The Past is a Foreign Country (8 page)

TWO DAYS LATER, Francesco phoned me. I could come round at three o’clock in the afternoon, he said. To make a start.

I’d never been to his home before, had never even tried to
imagine 
what it was like.

It was a dark, oppressive apartment, which smelled stale, shut in. The furniture was old. Not antique, just old and undistinguished.

The place was tidy, but in a strange way. There was something not quite right about it, just below the surface, something
really
not right.

I knew that Francesco lived alone with his mother, but I’d never realised until that afternoon how old she was. An elderly lady with a curt, hostile, resentful manner.

Francesco let me into his room and closed the door. It was quite a large room. The stale smell that lingered in the rest of the apartment was less noticeable here. A child’s desk, covered with books. Books on shelves, books on the floor, even a few books on the bed. A large cardboard box full of Tex Willer and Spiderman comics. Walls bare except for an old poster of Jim Morrison, his face staring out into space. His fate already written in his eyes.

Francesco didn’t say anything and wasn’t even looking at me. He opened a drawer in the wardrobe, took out a pack of French cards, shifted a few books to make space on the desk, indicated a chair for me, and sat down on the other. Only then did he turn to me. He looked at me for a long time, with a strange expression on his face,
as if he didn’t know what to do. For the first time since I’d known him, he seemed vulnerable, and for a moment I felt a real affection and tenderness towards him.

At last he put the cards down on the desk.

‘My father left home when I was thirteen. He was younger than my mother and went off with a woman who was younger than him. Much younger. A pretty commonplace thing, I suppose. Two years later he and his girlfriend both died in a road accident.’

He broke off almost abruptly, went to the window and opened it. Then he took an ashtray from a drawer, sat down and lit a cigarette.

 ‘I never forgave him. I mean: not only for leaving us. I never forgave him for dying before I had a chance to make him pay for going away and leaving me alone. When he died I had a strange feeling about it, a really nasty feeling. I felt terrible grief and at the same time real anger. He’d escaped me. Damn it, he’d escaped me. I didn’t think it in so many words, but that was the feeling. I’d thought so many times of how, as an adult, I’d confront him with what he’d done to me and rub his face in it. I’d be grown up and successful, and he’d be old and maybe desperate to rebuild his relationship with the son he’d abandoned so many years earlier. Too easy now, I’d have said. Too easy now, after you left me alone when I needed you. Too easy to die that way, without paying what you owed.’

He rubbed his face with his hands, moving them up and down vigorously, as if he wanted to hurt himself.

‘Damn it, I really loved the bastard. I felt so alone when he left. Damn it. I always felt alone, after that.’

As he’d started, so he stopped. Abruptly. He picked up the pack of cards, did a few very quick exercises with one hand, and then said we could begin.

Now he looked and sounded like the Francesco I knew.

He took the queen of hearts from the pack, along with the two black tens: clubs and spades. ‘Do you know the three card trick?’

I knew it in the sense that I’d heard of it, but I’d never seen it done in real life.

‘All right, follow me. The queen wins, the ten loses. The queen wins and the ten loses.’

Delicately, he put the three cards down on the table, one next to the other. I could see clearly that the queen was the one on the left.

‘Which one’s the queen?’

I touched the card on the left with my index finger. He told me to turn it over. It was the ten of clubs.

How had he done it? He had put the cards down so slowly, I didn’t see how I could possibly have got it wrong.

‘Do it again,’ I said.

He picked up the queen and one of the tens with his right hand, holding them between his thumb and index finger and between his thumb and middle finger. He picked up the other ten with his left hand, holding it between his thumb and his middle finger.

‘The queen wins, the ten loses. OK?’

I didn’t reply. I was watching his hands to make sure I caught
every
move. Again he put the cards down slowly, and asked me which one was the queen. Again I pointed to the card on the left. He told me to turn it over and again it was a ten.

He repeated the trick six or seven times and I didn’t pick out the queen once. Not even when I just guessed, to escape the illusion of those hands moving so hypnotically and elusively.

It’s hard to explain, to anyone who hasn’t experienced it, the sense of frustration produced by such an apparently simple trick. There are only three cards. The queen is definitely there, and it’s all
happening
right in front of your eyes, at a distance of a few centimetres. And yet there’s no way you can find the queen.

‘The odds for the person betting are very close to zero.
Learning
 this trick is a good way to start. All the basic principles can be grasped immediately.’

He explained how the trick worked, and then he repeated it two or three times, even more slowly. To demonstrate the technique. Even now, now that I knew the trick and
knew
where the queen was, I still pointed to the wrong card.

Then he gave me the three cards and told me to try.

I tried. I tried again and again and again, and he corrected me, explaining how I had to hold the cards, how I had to let go of them, how I had to direct the other person’s eyes away from the queen, and so on.

He was a good teacher, and I was a good pupil.

By the time we stopped, maybe three hours after we’d come into the room, my hands hurt, but I was already able to perform the trick to an acceptable standard.

I felt quite exhilarated, and was dying to show it to someone – maybe my parents when I got home.

Francesco read my mind. ‘I shouldn’t have to say this, but you should never show a trick to anyone until you’ve completely
mastered
it. Doing a trick and getting found out is frustrating but
commonplace
. Doing a trick at the card table and getting found out can be a lot riskier.’

I made a smug gesture with my hand, as if to say that he was telling me something obvious.

No, he didn’t have to say it.

HE HAD BEEN having these dreams since he was a child. They were set in a vague past that may never have existed. In strange but comfortable places, filled with friendly presences. Warmth,
anticipation
, order, wishes, excitement, cozy and brightly-lit rooms, children playing, familiar voices in the distance, serenity, smells of food and cleanliness.

A sense of nostalgia, melancholy but sweet.

They were recurring dreams. There was nothing in them that had actually happened, no recognisable people, no places he knew. And yet – and this was the strange thing – he felt at home in these dreams.

Whenever he had them, it was always a terrible wrench waking up from them.

Very much like the time his mother died.

He wasn’t yet nine. One morning, he had woken up and found the house full of people. His mother wasn’t there. The wife of one of his father’s – the general’s – officers had come for him and taken him to her house.

‘Where’s Mummy?’

The woman had not replied immediately. First, she had looked at him for a long time with a mixture of embarrassment and sorrow. She was a big woman, good-natured and awkward.

‘Your mother isn’t well, sweetheart. She’s in hospital.’

‘Why? What’s happened?’ And as he said the words he felt the 
tears erupting, together with a sense of despair he’d never known until that moment.

‘She’s had an accident. She’s … not well at all.’ Then, not knowing what else to say, she hugged him. She felt soft and smelled just like their maid. A smell little Giorgio would never forget.

His mother had not had an accident.

The previous evening his father had gone out, as he often did. Official dinners, work, other things. His mother almost never went with him. She had put him to bed at the usual time – exactly half past nine – and had given him the usual kiss on the forehead.

Then she had gone to the remotest point in that vast apartment – the lodgings of the commanding general, the biggest of all – and locked herself in the servants’ bathroom with a pillow and a small .22 calibre pistol which his father had given her as a present the year before.

No one had heard the gunshot. It was muffled by the pillow and dispersed through the dark corridors of that gloomy, overlarge apartment.

She had celebrated her thirtieth birthday that evening.

She would be thirty forever.

Lieutenant Giorgio Chiti often thought he would go mad, too. Just like his mother. She had suffered from nerves, his father had told him many years later, in that icy, distant tone of his, a tone devoid of compassion or regret, devoid of anything.

Suffering from nerves meant mad.

And he was a lot like his mother. The same features, the same complexion. There was something slightly feminine in his face, just as there was something slightly masculine in hers as it
appeared on those few blurred photographs and in his ever more faded memories.

He was afraid of going mad.

There were even moments when he was
sure
he would go mad. Just like his mother. He would lose control over his thoughts and actions, just as she had done. Sometimes this idea – madness as an inescapable destiny – became an obsession, an obsession he found hard to bear.

It was at such moments that he would start to draw.

Drawing and painting – along with playing the piano – were the things his mother had done to fill the long, empty days, in those lodgings tucked away behind the barracks. Lodgings that were
always
too clean, with the same shiny floors, the same smell of wax, all of them silent, with no voices to warm them.

Pitiless places.

Giorgio took after his mother in this, too. Ever since he was a
little
boy, he’d had the ability to copy really difficult drawings, and to invent animals that were fantastic and yet incredibly realistic. Half cat and half dove, for example, or half dog and half swallow, or half dragon and half man. What he liked most of all, though, was
drawing
faces. He loved doing portraits from memory. He would see a face, imprint it on his mind and later, sometimes hours or even days later, reconstruct it on paper. That more than anything else – that ability to draw people’s faces from memory – had stayed with him as he grew up. They were always excellent likenesses, and yet subtly different, as if he had somehow grafted his own fears and anxieties onto other people’s faces.

Faces. Mad faces. Unhappy faces. Frozen faces, distant and
stand-offish
like his father’s. Cruel faces.

Remote faces, full of melancholy and regret, staring into the distance.

THE RESULTS OF their trawl through the records had been
disappointing
. There were about thirty men whose records were compatible with the details of the assaults they were investigating. Some were
rapists
, some Peeping Toms, some had molested women in parks. They had checked them all, one by one.

Some were in prison at the time of the assaults, others had
cast-iron
alibis. Some were crippled or old, physically incapable of
committing
that kind of assault.

They had ended up with three men who didn’t have alibis and whose appearance didn’t clash with the shreds of physical
description
provided by the victims.

They had obtained warrants and had searched the men’s homes. They had no real idea what they were looking for. Just something, anything, that they could link to the case. Even if it was just a
newspaper
cutting about the assaults. It didn’t have to be a clue, just something to give the investigation the impetus it badly needed.

They had found nothing, apart from piles of porn magazines and other obscene material.

For a month, they had gone back again and again to the scenes of the assaults, looking for possible witnesses, anyone who had seen anything. Not necessarily the act itself, but a suspicious person
hanging
around earlier, for example, or someone who’d been past there again a little later, or on the following days.

Chiti had read that people like that sometimes liked to go back
to the scene of the crime. It gave them a feeling of power, of being in control, to return to the place where they had committed their assault and go over what had happened in their mind. So he and his men had spent hours and days, showing photographs and talking to shopkeepers, caretakers, security guards, tenants, postmen, beggars.

Nothing.

They were searching for a phantom. A bloody phantom. There came a time – it was a bright, sunny morning in June, almost two months after the last assault, which made it the longest lull since this whole business had started – when Chiti thought they should wind down their inquiries for the moment. Although he didn’t like admitting it to himself, Chiti hoped that everything would end like this, as it had begun. The same way he always hoped his night-time headaches would pass by themselves.

Two days later, the sixth assault took place.

Chiti had left his office and the barracks at dinner time. He told the sentry that he would be back about midnight, and in any case he could always be reached by pager. He had gone for a pizza, as usual, then walked around the city. Alone, as always, and aimlessly.

He had got back about midnight, a quarter of an hour after the 112 call had come in. A couple on their way home from the cinema had seen the girl coming out of an old municipal apartment block, crying. They had called the carabinieri and immediately two patrol cars had arrived on the scene. One had taken the victim to
casualty
, the other had brought the couple to the barracks to take their statements.

The girl was still in casualty when Chiti got back, but they’d almost finished with her and she’d be brought to the barracks very soon.

The couple – a husband and wife, both retired schoolteachers – hadn’t been able to tell them anything remotely useful. They had been on their way home from the cinema when they had heard sobs
coming from a doorway – they had passed it a few moments earlier, the wife said – had looked back and had seen the girl come out.

Had they noticed anyone immediately before that, or
immediately
after? No, they hadn’t noticed anyone. Of course, there’d been cars passing, and they couldn’t rule out the possibility that while they were attending to the girl, someone might have passed on foot. In fact, someone must have passed, the wife said – she was clearly the boss – but they couldn’t say they had
noticed
him, or were able to provide any kind of description.

And that was it.

As they were signing their pointless statement, the girl arrived,
accompanied
by a man of about fifty who looked as if he didn’t quite know what was going on. Her father.

She was short and round, neither pretty nor ugly. Nondescript, Chiti thought, as he asked her to sit down in front of the desk.

God knows the criteria he uses to choose them, he thought while Pellegrini positioned the paper for the statement in the new electronic typewriter – he was the only person who knew how it worked.

‘How are you feeling, signorina?’ Chiti asked, realising as he did so what a stupid question it was.

‘A little better now.’

‘Do you feel up to telling us what happened, what you remember?’

The girl lowered her head and said nothing. Chiti looked around for Marshal Martinelli and made a sign with his eyes in the
direction
of the girl’s father, who was sitting on a small sofa. Martinelli understood. He asked the man if he wouldn’t mind going with him into the next room. Just for a few minutes.

‘I imagine you felt uncomfortable telling us what happened in front of your father.’

The girl nodded but still said nothing.

‘And I realise you may also be embarrassed to talk to all these men. We could find a female psychologist or social worker and have
her sit in, if that’s any help.’ As he said this, he wondered where the hell he was going to find a psychologist or social worker at this hour. But the girl said, no, thanks, there was no need. As long as her father wasn’t there.

‘So would you like to tell us what happened? Take your time, and start from the beginning.’

She had gone out with three girlfriends, as she often did. They didn’t have any boys with them. They had gone to a club in the centre of town for a drink and a chat and at about eleven thirty she and one of the girls had left. They had classes at the university the following day and they didn’t want to stay up late. They had walked part of the way together and then had said goodnight and gone their separate ways.

No, she’d never had any trouble going home at night on her own. No, she hadn’t read anything in the newspapers or seen anything on TV about the other assaults.

When it came to the assault itself, Caterina – that was her name – was obviously vaguer. It was about five minutes, maybe less, since she’d said goodnight to her friend. She was walking at a normal pace. She hadn’t noticed anything or anyone unusual. Suddenly, someone had hit her hard on the back of the head. It was like a punch, or a blow from a blunt instrument. When she’d come to, she was in the entrance hall of an old apartment block. He had made her kneel. There was a bad smell in the place, she remembered, a smell of rubbish, rotting food, cat’s pee. And she remembered the man’s voice. It was calm and metallic. He seemed perfectly in control of himself. He had told her to do things. He had told her to keep her eyes closed and her head down, and not even try to look him in the face. He had told her that if she disobeyed he would kill her with his bare hands, right there. But he said all this in the same calm voice, as if he was doing a job he was used to. And she had obeyed.

Once he’d finished, he had punched her again. Very hard, in the
face. Then he had told her not to make any noise, not to move and to count to three hundred. Then, and only then, she could get up and go. He told her that he wanted to hear her start counting aloud. She had obeyed, and had counted to three hundred, aloud, in that dark, fetid, deserted entrance hall.

No, she couldn’t describe him. She had the impression he was tall, but she couldn’t be any more specific than that.

And she hadn’t seen his face, not even in passing.

Would she at least be able to recognise his voice if she heard it again?

The voice, yes, the girl said. She would never, ever, forget it.

When the girl had finished her statement, Chiti made her sign it, and told her to call them if she remembered anything more about the man, or if she needed anything at all. She nodded at everything Chiti said to her. Mechanically, like a slightly defective clockwork device.

When she left the room, she moved in the same way.