Involuntary Witness

by Gianrico Carofiglio

  A hundred and ten.

  Slowly I opened one flap. Then the other. Then I opened the metal door. Without leaving the lift I looked out at the broad slabs of marble paving the landing. I knew I mustn’t put a foot on the cracks between them. I must be careful to tread from one slab to the next. I remembered that was exactly what I had always thought coming out of that lift ever since I had used it.

  I thought: what the hell.

  And I put the first foot right between two slabs. I was not concerned about the second, but turned to close the lift doors with intense concentration. First the two inner flaps, then the metal door, which I pushed to gently until I heard it click.

  I stayed there leaning against the wall of the landing for maybe ten minutes. I held my briefcase in front of me with both hands, my arms stiff. From time to time I swung it to and fro. I looked into space with half-closed eyes and, I think, a slight smile on my lips.

  When enough time had passed I pushed myself away from the wall. I recalled how a year before I had met Signor Strisciuglio, and thought now of knocking at his door. To tell him how it had all ended.

  But I didn’t. I stepped back into the lift, which no one had summoned in the meantime, and left the building.

  High time to get home.

  30

  When I was a child and they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up I always said “a sheriff”. My idol was Gary Cooper in High Noon. When they told me there weren’t any sheriffs in Italy, but only policemen, I promptly replied that I would be a policeman sheriff. I was a good child and wanted to hunt down wrongdoers one way or another.

  Then – I must have been about eight or nine – I witnessed the arrest of a bag snatcher in the street. As a matter of fact I don’t know if he was a bag snatcher or a pickpocket or some other kind of petty crook. My memories are slightly vague. They only become clear for one short sequence.

  I am with my father walking along the street. There is a rumpus behind us and then a skinny youngster rushes past us like greased lightning, it seems to me. My father clasps me to him, just in time to prevent me being knocked over by another man, also running. He is wearing a black sweater and yelling out as he runs. Yelling in dialect. He is yelling to the boy to stop or else he’ll kill him. The boy doesn’t stop of his own accord, but perhaps twenty yards further on he crashes into a pedestrian. He falls. The man in the black sweater is on top of him and now a third man is coming up, bigger and slower on his feet. I wriggle free from my father and get near them. The man in the black sweater strikes the boy, who from close up looks little more than a child. He hits him in the face with his fists, and when the other tries to protect himself, he tears his hands away and starts hitting him again, yelling in dialect, “You son of a whore. Go fuck your mother. Damn you, you fucking bastard.” And another smash on the head with his clenched fist. The boy cries out, “Stop it, stop it”, also in dialect. Then he stops shouting and bursts into tears.

  I watch the scene, hypnotized. I feel physically sick and also ashamed at the sight of it. But I can’t tear my eyes away.

  Now the other man, the big one, comes up. He has a placid look and I think he’s going to intervene, to put an end to that horror. He stops running five or six yards from the boy, who is now huddled on the ground. He covers that distance at a walk, panting hard. When he is standing right over the boy, he takes a deep breath and kicks him in the stomach. Only one kick, but really hard. The boy stops weeping even. He opens his mouth and stays that way, unable to breathe. My father, who until then has also been petrified with horror, steps forward to intervene, says something. Of all the people around, he is the only one to make a move. The man in the black sweater tells him to mind his own bloody business. “Police!” he barks. But they both stop hitting the boy. The big man lifts him, grasping him by the jacket from behind, and forces him onto his knees. Hands behind his back, held by the hair, handcuffed. This is the most obscene memory in the whole sequence: a helpless boy at the mercy of two men.

  My father pulls me away and the scene fades.

  From then on I gave up saying I wanted to be a sheriff.

  That episode had occasionally come to mind over the years. Sometimes I told myself I had become a lawyer as a sort of reaction to the disgust I had felt. Sometimes, in moments of self-glorification, I had even believed it.

  The truth, however, was quite different. I had become a lawyer by sheer chance, because I had found nothing better to do or wasn’t up to looking for it. Which comes to the same thing of course.

  I had enrolled in law school because I hoped to gain time, because my ideas were none too clear. When I graduated, I sought to gain more time by parking myself in a law firm while waiting for my ideas to clarify.

  For some years after that I thought I was working as a lawyer only until I got my ideas clear.

  Then I gave up thinking this, because time was passing and I was afraid that if I did get my ideas clear I would be forced to draw some unpleasant conclusions. Little by little I had anaesthetized my emotions, my desires, my memories, everything. Year after year. Until the time when Sara showed me the door.

  Then the lid blew off and from the pan emerged a lot of things I had never imagined and didn’t want to see. That no one would want to see.

  Every man has reminiscences that he would not tell to everyone, but only to his friends. He has other matters in his mind that he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself, and that in secret. But there are other things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind.

  Dostoyevsky. Notes from Underground.

  It isn’t good when those stored-away things come out. All at once.

  I reflected on all these things, and others, while working through piles of routine matters in the office. I checked on expiry dates, wrote simple deeds and, above all, made out some bills. I had to, in view of the fact that defending Abdou would not make me a rich man. The room was cool, thanks to the air-conditioning, whereas outside the heat had set in, for keeps.

  I finished at about seven. My room is north-facing and has a big window to the left of the desk. Looking out, I noticed the sun on the terrace of the building opposite, then I lent an ear to the faint buzzing of the air-conditioning and the muffled music coming from the apartment below.

  Such awareness was unusual for me and made me feel good. It occurred to me that I wanted a cigarette, but not in the usual way. I wanted to do things with calm. I picked up the packet lying on the desk and held it in my hand for a while. I popped one out by tapping with two fingers on the bottom end and took it directly between my lips. I remembered the infinite number of times I had made that series of gestures like an automaton. I felt that now I was able to look into the void without being overcome with dizziness. Able not to tear my eyes away. I felt a kind of shiver pass through my whole body and simultaneous exaltation and sadness. I had a vision of a ship leaving harbour for a long voyage. I put a match to the cigarette and felt the smoke strike my lungs as another sequence of memories burst upon me. But they held no terror for me now. I could tell you exactly what I thought at each puff of that cigarette.

  They were eleven in number. When I stubbed out the butt in the little glass bowl I used as an ashtray I knew that after the trial was over there was something I must do.

  Something important.

  31

  On the Friday morning, having dropped in at the law courts for a preliminary hearing, I went to see Abdou in prison. His interrogation was fixed for the following Monday and we had to prepare for it.

  The warder in charge of the register ushered me into the interview room and, with what seemed to me a malevolent smirk, closed the door. The heat was suffocating, worse than I’d expected. I removed my jacket, loosened my tie, unbuttoned my collar, and finally decided that I was not a prisoner, that there was no rule that said I had to stay shut in there gasping for breath, so I opened the door. The warder in the corr
idor gave me a nasty look, seemed about to say something, but then let it go.

  I leaned against the doorpost, half in and half out of the room. I took out a cigarette but didn’t light it. Too hot even for that.

  I felt the shirt sticking to my back with sweat, and into my brain burst a thought straight from the recesses of my childhood.

  What you need is talcum powder.

  When we were sweaty as children, they sprinkled us with talcum powder. If you made a fuss, because you thought you were too grown up for talcum powder, you were told that you might catch pleurisy. If you asked what pleurisy was, you were told that it was a serious illness. The tone in which they said this put paid to any wish to ask again.

  Thinking thus, I realized that it was the second time in as many days that I had remembered childhood things. This was odd, because usually I never thought about my childhood. Whenever anyone asked how my childhood had been, I always answered at random, sometimes saying I’d had a happy childhood, sometimes that I’d been a sad little boy. Sometimes, when I wanted to make an impression, I said I’d been a strange child. It gave me an aura of glamour, I thought. We special people have often been strange children, was the implication.

  The truth was that I remembered next to nothing of my childhood and had no wish to think about it. I had occasionally tried really hard to remember, and it made me sad. So I gave up. I didn’t care for sadness, I preferred to avoid it.

  Now I looked with amazement at these fragments of memory popping out from goodness knows where. They made me slightly melancholy and gave me a sense of astonishment and curiosity. But not sadness, not what had previously made me look away.

  I meditated on this further change in me, and a really cold shiver ran up my spine to the roots of the hair on the nape of my neck and down my arms. Even in that heat.

  I lit that cigarette.

  I saw Abdou arriving from way down the corridor.

  He came up to me and gave me his hand, with a motion of his head that looked to me like a little bow. It seemed only natural to reply in kind, but then I felt embarrassed.

  He had a newspaper with him, and stood aside for me to enter the room.

  We sat down, both of us avoiding the ever-present, broken-seated armchair. Abdou handed me the newspaper with a kind of smile.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “It talks about you, Avvocato.” The tone of his voice had changed.

  I took the paper. It was three days old. It mentioned the hearing of the previous Monday and there was even a photo of me. I hadn’t seen it, let alone read it: for a year now I hadn’t bought the papers.

  KEY WITNESS WAVERS IN LITTLE FRANCESCO’S DEATH TRIAL

  A dramatic hearing yesterday in the trial of Senegalese citizen Abdou Thiam for the kidnap and murder of little Francesco Rubino. Evidence was given by several of the key witnesses for the prosecution, including Antonio Renna, owner of a bar in Capitolo, the seaside district of Monopoli from which the child disappeared.

  In the course of the preliminary inquiries Renna stated that he had seen the accused passing his bar, very close to the scene of the disappearance and only a few minutes before the disappearance itself. Interrogated in court by the public prosecutor, the witness confirmed these statements with a great show of confidence.

  The sensation occurred in the course of the spectacular cross-examination conducted by the counsel defending the Senegalese, Avvocato Guido Guerrieri. After putting a number of apparently innocuous questions, from the answers to which there emerged, however, a patently hostile attitude on the part of Renna towards non-European immigrants, Avvocato Guerrieri showed the witness a number of photographs of black men, asking him if they portrayed anyone he recognized. The bar owner said no, and it was then that the defence counsel played his trump card: two of those photographs were in fact of the defendant, Abdou Thiam. The very person whom the witness Renna had with such confidence declared having seen pass his bar on that tragic afternoon. The photographs were attached by the court as documentary evidence.

  Public Prosecutor Cervellati was forced to re-examine the witness with a view to explaining the details of his deposition. The witness explained that he had not seen the accused since the year before, when the events took place, that he was certain about his statements and had not recognized the accused in the photos because it was so long ago and the photographs were badly printed. The latter were, in fact, imperfectly reproduced colour photocopies.

  The re-examination conducted by the public prosecutor to some extent repaired the damage, but it is unquestionable that in the course of this trial Avvocato Guerrieri has scored several points in his favour in what is undoubtedly a very difficult trial for the defence.

  Interrogated before the bar owner were the police doctor and Sergeant-Major Lorusso, the detective who conducted the inquiries. The cross-examination of Lorusso also had its tense moments, when the defence hinted at shortcomings and oversights in the course of the searches carried out at the lodgings of the Senegalese.

  The trial continues tomorrow with the parents and grandparents of the little boy. Fixed for next Monday is the interrogation of the accused and then, except in the event of eventual applications to produce fresh evidence, the trial will proceed to the closing argument.

  I read the article twice. Spectacular cross-examination. I could not suppress a feeling of childish pleasure at reading those words and seeing my photograph in the paper. Occasionally during other trials I had got a mention and even had my photograph printed.

  But in this case it was different. I was the protagonist of the whole article.

  When had they taken that photo? It wasn’t very recent, perhaps a couple of years old, but I couldn’t remember the occasion. I looked fairly good in it, even though, all told, I thought I looked better in real life.

  After a second or two of such reflections I felt a complete idiot, put down the paper and turned to Abdou.

  He was watching me. From his expression it was clear that now he was convinced that we would pull it off. He had read the paper and was now thinking that perhaps he had been lucky, that he was in the hands of the right lawyer. I asked myself whether I had better tell him that despite the fact that things had gone well in the hearing, the odds were still heavily against us. I concluded that there was no reason to do so. I therefore only nodded and gave a slight shrug. It could mean anything or nothing.

  “Right, Abdou. We must now put our minds to the next hearing. Your interrogation.”

  He nodded and said nothing. He was attentive but it was not up to him to talk. It was up to me.

  “I am now going to tell you how the thing works, and how you must behave. If something I say is not clear to you, please interrupt me and tell me so at once.”

  Another nod. “Of course.”

  “You will first be examined by the public prosecutor. While he is asking you questions, look him in the face. Attentively, not with an air of challenge. Do not answer until he has finished the question. When he has finished, turn towards the bench and speak to the court. Never get into an argument with the public prosecutor. Is that clear?”

  “When the prosecutor is speaking I look at him, when I am speaking I look at the judges.”

  “OK. Obviously the same thing holds true when you are questioned by the counsel for the civil party, or when I question you myself. You must make it clear to the court that you are listening to the questions before answering them. Is that clear?”

  “Yes.”

  “Wait for the questions to end before answering. Especially when I am doing the questioning. We must not seem to be putting on an act, with every question and answer memorized. You see what I’m trying to say?”

  “It must not seem like an act between us two.”

  “OK. Don’t sit on the edge of your chair. Sit well back. Like this.” I showed him how. “But don’t sit like this.” And I showed him again, slouching back, sprawling, knees crossed and so on.

  “The idea’s clear e
nough, isn’t it? You mustn’t give the impression of wanting to run away, by sitting on the edge of your chair, but nor must you give the impression of being too relaxed. We’ll be talking about your life, the fact that you might go to prison for a great many years, and so you can’t be relaxed. If you seem relaxed, it means you’re putting it on and they will realize that. Maybe unconsciously, but realize it they will. You follow me?”

  “Yes.”

  “When you don’t understand a question, or even if you are unsure of having understood it, don’t try to answer. Whoever has put the question, ask him to repeat it.”

  “Very good.”

  “Then, before going on would you like to repeat to me what I’ve said so far?”

  “I must look in the face whoever is asking me questions. When the question is finished, I turn, look at the court and answer. If I don’t understand a question, I must ask for it to be repeated, please. I must sit like this.”

  He sat as I had told him to. I smiled and nodded. He didn’t need things said twice.

  At that point I delved into my briefcase and took out the copy of his interrogation by the public prosecutor and various other papers. Having made clear how he must conduct himself, we now had to talk about what he would have to say, of how he was to explain what he had already said, and of the applications for additional evidence that I would have to put forward after his interrogation.

  I was in the prison until three o’clock, with the heat becoming more and more insufferable. When we shook hands at the moment of parting, I felt we had really done everything we could.

  I went home, had a shower, put on light trousers and a sweater. I made a salad, ate it, and smoked a couple of cigarettes, seated in an armchair and drinking a whizzed-up American coffee. At about half-past four I started for the office. I tried to buzz Margherita from the front door but she wasn’t at home. I was disappointed, but thought I would ring her later, when I’d finished work.