Dellisanti fell for it and objected. I should have requested this admission at the preliminary hearing, he said, without even standing up. Besides, as far as he could tell, these were the same records which the defence had already produced. The request was therefore superfluous.
“Your Honour, I might say that if these are the same documents already produced by counsel for the defence, I don’t see why there should be any objection. Or perhaps I do see, but we shall look at that at the appropriate moment. Yes, it is true, these are the same documents produced by counsel for the defence. Theirs are a copy and so are ours, taken directly from the medical records of the nursing home. But on our copy there are a few annotations in pen, made by the doctor who treated the plaintiff after her admission to hospital. As I said, the annotations on our copy are in pen. So we could say that our documents are both a copy and an original. One only has to look at our documents and those produced by the defence to realize that theirs are a copy of ours. For reasons that we will explain further in the course of the hearing, but which you, Your Honour, have surely already realized, the admission of our copy is relevant.”
Caldarola couldn’t find any arguments to refuse my request, and those put forward by Delissanti were really insubstantial. So he allowed the admission of the documents and then ordered a ten-minute recess before cross-examination.
26
When Caldarola told Delissanti that he could proceed with the cross-examination, Delissanti replied, without even lifting his head, “Thank you, Your Honour, just a moment.” He was rummaging among his papers, as if searching for a document without which he couldn’t start his questioning.
He was faking it. It was a trick, to make Martina feel tenser, to force her to turn to him and meet his eyes. But she was good. She didn’t move a muscle, didn’t turn towards the defence bench, and in the end, when the silence was starting to be embarrassing, it was Delissanti who gave in. He closed his file, without taking anything out, and began.
You lost the first round, fatso, I thought.
“If I understand correctly, you have regular meetings with a psychiatrist. Is that right, Signorina?” The way he said Signorina, it was clear he meant it as an insult. In other words: a woman who’s pushing middle age and hasn’t yet found a husband.
“We meet every three or four months. It’s a kind of counselling session. And he’s a psychotherapist.”
“Am I correct in saying that since your nervous breakdown and your admission to a psychiatric ward, you have never stopped treatment for your mental disorder?”
I half rose, with my hands on the desk.
“Objection, Your Honour. Put in those terms the question is inadmissible. Its purpose is not to get an answer, not to elicit information from the witness which may help in reaching a decision, but only to obtain an offensive and intimidating effect.”
“Don’t judge counsel’s intentions, Avvocato Guerrieri. Let us hear what the witness has to say. Answer the question, Signorina. Is it true you have never stopped therapy?”
“No, Your Honour, it isn’t true. The therapy itself lasted, as I’ve said before, a year and a half, maybe a little more. During that time, I had two sessions a week with my therapist. Then we reduced it to once a week, then twice a month…”
“Let me rephrase the question, Signorina. Is it correct to say that you have never stopped seeing the psychiatrist, but you simply see him less frequently?”
“If you put it like that-”
“Can you tell me if you have ever stopped seeing the psychiatrist? Yes or no?”
Martina clenched her mouth shut and her lips became very thin. For a moment, I had the absurd feeling that she was going to get up and walk out without saying another word.
“I’ve never stopped seeing the psychotherapist. I see him three or four times a year.”
“When was the last time you paid a visit to your psychiatrist?”
He kept repeating the word psychiatrist. It suggested a stronger, even if implicit, connection with the idea of mental illness. It was a simple trick, and a dirty one, but it made sense from his point of view.
“They aren’t visits, we just meet and talk.”
“You haven’t answered my question.”
“The last time I went to my…”
“Yes.”
“… a week ago.”
“Ah, how fortuitous. Since you insist on calling this person a psychotherapist, and just so that we can clear up any ambiguity: is he a doctor specializing in psychiatry or a psychologist?”
“He’s a doctor.”
“Specializing in psychiatry?”
“Yes.”
“Why do you still see him if, as you say, you’re cured?”
“He considers it advisable for us to meet and check how things are in general-”
“Excuse me for interrupting, but I find this interesting. It’s the psychiatrist himself who considers these occasional meetings necessary?”
“It’s not that he considers them necessary-”
“Excuse me. Did your psychiatrist say to you at a certain point, when he considered that your mental condition had improved: it’s no longer necessary for us to see each other twice a week, but once a week?”
“Yes.”
“And did your psychiatrist say to you at a certain point, for the same reason: it’s no longer necessary for us to see each other once a week, twice a month will be enough?”
“Yes.”
“And did your psychiatrist say to you that you will have to meet for the rest of your life, even if only four times a year?”
“For the rest of my life? What do you mean?”
“So he doesn’t envisage treating you for the rest of your life?”
“Of course not.”
“When you’ve completely overcome your problems, you’ll be able to stop seeing him, is that right?”
Martina finally turned to him, looking like a little girl who wonders why adults are so stupid. She didn’t answer, and he didn’t insist. There was no need. He’d got what he wanted. I’d have liked to smash his face, but he’d been good.
Delissanti paused for a long time, to let the result he had obtained sink in. His face seemed expressionless. But if you looked closely, you caught a hint of something vaguely brutal and obscene.
“Is it true that once, in the course of an argument at which a number of other people – your mutual friends – were present, Professor Scianatico lost his temper and said to you, and I quote, ‘You’re a compulsive liar, you’re unbalanced, you’re unreliable, you’re a danger to yourself and others’?” Delissanti’s tone was different now. He hammered home the words “compulsive liar”, “unbalanced”, “unreliable”, “danger”. Anyone listening with half an ear would have had the impression of a lawyer insulting a witness. Which, when you got down to it, was precisely what Delissanti was doing. An old, cheap trick, designed to provoke the witness into losing his or her cool. Sometimes it works.
I was about to object, but at the last moment I held back. If I objected, I thought, it would be obvious I was afraid, and was thinking Martina wasn’t capable of answering and getting through the cross-examination. So I stayed in my seat and said nothing. In the few seconds that passed between Delissanti’s question and Martina’s answer, I felt the muscles of my legs tensing and my heart beating faster. The signs of a body that’s about to act by instinct and then is stopped by a command from the brain. Just like when you’re about to hit someone and then a flash of reason stops you.
I was certain that Alessandra Mantovani had made the same mental journey. When I turned to her, I saw that she was shifting slightly in her seat, as if a moment earlier she had pushed herself to the edge, ready to stand up and object.
Then Martina answered. “I think so. I think he said that kind of thing to me. More than once.”
“What I want to know is if you remember a specific occasion on which these things were said in the presence of mutual friends. Do you remember?”