“There’s so much we need to say to each other.” Giacomo’s voice is urgent now. “That I need to say, I mean. Helen, darling. So much I need to explain.”
“About Yvonne?”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Helen. Yvonne doesn’t matter. About you and me. About Federico.”
8
Giacomo is smoking some distance from Helen, his elbows on a windowsill, blowing the smoke out into the early evening air. He’s forgotten how pleasant the first part of the summer can be in Rome, before the heat sets in. He can just hear Helen on her mobile some yards away. She sounds agitated, one hand holding her hair off her face, the other clutching the phone, her knuckles white. She is standing in a corridor in the hospital, with two young policemen beside her, their patience plainly visible on their faces and in the way their arms are clasped behind their backs, as if to render them defenceless. Giacomo glances at his watch and then at a television suspended from the wall at just above head-height, angled down towards a row of empty seats. He is waiting for the news. There have been flashes throughout the day apparently, but now the programming is back to normal, a quiz show, flashing lights, fabulous prizes. Someone will be in deep shit for this, he thinks, this insensitivity. He looks at Helen and wonders how she is coping. He wishes he could be alone with her. What a cool customer she must seem to everyone. Still elegant, more so than before to be honest, she used to look too frail, too lightweight to be really elegant. The first time he saw her, hovering behind Federico in that dreadful freezing flat they’d found in Turin, he wondered why Federico had been so proud of her. Skinny, almost anaemic, not his type at all. And now, here she is, expensively dressed, even chic. Yvonne could learn a thing or two, although he’d never say this to either of them. He has always loved women with large, generous bodies, by which he means he has loved making love to them, loved fucking them. Yet the ones that stick with him are the others, the Audrey Hepburn types, the clothes-horses. He can’t regret this morning, whatever else might have happened, nor the other times, all the other times, and he doesn’t think she can either, though she’s trying, he’s sure of that. Whatever they had, he thinks, they still have. If only he knew what that was. Perhaps Helen will know, if he has a chance to talk to her. Perhaps everything will be all right.
Helen has asked him to stay until she’s seen the body, or he’d have gone back to the hotel. He’s already had to cope with Yvonne on the mobile, whining that she’s neglected. She wants him beside her all the time, he’s discovered, within touching distance, to stroke, to kiss, to pamper. At first, he thought she saw him as a pet to fondle and distract, which amused him because nothing could be further from the truth. The truth is that, without him, she’s nothing, a washed-up ex-model with tastes she can’t afford to indulge. And now he knows that she also knows this. He knows because he has forced her to admit it, by withdrawing, by not meeting her demands. He has made her cry, which has reduced her value in his eyes. He recognises this, and isn’t proud, but what can he do? And now, it occurs to him, he will have to contact Stefania and tell her what has happened to Federico. She’ll be distraught. The way things stand between them, she’ll probably find a way of blaming him as well.
Helen calls him over. “He’s ready. Whatever that means. I wish to God I was.” She slips her arm through his. “That was Giulia, Federico’s mother,” she says. “They won’t leave his parents alone either.” She flicks open her mobile to turn it off.
“They?”
“Oh, everyone. The papers. The RAI.
The Economist
. Federico always says they pay more attention to him abroad than here.
FT.
What’s that about a prophet outside his own country? Do you know, Giulia’s even had calls from politicians? Not friends, you’d expect that. From people he’s never met. They want to rope him in, all of us in. He must have died for something, after all. Isn’t that what you said in the hotel, about political mileage?” She grips his arm. “Oh, Giacomo,” she says, her voice faltering, “I wish I could understand what’s happening.”
“Don’t worry about anything now,” he says, to comfort her. He’s thinking about the reports of Federico’s death, the delicacy of the phrase the news agency had used to talk about Federico, about “extra-parliamentary activities”, as though all they’d been doing was sticking up posters and spraying slogans on walls. How
exciting
life had been then, whatever else it had been, however shameful and destructive. How strange time is, though, the way it folds in on itself, teases you, makes you feel mortal and immortal all at once. He’s never forgotten that first time in Turin, when he fucked Helen in the kitchen. Talk about teeth and claw, fingernails like a cat, that dangerous edge to her he’s always half-loved, half-feared; nor the other times, not often enough for him, but there was all that bad feeling to get over, that misunderstanding. It took years for Helen to forgive him, or so she said, and then the logistics of it all – marriage, whatever – got in the way. She could have left Federico at any time and come to him, she’d always known that. And, as always, he wonders what stopped her. She’s never really said. He looks at Helen now as she stands beside him, a woman in her early fifties, which used to seem old and no longer does. They have so much life ahead of them, he feels, almost as though Federico’s death has invigorated him; as though he has been spared.
With Giacomo close behind her, Helen allows herself to be led down some stairs into the basement of the hospital, along a corridor lit by humming fluorescent tubes. The walls are the usual green and beige as they segue from the wards of the living to the refrigerated cells of the dead. Giacomo hasn’t been in a morgue for decades and is curious to see how much they’ve changed, if at all. He walks a pace behind her as they enter a room and come to a halt in front of a wall of small square stainless steel doors, like the
loculi
of a cemetery except that, instead of the photograph and dates of birth and death, there is a metal pocket with a slip of paper inside it; half
loculus
, half filing cabinet. The bureaucracy of the dead.
He can’t see her face, and he’s glad of it, as a man in a green coat and white clogs lifts a latch and pulls out the long tray with Federico lying on it, encased in a plastic bag. The man drags back a zip and Giacomo steps forward, as if to protect Helen, although his first instinct is to see the body. For a moment, it crosses his mind that maybe the dead man is not Federico at all, but someone else, some absurd mistake, and he remembers that the same thought passed through Helen’s mind in the hotel room; it feels like hours ago now. He wonders if her disappointment is as acute as his when he sees the face of Federico, drained of colour and oddly youthful, emerge from the bag. Surely
more
acute than his, he corrects himself, they’ve been married for over twenty-five years, they’re still together after all that must have happened, her disappointments and lies, his compromises; she must be desolated by this. He looks at Federico, the hair smoothed back, less of it than when they first met over thirty years ago but still not a trace of grey, the eyes wide open with that cold, almost repellent blue as piercing as ever. He sees, as always in these situations, the total absence of the person, the total obliterating presence of death, as though the physical body really were a sort of receptacle for some living flame, some flickering quenchable soul. Perhaps we’ll all get God one day, before we die. He frowns.
Helen slumps against him. He slips his arm round her waist and hugs her to him, as much for support as anything; she seems to be about to fall. She has been so brave, it can’t last forever. Sooner or later, she is bound to collapse, need help, and he’ll be there. When the man in the green coat starts to tug the zip further down, his gaze casts over to the wall as though ashamed or complicit in some way, and it becomes obvious that Federico is naked – but of course he’ll be naked – she utters a stifled cry and turns towards Giacomo, raising her face until her eyes, as wide and blank as Federico’s, are staring into his.
He cups his hand around the back of her head and guides it into his shoulder. He’d have done anything, he realises, to spare her this. Shaking his head at the man in the green coat, he leads her, almost falling, towards the policemen near the door. Surely there must be someone more senior than these two, he thinks, they look like kids. I used to be scared of men in uniform; now I feel like sending them off to find their mothers. “We’ve seen enough,” he says.
Ten minutes later, they are sitting with the man who seems to have been assigned to them, not much hair, a thin pusillanimous face, oddly shabby for a state official. The magistrate assigned to the case. Giacomo hasn’t caught his name; he’s surprised she doesn’t warrant something higher. He heard the Attorney General had done a PR job at the site of the shooting, but look at this character in front of them. There’s a bleached, northern look to him, confirmed, as he begins to talk, by a trace of accent. Couldn’t they have sent someone with a decent pair of shoes? Perhaps it isn’t the magistrate at all, he thinks; this one smells more like police.
The man is asking Helen questions in a low-voiced way that might be intended to express his sympathy but is having the opposite effect. She wipes her tears from her cheeks with her hand and glances round the room, an office emptied of its normal occupants, in a fretful way. She says to Giacomo, in English, “He’s treating me like an idiot. He seems to think I don’t speak Italian.” Immediately, the man shakes his head. “Not at all, Signora Di Stasi, please forgive me,” he says, also in English, his thin voice rueful, even sad. His English sounds perfect, with an accent it takes Giacomo a moment to place: South African. “You have my deepest sympathy.” To Giacomo’s surprise, Helen’s cheeks flush with embarrassment.
The man continues in English, beginning to ask Helen about her movements that morning, with cautious insistence. Giacomo lights a cigarette and waits, curious, to see if she will tell the truth. Why shouldn’t she? She hasn’t done anything wrong. Because old habits die hard? Helen has told enough lies in the past. She’s lied to Federico, she’s lied to me. And then he thinks, What in God’s name possessed me to accept this invitation? To come back to Rome like this, so publicly? I might as well have put an announcement in the paper. Sitting duck in capital. Pot shots welcome. Because of course this terrible thought has also entered his head. Is this murder directed at me in some way? Is Federico no more than a warning? How many enemies do I still have?
“Is this necessary? I’ve already explained it to your colleagues this morning. Surely someone takes notes?” Helen glances across at Giacomo and makes a gesture that seems, to his astonishment, to be an invitation to kiss her, two slim fingers brushing her mouth, but is actually a request for a cigarette. He lights it for her, alert to what Helen’s interrogator might do with this glimpse of intimacy. Will he have done his homework? This little man in his cheaply cut grey suit who imagines the right questions will turn up the right answers, because there are right answers, there are always right answers; it’s just a matter of knowing where to look. How much will he know, Giacomo wonders, handing her the lit cigarette, how much will he know about the three of them, no, the four of them, because there was always Stefania, good solid Stefania, about the old days in Turin, when politics was passion, the real and only thing. Sexy, as well, though they didn’t realise that at the time. Or maybe they did. Maybe he and Helen did. This time, though, she should know when it suits her to tell the truth. The shabby man’s not to know she hasn’t, of course. Giacomo’s safe enough so far.
She takes a drag, then looks for somewhere to put it down, already at a loss to know what to do with a cigarette she doesn’t want. She stopped before Federico, before Stefania even. Anglo-Saxon health fetishism, he’d thought at the time, yet here he is with Yvonne constantly at his throat and the sense of being hounded by clean air fascists in France of all places. Thank God they still won’t let him into the States, that’s one advantage. The interrogator pushes across the desk an ashtray the size of a dinner plate – Giacomo has never been in an Italian hospital that doesn’t have a plentiful supply of ashtrays – and coughs discreetly, as if to say, under the skin we’re the same, we’re men, we understand each other. Giacomo looks at him with unexpected admiration. It’s true in a way. We must be the same age, give or take a year or two, we probably have more in common than either of us dreams, we know the same things, the same flavours, the same fears, unlike those youngsters in the corridor outside who know nothing. He’s right. We understand each other. Isn’t that what they say? Police and thieves.
Helen stubs out the barely started cigarette, exhales a ribbon of smoke, continues: “I said goodbye to my husband at the car, where we always say goodbye. He drove off – was driven off, I mean – and I went into my local bar, the one on the corner, I don’t know what it’s called, I’ve never looked up to see, and I had a cappuccino and a, no, nothing else. A cappuccino. I spoke to the woman who owns it about something, a few words, I don’t remember what…”
She is talking in a measured, almost off-hand way that would be insulting in any other situation, as though she has been pestered beyond endurance; but here, in this hospital office that is slowly filling up with smoke, it denotes something else, an exhaustion to which she, more than anyone, is entitled. “After that, I went to the American Library, it’s just down the road from where we live. I wanted to work on my thesis. I’m doing another degree, in American literature, to pass the time really. It was my husband’s idea.”
She pauses and looks puzzled, as if she is thinking, Why am I saying all this? What business is it of theirs? Or maybe, What am I doing here? Can any of this be real? The man turns his head, in what looks like a gesture of delicacy, and stares at the wall. Giacomo is impressed again. After a moment, with a tiny shake of her shoulders, Helen goes on: “I stayed there for some time, I didn’t really look at my watch, twenty minutes maybe, half an hour.” She sighs. “I had the start of a headache, I thought a walk might make it better, so I left the library and decided to wander around the centre a little, look at a few shops, and wait for it to go. Walking usually helps. I didn’t need to be at work until twelve, you see…”