Maybe nothing exists without self-contradiction. Peace-keeping missions. Friendly fire. Sacrifice itself is a word that unsettles. It’s a word that asks us questions we aren’t prepared to answer. Still, it’s not to be denigrated, the afterlife of the martyr.
Helen’s hands are shaking as she reads. Can this really be what he was writing for the conference? It isn’t Federico’s style at all. She turns over a couple of pages and reads again.
not all to feel guilty about. I used to think I’d confess to Giacomo that he was jailed in my place, that one word from me, one gesture, and he’d have been released. But I didn’t have the courage. And then, when I did have the courage, I saw that it would deprive him of what he most valued, his notoriety. It would turn him into a victim, even worse, my victim. I never told Helen for the same reason; she always needed an excuse to respect Giacomo. My father knew; he’d never have fought for Giacomo’s pardon otherwise. That’s when my father stopped worshipping me. He thinks it was before, when I was on the other side, but it wasn’t. He respected me then.
And now I’ve told my mother what I intend to do, in a moment’s weakness, because I was scared, and I know she assumes, because what other explanation can there be, that I’m delirious, insane. She thinks it’s the illness talking, not her son. Perhaps it is.
How many secrets are there, she wonders, appalled. Is it true that I need an excuse to respect Giacomo? What did he mean by that? Often she’s felt more respect for Giacomo than for Federico. She’s respected his flair and energy, the largesse of him, seen them as implicit criticism of Federico’s cautious, scrupulous approach to life. She’s seen him as bountiful and Federico as penny-pinching. She’s continued to desire him after her desire for Federico dwindled to almost nothing.
And this talk of illness. What illness?
She turns to another page.
days, I look at Helen as she talks to me and I see her lips moving and she might be laughing or anxious or angry about something. And I want to tell her what I feel but I have no words for it that she’ll understand. Because I don’t trust her anymore, or she doesn’t trust me. I can’t tell which came first. We no longer have the words. We babble to each other.
When you say you trust someone what you’re saying is that you share a language, you have a language in common and can use it, not always or even necessarily to tell the truth, because even within trust there are secrets, but to be with that person, as much to commune as to communicate. Conversely, the loss of trust is the loss of that language you share. You watch the other person speak, you watch the movement of their lips, with love perhaps, with bemusement, with anger or irritation. But who or what that person is or believes or needs is beyond you, mysterious, and finally less than mysterious; without interest. It’s like an aphasia of the soul. After a while you cease to listen to the noise the person makes. But I can’t believe that this should be the case with Helen.
And if it is, how far am I responsible? How far is my silence responsible? Speaking to Martin the other night I almost told him, but something stopped me. Respect for Helen? Perhaps. I’m filled with doubt. Besides, Martin
This is the worst, Helen thinks, this is the worst since he died. It can’t get any worse than now. But to have him speak to her like this and to have no way of saying that she is sorry, and that she doesn’t understand, and that whatever he might have told her she would have heard if she’d known. If she’d only known. This is the worst.
7
Giacomo and Fausto are sitting in the bar of the hotel, while Yvonne sulks in their air-conditioned room on the fifth floor, “Please Do Not Disturb” in five languages, including Arabic and Japanese, dangling from the door. Giacomo hadn’t expected to find her there and suggested she go back to Paris alone, not only because he doesn’t want to leave Rome, or Helen, but to see if she will actually go without being taken. She’s a hopeless traveller, or pretends to be, constantly losing small articles of clothing and needing them to be retrieved, always without the right amount of change in the appropriate currency; although the Euro, bless its otherwise unlovely heart, has put paid to that, at least between Paris and Rome. But she shrugged and pouted and said he only wanted to get rid of her.
He was surprised to get the call from Fausto, but not for long. He’s always respected Fausto and the fact that he knows the respect isn’t mutual has given his own respect for the older man an unselfish, ethical aura, reflecting well on him and giving him a sort of advantage. And he’s grateful for the way Fausto assisted in his defence from the pulpit of more than one newspaper, not to speak of strings he must have pulled behind the scenes. It’s good to see the old man again, Giacomo acknowledges to himself, magnanimous in victory, curious to see what role he might still have. There’s nothing sadder than someone whose power to influence events has been wrested from him, thinks Giacomo, who can only imagine this appalling fate. Of course, there are ways and ways, he knows that. He’s been quoted as saying that, in politics, there are buccaneers and there are bookkeepers. Giacomo, despite his ever more sensible and pondered manner, his handmade shoes and tailored suits, his wasted hours in airport lounges and at meetings, is convinced that he’s still a buccaneer. Fausto, in his own way, has also played a reckless, even dangerous game: partisan, prison, internal exile. And now, sitting opposite Giacomo in the bar of this luxury hotel, he is talking about the moral question, an expression Giacomo has almost forgotten, and Giacomo is trying to concentrate.
“Federico knew he was running risks, of course,” says Fausto, shaking his head. “But we never imagined this, this moral desert.”
“Risks,” repeats Giacomo, lost for a moment.
“It wasn’t a political appointment. But he was expected to do something that mattered, not only by the minister, but by the people who knew him, who knew what he really wanted to do.”
“And the minister pulled one way and Federico pulled the other? That was inevitable, surely? Did you see the point of what he was doing?”
“I mean,” says Fausto stiffly, “that everything he tried to do was in vain. The practice of government in this country is nothing but shameless self-interest.”
Well, yes, thinks Giacomo, but how surprising is that? How new? Your lot managed to stay in opposition for forty years and, as soon as they had the chance to govern, you and a bunch of others got on your ideological high horses and rode off. You pulled out in time. Now you complain about other people’s low moral standards. You never had the chance to be corrupted. You never had anything to sell. And that’s what the practice of government is. And that’s why I’ve always stood outside, deliberately. But he doesn’t say any of this, partly out of pity, but primarily because it’s all been said before. He has the feeling that Fausto, too, is talking for the sake of it, talking until something that actually matters can be slipped in as secondary. Fausto pauses, resting his squat liver-spotted hands on the low table between them, the hands of a worker; although Fausto, to Giacomo’s knowledge, has wielded nothing heavier than a pen since the war. Strong, small hands, like paws, on the gleaming wood.
“I think he was going mad,” says Fausto, almost in a whisper. “These last few months.”
“Yes,” says Giacomo, relieved that the purpose of their conversation has finally been broached. “I think so too.”
“What did he say to you?” says Fausto.
“All kinds of things. We didn’t actually talk, but he sent me emails, text messages. He said we were governed by forces that have nothing to do with politics, that would never be understood. It was madness to think we had control over them in any rational sense.”
Fausto nods, apparently reassured, eager to confide in Giacomo now that his doubts about Federico have been confirmed. “Yes, yes, that’s exactly the sort of thing he said to me. Forces. Dark forces. He called them dark forces. I didn’t know what he meant at first. I thought it was some sort of metaphor for, I don’t know, globalisation, the free market. I never for a moment imagined he thought the forces were real. He looked so ill. These last few months, he’d lost weight. I don’t think he was eating, though Helen didn’t seem to notice. He talked about the need for sacrifice, you know; I don’t know what he meant, some final sacrifice. Isn’t public service sacrifice enough? He couldn’t even move without bodyguards.” Fausto shakes his head, helpless. “I went into his office one day and he was sitting there with a bowl of crystals. He had his hands in it, playing with them. I couldn’t believe my eyes. He looked across at me and said he was absorbing their auras. I was absolutely dumbfounded. ‘Are you sure you’re all right?’ I said, and he started laughing. ‘Don’t worry, Dad,’ he said. ‘I’m not completely mad.’ He pushed the bowl to one side and started talking about something else, something serious. I didn’t know what to make of it. I still don’t.” He crouches forward, stares intensely into Giacomo’s face. “Did he talk about crystals to you?”
“No,” says Giacomo. He picks up his empty coffee cup and uses his spoon to scrape out the dark brown crust of sugar at the bottom. “Didn’t Nero play with crystals?” he says. “Crystals, precious stones? He said it relaxed him. They are believed to have curative powers, aren’t they? Perhaps that’s why Federico was doing it: to relax.”
“Did he mention the conference in these messages he sent?”
“Not really, no.”
“He told me he was working on something that would make everyone sit up. He said it would end the war.”
“You don’t know what?”
Fausto shakes his head in a hopeless, exhausted way. This odd, earnest, loveable little man, thinks Giacomo, who has wasted his whole life on a futile quest for utopia, who still, in his bones, believes in Marx and the Marxist dream though he’s learnt not to say so and prefers to talk of social democracy like everyone else. This decent little man – with his paw-like worker’s hands and his squared-off pugnacious bullock-like build continues to worship the notion of social perfectibility, in spite of Auschwitz and Buchenwald and the gulags and Hungary and Gaza and 9/11 and Madrid, in spite of the fact that the bigger the dream the greater the toll of the dead – continues to worship rationality and safety nets for redundant workers and the movement to stop the war, while the country he’s fought for, and been imprisoned by, and been prepared to die for, goes down the plughole.
And now, as Giacomo watches him run his fingers through his stiff white hair in a sudden intensely upsetting gesture of desperation, so that Giacomo wants to comfort him in some way, Fausto cries out, his voice trembling: “Why did they kill him? Why did they have to kill Federico? Do you know why? It makes no sense.” He looks at Giacomo, eyes wet with tears. “You don’t know, do you? You’d tell me?”
Giacomo shakes his head.
“All I know is that there’s something fishy about this whole business.” With Fausto in front of him, about to weep, he can’t bring himself to say the word
murder
. “It’s the kind of thing that used to go on in the Seventies, in my day, not now. The world’s moved on. And yet someone’s done this here and now, this stupid brutal thing, and it’s in no one’s interests at all: it’s pointless, anachronistic. It doesn’t solve anything.” Giacomo lifts his empty hands, exasperated. “It isn’t even terrorism. Who’s terrorised? Who’s threatened, apart from a handful of civil servants and academics? They’ve simply destroyed a life for some trivial political vendetta. Terrorism’s moved on. It hits the innocent. That’s how things work now. Hasn’t anybody told them?” He pauses. “Don’t ask me who did it. I wish I knew.”
Fausto is too emotional to speak.
“I’m sorry,” says Giacomo, taking pity. He should have kept his mouth shut. “There’s no justification for what’s been done.”
They are both about to stand up when Giacomo reaches across and touches Fausto’s arm.
“Can I ask you a question?” he says. “It’s something that’s been bothering me for years.”
Fausto sits back in the chair.
“Everything you did to get me released from jail, my pardon. I’ve always known you didn’t like me. There was no reason why you should. I know you thought I was a bad influence on Federico. But I didn’t know then how many strings you’d pulled for me. I only found out later, after the pardon came through, when I was in France. I’m grateful, of course,” he says as the old man’s face sets into a look of irritation, almost anger. “But I don’t know why you went to so much trouble.”
“I don’t believe anybody should be jailed for crimes of opinion,” says Fausto stiffly, the stress falling, unflatteringly, on anybody.
Giacomo smiles. “Well, that’s noble. But that isn’t why I was jailed.” He leans forward, abruptly serious, his hand once again on Fausto’s arm. “Don’t you remember? I was charged with conspiracy to murder. Possession of firearms. I was charged with having taken part in a bank raid during which two people died. They said I’d stolen a car that was used in a kneecapping episode. The irony is that none of it was true in material terms. What I mean to say is that I may have done these things, or similar things, on other occasions. But not on those occasions. I don’t know who it was who did it. But it wasn’t me.”
“You didn’t say this at the trial.”
“I didn’t say anything at the trial. I was a political prisoner, remember? None of us did. We were pledged to silence. How annoying we must have been.”
“You were treated unjustly,” insists Fausto, red in the face, inexplicably furious.
Giacomo nods. You aren’t going to tell me, he thinks. He watches the old man leave the hotel, then sits down again and thinks of Helen. He wants to call her, hear her voice, but something tells him to wait. She’ll call him when she needs him.
Yvonne finds Giacomo in the hotel lounge, his feet on the low table in front of him, his shoes kicked off beside them. He is watching television. He has been alone for almost two hours, although she doesn’t know this and would be furious if she were told. He smiles at her and lifts a hand, as if he expects it to be kissed. What he actually intends to do is guide her down into the seat beside him, a gesture so cavalierly inappropriate, given her evident rage, that he lets the hand fall immediately. Taking his feet off the table, he slips on his shoes, then pats a plump little cushion beside his leg. He parodies the face of a child caught out in some mischief, pretending to be contrite, but Yvonne isn’t amused. She stands beside the overstuffed divan, her neat foot tapping the marble, until he speaks.