13.15 She paused, and held her head alert, as though she were still hearing, in the restaurant, these children’s voices. So what did you do? I asked her. I stood down, she said. I mean, I stopped making the movements, stopped striking up and running through the postures, and just stood in front of him. After a while, when his sobbing had subsided, he opened his eyes and looked at me. He still had the wand in his hand, hanging by the chair’s side; and he passed this to me now. Passed it to you? I asked. Yes, Madison replied: he handed me the wand, the cattle-prod. What did you do with it? I asked. I took it from him, she said, and set it down on the floor some feet away. Then I turned back to face him, to see what he wanted; but his face had gone all vacant. So I moved over to the window. When I looked out of this, I saw a garden, running away beneath it. The villa was built on a hilclass="underline" although we’d gone down one floor from the entrance to get to this room, on the side that I was looking out of now, the far side, the room was two floors above ground level. There was this garden, and there were two children playing in it. They can’t have been much more than five years old. It was their voices I’d been hearing, coming through the window — not through the machine; I’d just assumed that, because the voices had been caught up in the machine’s general noise. Now that this had dwindled to a slow, quiet croak, they carried to me clearly. The children were playing tag or something; sudden shrieks of laughter and excitement leapt from them and ricocheted around the room. I moved a little to the side and lifted the drape, this crinkled curtain. Behind it there was just more wall, as I’d thought. Then I turned back to face the room’s interior. I went up to the chair with segments and appendages, the maybe-dentist’s chair. It had these straps on it, restraining straps I guess; but these were loose, unbuckled and all worn. Then I inspected the machine, she said: the gizmo, this big, clunky apparatus that had held both me and this man in its power for so long. It really was old: it had all these ancient valves and needles set in a worn metallic frame, and knobs with faded numbers round their circumference. The screen was gridded; the speaker’s grille was cross-hatched, set on a diagonal. Nothing was really coming out of the speaker anymore, though — just a kind of sonic dribble. The wave-lines on the screen were still there; but they were placid and immobile. Whatever this thing had been doing, it wasn’t doing it anymore. It had gone all vacant too, just like its operator … Madison seemed to go vacant at this point herself, staring ahead into the restaurant’s dead space. So what did you do? I asked her. I sat down beside him, she said, on the floor, leaning against the armchair’s side. His hand was hanging limp beside my shoulder. I just sat there, and he sat there too, and all the objects in the room just sat there, doing nothing, for a long, long time.
13.16 We sat there too, in silence, Madison and I, in this restaurant. I couldn’t think of anything to say. In the fading afternoon light, waitresses and chefs were eating now, taking late lunch or early supper. Eventually I asked her: How did you get out? Out of where? she asked back. The room, I said: how did you leave the room? I didn’t, she said. Not at first. I fell asleep against his chair. I must have been awake for two whole days by this point, if you don’t count the hour of sleep I’d had back at the school building, before the raid. I was really tired. Did he sleep too? I asked. Who? she asked. The man, I said. Maybe, she said. He sat in the armchair for a long time without moving. His breathing was regular and deep, and so was mine; and then I was asleep. When I woke up, he was gone. The machine had been switched off: no more wave-lines, even flat ones; no more noise at all. And the children’s voices had disappeared too. Just moments after I woke up, another man walked in; perhaps his footsteps coming down the corridor, approaching, were what woke me. This new man was much younger — in his thirties, maybe. He was smartly dressed as well, but his clothes weren’t expensive like the older one’s. This man was friendly: he asked me if I’d rested; and I told him yes, I had; and he said: Well, we’d better get you on your way. He spoke to you in English? I asked Madison. Yes, she replied; good English, with a slight Italian accent. I thought he might have been a consular official — a junior one. They use locals for that, don’t they? she asked. I don’t know, I said; is that what he turned out to be? Who? she asked. This other man, I said. I don’t know, she replied; I never found out. I mean, I never asked. He led me from the room, and through some other corridors and doors, not the ones I’d first come through, and then down some other steps; and suddenly I found myself back in the lobby, the reception. You mean up some steps, I corrected her. No, she insisted: down. This man, she went on, handed my receipt, which he must have been given by the plain-clothes guy, to the receptionist, and I got all my stuff back. And he said: There: all accounted for? — something like that. And I told him: Yes, I think so, or something. I didn’t have my mobile, but that had been left behind at the school. He led me back out through the front door, to the cobbled courtyard; and he said, still in a friendly, helpful voice, that I shouldn’t go back to the centre of town, since police were still rounding up people who looked like protestors. Go this way, he said as we got to the road, pointing to the right; then he turned round and went back to the villa.
13.17 And you? I asked. Me? she asked back. Yes, I answered: what did you do? I walked in the direction he’d suggested, she said. I’d come out into some kind of suburb. It was a nice day: warm and sunny, languid. I remember there were flowers along the roadside, hanging over garden walls. I passed some kind of workshop, where a man was cutting something with a saw; then shops. There was this clothing shop. I went inside and bought some new clothes with my credit card: a shawl, a hat, a skirt. They weren’t particularly good clothes; just the kind of things that middle-aged, suburban women wear. And while I was in the shop, I tried to ask if there was a bus stop or metro station somewhere nearby; and the shop-woman told me ferrovia—railway — and, sure enough, there was a train station just a hundred yards away. One platform took you back to the centre of town; the other one led to Turin. So I took the next train from the second one. And on the train, on a route map in the corridor, I saw a little airport-icon by the stop just before Turin, with Internazionale written next to it; so that’s where I got off, and bought a ticket back to London — again, with my credit card. I remember thinking that it was ironic. What was? I asked. That it was my credit card that saved me after I’d been protesting against capitalism, she said. Oh, I see, I told her; I suppose it was. There was a plane leaving in about five hours’ time, she carried on. I bought a ticket, and sat there for the next five hours, hardly moving, waiting for the plane. And that, Madison concluded, laying her hands, palms-down, across the tabletop and looking at me with a frank but empty gaze, is how I came to be in Torino-Caselle Airport.
13.18 By now, the staff had finished eating. Dusk was coming down, but they hadn’t switched on the restaurant’s lighting yet. Madison sat back in her chair. As her face retreated from me, it grew indistinct. The thing about Turin, she said after a pause, is that it’s where … I know, I said: it’s where the shroud is from. No, Madison told me; I wasn’t thinking of that. I was thinking of that other guy, who went mad. What other guy? I asked. The famous philosopher, she answered. Kierkegaard or Schopenhauer or someone; the one who said that God was dead. Oh, I told her: you mean Nietzsche. Maybe, she said. I’m pretty sure it was Nietzsche, I said. Whoever, she replied; it doesn’t matter: the point is — I found this out later — he saw a horse being beaten in a square in Turin, and he lost it. Can you imagine? After all the questions that he must have grappled with, the complex, universal stuff he’d thought and written about, it was a horse that did his mind in: a dumb horse. Its owner, driver, operator or whatever, she continued, was whipping it; and Kierkegaard or Nietzsche or whoever saw this act of cruelty, and it wacked him out, sent him insane. He never wrote another book. For the first time in the conversation, she looked genuinely disturbed. Of all things, she said: a horse … Her voice had gone all faint. So had her face: darkness was gathering around it, smudging its parameters more and more with each passing minute. We sat in silence for a while, listening to the muffled noise of traffic and the low-level bustle of the staff as they readied the place for the evening sitting.