Natsu leaned against the cage and he took her hands through the bars. He squeezed them in his, and said something which luckily I couldn’t hear. I felt a twinge of jealousy, and a simultaneous pang of guilt. They were very different but both hurt equally.
I had to leave the courtroom to overcome the feeling that everyone was looking at my face and could see in it what was happening inside me.
A few minutes later the escort passed me, taking Paolicelli away in handcuffs. He greeted me with a kind of weak smile and raised his fettered hands.
31
The afternoon before the second hearing I went to visit Paolicelli in prison. I told him what would happen the following morning-I would begin with his wife’s testimony and then I would examine him – gave him advice on how to conduct himself in court, and went over the questions I was going to ask him and the answers he should give me.
It didn’t take very long. We finished in less than half an hour.
As I was putting my papers in my briefcase, getting ready to leave, Paolicelli asked me if I didn’t mind staying another ten minutes or so for a chat. Those were his exact words: You couldn’t stay another ten minutes or so for a chat?
I couldn’t help the look of surprise on my face, and obviously he noticed.
“I’m sorry. I know it’s ridiculous, I don’t know what came over me
…”
I interrupted him with an awkward gesture of the hand, as if to tell him he didn’t need to apologize. “It isn’t ridiculous. I know how alone you can feel in prison.”
He looked me in the eyes, then covered his face with his hands for a few seconds and gave an almost harsh sigh, heavy with suffering but also a kind of relief.
“Sometimes I think I’m going mad. I think I’ll never get out of here. I’ll never see my little girl again, my wife will meet someone else and make a new life for herself-”
“I met your daughter. Your wife brought her into the office one evening. She’s really beautiful.”
I don’t know why I said that. To interrupt what he was saying, I guess, and make my guilt more bearable. Or maybe there was another reason. Whatever it was, the words just came out, and I couldn’t control them.
I couldn’t control anything in this situation any more.
He was looking for something to say in reply but couldn’t find it. His lips were tight and he was on the verge of tears. I didn’t look away, as I would have done as a rule. Instead I reached an arm across the table and put my hand on his shoulder. As I did so, I thought about how many times I’d fantasized about getting my hands on him one day.
None of this makes sense, I thought.
“How do you spend your time in here?” I asked him.
He rubbed his eyes and sniffed before replying. “I’m quite lucky. I work in the infirmary, and that helps. Part of the day passes quickly. Then in my free time…”
As he said this, he became aware of the paradox. Free time. He seemed about to make a joke out of it, but then must have thought it wouldn’t be funny or even original. So he just made a tired gesture and continued talking.
“… well, anyway, when I’m not working I try to do a little exercise, you know, press-ups, stretching, that kind of thing, and apart from that I read.”
Right, I thought. That was the only thing missing. A Fascist who reads. Do they have the works of Julius Evola in the prison library? Or maybe highlights from Mein Kampf?
“What do you read?”
“Whatever I can find. Right now I’m reading Nelson Mandela’s autobiography, A Long Road to Freedom. It’s a good title, for someone in my position. Do you like reading, Avvocato?”
I thought of telling him he didn’t have to keep calling me Avvocato. It was a bit absurd, considering – how shall I put it? – everything there was and had been between us. Only he didn’t know what there was and had been, between all of us. He would probably never know.
“Yes, I like it a lot.”
“And what are you reading now?”
I was reading Nothing Happens by Chance. And as I answered his question and told him the title I had the feeling that everything suddenly had a clear, distinct meaning. Or rather, that this clear, distinct meaning had always been there, like Poe’s purloined letter, but I simply hadn’t been capable of grasping it. Because it was too obvious.
His voice dispelled everything before I could find the words to define that meaning and remember it. “Is it a novel?”
“No, it’s an essay by a Jungian psychoanalyst. It’s about chance and coincidence, and the stories we tell ourselves to give meaning to chance and coincidence. It’s a good book, a book about the search for meaning, and about stories.” And then, after a brief pause, I added, “I like stories a lot.”
Why was I saying these things? Why was I telling him that I liked stories? Why was I talking about myself?
We carried on chatting. A bit more about books, then about sport. He would never have guessed I was into boxing, he said, I didn’t really look the type, I didn’t even have a broken nose. He himself played tennis, quite well in fact. A pity there weren’t any courts in prison – that might have been why his backhand wasn’t what it should be. He was more relaxed now and the joke came out quite freely. At that point I remembered that the first time we met he’d told me he’d started smoking again in prison, and yet I’d never seen him light a cigarette.
How come? I asked him. He didn’t want to make me feel uncomfortable, he replied, seeing that I’d quit smoking. I said thanks, but smoke didn’t make me feel uncomfortable any more. Almost never, I thought without saying it. He nodded, but said he’d continue not to smoke when we met. He preferred it that way.
After smoking we got on to music.
“I think music is one of the things I miss the most.”
“Do you mean to listen to or to play?”
He smiled, and shrugged slightly. “No, no. To listen to. I’d have loved to learn an instrument, but I never tried. There are a lot of things I’ve never tried, but there you go. No, I love listening to music. Especially jazz.”
“What kind of jazz?”
“Do you like it too?”
“Fairly. I listen to it a lot, though I’m not sure I always understand it.”
“I like all kinds of jazz, but here in prison what I miss most is some of the classic tracks I used to listen to when I was young.”
You mean when you were a Fascist thug and painted swastikas on walls? Didn’t you know that jazz is black people’s music? How does that fit in with the master race and crap like that?
“My father was a great jazz fan. He had this incredible collection of old records, including some really rare LPs from the Fifties. They’re mine now, and I still have a real turntable to play them on.”
That record collection must have been in one of the rooms I didn’t go into, I thought, and suddenly the smell of the apartment filled my nostrils, and I felt sad.
“Do you have a favourite piece?”
He smiled again, looking into the distance, and nodded. “Yes, I have. ‘On the Sunny Side of the Street’. If I get out of here, one of the first things I’m going to do is listen to a very old radio recording I have of that piece. It was made by Louis Armstrong in the RAI studios in Florence, in 1952, I think. He sings and plays on it. It’s a crackly old recording, but it still sends shivers down my spine.”
He startling softly whistling ‘On the Sunny Side of the Street’, perfectly in tune, and for a few moments forgot about me and everything, filling that shabby, silent room with notes, while the questions ricocheted around my head like billiard balls.
Who the fuck are you? Were you really there when that young man was stabbed to death? And are you still a Fascist? How could you have been a Fascist and liked jazz? How can you like books? Who are you?