Temporary Perfections (2 page)

We made it all the way to Piazza Cavour without hitting traffic once. My friend the book-reading cabbie stopped the car, turned off the ignition, and turned around to look at me. I thought he was about to tell me how much I owed him. I reached for my wallet.

“I’m reminded of a Paul Valéry quote.”

“Yes?”

“It goes something like, ‘The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up.’ ”

We sat there for a few seconds, looking at one another. There was something more complex than shyness in the man’s eyes. It was as if he were accustomed to fear, and he had disciplined himself to control that fear, in the knowledge that it would always be with him, waiting. I think my eyes displayed astonishment. I tried to remember if I’d ever read anything by Valéry. I wasn’t sure.

“I thought that line might help you, considering what you just said. About change. I don’t know if other people feel this way, but I like to share the things I read. When I repeat a line that I’ve read, or an idea, or a verse, I sort of feel a little as if I were the author. I love that.”

He said the last few words almost as if he were apologizing. As if he had realized that he might have been a little pushy. I hastened to reassure him.

“Thanks very much. I’ve done the same thing since I was a boy. But I don’t think I could have described it so clearly and so well.”

Before I got out of the car, I shook hands with him. As I
was heading off for my appointment, I knew I would rather have stayed there, talking about books and other things. I was at least an hour early. I knew every detail of the case, and there was no need to go over my papers, so I decided to go for a walk. I crossed the Tiber, making my way over the Ponte Cavour. The river water was greenish yellow, glittering with quicksilver flashes of light, a delight to behold. There weren’t many people around, only the occasional muffled sounds of cars and faint voices—background noises. I had the powerful and wonderfully irrational impression that this almost complete silence had been imposed for my own personal enjoyment. Someone said that moments of happiness take us by surprise and sometimes—often—go completely unnoticed. We only realize that we were happy afterward, which is pretty stupid. As I was walking toward the Ara Pacis, a memory from many years ago came to me.

I was studying for my exams with two friends, shortly before I was to graduate. In fact, the three of us had become friends because we studied together, wrote our theses at the same time, and graduated in the same class. These are things that create a bond, at least for a while, in certain cases. We were actually very different and had little in common, starting with our plans for the future. That is, they had plans for the future, while I didn’t. They had decided to study law because they wanted to become magistrates, without a shadow of a doubt, with relentless determination. I had enrolled to study law because I didn’t know what else to do.

I had mixed feelings about their determination. Part of me looked down on it. I thought my friends had narrow outlooks and predictable aspirations. But another part of me envied them their unambiguous plans, their clear vision of a desirable future. It was something I didn’t really
understand, something I failed to grasp, and which seemed to offer comfort. An antidote to the lurking anxiety that tinged my unfocused vision of the world.

Right after graduating, without even taking a real vacation, they immediately applied themselves seriously to studying for the magistrates exam. I applied myself seriously to wasting time. I spent my days as an intern in a civil law firm, a waste of time, and I fantasized about taking courses at foreign universities, though what kind of courses they might be remained vague. I was considering enrolling in the department of literature. I was pondering the idea of writing a novel that would change both my life and the lives of its large audience of readers, though luckily I never wrote a single page. In other words, I had my feet firmly on the ground and a head filled with clear ideas.

Because of these clear ideas, when the magistrates examination was announced, I decided on the spur of the moment that I would apply to take the test, too. When I told Andrea and Sergio, we shared a moment of odd, slightly embarrassing silence. Then they asked me what on earth I was thinking, since they knew perfectly well that I hadn’t cracked a book since the day I’d received my degree. I told them I planned to study for the three months leading up to the written exam and give it a shot. Maybe, while I studied for that exam, I’d figure out what I wanted to do with my life.

I really did try to study during those few months, secretly cherishing the hope of a stroke of luck, a shortcut, a magical solution. The lazy man’s dream.

Then, one February morning, in the middle of the stupid decade of the 1980s, Andrea Colaianni, Sergio Carofiglio, and Guido Guerrieri set off in Andrea’s father’s old Alfa
Romeo. They headed to Rome to take a battery of written examinations for the position of entry-level magistrate in the Italian judiciary.

I remember bits and pieces of that trip to Rome, an assortment of images—gas stations, an espresso and a cigarette and a piss, half an hour of impressively hard rain high in the Apennines—but the only memory I have of the whole episode is a feeling of lightness, an absence of responsibility. I had studied a little, but I hadn’t really made an investment, not the way my friends had. I had nothing to lose, and if I failed to pass, as was all too likely, no one could call me a failure.

“Why are you doing this, anyway, Guerrieri?” Andrea asked me again as we drove, after turning down the car stereo. We were listening to a mix tape I’d made for the trip; songs like “Have You Ever Seen the Rain?,” “I Don’t Want to Talk About It,” “Love Letters in the Sand,” “Like a Rolling Stone,” and “Time Passages.” When Andrea asked me that question, I believe Billy Joel was playing “Piano Man.”

“I don’t really know. It’s a shot in the dark, a game, whatever. Of course, even if I luck out, I don’t think I’ll see being a magistrate as my mission in life. I don’t have your burning ambition.”

It was the kind of thing that drove Andrea crazy, because it was right on target.

“What the fuck does that mean? What does burning ambition mean? Who has a mission in life? This is the kind of work I want to do. It interests me, and I think I’ll enjoy it.” He stopped and corrected himself immediately, to keep from jinxing himself. “I
would
enjoy it. And it would be a chance to do something useful.”

“Same for me. I think the only way you can change
society, change the world, is from the inside. I believe that if you work as a magistrate—if you do a good job, of course—you can help change the world. Cleanse it of corruption, crime, and rot,” Sergio said.

It was his words that stuck in my memory, and when I think back on them I feel something ambiguous, a mixture of tenderness and horror, at how those naïve aspirations were swallowed whole by the voracious crevasses of life.

I was about to deliver a rebuttal, but then I thought I really had no right. I was an interloper in their dreams. So I shrugged and turned up the sound on the tape deck, just as Billy Joel’s voice faded and the opening guitar riff of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Have You Ever Seen the Rain?” played. Outside, a massive thunderstorm had just ended.

The civil service test involved three written examinations: civil law, criminal law, and administrative law. The order in which the tests were administered was assigned randomly each year.

That year, the first exam was on administrative law. That was a subject I knew absolutely nothing about, and so I withdrew from the civil service exam after three hours, renouncing my secret and irrational hopes. The sliding door that leads to the world of adulthood wasn’t destined to open for me just then, so I went to sit in the waiting room. I would remain in that waiting room for quite some time to come.

There have been times, in the years since, when I’ve wondered what my life would have been like if, by some fluke, I had passed that exam.

I would have left Bari. I might have become a different person, and I might never have returned home. That’s what
happened to Andrea Colaianni, who passed the exam; he moved far away and became a prosecuting magistrate, but in time he was forced to rein in his dreams of changing the world, for real, on his own.

Sergio Carofiglio didn’t pass. He wanted to become a magistrate even more than Colaianni did, if that was possible, but he failed the written exams. He sat for the exams a second time, and then even a third, the maximum number the law allowed. We were no longer close by the time I heard that he had failed the third and final time, but I stopped to think about the devastating feelings of defeat and failure he must have experienced. Then he met a girl whose father was a manufacturer from the Veneto region, got married, and went to live somewhere around Rovigo, where he worked for his father-in-law and drowned his bitterness and broken dreams in the northern fog. Or maybe that’s just how I imagined it; maybe he’s actually rich and happy. Maybe not becoming a magistrate was the best thing that ever happened to him.

I stayed in Rome, after withdrawing from the civil service exam. My room in the
pensione
was paid up for three nights, that is, for the entire period of the written examinations. And so, while my friends were struggling with criminal law and civil law, I enjoyed, to my own surprise, the most wonderful Roman holiday of my life. With nothing I had to do and nowhere I had to be, I strolled for hours, bought half-price books, stretched out comfortably on the park benches in Villa Borghese, read, and even wrote. I wrote horrifying poems that, fortunately, have been lost over the years. On the Spanish Steps, I made friends with two overweight American girls. We went out for pizza together, but I politely declined an invitation to continue the evening
back in their apartment, because I thought I’d glimpsed a conspiratorial glance passing between them. Reckoning that they tipped the scales at one hundred seventy-five to two hundred pounds each, I decided that, as the saying goes, to trust is good, but not to trust is better.

The world was teeming with endless possibilities in that warm and unexpected Roman February, as I teetered between the no-longer of my life as a child and the not-yet of my life as a man. It was a brief, euphoric, temporary moment in time. It was wonderful to stand, poised, in that moment. And only what is temporary can be perfect.

I remembered these things during the course of an hour that, by some strange alchemy, seemed as timeless and sweet as the days I had enjoyed twenty years earlier. I had the irrational, exhilarating sensation that the tape was about to rewind, and that I was about to be offered a new beginning. I felt a shiver, a vibration. It was beautiful.

Then it dawned on me that it was ten o’clock, and I realized that if I didn’t get moving I’d be late. I turned and walked briskly back toward Piazza dei Tribunali.

When you argue before the Court of Cassation, the first thing you do is rent a black robe.

The dress code of Italy’s highest court requires that all lawyers wear a black robe, but—except for lawyers who practice in Rome—almost no one actually owns one. And so you have to rent one, as if you were acting in a play or attending a Carnival masquerade party.

As usual, there was a short line at the robe rental room. I looked around in search of familiar faces, but there was no one I knew. Instead, standing in line ahead of me was a guy who was, to judge from his appearance, the product of repeated, passionate couplings between close blood relatives. His eyebrows were very bushy and jet black. His hair was dyed an unnatural blond with red highlights. He had a jaw that jutted out in front of him, and he was wearing a forest green jacket that looked vaguely Tyrolean in style. I imagined his mug shot in the newspaper under the headline “Police Break Up Ring of Child Molesters,” or proudly posing on a political campaign poster alongside a virulently racist slogan.

I took my rented robe and forced myself to refrain from sniffing it; doing so would have resulted in suffering a queasy sense of disgust for the rest of the morning. As
usual, I mused for a few seconds about how many lawyers had worn it before me and the stories they could tell. Then, also as usual, I told myself to quit indulging in clichés, and I walked toward the court chambers.

My case was one of the first. A mere half hour after the hearing began, it was my turn.

It only took the reporting advocate a few minutes to summarize the history of the case, explaining the reasoning behind the guilty verdict and then the grounds for my appeal.

The defendant was the youngest son of a well-known and respected professional in Bari. At the time of his arrest, nearly eight years earlier, he was twenty-one years old, attending law school without much to show for it. He was much more successful as a cocaine dealer. Anyone in certain circles who occasionally wanted or needed some coke—and sometimes other substances—knew his name and number. As a dealer, he was careful, punctual, and reliable. He made home deliveries, so his wealthy customers weren’t obliged to do anything as vulgar as traveling around the city in search of a drug dealer.

At a certain point, when everyone knew his name and what he was up to, the Carabinieri noticed him, too. They tapped his cell phones and followed him for a few weeks and then, when the time was right, they searched his apartment and garage. It was in the garage that they found almost half a kilo of excellent Venezuelan cocaine. At first, he tried to defend himself by saying that the drugs weren’t his, that everyone else in the building had access to his garage, and that the coke could have belonged to anyone. Then they confronted him with the recordings of the phone calls, and at last he decided, on the advice of his lawyer—me—to avail
himself of his right to remain silent. It was a classic case—any further statements could have been used against him.

After a few months of preventive detention he was placed under house arrest, and a little more than a year after his initial arrest he was released, with the requirement that he remain a resident of the area and show up regularly to sign a register. The trial proceeded at the usual slow pace, and the defense theory, all other chatter aside, was based on a claim that the phone taps were not legitimate evidence. If that objection had been accepted, the prosecution would have had a much weaker case.