Chase Your Shadow (21 page)

But for the most part he was at peace in Gemona, a sanctuary he so craved from the storm of his celebrity life that once he drove four hours through the night after a race meeting in Austria, arriving at the Hotel Wily at three in the morning. In Gemona there was no pressure on him to disguise his insecurities behind elaborate masquerades. Pittini interpreted his stays in her town as an opportunity for him to escape the disruption and play-acting that defined so much of his life. In contrast with nouveau riche Johannesburg or the Milanese beau monde, Gemona was a town whose inhabitants were not impressed by appearances. They had lived through a devastating earthquake, they carried in them the hard-won wisdom of a nation that had seen the rise and fall of mighty empires, they had no time for fops or idlers. Decency, respect and hard work were
the yardsticks by which people were measured there. Pistorius could play that part, too.

‘The Oscar I got to know was the opposite of a prima donna,’ Pittini said. ‘Once he bumped his artificial leg on a door and tore his trousers. After joking, “Imagine how painful this would have been if I had had a real leg,” he asked me if I would get him a needle and thread. He mended the tear himself. The same thing when it came to washing his clothes. He went to the laundry, put his things in the washing machine, waited there for an hour along with other ordinary people from the town and then he folded the clothes neatly himself. He never ironed his clothes, he just hung them up. I never saw him complain about small stuff. He was never demanding with me and always expressed his gratitude for the things I did to help him.’

The people of Gemona saw those qualities in him and loved him for them. They also felt proud to be associated with him, in testimony to which they painted a colorful mural of him in Lycra running uniform and blades on a prominent street corner. At the entrance to the Hotel stood a large poster of him on which he had written a message of thanks.

‘Here he was like another member of the family,’ Luisella Goi, the Hotel Wily’s manager, said, ‘always smiling and gentle and polite, but also very playful. He would hug me and my children. One day in the garden he picked me up and I was dangling in his arms with my feet in the air. He loved being with my one-year-old daughter, loved playing with her and sitting down and spoon-feeding her.’

The Goi family gave him the run of the hotel. He was in and out of the kitchen at all hours, had the contents of the fridge at his disposal, as if he were in his own home. When the kitchen was busy
preparing the industrial quantities of meals the restaurant served, he would sometimes join in, taking special pleasure in the patient task of making the little potato and pasta balls known as
gnocchi
. ‘He said he was so glad we taught him to make
gnocchi
because doing so brought him peace,’ Luisella said.

He had his meals in the big hotel dining room, almost always sitting alone. ‘He was quiet and you could see he did not want to be disturbed,’ said Luisella. ‘Everywhere else he went he was probably bothered all the time, but here people let him be. Maybe it is because we are too busy working all the time or maybe it is because of our ignorance, but we did not treat him in this town as if he were a big celebrity.’ Except for one memorable evening when he arrived back in Gemona after winning a big race and the people in the restaurant stood up and applauded, to which he responded by going from table to table to shake everybody’s hands.

Town residents who spent time with Pistorius spoke warmly of him. A middle-aged single mother called Marisa once gave him a ride in her small car from Venice airport to Gemona. They chatted non-stop during the hour-long journey. ‘When we were approaching Gemona he said, “Look, your sweet town,” and I melted,’ Marisa recalled in halting English. ‘For me he was not a
campione
, he was just a nice young man.
Una persona stupenda
. He liked us here because we treated him like a normal person and he could be himself. I think for a person like him who is accustomed to people trying to use him in different ways it was very calming to be here.’

The fact was, though, that the town did use him. It was the idea of the mayor, Paulo Urbani, to recruit him to promote Gemona’s image. And yet, talking to Urbani, the sense was that while the head drove him in his initial calculations, the relationship between the two men ended up being heartfelt.

In the foyer of the town hall, built in the Venetian manner in 1502, there was a photograph on the wall of Mayor Urbani with the president of Italy, and another one next to it, the same size, with the mayor and Pistorius. In the mayor’s office, on his desk, stood a framed picture of the two of them smiling. This was ten months after he had been charged with the murder of Reeva Steenkamp.

‘It was easy to love him,’ said Urbani, a bearish, handsome man in his forties. ‘He was a simple person who became perfectly adapted to our community. He never complained about anything and he was
molto cortese
. He always jumped to open the door for my wife. It was easy to talk to him and he was curious about everything here, the food, the culture, the football. He spoke of the many places he had been and I was surprised that he traveled alone in the world, with his disability. I found him old in his behavior and was surprised he was so mature for his age.’

Nothing had prepared Urbani or the rest of Pistorius’s friends in Gemona for what happened on the morning of February 14, 2013.

Pittini was the first person in town to hear the news. ‘Peet van Zyl phoned. It was 6.30 in the morning. I asked him why he was calling me so early,’ Pittini said. ‘He told me, “Something’s happened to Oscar.” I thought, a car accident. He died in a crash. “No,” Peet said. “No car accident. He shot Reeva. She’s dead.” I nearly fainted.’

Urbani nearly fainted, too. ‘It was a terrible shock to me and a terrible shock to our community. Some people’s first reaction was that it was a bad joke. We had adopted him as one of us and we could not believe it. It was impossible. That was not the person we knew.’

Urbani followed the bail proceedings closely the next week and on the morning of the day the verdict was delivered he went to the cathedral to pray that Pistorius would be set free. ‘It was painful to see Oscar in court. He was the image of desolation. It made me think of
people who lost family members in the earthquake here. But it was all made worse by the false news, the steroids, and the claims that he had bought a house in Gemona that he had not told the tax authorities about. All lies.’

Urbani stuck by his friend, but some people of his acquaintance, and many more far and wide, did not. For Gemona’s mayor this offered a sad reflection on human nature. ‘The greater the rise, the bigger the idol, and when he makes an error and falls, the greater the monster he has to become. When things go well, everyone cheers and you are a hero; when things go wrong, the
invidiosi
, the envious ones, emerge and now they have the strong voice and they celebrate his failure. I even had some political rivals using him to attack me. How low can you get?’

Urbani had no regrets about having invited him into the Gemona fold. Not politically – he was re-elected with 78 per cent of the vote in May 2014 – and not personally either. He made no apologies for keeping the photographs of Pistorius on display in the town hall.

‘Oscar is a friend and I will support him. I cannot deny the friendship. If the judge says he did it on purpose I cannot deny that either, but there is a principle of loyalty and of gratitude here. We will follow the trial with passion in Gemona. If the judge says he is guilty, I will take down the pictures. We must show respect for the law. But if he is found innocent, it will be a day of joy for him and for our community.’

Pittini said that the mayor’s sentiments expressed the majority view in the town. ‘Many people asked me to send Oscar messages of support after the shooting. They said no one is perfect, everyone can mess up badly in life, we must be forgiving. One woman said to me, “I am a mother and a mother can really understand a mistake,” and she started crying. She had not even met him.’

One person who had met him was Flavio Frigè, a fifty-year-old man with a beard and a ponytail who had lost an arm and a leg in an
industrial accident when he was seventeen and wore prostheses on both amputated limbs.

‘Being disabled myself, it was very important for me that people around the world should see him do those incredible things,’ said Flavio, a lively minded man who showed no sign of resentment or even self-consciouness about his condition. ‘I felt validated by him. For thirty-three years I have battled to make a life for myself, and I think I have done well, but he gave me something more. Oscar made disability visible. He made me proud.’

Flavio met his hero and found him to be, as he had hoped,
un bravo regazzo
, a great guy. He was ‘
una persona molto buona, un ragazzo molto disponibile, gentilissimo
,’ Flavio said.

His first reaction to the news of the shooting was incredulity, he said. ‘I could not believe it. I did not want to. And then, when it sank in, I felt a huge sadness for the
ragazza
, that girl, Reeva. Huge! Then I felt his sorrow and I wanted to see him again and hug him. I still do. The Oscar I knew, it is impossible he would do such a thing. But I will not judge. Only he knows what happened. I only hope he will be found innocent of murder, though for him the punishment is permanent.’

However great the battle had been for Pistorius to conquer his disability and triumph, Flavio said, it was nothing compared to the test he would face now. ‘Losing an arm, a leg, is one thing,’ Flavio said. ‘Losing the woman you love and losing her in such a way . . . so hard. And on top of that, being a famous public figure obliged to take the scorn and the shame of the world . . . No, no. The challenge of the body can be overcome. You fight. You battle. I know it. It can be done. But far, far deeper and more painful is the suffering of the soul. What do you do with that? Nothing. You can never make amends and the sorrow will never go away.’

12

Not one, but all Mankind’s epitome.

JOHN DRYDEN
,
ABSALOM AND ACHITOPHEL

T
HE GENTLENESS
of Gemona magnified Pistorius’s sense of South Africa’s dangers. Sometimes, strolling from the Hotel Wily to the running track, he caught himself worrying about the safety of his relatives back home, in particular his sister Aimée. When they walked the city streets of South Africa, they did so warily, alert to the possibility of criminal assault. In that they were no different from the majority of white people, or the better-off black citizens, who signposted their economic ascent in the years after Mandela came to power by adopting the previously whites-only habit of traveling in the relative safety of their cars distances that in New York, Paris or London people would cover on foot.

The high crime rate in South Africa was a function of its economy and demographics. The large black and white middle class lived surrounded by an ocean of poverty. Twelve million people out of a total population of fifty million provided inviting targets for the malevolent or the desperate among the impoverished majority, generating a pool of willing recruits to the country’s large web of criminal networks.

In Gemona, where incomes are evenly spread and nobody goes
hungry, Pistorius could breathe more easily. The sense of a load being lifted was the common experience of South Africans who traveled to Europe or the US; on returning home they would feel a tightening of the stomach muscles as they braced themselves once again to be on their guard. Alertness was the natural condition of people who lived in South Africa – a country in which the private security industry employed more than 400,000 people, twice the number of police officers; where traffic bulletins on the radio would routinely include news of street crossings where ‘smash-and-grabbers’ were reported to be operating; where youths begging on street corners would carry boards that read ‘I will die of hunger before I steal’, signaling their own respect for the law but reminding potential benefactors of the constant threat of crime. Being away from this mayhem for a prolonged stretch in a place where crime was less prevalent only heightened the anxiety on one’s return.

Pistorius always carried a gun for protection when he was in South Africa, and if he drove fast it was in part because he was obsessed with speed, but also to improve his chances of escape in the event of an attempted car-jacking. On the road he often suspected he was being followed by another vehicle. At night, he would park his car only in a well-lit area. In a restaurant, he would check the exits and entrances on arrival and choose to sit with his back to the wall, in a position where he could scan the room should he need to respond quickly to a hold-up. When he stayed in a hotel and there was a knock at his room door, he would always first ask who it was and then keep the latch on as he opened the door. Peet van Zyl, his agent, said that when Pistorius heard an unexpected bang, such as a car backfiring, he would grab his arm in fright.

All South Africans are vigilant, few more vigilant than Pistorius. The measures people took to protect their homes would rise in
proportion to their incomes. His uncle Arnold had twenty-four-hour sentries at the gate of his fortified castle of a home, as well as a sophisticated alarm system and a corrugated metal screen between the gym and the rest of the house, which he could lower or raise electronically at the press of a button. After apartheid, when people of all races were allowed to move at will in previously all-white residential areas, those with money increasingly took to living in gated communities. In the suburbs of East Pretoria, where Pistorius lived, most people sheltered themselves within compounds surrounded by high walls and razor wire, and patrolled by armed guards in quasi-military vehicles. Built on what had once been bare, dry veldt, they had names like Faerie Glen, or Forest Manor, or Nature’s Valley, as if devised by the marketing departments of real-estate companies specifically to counter the impression of prospective buyers that they would be living inside an army garrison or behind the walls of a prison. But it was a price people thought worth paying, to keep the barbarians outside the gates.