A middle-aged man of less than average height, with salt-and-pepper hair and beard and a dark brown suit
My God, how I hate dark brown
emerges from behind a column and clearly scans the room for me. He spots me and moves across the lobby in my direction. A cluster of foreign visitors leaving the hotel cross his path, and he slows his pace. The women are dressed in evening gowns, the men are dressed in tuxedos. Maybe they’re going to La Scala, or maybe they’re just going to get fucked in the ass somewhere, for all I care. I wish I could throw a water balloon full of shit at them, big enough to turn all of them, including the face of the guy walking toward me, dark brown.
When he reaches me, he’s forced to tip his head back to look at me. He doesn’t seem too pleased about that. His voice has a Sicilian accent, which I’m not accustomed to hearing used in the pronunciation of my name anymore.
“Are you Nicola Sangiorgi?”
“In the flesh.”
He extends his hand.
“A pleasure to meet you. My name is Enrico Della Donna. Your father, the senator, does the honor of bestowing his trust on me.”
Which is to say: I’m his secretary and personal assistant and I lick his ass every time he tells me to.
I shake the extended hand without much enthusiasm. I’m practically certain that he’s even less enthusiastic than I am.
“You’re a little different than the pictures I’ve seen in your father’s home. You’re grown up, you’ve become a man.”
I don’t think he expects an answer. In any case, I wouldn’t have given him one.
“If you’d care to follow me.”
I would care to follow him. So I do.
Della Donna leads the way down a hallway lined with soft carpeting. The wallpaper is seemly and bright.
He walks like a servant. I walk like a confident fugitive who is no longer afraid.
“I was told by the senator that you now work in Latin America. It’s certainly commendable to try to make one’s way in the world through one’s own efforts. There aren’t many people who would have had the courage to choose the more daunting path, in your situation.”
We reach the end of the hallway. The man upon whom my father the senator does the honor of bestowing his trust completes another of his important tasks. He pushes the elevator button.
And he goes on talking.
“I imagine you hurried back to Italy when you learned of the terrible fate that was visited upon your uncle. Such a horrifying thing. We are staying here in Milan until the judicial authorities issue a clearance for his burial. If we’d had advance notice, we would certainly have sent a driver to pick you up at the airport.”
I have no idea how much he knows about my personal history, because I don’t know the extent of the trust that has been bestowed upon him. The general logic of the things he says is leaky as hell, but there’s no one on earth quite like a politician’s personal assistant when it comes to believing things he has a vested interest in believing.
We step into the elevator and, in accordance with that odd ritual that seems to govern elevators all over the planet, we ride in complete silence. The walls of the cabin are sheathed in wood, with darker moldings that appear to be briarwood. The back panel of the elevator is a mirror, to greet and welcome the reflections of the passengers.
The elevator stops at the floor requested.
Della Donna steps out into the hallway to show me the way.
I stay in the elevator. I raise a hand to beg his pardon.
“Please excuse me for a moment.”
“Of course.”
I reach into my pocket and pull out a bunch of keys.
I choose the sharpest one.
Then, with utter calm and a steady hand, I carve two phrases into the beautiful glistening wood:
Luca is a faggot.
Mary is a whore.
Anyone who reads it will just have to trust me, because I’ve forgotten the phone numbers.
Della Donna refrains from commenting. I feel sure he’s commenting in his head. He’s free to do so, it doesn’t cost a cent. If we were to lock up all the people who ever dreamed of murdering someone, we’d have to turn the Italian boot into one giant maximum-security prison.
We walk down the hallway until we stop outside a door without a number. That usually means that it’s a suite. The man knocks discreetly and then enters without waiting for an answer. He ushers me in and immediately closes the door, remaining outside, silent and discreet as ever.
My father is standing in the middle of the room.
He’s tall, erect, and solid. I’m looking at what might very well be my own portrait when I reach his age. His dark eyes gaze at me without curiosity, the same curiosity that I fail to feel about him. I ought to be experiencing emotions, a flood of memories, fragments surfacing from the past. I ought to extend my hand to him, or spit in the hand that he extends to me, if he happened to extend his hand. But I feel absolutely nothing. I’ve seen too much blood spilled in the last few days to have any desire to see more. This isn’t a meeting between a father and a son. It’s just a chance encounter between two people who were bound to run into each other sooner or later.
We’re separated by only a few yards, but it’s an unbridgeable gulf.
His tone of voice is the same as ever. He doesn’t ask. He demands to be told.
“Where have you been?”
“Are you trying to tell me that you care?”
I’ve recovered my Sicilian accent and I address him with the old-fashioned formal that uses the voi, just as he so often told me he used to do when speaking to his father. He has no reaction. He steps closer to me. Now he’s only inches away. The slap arrives without warning and it covers the whole side of my face. But I’m not a little boy anymore and I feel no pain.
I straighten my head and at last I smile.
“It’s quite easy to hide from someone who isn’t looking for you.”
Senator Amedeo Sangiorgi maintains his composure. His attitude remains unchanged. His tone remains entirely unruffled. He still demands information.
“Why did you leave?”
“Because I was afraid.”
“Of whom?”
“Of everything and everyone. But especially of you.”
He listens to my words without seeming to take it too hard. As if it were just another of the gratuitous attacks leveled on the floor of the Italian parliament by a member of the opposition. He walks over to a small round table where a bottle of mineral water stands in an ice bucket. He pours himself a glass of water. He drinks it and then carefully sets the chalice back down on the table, as if he weren’t too sure of its structural integrity.
“That begs the next logical question. Why have you come back?”
“I’ve come back to tell you about chaos and chance.”
When he lifts his gaze to meet mine, there’s a question mark in his eyes. But that doesn’t yet rise to the level of curiosity. He’s just wondering whether his son has perhaps lost his mind. He walks over and sits down in the middle of a crimson velvet sofa. He extends both arms and rests them on the back of the sofa.
I continue. It’s my turn now. Now I’m the one who’s demanding information.
“I’ve come back to tell you about the way that those two factors took Nicola Sangiorgi by the hand and transformed him into another person.”
I walk around the room. I happen to notice a painting hanging on the wall, a fairly good imitation of Utrillo’s Moulin de la Galette.
I can feel his eyes boring into the back of my neck.
“A short while after I left, I was holed up in a cheap pensione in Rome. I met a poor devil, a man who worked in the office of vital records in a small town in the province of Perugia. His wife had cancer, and he’d spent every penny of his savings on her treatments. The two of us were born to get along. He needed money, I needed a name. So I found money for him and he found a name for me.”
I turn so that he can see m
y face. But especially so that I can see him. It’s a show I wouldn’t miss for anything in the world.
“He made me a member of the family of a married couple that had just moved to Australia to live with their relatives there. Unfortunately for them, the two poor souls died almost immediately afterward in a plane crash. The chaos and chance I was telling you about were working hand in hand, as you can see for yourself. Just consider the irony of fate. I’d only just come into the world and I was already an orphan. And think of poor Marisa and Alfonso Marcona, summoned to their maker without ever meeting their only child, a son: Francesco.”
It takes him a few seconds to put together first and last name. Then, all at once, he gets it.
The newspaper headlines; the identikit that, he suddenly realizes, matches me perfectly; the police reports about the hunt for me that, in his position of power, he has certainly read.
“Then you’re that…”
I can’t tell if his voice fails him or whether I’ve simply interrupted him.
“Yeah. I’m the guy they set up to get to Bonifaci. Didn’t Carla tell you that, if that’s really her name?”
I give him some time to try to guess how much I know. I’m going to savor the pleasure of letting him realize little by little that I know everything.
“Or did she just vanish without a trace, and without bringing you and your friends what you sent her to get from the villa in Lesmo?”
He leaps to his feet. There are sparks in his eyes. But they’re useless flames, flames that can burn only him.
“My brother’s body is still warm in his casket and you come here to bother me with this paltry nonsense?”
“Your brother’s in his casket because you put him there.”
I use the same tone of voice with which Someone first questioned Cain about what he had done.
For the first time in my life I see a sword pierce the invulnerable armor of Senator Sangiorgi. His voice cracks slightly as he walks over to the telephone and lifts the receiver.
“What are you talking about? Have you lost your mind? I’m going to call the police and have you arrested.”
“What for? The minute I leave your hotel room I’m going to turn myself in.”
I throw the dark brown envelope onto the sofa where he was just sitting.
“But first I wanted to make sure you had this. You’ve earned it.”
His eyes follow the trajectory of the envelope as it sails across the room. He slams the receiver down on its hook, leaving it slightly askew. He walks over to the envelope, his eyes never leaving that paper wrapper perched on the velvet sofa like a worthless jewel.
He sits down, picks up the envelope, and opens it.
Inside it is everything.
His own story and the story of Mattia Sangiorgi.
Photographs of my uncle naked in bed with a girl I’ve never met. Documents that prove both my father and my uncle were collaborating with the Mafia, specifically with Turi Martesano, the most powerful capo in all Sicily. The help that the Mafia boss gave the two brothers, elevating them to the highest political offices. After that, the rigged contracts, the wheeling and dealing, the bribes, the murder of citizens who failed to cooperate, the election fraud.
Documents that represent many years of life, as well as many years of prison.
When he’s done examining the dossier, my father looks up. There’s not a trace of the man who was there until just a moment ago. Which scatters to the winds every trace of the man I used to be.
There’s only one question I can ask.
“Why?”
He looks at me.
Suddenly, memories line up in my mind to claim their due. The beach house in Mondello, the smell of the soil, the blue of the sea, long walks through the streets of Palermo, the dog that used to run to greet me when I came home from school, dinner parties with my parents’ friends, and the way I’d make the rounds of the festive table, saying good night to each of our guests.
My father’s inflexible personality; the people who came to see him in his office; his face, which we saw less and less at home and more and more on the election billboards. My mother’s face, her cautious diplomacy with her husband and her staunch complicity with me. Her funeral, which I missed, because I’d already become Bravo and I cared more about myself than about the woman who had brought me into the world.
Then everything begins to spin and fade. The faces turn into blurred images and then into nothing but patches of color, while the words become indistinct sounds that all take shelter in the question that I ask him again.
“Why?”
My father stands up and goes over to the window and looks out. He’s wearing a white shirt, no tie, a suit vest, and dark trousers. Before, he was tall and erect and he emanated a sense of solidity. Suddenly his clothing looks a little loose on him.
His shoulders sag slightly, and his step is less brisk and determined. Now I’m looking at what could one day have been my own portrait if I hadn’t decided to come here today.
His voice has come back to earth. It’s the voice of a man now.
“When I first went into politics, everything was so clear. There was a point of departure and an ultimate objective and that was the point toward which I would strive, without wavering or making concessions. I had a thousand new projects, a million ideas. Important projects, the kind of thing that could change the course of history and the lives of people everywhere.”
There’s a pause, bowed down under the weight of regret. Or maybe that’s just me, believing he’s still capable of such a feeling.
“But then you’re faced with the first obstacle, the one you can’t overcome without giving up a tiny part of yourself. It’s nothing much, just a minuscule compromise. You tell yourself it’s for a good cause, that it’s just a minor detour on the way to something bigger, for the common good. But a compromise is a compromise. There aren’t big ones or little ones. There’s only the first compromise, which you always accept with the illusion that it’s also the last compromise.”
He breaks off, thinking how deceptive numbers can be.
“Until one day you stop counting them.”
He turns. Now we’re face-to-face. This is the longest conversation we’ve ever had.
“It’s been said that power erodes the soul. It’s not true. What eats away at the soul is the fear of losing power. Once you’ve tasted power, it’s not something you can easily do without. It’s just that much harder when the people who helped you to achieve that power are no longer willing to do without you.”
He walks over to the table and pours himself another glass of water.
“People like Bonifaci gain their strength from the weakness of other human beings.”
He takes a long drink. Then he sets down the chalice, but this time hard.
“That man held us in his grip. He had an enormous and diffuse power, touching people in every party, in the world of finance, and even in the Vatican. He had to be stopped, somehow. And we finally found the way.”
“And you didn’t hesitate to sacrifice your own brother.”
He rubs his face with his hands. He too has to deal with the exhaustion of the past few days.
“Mattia was clearly beginning to crack up. We could no longer rely on him. With the things he knew, he could have done just as much damage as Bonifaci, if he decided to talk. When he was invited to the villa in Lesmo, we saw that this was an opportunity to rid ourselves of two threats with one blow.”
“What about all the people who were murdered? Did you ever think about them?”
He looks at me the way you look at the most obstinate kind of deaf person, the one who refuses to hear.
“You still don’t get it, do you, Nicola? In the face of interests of this size and scope, there’s no one who’s not expendable. No one.”
An image surfaces in my mind. The picture of a man, utterly alone, kidnapped and locked up in a room, sentenced to death by a band of terrorists and by the Gods of Political Ex
pediency.
“Is that true for Aldo Moro, too?”
In his eyes I glimpse the irrevocable certainty of a verdict before it’s uttered. His voice is an icy gust of wind, and I’m surprised not to see a cloud of frozen mist emerge from his mouth.
“Aldo Moro is already a dead man.”
We sit in silence. A pointed, sharp-edged silence, a silence that wounds and draws blood. The time has come to sum it all up, now that hidden thoughts have become words and intentions have become irrevocable acts.
In a flat, toneless voice he asks a question, though he already takes the answer for granted.
“What will you do now?”
“I told you. I’m going to turn myself in. I’m going to hand over to the police the originals of the documents I just showed you. And to make sure there is no chance of a cover-up, this evening the newsrooms of all the major dailies are going to receive a complete copy of their own.”
He nods his head, without a word. Then he goes over to sit on the sofa. He takes his head in his hands and rests his elbows on his knees. What I’m looking at now is nothing but his body. His mind is already long gone. It’s already abandoned the useless luxury of that hotel room.
But there’s still one thing I have to know. To complete the picture, to make sure that nothing I’ve done or am about to do is unjustified. That everything should have its specific point of arrival, because everything had its point of origin.
“I have one last question for you.”
He waits in silence. He’s drained of energy. He has no words, he has nothing.
As I ask the question, I can’t keep my heart from racing.
“When Turi Martesano gave the order to do what they did to me, did you know about it?”
The silence that comes as the only answer to my question is a chilling confession. I take a deep breath, because my lungs need all the air that I can manage to give them. I don’t know how this man feels right now. I can’t imagine what room he’s shut himself into, where he’s taken refuge from the ghosts of the people whose deaths are on his conscience.
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