“Don’t you dare touch me again,” says Helen, as Giulia, her face flushed, calls for the car. Don Giusini has fallen back a few paces, arms crossed, watching the scene. Because it is a scene, thinks Helen. I’m finally making a scene.
“This afternoon,” she calls out to him. “All right? You know where I live?”
Once more, he nods, his eyes fixed on her. She walks away from them all, from her parents-in-law, from the suited men gathering round her, stifling her, and hurries across to the priest, who takes both her hands in his as she holds them out. The cameras edge towards her, but she doesn’t care about them.
“What do you want to tell me?”
The man glances down, to the marble floor of the courtyard, and then up, directly into Helen’s eyes.
“Federico was dying,” he says.
2
Giacomo heads up from Piazza Barberini, but has gone no more than fifty yards when he finds his path blocked. The area outside the American embassy – indeed, the entire width of Via Veneto – has been cordoned off by the military. He will have to find an alternative route to the hotel. Frustrated, he tests the weight of the cordon, lifting the roped post fractionally from the pavement. Two soldiers approach and wave him away with the tips of their machine guns, their eyes invisible beneath the shadow of their helmets. They’re American, he notices, and his first instinct is to ask them what right they have to block a road in the capital of a sovereign state, but he resists.
He looks at the soldiers, fresh-faced, one with acne, the other Hispanic. They’re the age that he and Federico must have been the last time he stood outside the embassy, with thousands of others, in parkas and those stiff Peruvian sweaters that stank of yak, holding hand-written posters and candles and guitars. They’d gathered to protest about US involvement in the first 9/11, when Allende was assassinated, and Victor Jara. How did that last song by Jara go? The one he’d written with his hands already smashed? Giacomo can’t remember a note of it now, although he knew it once by heart.
What he remembers best about the event is being pulled from the crowd and taken to a police van, his arms twisted up behind his back, terrified, thrilled, finally aware
on his own skin
of what it meant to be the victim of fascist brutality. How simple things were then, the words always ready when they were needed. That was the first time Giacomo had been arrested, though not charged, held for a night with others, roughed up and documented, released. Years later, a girlfriend of his, with access to the appropriate offices, had found the immigration file on Mura, Giacomo (born Rome, Italy, October 1953), a bulging folder containing the mug shot the
carabinieri
had taken that morning, his left eye dark and almost closed where he’d been hit. Visa refused. How proud he’d been.
He is still beside the cordon when fifteen motorcycles in a V formation sweep out of the embassy grounds, followed by five Cadillac limousines, each bearing on its hood the American flag, and a further group of motorcycles. And somewhere in the middle of all this screaming horsepower, all this protection and visible immensely vulgar show of power, is the man himself, the ruler of the world.
Giacomo recalls, as he invariably does in these situations, the first time he saw Mitterrand, dwarfed by the ring of men around him, the crème de la crème of exquisitely dressed bodyguards, the President’s feet invisible so that he seemed to be floating on a cushion of air, a portly and trivial presence at the heart of brute force exemplified. All emperors are the same, he thinks, new clothes or not. Thank God he’s never been tempted. How difficult it must have been to be Federico these past few years, tailoring to the court, when he could have been like Giacomo, an irritating presence on the fringe of it all, enjoying the crumbs as they fell from the master’s table, nipping at their ankles and darting off.
He is glad that Fausto called this morning to tell him the conference was cancelled, as he’d expected. But this doesn’t mean he’s ready to leave Rome, leave Helen.
Federico is already cold news, he discovered over coffee in a bar. Today’s front pages are full of the hostages, the Italian embassy in Baghdad attacked by mortar fire, political infighting, the US emperor’s visit. Not much space given to the claims of the old woman, the mother of the murdered driver, but that’s only natural. It’s in no one’s interests, finally, to give her credence. He wants, he realises, to call the woman
widowed
. There’s no word for a woman who’s lost her child, it occurs to him, perhaps because it should never happen, it goes against the natural order. But it happens all the time. The emperors make it happen, and their advisors. Perhaps there was a word for it in Latin, in ancient Rome, he thinks, when it must have been needed all the time.
Federico has been shuffled back to the third or fourth pages or even further. Interestingly, the papers owned by the PM and his family have relegated the story to national news, as though his murder has the status of a mafia killing or kidnapped child. As though it isn’t political at all. These are distinctions most people don’t make by now, thinks Giacomo, unless the murderer is Muslim. Muslims are the only real terrorists these days, driven by ideology, because it is easier to see the threat as external; it makes us feel better about ourselves now that we’ve put history and ideology behind us. It was different in our days: they couldn’t tell the terrorists from their own children. We were their children. And now Helen’s standing beside her husband’s coffin in a room in a ministry, at the heart of the country’s power, and he’s wishing they were both in bed again.
She was strange last night. You’d expect her to be distant, but he’d hoped she’d share it with him: her grief, her need for comfort. He’s never been so attentive to a woman’s demands in his life, he thinks – this wonderful, fragile creature – as though his ear is pressed to the shell of her. This is the first time since they met that they’ve both been single, free. He hasn’t said this to her, it’s too soon for that; but he wonders if she’s thought it too. She must have done. This morning, when she said she was going to the
camera ardente
and then onto wherever else they took her, she’d decided to play the game, he’d looked at her and seen her as she was; alone, without Federico. This is how it’s meant to be, he thought. Everything he might have said, about how unwise it was to let herself be led, he bit back. He wanted her to make her own decisions for once. The whole Helen, finally, for him.
He turns round and heads back to Via del Tritone; the hotel can wait. Walking down the hill, he squints into a place selling postcards and sees a woman in a T-shirt with a line of sweat on her upper lip, and feels attracted to her, always a relief, that automatic response. Like waking up in the morning and checking his pulse, to be sure it isn’t a dream. Still potent, still alive. Five minutes away to his right are Via della Vite, Via Condotti, Via Borgognona, Yvonne’s world, with its stage-lit museum-like windows and bone-thin shop assistants, though presumably this isn’t what they’re called any longer. Consultant
somethings
? He wouldn’t be surprised. Yvonne would know, but he isn’t likely to ask her. She’ll be back with her rake-thin friends in Paris by now, dissecting salad leaves in some overpriced cellar, still bottled water in their glasses, dishing dirt. His step is light. He thinks about calling Helen again, but decides against it. She’ll call him back when she’s ready.
3
She expected to be accompanied by Giulia and Fausto, but a middle-aged man in a pale grey suit takes Helen by the elbow and, with the gentlest pressure, removes her from their company. She experiences a sense of panic – even Giulia would be better than nothing – as he steers her to a waiting lift, letting her go as soon as they are both inside and the doors have smoothly, swiftly closed on the faces of her distant in-laws, left far behind her in the hall. The lift is carpeted, mirrored, an ornate gilded cornice concealing the light. Looking into the mirror to her left, she can see where the man’s hair has been combed across his bald patch and has to suppress a smile. He turns to her, the mechanism of the lift almost soundless so that she has the sense of being suspended in time as much as space, and offers his condolences in an unctuous whisper, his accent southern, his eyes sliding over her and off, as though she is dressed inappropriately. Perhaps she is. But what had the priest meant?
Federico was dying.
She follows the man along a corridor into a room that must be directly above where Giulia and Fausto are waiting; more carpets, flimsy-looking gilded chairs along the wall, a row of long, elaborately draped windows overlooking the street. A group of men is gathered at one end of the room, around a desk at which someone is sitting, concealed from her. She recognises his voice at once, the Milanese accent, the self-satisfaction. He is telling what sounds like a joke.
“–and the Pope are walking along the banks of a river when the Pope drops his Bible in the water. Immediately, I walk on the water and pick the Bible up. Next morning,” – professional pause for effect – “
l’Unità
has the front page headline: ‘Prime Minister can’t swim!’.”
The man who has brought her is waving towards the group in a frantic way, but no one notices him until the joke has been finished and appreciated. It is only when they part and the PM sees her that the laughter dies away. One of the group whispers hurriedly in his ear. He stands up and walks across to her at once, his features flushed with displeasure. It isn’t the first time they’ve met; Helen has been introduced to him on two or three earlier occasions, but he clearly doesn’t remember this, and hasn’t been reminded. He takes her hand in both of his, soft and warm, and squeezes it. He is shorter than she is, though not by much.
“
Le mie condoglianze più sentite
,” he says. She lowers her eyes and nods, thankful that he hasn’t tried to speak to her in his cruise-ship English, as he has done in the past. This close, she can see the matt beige powder on the forehead and cheeks, the sides of the nose toned down. She wants him to let her go, but doesn’t like to pull her hand away.
“I greatly admired your husband,” he continues, in Italian, the corners of his mouth twisted down as though trying not to smirk, to suppress his instinct to flirt. “His work has been of inestimable value.” She knows he’s lying. Federico has told her a hundred times how close he’s come to being removed from his post by the PM’s boys at the ministry. But his lies don’t surprise or shock her; she hasn’t expected the truth. No one has told her the truth, she thinks, not yet. Except, maybe, Don Giusini. But how can that be true?
Federico was dying
. The PM is talking about everything Federico has done for his country, for
our
country, he says, squeezing her hand. And now it is their turn to do what can be done for him, he is saying, to show him that his death has not been in vain. To demonstrate to their enemies that they stand united against those – cowardly, illiberal, terrorist, intolerant of freedom – who would intimidate them.
She’s heard of his charm, even his enemies acknowledge it, albeit in a qualified way, the charm of a salesman, a card-sharp, and for a moment she succumbs to it, like someone who finally allows herself to drown after hours in the water, who welcomes the water into her lungs because it is useless to resist any longer. And then it occurs to her that she has heard this speech before, or speeches to this effect. It is part of his repertoire.
He must have seen some change in her because his smile flickers back, the lips sealed together, the effect vaguely comic despite its intention, which is surely not to amuse but to express, in the midst of grief, an understanding, a solidarity. He is suddenly what Helen’s mother used to call, with contempt, a “ladies’ man”. Ladies’ men also have their repertoires, she thinks. She tugs her hand free and the smile disappears, as if some mechanism has been brought into play. When he shifts his head to one side, to summon one of the other men in the room, one of his band of assistants, she sees the faintest line along the jaw where the make-up comes to an end. “I trust you to do what you can,” he says to her in a stern, admonitory tone, his hard eyes fixed on hers, “your husband’s wishes must be respected. For the good of our beloved Italy. Its international standing. The eyes of the world upon us.” And then, as briskly as he approached her, he turns on his heels and struts away.
A few moments later, in another formal room, she is asked to sit down and is left alone. She has a sudden impulse to laugh, as much with relief as anything. She hasn’t given in. Beloved Italy, indeed. Opening her bag, she takes out her mobile and switches it on. There is no coverage, so she can’t call someone who might share the absurdity of this. Martin would be ideal. But what did Don Giusini mean? As the PM’s face returns to her, so close she can see the powder in the pores, she remembers Federico one evening, preparing their meal, the noise of the television in the background. The best way to destroy the PM and people like him isn’t assassination, he said, his knife in his hand, but humiliation, constant humiliation. One day, I’ll tweak his nose in front of the cameras. Laughing would do it, if enough of us were prepared to laugh. Laughing out loud each time he opens his mouth and utters his platitudes and lies. That’s what he’s most afraid of, to appear ridiculous. But he already does, she said. I don’t understand why everybody can’t see that. I might just do it one day, he’d said, when I’ve nothing to lose. I wish you would, she remembers saying. That’s what
I
should do, she reflects now, with the useless cell phone in her hand, in front of everyone. Tweak his nose, laugh at him to his face. She looks up, drawn by some noise, and sees a closed circuit camera pan round the room. A moment later, a man walks in.
She’s seen him on television, one of the shouting matches that pass for political forums, but can’t remember his name. He is younger than she is, short-haired, almost shorn to the scalp, rat-faced, the kind of man who might just as easily run a market stall as a ministry these days. He doesn’t introduce himself; he seems to assume he’s known to her, with the arrogance these people have.