down on me.
'How do you know he doesn't have some footage of us? We could lose our advantage or it could be cancelled out.' He said 'of us,' not 'of me,' I thought that it could be footage of Rendel or Mulryan, although the latter seemed a very cautious type, and I couldn't imagine Pérez Nuix behaving like Manoia in that cowshed. Or it could be Tupra, of course, or someone above him or, rather, above us, for I, too, was 'us.' Or a compromising video of another sort, not equivalent, not comparable, not as vile, or so at least I hoped. What I had seen in that film from Sicily was utterly repellent, as were the scenes shot in Ciudad Juarez and other places, I would never be able to forget them or, better still, erase them: as if they had never existed or trod the earth or strode the world, or passed before my eyes.
'That was in Sicily, wasn't it?' I asked then, adopting a technical tone of voice, which is the most helpful when one is on the verge of collapse.
'Very good, Jack, you get better and better,' he replied and made as if to applaud me, although he couldn't do so while holding the disk in one hand and his cigarette in the other. 'How did you glean that, from the song, the language or both things?'
'Three things—there was the guy with the lupara as well. It wasn't that hard.' I assumed he would know that word, even if he didn't know Italian. I was wrong, and this surprised me.
'The what?'
'The lupara! And I spelled it out for him. 'That's what they call that kind of double-barreled shotgun in Sicily'
'Well, you do know a lot.' Perhaps he was bothered because I was managing to put on a semblance of composure; after spending so much time covering my eyes, he must have felt sure that I would completely fall apart when I saw the man with whom I had shared both supper and drinks, whose hand I had shaken, with whose wife I had danced, gouging out a person's eyes. And of course I had fallen apart, I was trembling inside and I wanted to get out of that room as quickly as possible, but I wasn't going to let Tupra see that, he had tormented me quite enough for one night and I wasn't prepared to give him still more pleasure. Flavia would have no inkling of her husband's sadistic side, it's astonishing how little we know the faces of those we love, today or yesterday, let alone tomorrow.
'What I'd like to know is how come there was a camera in what I assume to be a remote cowshed somewhere in the back of beyond? Isn't that rather strange?' I tried to maintain that technical tone of voice, and I was doing quite well with my efforts to pull myself together.
Tupra again looked down at me from above, more amused now than irritated.
'Yes, it would have been very strange, Jack, if the fellow with the lupara, you see what a quick learner I am'—he pronounced the word as if it were English, 'looparrah,' he didn't have a very good ear—'hadn't hidden it there beforehand. If they'd discovered it, he might have ended up just like the man in the chair.'
I didn't really want an answer to my next question, but I asked it purely in order to shore myself up, until the moment when I could leave, and I asked it in that same technical tone:
'You're not telling me that guy's English, are you, looking like that? You're not telling me he's our agent?' I almost said 'your,' but I corrected myself or changed my mind in time, possibly ironically, possibly because in some way it suited me.
The answer was obvious, 'What else do you think we spend our money on?' or 'Why else do we have contacts?' or 'Why else do we resort to blackmail?' but Tupra, at that late hour, wanted to draw the attention back to himself. The fact is he had been doing this intermittently all night.
'That's a big question, Jack.' He moved away from me, went to the desk from which he had taken the disk, carefully put the disk back inside, and locked the drawer with the key, the key to his treasures. Then he turned to ask me the question again, from the other side of the desk, in the near-darkness. He said it with his large mouth—with his overly soft and fleshy mouth, as lacking in consistency as it was over-endowed in breadth—at the same time blowing out smoke: 'You've had plenty of time to think about it, so answer the question I asked you in the car. Now that you've seen things you'd never seen before and, I hope, never will again. Tell me now, why, according to you, one can't go around beating people up and killing them? You've seen how much of it goes on, everywhere, and sometimes with an utter lack of concern. So explain to me why one can't.'
None of the classic responses would work with him, I had known that from the start. I hadn't expected Reresby to come back to it, although I don't know why, given that like me and like Wheeler, he never lost the thread or forgot any unresolved matter or let go of his prey if he didn't want to. I looked stupidly around me, as if I might find an answer on the walls; the room lay in semi-darkness, the lights down low. For a moment, my eyes rested on the one image, perhaps as a respite from all the others, from those I had seen on that wretched television screen and from Tupra's living image: the portrait of a British officer wearing a tie and curled mustache and a Military Cross, his hair grown into a widow's peak, his eyebrows thick and an elegiac look no doubt like mine in his eyes, and in that mournful look I saw a reflection of my own exhaustion, a look that might give me away to Tupra, despite my artificial tone of voice. I could just make out the signature on the drawing, 'E. Kennington. 17,'
Poison, Shadow, and Farewell Page 18