At that point I stood up and asked to be allowed to speak. “Keep it short,” Caldarola admonished me: he was starting to get impatient.
“Just a few words, Your Honour.” I heard myself speaking and my voice was tense. “First of all, we would like to know how counsel for the defence came into possession of these photocopies. Or rather, we would first like to examine these photocopies, since Avvocato Delissanti has not had the courtesy to place them at the disposal of either the public prosecutor or myself. As should have been dictated by the rules of courtesy, even before the rules of procedure.”
Delissanti, who had only just sat down on a chair that barely contained his huge backside, stood up again with surprising agility. His face and neck turned very red. The redness made a strange contrast with the white collar of his shirt, which held his brutal neck like a vice, a neck almost twice the size of mine. He yelled that he would not take lessons in procedure, let alone in courtesy, from anyone. He yelled other things, offensive things I assume, but I didn’t hear them because I too raised my voice, and it didn’t take long for the hearing to be transformed into what’s known as an unholy row.
It sometimes happens. The so-called halls of justice are rarely a place for gentlemanly debates. Not the ones I’ve been in, anyway. And not Caldarola’s courtroom that morning.
The outcome was as bad as it could be. At least for me. The judge said he was forbidding me to speak. I said I would like parity of treatment with counsel for the defence. He cautioned me not to make offensive insinuations and repeated – “for the last time” – that he was forbidding me to speak. I didn’t stop speaking, I didn’t calm down, and I didn’t lower my voice. I knew I was screwing up. But I couldn’t stop. Just like when I was a little child, playing football in the school championship, I’d respond to the stupidest provocations, get into fights, and be regularly sent off.
The outcome was more or less the same as in those football matches. The judge called a five-minute recess. When he came back in, he didn’t look very friendly. To keep to the rules, he consented to Alessandra and myself consulting Dellisanti’s file. It was a copy of the medical records from a private nursing home in the north, where Martina had spent a few weeks.
Both Alessandra and I again objected to their being admitted and to Genchi’s testimony being heard. Caldarola delivered his verbal ruling in his usual monotonous voice, in which there were now hints of malice and threat. The judge, having heard the requests from both parties regarding admission of evidence; having noted that all the evidence requested is admissible and relevant to the case; having noted in particular that the admission as evidence of the plaintiff’s medical and psychiatric records and the hearing of testimony from a psychiatric specialist, as requested by counsel for the defence, are both relevant, with the purpose (as expressly allowed in Article 196 of the Code of Criminal Procedure) of evaluating the statements of the said plaintiff and ascertaining her physical and mental fitness to testify in court; having also noted that the behaviour of the plaintiff’s attorney Avvocato Guerrieri at today’s hearing does not seem exempt from disciplinary censure and must therefore be submitted to assessment by the appropriate authorities; for these reasons: all the evidence requested by the parties is admitted; the beginning of the trial is set for 15 January 2002; a copy of the record of today’s hearing should be sent to the sitting public prosecutor and the Bar Council of Bari so that they may assess, according to their respective expertise, whether there exist grounds for disciplinary action to be taken against Avvocato Guido Guerrieri, member of the Bar Association of Bari.
“You screwed up,” Alessandra whispered as we were leaving the courtroom.
“I know.”
I searched for something to add, but couldn’t find anything. Delissanti was behind us, with his people. They were passing comment, and even though I couldn’t make out the words, there was no doubt about the tone. Smug.
I said goodbye to Alessandra and started walking faster, because I didn’t want to hear them. Anyone watching the scene, and having seen what had happened before, would have thought I was running away.
Sister Claudia, who had been in court the whole time, suddenly appeared by my side, without my noticing where she had come from.
She walked out with me, without asking me any questions. He didn’t hurt me that time. When it was over he told me it was a secret between him and me. I mustn’t tell anyone. If I told anyone, bad things would happen. There was a puppy in the yard. He was a little white mongrel and I’d called him Snoopy. He slept in a box and I used to take him our leftovers to eat, and sometimes a little milk diluted with water. I said he was my dog, even though I knew perfectly well they’d never allow me to take him upstairs to our apartment. He said if I told anyone our secret, the puppy would die. I went back down to the yard, told the other kids I didn’t feel like playing any more, and went and hugged Snoopy. It was only then that I started crying. Of the times after that one, I don’t have such a clear memory. They’re all mixed up together. Always in that room, with the unmade bed, the stink of cigarettes. The other smells. The empty beer bottles on the bedside table, or overturned on the floor. The sounds he made as he was… finishing. The fear that my little sister, who was often in the next room, would come in and see us. More than a year had passed – I remember it well because I was in my first year of high school – when he told me I was getting big, and there were things – other things – I ought to know, and that he ought to teach me. It was a rainy afternoon, and my mother was out. She was still working in the afternoons, when she could, because he was still unemployed and we couldn’t make ends meet otherwise. That time he hurt me. He hurt me a lot. And the pain stayed with me for days. After he’d finished, he told me I was a woman now. As he said it he pinched my cheek, between his index and middle fingers. Like a gesture of tenderness. At that moment, for the first time, it came into my mind that I wanted him to die.
21
Going to the supermarket relaxes me. It’s always been like that, ever since I was a child and my mother and I used to go to the Standa on the Corso Vittorio Emmanuele, go down to the basement, take a trolley, and do the shopping.
I remembered the pleasant sense of cold you felt as you went down the last flight of stairs and walked in between the refrigerated aisles, surrounded by the smell of uncooked meats. The meat in those refrigerated aisles, the vegetables, the cheeses, the plastic: all came together in a single, complex, rather aseptic smell, which for me was the “smell of the Standa”. There weren’t so many supermarkets at that time, and going to the Standa was a bit like going to the funfair in the Fiera del Levante, which was in September, just before the school term started.
At the Standa supermarket there were some products you couldn’t find elsewhere. For example, certain vaguely exotic-looking cheeses in tubs, the names of which I can’t remember. The taste, though, I remember welclass="underline" they tasted of ham, a kind of rustic taste, much more intense than those little triangles I was used to eating, which didn’t taste of anything. There were French biscuits that were like little pastries. They were a luxury item, and you couldn’t eat them like ordinary biscuits, with milk, for example. And there were so many other things we loaded in the trolley that I always wanted to push it, things that now fill my memory, in the grainy, nostalgic colours of a Super-8 home movie.
I thought then that all kids my age liked going to the supermarket.
I still do. There are afternoons when I can’t stand it any more – the clients, the papers, the office, the phone calls to my colleagues – and I feel that I need to get out, to go to a bookshop, or a supermarket. Most of the time it passes, that desire to get out, because there are other clients, other papers, other pain-in-thearse colleagues to talk to on the phone. Sometimes, though, when I really can’t take it any more, I go out. And sometimes I take the car, and drive off for an hour, or even two, to one of those huge hypermarkets on the outskirts of the city.