“I come at last to my conclusion. Our task is to find solutions to the cases with which we are presented. But we need to be aware that the ability to find answers and solutions to conflicts is based on our ability to live with uncertainty, with the opaqueness of reality.
“The English poet John Keats called this ‘negative capability’. He thought this was the essential talent that man required to obtain genuine results, to really solve problems. Keats called this capability ‘negative’ in opposition to the attitude of those who tackle problems in search of immediate solutions, in an attempt to bend reality to their own need for certainties.
“Looking for an immediate unequivocal interpretation from which to derive an immediate and reassuring solution is, in most cases, an automatic reflex and ultimately a device to avoid having to think.
“For Keats, by accepting uncertainty, error and doubt, it’s possible to look more deeply, to catch details and shades of meaning, to ask new, even paradoxical questions, and in this way to expand the borders of knowledge and awareness.
“My grandfather taught philosophy. When I was little he often said something – I don’t know if it was his or a quotation, and I’ve never wanted to check – that I only really understood when he’d been dead for some time. It went more or less like this: in every activity, in every kind of work, it’s useful from time to time to take a statement we’ve always taken for granted and turn it into a question.”
I paused for a moment. Nobody seemed distracted, nobody was checking his or her phone. A slight shiver went through me. Maybe it was that memory of my grandfather, which hadn’t been in my notes and which had come out without my realizing it, like a distant, glowing echo.
“Thank you for listening to me, and good luck.”
Cotturri was the first to applaud, and the others followed. Some with enthusiasm, others out of politeness.
For some, the speech they had just heard was a defence lawyer’s spiel, a way of dreaming up more or less sophisticated obstacles to the possibility – the mission – of going out into the world, righting wrongs and doing justice. At all costs. Needless to say, these missionaries are those who share with idiots the record for the largest amount of damage caused, some of it irreparable.
I was by the door, saying goodbye, when the young woman with grey eyes came up to me. Looking straight at me, she gave me her hand; her handshake was as I expected, serious and firm.
“Thank you, Avvocato, it was … stimulating,” she said with a hint of a smile.
Cotturri walked me to the stairs.
“I wasn’t expecting a talk like that,” he said before we parted. “I wasn’t expecting it to have … that kind of theoretical concern. It was very good, very instructive. Not just for the kids.”
You sometimes feel happy when you think you’ve done something well, I thought as I walked to my office.
Definitely feeling happy.
12
I had kept Lorenza informed of developments by telephone. Since her visit to the office, I hadn’t seen her again. Two days before the hearing she called me.
“I’m sorry, Guido, will I be disturbing you if I drop by this afternoon?”
“No, that’s fine.”
“If it’s all the same to you I’d prefer to make it late, when you’ve finished with your other appointments. That way we can talk in peace, without worrying about keeping someone waiting.”
I took a quick glance at my diary and told her to come at 8.30, when I would definitely have got through my other commitments. When everyone’s gone, I also thought, as if I had something to hide. A rather absurd thought, I told myself, quickly dismissing it.
She arrived a few minutes early. Pasquale announced her and admitted her to my office. He asked me if I still needed him and I replied thank you, I didn’t need anything, he could go. The others, Consuelo and the trainees, had already left.
“Thank you for seeing me today, I know you’re very busy.”
I simply nodded and smiled rather stiffly, then asked her if she’d like a coffee or a fruit juice or something else to drink. I don’t know why, but I was sure she would say no, thanks.
So when she replied that she’d have a coffee I was surprised. It was a trifle, but it made me think how we speculate about things, and are extremely certain about them, only to see them just as easily proved wrong.
I went to make the coffee, grabbed a fruit juice for myself and returned to my office. Lorenza had stood up and was looking around.
“I didn’t really take it in last time, but this doesn’t look like a lawyer’s office. Not that I have much experience of them, but it’s different from how I would have imagined it, definitely very different from Costamagna’s.”
I had been in Costamagna’s office. His office was all in walnut, with leather armchairs and shelves filled with law books. It really was hard to imagine decor that was more different.
“If you want to smoke, go ahead,” I said, “it doesn’t bother me. In fact, I like the smell of cigarette smoke in here. It makes me feel at least fifteen years younger.”
“How did you know I still smoke?” she asked.
I know because your clothes smell of cigarettes, too many cigarettes, and the thumb and index finger of your left hand – I remember you’re left-handed – are stained with nicotine.
I didn’t say that.
“I don’t know, you seem to me like someone who doesn’t quit smoking,” I said. “But I realize that doesn’t make any sense.”
She smiled a little. And the smile made her seem fragile.
“Actually, I never have quit,” she replied, taking out a packet of soft MSs. “There’s no specific reason I asked if I could see you, so please forgive me if I’m wasting your time. You explained to me on the phone what’s supposed to happen the day after tomorrow – in other words, nothing. Nothing significant, I mean. But the anxiety’s killing me, so I thought talking to you in person would help.”
Clients often visit a defender’s office for no particular legal reason. They do it to alleviate their anxiety, to have confirmation that there’s somebody on their side who knows (or it’s assumed knows) how to handle a grim, threatening, often incomprehensible situation.
“As I told you, the day after tomorrow I’ll ask for an extension to give me time to make requests for the submission of new evidence. I’ve already talked to the judge, who’s aware of the situation and has assured me there won’t be any problems. I would have called you anyway to clarify a few things, after studying the papers, so it’s good that you’re here.”
She puffed away at her cigarette with the brutal, distracted greed of a true nicotine addict. For a moment I was on the verge of asking her for one.
“What do you need to know?”
I needed to know the truth of the alibi she had tried to provide for her son, which the assistant prosecutor had demolished so effectively. And I needed to know all about that old charge of aiding and abetting and resisting an officer of the law – an episode that, as it happened, dated from the time when she and I had been together. But I omitted to mention this last point.
Lorenza listened to me carefully and replied with great clarity. She came across as convincing.
I wondered why she hadn’t done so the day she had been cross-examined in court. A stupid question. When you’re in the witness stand, it works differently. If there isn’t anybody helping you to keep calm, especially when you’re caught off guard by an unexpected question, the risk of amnesia, or at least aphasia, is strong. The memories come flooding back only after the examination is over, accompanied by inevitable frustration. The esprit de l’escalier is quite a common phenomenon among witnesses in criminal trials.
“You’ve told me some useful things. Obviously before you testify we’ll prepare well, to avoid any surprises like the ones that were sprung on you at the original trial. Maybe we can manage to set the record straight, at least in part. It isn’t an easy case, but there may be some glimmers of light.”
“Have you dealt with many cases … of this kind?”
“You mean murder cases?”
“Yes.”
I counted. There were eight in all. Not many, but not a small number either for a lawyer who doesn’t usually take on clients involved in organized crime. It’s those who do who are more likely to handle certain kinds of case.
“How did they go?”
“Four acquittals and three convictions.”
“Four plus three makes seven.”
“In one, the defendant died during the trial. He had a heart attack. The judge ruled that the case couldn’t go ahead.”
“Was he guilty or innocent?”
“Guilty, I think. Though he swore he was innocent.”
“If he hadn’t died, would he have been convicted?”
“Hard to say. The evidence was circumstantial, but maybe yes.”
“And in the other cases? The cases where your clients were convicted?”
“Two convictions out of the three were where the accused confessed. Then it’s all about getting the mildest sentence, not getting them acquitted. As for the third … if I’d been in the judges’ place, I’d have delivered the same verdict.”
“And what about those who were acquitted?”
“Do you want to know if they were guilty or innocent?”
“Yes.”
“One was a case of self-defence. The others … I like to think they were all innocent, but let’s say I’m only reasonably certain about one of the cases. With the other two, I don’t know, but the investigations had been badly conducted and acquittal was the right decision.”
At that moment my mind went in a direction I couldn’t control. It had happened to me before, every time I had dealt with a murder: I wondered what the last minutes of the victim’s life had been like. What activity had Gaglione, bouncer and drug dealer, been engaged in just before he was killed? What had his last normal thought been before he realized there was somebody in his apartment about to shoot him?
I told myself it wouldn’t be a particularly good idea to share this stream of fantasies with Lorenza. So, to cut it off, I looked at my watch.
“It’s already twenty to ten. Come on, I’ll close the office and we’ll go down together.”
I switched off the lights, checked there were no windows open (a little neurosis I’d developed ever since I’d found a bat in the conference room) and we left.
“Do you have a car?” I asked her, remembering from the reading of the file that she didn’t live nearby.
“No. I like walking.”
“Me too. Home isn’t far, but in general I go everywhere on foot or by bicycle.”
For a moment neither of us spoke. It might have been my old fear of silence, my always feeling uneasy and slightly responsible for other people, worried about what they were thinking, that made me say something I didn’t really want to.
“Would you like a drink, maybe a bite to eat?”
As with the coffee, I thought she would say no, thank you, I’m going home to sleep. Instead of which, she replied completely naturally:
“Okay, but you choose where to go, I don’t go out much in the evening. To be honest, I almost never go out, and I’m not very familiar with restaurants.”
I took her to a trattoria near the university, a place I rarely went. It seemed only natural to choose a place where I thought – I hoped – I wouldn’t bump into anybody I knew. I realized I was embarrassed to be seen with her, and I also realized that the embarrassment was to do with vanity. And that made me feel ashamed.
As we sat at the table and she studied the menu, I kept thinking. I’d always had vague visions – rather than genuine memories – of the brief period when our paths had crossed. Visions marked by a deep sense of unreality, as if certain events hadn’t really happened, as if we’d never really met. At least not the way I thought I remembered it.
We ordered starters, salted sea bass and a bottle of white wine. She ate methodically and took large, regular gulps of the wine, as if complying with a prescription. By halfway through dinner the bottle was finished, and I ordered another without her raising any objection.
“Twenty-seven years,” she said suddenly after finishing her fish. “What month did we meet?”
She’d caught me unawares. “It’s almost twenty-seven years.”
“Almost? So you really do remember what month we met?”
“March. The end of March 1987. But I don’t know the exact date.”
So we started talking about what had happened in our respective lives in those almost twenty-seven years. I didn’t have any great desire to talk and I muddled through by mentioning just a few things that were more or less general and more or less true. She, on the other hand, after a slight hesitation, a slight holding back maybe, relaxed and gave me a thorough and, I think, quite honest summary of what had happened to her.
She had lived in Bologna and for shorter periods in other cities. Then she had returned to Bari and now lived in the apartment she had inherited from her parents.
“You remember how I used to say I wanted to write?”
I nodded: I did remember. And it had never seemed as if she was feeding me a line. No, it was more a declaration of intent regarding an inevitable and almost heroic future. When I had occasionally thought about her, I had always been surprised that I hadn’t one day come across a novel of hers in a bookshop.
“I did write a novel,” she said.
I wanted to appear interested, and was trying to formulate a question that wouldn’t hurt her feelings (I’m in the habit of browsing in bookshops two or three times a week: the fact that I hadn’t noticed the publication of this book of hers suggested it hadn’t exactly been a success), but she got in first.
“It was brought out by a small publisher.”
She said the name of a publishing house that was indeed small, but of good quality; I hadn’t seen any of their books around for a while.
“They went bust a few years ago,” she went on. “They were good at choosing books, but a disaster from a commercial point of view. I had some good reviews, I travelled everywhere at my own expense presenting it. I even won a few prizes, but there wasn’t much distribution, you couldn’t even find the novel in a lot of bookshops. Basically, it wasn’t a bestseller.”
“When did it come out?”
“In 2002, in September.”
“What was it called?”
“The Catalogue of Absence.”
I behaved like a well-brought-up person; I didn’t tell her the title suggested the kind of novel I’m inclined to fling at the wall at some unspecified point in my reading, certainly never later than chapter three. Instead, I asked her what it was about. If it was possible to sum it up, I added.
She sighed and assumed the manner of someone preparing to explain something the person she’s speaking to may not understand.
“It was an attempt, I don’t know how successful, to come to terms with myself, and with what had happened to me in the years that might have been the most important of my life. For good or ill.”
“Which were?”
She drank the last wine remaining in her glass and threw a rapid glance at the bottle in the ice bucket. Catching that glance, I poured her some more.
“Let’s say the nineties. A lot of the nineties.”
I felt a touch of narcissistic pique: the most important time of her life didn’t include the period when she had known me. It was expected, but all the same it bothered me to hear it confirmed.
“I started writing the novel in 1998, when I realized that in order to understand the meaning of my existence, I needed to strip myself bare in front of other people. Potentially in front of the whole world, because you’re speaking to the whole world when you write a book. The idea is to enter into communication with humanity, if you understand what I mean.”
While I was making an effort to remember what I was doing in 1998, concluding almost immediately that now wasn’t t
he right time (it had been a crazy and unwittingly sad period), Lorenza explained that her novel was a kind of conte philosophique (those were the words she used) that connected with the existentialist thought and, above all, the themes of Sartre’s Nausea.
“My character, who’s partly autobiographical, is halfway between Roquentin and the Autodidact. The kernel of the novel, the result of the protagonist’s philosophical and personal search, is that the true revelation of being is the incursion and therefore the awareness of absence, which is a category not very dissimilar to Sartrian ennui. In order to convey the sense of otherness, of elsewhereness, in relation to ourselves that defines genuine awareness, I used the stylistic device of telling the story in the second person. The I that is other than oneself, that is absent to oneself, is seen and questioned from the outside. Let’s say, from a place in the consciousness that’s a non-place.”
This has to be a joke, I thought. Now she’s going to confess that she’s pulling my leg. There are some things that nobody – well, almost nobody – can say seriously.
She didn’t confess that she was pulling my leg. So she meant exactly what she had said. She specified that a famous left-wing critic had written these things in an equally famous literary magazine. And that she identified with these “exegetical considerations”.
Then, helped by the wine and the fact that I was listening without interrupting her, she went on with her story.
The novel hadn’t done well, she said, readers hadn’t understood it, and only a thousand copies or a little more had been sold. As she had already told me, the publishing house had gone bust a few years later and the fact that this first novel hadn’t been a commercial success – the only thing that really matters today in the book world is sales – made it hard to find a new publisher and get a new contract. That was probably why she hadn’t managed to finish her second novel, which she had started soon after the first one had come out, on a wave of enthusiasm at being published and optimism for the future.
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