It hadn’t been easy to sleep on the overnight train from Paris. Bleary-eyed and stiff, with luggage for a few nights only, we stepped down to the platform and set off towards the ticket barrier. Then you stopped and looked up into an enormous, curved roof of smutted glass and steel. Ahead gleamed the vast advert for the Corriere della sera. On the fat iron pillars of Milan’s railway station, I could make out its date of construction given according to the Fascist calendar: Anno IX. So what would that be? Counting from 1922 … but I hadn’t had time to work it out before we pushed through the grey metal swing barrier, and crossed between the busy kiosks and timetable boards. Descending by way of a steep escalator, we were engulfed in the portentous marble of the central station’s vast booking hall … built in 1931.
Roger, your co-worker, knew the name of a hotel, one which he happened to remember was within walking distance of the courts where your case was to be tried. It was on the Corso Lodi. Nevertheless, despite everything, the Belle Vue House director was reluctant to let you have the time off to go. We had spent a week of your annual leave together in Cornwall and there was no more due for months. Finally, after you flourished the documents from the Italian Embassy under his nose, the director relented and allowed you a few days’ grace.
Nobody was forcing you to attend the trial. So why did you want to return?
‘It’s the proper thing to do,’ you told me.
‘But it’ll be a torture,’ I said. ‘How can you do that to yourself?’
‘I just have to.’
Coming from that vast edifice into a winter morning light, we bought a street map from one of the newsstands in the enormous square. There was a line of taxi drivers touting for custom under the shadows of various skyscrapers with huge neon adverts on their façades. Corso Lodi was somewhere down on our left-hand side, and quite a distance away along the Viale Umbria. Fearing the appeals of the taxi drivers and not understanding the tram or bus systems, I supposed there was nothing else for it.
‘Wouldn’t it be safer just to walk?’
‘Safer than taking a tram in the wrong direction, like we did in Rome,’ you said.
‘We might find a restaurant and get some lunch on our way.’
So we set off briskly down the Viale Andrea Doria in chilly late January air. Walking close to the frontages, you were all but grazing the walls with your shoulder. The street was not crowded, but at intervals groups of men in business suits and leather overcoats or formally dressed women in thick brown furs would come striding towards us. Here were city people with marks of determination, masks slackened in a picture of settled dissatisfaction, or resignation, masks aggressively animated in unintelligible talk, or laughing out loud, their large teeth on show. A few yards further on, up above the people’s heads, an enormous pair of spectacles, an optician’s signboard, was suspended over a shop doorway. Underneath, a man stood still by the wall. Closer, it was clear that his eyes were wide open, but the pale blue irises didn’t move at all, and a watery lightness transfigured the whites. Around his neck he wore a neatly painted label on a chain. It said CIECO in red lettering on a gold enamel ground.
At Piazzale Loreto we had to turn right. Each time anyone came anywhere near us on the street you would convulsively tense. You couldn’t but sense a threat in these people’s very appearance, which was perhaps only the everyday suspiciousness of urban populations; and yet Piazzale Loreto seemed grimly reminiscent of the violent mood in films about the Spanish Civil War. A car pulled up some distance ahead and as its window was wound down, passersby stepped away and hurried on regardless. But, no, not all of them—for now one old lady had ventured towards it and was pointing out landmarks or directions.
On the far side of the Viale Abruzzi, plate-glass windows of what looked like a restaurant opened around one spacious corner. It had Tavola Calda in an elegant cursive script across the curtained panes.
‘Let’s try that one. It means “hot food”, I think, not “cold buffet”.’
‘If you like.’
Seated amongst the tables of lunching businessmen, we had just started guessing what the menu had to offer when the door swung open and an old man came in. He was dressed in the style of the 40s or thereabouts with an outsized black corduroy jacket, white shirt and a soft, loosely knotted bow tie. Extremely thin hair was swept back from his forehead to make separate stripes across an otherwise shiny pate. He had a large waxed moustache—a modest parody of Nietzsche’s. From behind the bar, where he was evidently welcome, the old man produced a jazz guitar with a raised bridge and f-holes in the sound box. Putting the short strap over his head, he supported the instrument high on his broad chest and paunch, a bit like Django Reinhardt, the guitar neck lifted above his left shoulder.
As he sauntered between the tables, this antique musician beautifully picked out and improvised tunes with casually struck combinations of arpeggios and strums. This was surely Santa Lucia. Pursing his lips and wrinkling his forehead expressively as he concentrated on the hands’ techniques, he was playing variations on popular songs. Some of the diners clearly recognized snatches as he moved between them. ‘Dimmi quando, quando, quando …’ A couple were humming and crooning the phrases. They offered the guitarist a small paper note. ‘Nel blu, dipinto di blu, felice di stare lassù …’ Others there had pressed on the old man a handful of coins, which he deftly pocketed with barely a break in the recital.
Our soup arrived. It was made of pasta and beans, and piping hot. Tunes the musician played were inviting the diners to remember moments of the fleeting loves they shared. It must have been their gesturing hands and unintelligible Italian that set us at a distance from the workaday restaurant trade of shoppers and businessmen. You had your head down over the soup bowl, tipping the plate slightly towards yourself as you spooned up the liquid.
At a table not far away a scrawny fellow with bloodshot eyes was receiving a large white envelope from a sweating, overweight man. As the thin man muttered a phrase, the fatter one grew flushed and subservient. The thin man, his mouth set in an expression of aggressive intent, contemptuously snatched the package. He calculated its contents, flicking through the loose ends of notes, then turned it over to check none were folded.
‘Did you see that?’
The Mafioso-like character was standing up and leaving the other to push his plate away and slump back in the chair. The waiter came and started saying something that sounded like ‘carne’, but we almost seemed to disgust him by ordering a cappuccino and asking for the bill.
Paying and leaving the restaurant, we continued along the windy Viale Ascoli Piceno towards Piazzale Lodi. But what could have left such a restless feeling in the heart? What was it that seemed so uninviting in the city? It might have been the bare trees rising, their branches intertwined, along the wide paved-over central reservations. They divided the two carriageways of the avenue, its heavy traffic jostling for space between lines of parked cars on which the dust and grime had settled. More cars were parked around the narrow tree trunks at every angle, and in every piece of possible space. They looked completely abandoned there.
Here were the balconies with parapets, high-sided grey façades of apartments caked in smut to above head height. Traces of a foggy morning remained still on the air. The thick light made it seem like early evening, though it couldn’t have been much later than two in the afternoon. Deep shadows gathered between cars under the trees; others edged out from the angles of pavement and apartment block frontages. Policemen armed with short-barreled automatic machine pistols were standing guard outside the banks. Bits of packaging and newspaper leaves came gusting over the crumbling road surfaces.
Posters for films currently showing were pasted up on fences and patches of wall. Most of them seemed to be for porno cinemas. Next to a bit of graffiti that read ‘Titti ti amo’ was an advert for Ferita d’amore. The blown-up stilled frame showed a half-dressed girl cut off above the knee. You saw that one and instantly turned your head away. Small black squares were sticking across the places where the girl’s nipples would be, and these served to enhance the sense of something tormenting and forbidden: a fully clothed man with slicked-back hair was penetrating her, pushing her against a glass executive boardroom table. The girl was arching her back away from him, her neck curved even further, with a look on the uplifted profile that might have been agony or ecstasy. I glanced at it again, half-ashamed, as we went by, trying vainly to decipher the actress’s inscrutable face.
Not far down on the right from the Piazzale we found the Hotel Lodi, its entrance set into a grimy apartment block façade. The lobby had the air of a shabby, poky-looking place, but Roger the part-time theatrical agent had assured you that its prices were affordable.
‘Una camera per due?’
The woman on the desk, after taking the passports and having the register signed, led us upstairs to a dully painted but unexpectedly spacious and dust-free room. As soon as we were left alone, you said you’d better try and catch up on some of that lost sleep. Later we might try to find a pizza. While you were showering off the twenty-four hours of travelling and preparing yourself for a nap, I opened the yellow canvas gas-mask bag pressed into service for carrying books. It was French Army surplus—a native-speaker assistant at a local grammar school whom Alice was occasionally seeing at university left it in her room one evening, and never returned to retrieve it. Since she didn’t want the poor-looking thing, she passed it on to me. It would serve as a book bag all through my Courtauld years.
Inside the satchel was an envelope containing a few sheets of typed, headed paper. The first of the documents was in Italian. It consisted of the official summons from il Presidente del Tribunale di Milano, with a black official stamp on it dated 28 Nov 1975. A second document explained what it said.
(translation)
WRIT OF SUMMONS
The Chief Judge of the Court of Milan, Italy -- 2nd sect. hereby orders all competent writ-servers to summon, charging all expenses on the Public Treasury, the person mentioned below to appear before the said Court at the hearing of the 28th day of January, 1976, at 9 a.m., to be examined in the criminal proceedings instituted against:
Cesare Moretti, under custody charged with assault (Art. 519, Penal Code) and private violence (Art. 610, Penal Code) Milan, 27/11/75
The Chief Judge: sgd.
The Court Clerk: sgd.
A true abstract. Milan 28/11/75
sgd. -- Court Clerk
Person to be summoned
1) YOUNG, Mary Jane, born Lyme Regis on 8/1/54, residing at Belle Vue House, Paddington, London;
2) ENGLISH, Richard, born on 14/2/52, residing (illegible)
____________________________________
A true translation. Rome, 18/12/75
The Translator
(Renzo Arzeni)
This was how we had found out your assailant was in custody. The squadra volante at Como must have arrested him after noting down wrongly the dates of birth, and, as the translator’s parenthesis indicated, mangling my home address. And what exactly did ‘Private violence’ mean? It was a literal translation of the Italian document’s ‘violenza privata’. The word in the dictionary was ‘stupro’: we were going to attend ‘un processo per stupro’. So would we have to be asked about our private lives?
Beyond the window, dusk was already falling on Corso Lodi. The sky was invisible, cut out by apartment blocks beyond the avenue’s tree-lined central reserve. The leaf-less branches were heaving up and down in a strong wind. A woman, her head turned, leaned into the gusts, and then disappeared beyond the frame. A man stood waiting to cross the road. A car was pulling up, its window wound down, words exchanged; the doorways of shops seemed made for such encounters. Across the street those niches were deserted, but, further, a shop-girl had come out of the small electrical suppliers and, with the aid of a long pole, was lowering its grille for the night. A city was like this: glimpses of streets and bars, people getting off a tram, cars abandoned and vandalized. Some kids were playing five-a-side football beneath the trees, indifferent to the cold and wind; their pitch was dead earth, kicked to bone-hardness by innumerable passersby.
Attached to the translation sheet, a covering note had been stapled:
URGENT
Italian Embassy 14 Three Kings Yard,
London N.1.
London, 2nd January 1976.
218
Dear Madam,
The Italian Ministry of Justice has asked this Embassy to forward to you the enclosed Writ of Summons to appear before the Court of Milan on the 28th January 1976 at 9 a.m. to be examined in the criminal proceedings instituted against Cesare Moretti, who is at present under custody charged with assault and violence.
Should you decide to appear as witness in the penal proceedings (appearance is not compulsory) you will be paid: a) cost 2nd class return rail ticket; b) lire 1.400 (about one pound) for each day of the journey; c) lire 2.500 (about Lst. 1.70) for each day you are required to stay there.
Please acknowledge receipt informing if you intend to appear before said Court.
Yours faithfully,
(G.Titone)
Assist. to Labour and Social Affairs Councillor
Mrs. Young, Mary Jane
Belle Vue House, Paddington,
London W2.
All along the walls of the Corso Lodi were innumerable election posters, pasted across one another like papier mâché, some with the hammer and sickle on them, many in shreds, the promises of yesterday already waste paper. At this distance, overlapping and interrupting each other’s messages, they looked like a street-art collage. Over the top of them, and at eye level everywhere else, many more informal slogans had been daubed and sprayed. There was a mash up of what must be political parties: PCI, PSI, PR, DC, MSI, CGIL, CISL and UIL. The word ‘LOTTA’ was used all over the place. ‘Boia chi molla’ said one. Round about it somebody had painted a row of those little backward-facing swastikas. There were other slogans, both printed and painted, that seemed to be attacking the terrorist groups, the Brigate rosse—the ones who were to kidnap and murder Aldo Moro just a couple of years later.
But now Corso Lodi was dark and still. You were lying fast asleep. Perhaps we would venture out towards the centre when you woke. I glanced down at the papers on my lap to check again the expenses that we could claim after the trial. ‘Mrs. Young, Mary Jane’ … and it suddenly struck me that the girl who lay not far away, evenly breathing now in the low double bed had been addressed by the Italian Government as if she were, in fact, a married woman.
The Tribunale di Milano, unlike the central railway station, was built in the style of 1930s futurist modernism: a blank pale grey stone frontage cut into with tall, narrow slots of windows. We walked the few hundreds of yards back along Corso Lodi past the Porta Romana to where it intersected with the Viale Piave and there it was, on the opposite side of the square, the Palazzo della Giustizia with the Tribunale inside. It was approached by a high and steep flight of steps. Our eyes were obliged to lift skywards as we climbed towards its bleakly imposing façade.
Inside the entrance was a small, green-painted wooden cubicle. After glancing at the summons documents pushed under its glass screen, the custodian explained indifferently, waving his hands, where we were to go. His words emerged too rapidly to catch, and nor did I know how to ask him to say them again—but this time more slowly, please. The custodian’s casual manner didn’t appear at all encouraging. We were meant to be somewhere to the left and on a higher floor; that was what his hands had seemed to say. Stairs led to a balcony around the entrance atrium with a thick marble parapet. The vast interior height of the room was emphasized by occasional appearances of men at a distance in dark suits.
An official-looking person emerged from an office.
‘Dov’è questo … processo, per favore?’
The man shook his head firmly, meaning either that he couldn’t make out the words in my accent, wouldn’t help us anyway, or that he didn’t know. A number of people shrugged similarly before someone raised a finger towards the ceiling.
‘Terzo piano!’
After emerging from the lift, we had only stood there a moment, exchanging guesses, looking confusedly around as if for inspiration, when a man in a black uniform came up and spoke.
‘You English?’ he asked. ‘What you want?’
The man took one glance at the documents and led us down a corridor, past closed doors and towards a blank yellow marble wall. Here the passageway branched off to left and right, widening into an anteroom. It was merely a larger corridor. A small crowd of men and women were gathering there. The man, who must have been an usher, disappeared into an inner room through a polished wooden door.
‘Hope he’s telling them we’ve arrived.’
Placing ourselves by the door, against the wall, we vainly tried to become inconspicuous. There was a commotion beginning at the corner where the corridor widened. Two carabinieri in parade uniforms were escorting a prisoner to trial.
You needed just one look to recognize the man from four months before. He was not wearing handcuffs, but heavy chains with links that hung down from his wrists. He’d grown taller and larger in memory. Coming from his prison cell, between the two guards, badly shaven, Cesare Moretti appeared shrunken, pale, deprived of any dignity.
From the little crowd outside the court, there came a small, poorly dressed woman, walking with a limp towards the defendant being led into the courtroom. She was shouting something at him; the man was interrupting her in that same brittle voice. One of the guards detached himself from the advancing group and attempted to hold her at bay.
Then this must be his wife.
The accused had a wife who was lame. You glanced around at me in a rapid acknowledgement of the fact. Then I remembered the World Cup football. This person might even be some boy’s father, you could picture him kicking the ball to a child on waste ground between apartment blocks by railway lines—like those down which our train had rolled through the outskirts of Milan. The man’s imaginary son was wearing an Inter shirt and trying to kick the ball, but it slithered off his toe at a crazy angle.
All through that autumn, the days shortening from September, while I was starting at the Courtauld, you were working at the Home, Alice throwing herself into teaching practice, all through that autumn, Cesare Moretti had been waiting in custody for this trial.
No sooner had he caught sight of the crowd around the door to the court, than the accused man stopped in his tracks. He had certainly recognized us. There was no doubt about it; there was clear surprise on his face. He suddenly swung round and spoke to someone else standing by him—his lawyer perhaps. They hadn’t expected to have to deal with prosecution witnesses. The advocate was murmuring something to one of the guards, the carabinieri with their silver bomb cap badges. Now all four of them were turning round and disappearing in the direction from which they had come. His wife had been trying to speak with her husband—whose presence plainly upset her. She continued to cry and yell at him. He was telling her to shut up, and had asked the guards to remove him. Then the accused man’s relative found herself alone in that milling crowd once more.
‘Do you think he told her he was innocent?’ you whispered.
‘And his lawyer, for that matter.’
‘Because he didn’t expect to see us?’
‘Maybe it’s so we don’t see him,’ you wondered, and then, to yourself—
‘It was though. It is.’
The accused man’s wife had limped back to where the journalists and advocates stood talking. The sight of her husband had badly unsettled her. She was accosting anyone who’d stay and listen. It must have been her view of the case she was stating, moving from one to another as they listened or rebuffed her. She needed to wear non-matching shoes with different thickness of sole. One of them retained the caliper. She was dressed in an outfit of blue, grey and black, like mourning, clothes that made her seem older than perhaps she was. Her hair was a mousy colour, plenty of salt and pepper in it, and perm’d, perhaps for the occasion, into stiff close waves. The woman might even have been Cesare Moretti’s mother. For a moment she reminded me of Gran back at the National.
Her dark eyes were fixed upon us, and now, to your evident alarm, she was crossing the marble corridor. We were standing a little apart, against the yellow wall, beside the courtroom door. The woman stepped up extremely close to you, cornering you against the doorframe’s edge. A sequence of rapid-flowing words poured from her mouth, directed at your presence there. Though we didn’t understand what she was saying, it wasn’t at all hard to catch her drift.
‘Stop it!’ I tried to shout. ‘Stop it! Get away!’
But the woman would not be stopped. You were shaking with tears, your head lowered to withstand the shrill tirade. There was swearing and insults—Dio, puttana, marito, and, as I pushed myself between you and the woman, the words schifosa, dolore, and perché? perché? There was some incomprehensible wailing, a lament against fortune in the form of two unwanted foreign witnesses. Would she never stop?
Jostled, and receiving no answer to her impassioned questions, the accused man’s wife suddenly turned and hobbled away. Someone behind her must have shouted that she should leave those two alone. Had the presence of these witnesses borne in upon her the possibility that her husband might not have been telling the truth? Who was guilty? Had that girl trapped her man, that girl, the whore, trapped him into whatever really happened?
Now, still staring towards you, she was haranguing her listeners, begging patience of the men and women by the courtroom entrance. You were still wiping your eyes, trying to recompose yourself, when the usher appeared from the courtroom and guided you towards its heavy wooden door. I began to follow, but the official’s hand-gesture plainly indicated that I was to stay outside.
You had been in the courtroom now for really quite some time. The accused man’s wife was still a mere yard or two away, restlessly talking to whoever would pay her any attention—a strained, distraught voice piteously rising and falling. The answers the men were giving seemed to betray a perceptible irritation. Were they finding it burdensome to support the woman in her view of the case, not given time to express an independent opinion? Were they contradicting what she was saying? Studying the movements of their faces and hands, I found it impossible to tell. Who were they discussing now? The men had raised their eyes from the woman’s upturned face and were looking across towards me standing still by the door. At the mere thought of what they might or might not be saying, I found myself starting to redden. Then one of the men walked casually over.
‘Lei è il marito della ragazza qui dentro?’
Not understanding a word he said, I shrugged my shoulders and showed him the palms of my hands.
‘Io non comprendo.’
‘You are the—married with the—girl there inside?’
The man hadn’t asked it aggressively at all. No, rather he was asking me an all-too-pertinent question about what relation there might be between us. But I would hardly have known how to explain in English, so shook my head in a vain attempt to deflect the man’s curiosity.
‘Un amico.’
The man appeared surprised.
‘Ah, il fidanzato?’
I made no reply.
‘Fiancé?’ he asked, pronouncing the word accurately in French.
I hesitated, racking my brains for what else I could say, then nodded.
‘Ah sì, il fidanzato della ragazza,’ the man said, and seemed satisfied.
Had you ever dreamed of such a thing? Five years before, not long after we started sleeping together, you had missed a cycle.
‘What if I’m pregnant?’ you asked me below the blue Alhambra.
‘Of course if you are, we can always get married.’
And we had continued on into the Italia café, for a plate of their homemade minestrone, you explaining how soon you could be sure.
Not that it made me your fiancé, of course, but what else could be said that wouldn’t require fluent Italian and far more perspective, far more perspective altogether? Now the journalist or advocate had turned and was heading towards the small conclave of his colleagues, attended by the wife of the accused.
‘Il fidanzato della ragazza,’ he repeated.
There were nods and smiles of comprehension, even a few sympathetic glances in my direction, now the man sounded as though he were arguing with the distraught woman. Perhaps he was telling her that she should think what it must be like for him, that young English boy over there, to have a wife-to-be violated by a stranger. The woman grew mournfully agitated at what the man appeared to have said. It must have been some contrary viewpoint he was putting to the woman. My convenient lie had clearly contributed to her distress. A helpless anger suddenly overwhelmed me—still standing there, eyes half-focused on a patch of the yellow marble wall. Then the courtroom door opened and there you reappeared with the usher following closely behind you.
Hardly had I managed to exchange glances with my ‘fidanzata’ than the court official was gesturing towards the room out of which you had emerged: ‘Di qua.’
I entered a large high-ceilinged room, panelled in reddish-brown wood. To the left was a group of judges seated in a row behind a raised dais and bench. Before this judicial panel, a lower stage stretched into the floor. On it, two wooden chairs were placed. There were rows of benches for the public, down on the lower level. The accused man sat forward on his seat in the front row, a guard on one side and his lawyer on the other. I was invited towards one of the isolated chairs before the bench.
Above the tribunal of judges, at present in conversation with a woman leaning forward at the bench, a large mural dominated the room. It must have been one of those commissions the fascist authorities went in for to give the impression they were creating a new renaissance in Italian culture. They were to make Mussolini into the semblance of a condottiero art patron—borrowing some of the caché that had accrued to the Mexican muralists and the Depression’s WPA projects into the bargain. It was painted mainly in reddish browns, far too like that reddish clay earth, and managing to appear both shrill and muddy. The subject of the painting was Cain and Abel, its composition clearly indebted to Goya’s picture of the two men fighting with cudgels; here the semi-nude figures with exaggerated muscles were struggling in a murky sunset. The mural had been painted in an extremely free hand. The outlines of the combatants, though drawn with mannerist distortions, were blurring into each other and into the background, an indistinct rocky landscape where the two dusty bodies grappled on forever.
The woman descended from the bench and occupied the vacant chair. She couldn’t have been much older than twenty-five, but seemed so, in professional woman’s jacket and skirt with a white silk blouse. Her freshly washed hair was drawn tightly back behind her head, and held in place with a discreet navy blue ribbon tied into a bow. She had a thin transparent plastic envelope on her lap. The judge in the middle uttered something to the woman. So she must be the court’s English interpreter.
‘Are you English, Richard?’
‘Yes.’
‘Were you born on 13 March 1952?’
‘No,’ I said, not thinking that it mattered much. ‘It was the 18th of February, 1953.’
The woman seemed slightly flustered by these trivial differences. She was relaying them without question to the panel of judges.
‘Were you with Miss Young, Mary Jane, on Friday the 19th of September 1975?’
‘Yes, I was.’
‘And did you witness what happened early on the morning of the day following?’
‘Yes, I did.’
‘Where did the … what happened this night … occur?’
‘In a car.’
Again the woman appeared uncomfortable, with a slight flush about her features. She was lowering her eyes to the documents placed neatly on her lap.
‘Will you please tell this tribunal what car it was?’
‘Ford Escort—dirty beige.’
Then some more unintelligible words passed between the translator and the panel of judges.
‘Where were you in the car while this happens?’
Now the translator was blushing as she asked the question.
‘Lying on the back seat.’
‘Please tells us all you saw.’
‘It was raining, and he had a small gun, a black automatic pistol, and he was holding it in his right hand, pointing the muzzle over the driving seat towards me. He’d climbed across onto the passenger seat, and that’s where he did it—while I was lying in the back—and when I moved he waved the gun and shouted at me not to …’
The translator was taking notes, she didn’t look up while I spoke, or so much as glance at me when turning towards the judicial bench and reproducing in Italian, I supposed, exactly what had been said. The young woman was having difficulties, and kept stopping as if in search of a word, or ruffled for some other reason, then would glance down at her papers, cough and start again. When she finished, the president requested her to ask another question.
‘Can you see the man who menaced you and committed that crime here in this room?’
He was sitting there: his roughly-shaven oblong face, hair in thick strands swept back from the hairline, his small mouth turned up at the edges, the dimple in his chin, a fixed, mask-like smile on his narrow lips, a smile without a history.
‘Yes. Yes, I can.’
The accused man’s lawyer stood up and spoke to the president of the court. The president, in turn, said a phrase to the young translator.
‘Did you … from this man … receive at all any payment?’
We’re standing in a doorway. It’s the mechanics’ office on that petrol station’s puddle-covered forecourt. The man wants to know if we have any money to pay for the lift to Como. Perhaps he means to rob us. For safety, for safety one of us has said that we don’t. It’ll be needed for the train tickets to Paris and the Channel ferry anyway. Then come the words exchanged at gunpoint in a car parked on the hard shoulder, pitch dark outside, windscreen wiper blades beating back and forth, sluicing the rain off its flooded glass.
‘Amore, Amore!’
‘A Como, per favore!’ you urge.
‘Amore prima, amore!’ He is waving his gun. ‘Como dopo …’
‘He’s going to kill us,’ I hear you whisper. Then to the man you insist—
‘Como prima, per favore, prima Como.’
‘Amore, amore,’ he repeats.
‘Shall I try to get the gun?’
‘Tu: zitto! … Silenzio!’
He’s snatching at your blouse. It has started to tear at the buttons. There’s a brooch pinned above your breasts. I begin to edge towards the nearside door.
‘Sta giù! Giù!’ he yells. ‘Sta giù!’
The man is shaking his automatic pistol in the dark, jabbing downwards with it, meaning lie down on the back seat floor and shut up.
‘Apri! Subito!’
He is having trouble with the brooch’s fiddly fastening.
‘Don’t do a thing,’ you whisper to me. ‘I think it’s our best chance.’
The man named Cesare Moretti is unzipping your jeans, lowering himself on to you now.
‘He could kill us after … Just be ready to run for it.’
The man’s grunting now as again I try to slide as silently as possible towards the car door handle, but once again he shouts: ‘Non muovere! Tu, silenzio!’
Tensed and passive, you let the car roof float above you, concentrating on his tie. You’re wondering could you use it to strangle him with.
I’m thinking: this is how we die. We aren’t going to grow old. Suddenly it seems such a pity. I hadn’t expected life to be this short. Yes, it’s a shame. In the back, lying down, I’m praying to the God that half an hour before I would have argued wasn’t there. Oh Jesus, just to do the best thing. Help us to get out of this alive. Now the man is straining to finish. Will there be a momentary chance to get away? He’s panting, panting, and he comes.
Can he really be intending to drive us into Como?
‘No,’ you say, you don’t want to now. Cesare Moretti’s hand with the pistol in it has dropped back down to his side as he clambers off you. I open the door and step out into the downpour, keeping as low as possible; but the man simply gets out too, leaving his pistol on the dashboard, and lifts up the car boot lid. I grab the rucksacks and step away into darkness, onto the reddish muddy earth of the road’s verge. There are deep cracks in it from the long summer heat. They’re beginning to soften, to melt at the edges. Pulling your clothes around yourself, you climb out as quickly from the car, and now this man, to our astonishment, our relief, has gone back round to the left hand side, ducked in, and is driving away. It’s then we see the number-plate.
‘Remember that,’ you call out, standing in the soaking uncut verge, watching as his taillights blur into the stormy distance. But now the car’s turned, its headlight arcing, and driven back down the wrong side of the carriageway. You throw yourself into the soaking wet grass of the shallow embankment falling away from this side of the road.
‘He’s coming back to kill us!’ you’re shouting, droplets glistening on your face. Saying nothing as we lay there, the smell of long dry foliage and moisture in my nostrils, my eyes turn towards you lying prone beside me, feeling so close to death, sensing us alive there in the rain.
When the headlights disappear and there’s no more engine noise, we begin to run down the hard shoulder into the dark. The rain pummelling our faces has cooled the September air. At the first car to appear, we step out into the beams waving our arms to make the driver stop. But it continues through the downpour as if we aren’t even there. This is obviously far too dangerous. We should try to find an emergency phone. And I’m sure I pressed the button for police, but there it is, pulling up beside us, a breakdown truck with a crane.
So now I’m here—it dawned on me as I sat there before the young woman interpreter—to corroborate your innocence? Moretti’s defence is that we made some kind of financial arrangement? That what had happened amounted to a payment in kind?
‘No, we didn’t,’ I said.
‘You paid no money to this man?’ the translator was asking.
‘No. We did not.’ More conversation ensued between the judges on the bench. At last, the English translator, evidently relieved, turned back to me and said,
‘Are there any other details you remember and want to tell this court?’
‘No,’ I said, my mind a blank, ‘I don’t think so.’
The interpreter conveyed this response to the judges and reported their reply.
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘You are finished.’
But I didn’t appear to understand.
‘You are finished,’ she repeated.
Beckoned to by the interpreter, the usher stepped forward and made to lead me back towards the courtroom door.
‘Thank you,’ I said, in the direction of the judges, stepping outside with barely a glance at the curious smile of the man sitting there in his chains.
Outside, the usher explained we were welcome to stay until the trial was over.
‘You wait the verdict?’
‘No,’ you were saying, ‘we have to get back to England.’
Here once more were the lawyers, the advocates or journalists, and staring hard was the accused man’s wife, but dejected-looking now, as if her anger and frustration had spent itself in those tirades. She stood silent in her helplessness as we were escorted away. And then there came over me the sensation of a vast burden lifting while we were being led from that corridor outside the courtroom, out of the lives of Moretti and his wife; it seemed that the woman with the orthopedic shoe might even have envied us. There we were, free to go, relieved from the consequences of whatever it was her husband did or didn’t do on the night he came home in the small hours of that distant September night.
‘You have expenses?’ the court usher asked.
‘Yes,’ you said, ‘we need them for the train back.’
The usher took a look at the summons documents, then led us along another series of corridors and down in a lift to the Tribunale di Milano’s accounting section. At the grille we received the various travel expenses and daily allowances in Lira. As you handed me the money for safekeeping, an unwanted thought struck home: the judges had asked if we received any payment, and no, we hadn’t … or at least not until now. You were doubtless thinking no such thing, and, of course, that thought, and all the others, remained entirely unexpressed.
The usher was guiding us back up to the main atrium and the entrance doors.
‘Buon viaggio!’ he said, and vanished back into the Palazzo della Giustizia, as we descended its precipitous steps down into the chilly air.
Not far from Piazza Duomo and Milan’s famous porcupine cathedral, we re-circulated a part of the expenses on a lunch of something or other.
‘Did they ask you if we were given any payment?’
‘Presumably he couldn’t claim he didn’t do it once we appeared,’ you said, ‘so he changed his defence to a payment in kind—or something like that.’
‘Perhaps he went away to change his plea … or his line of defence.’
‘Maybe,’ you said. ‘But I don’t really want to talk about it anymore.’
You didn’t want to talk about it. There and then, in the hope that time would do its work, we enveloped ourselves in the silence of what was meant to be forgetting—like the flash of white sails on the Ijselmeer, that stripe of light on Solent Water, our September in the rain and trial at the Court of Milan were locked inside as if forever. I couldn’t take responsibility for the damage caused, for there was no one there to acknowledge the gesture; I couldn’t distinguish that gesture from being actually responsible for the hurt, when all the time trying to act as if nothing had happened. The flashes of memory and inexplicable blanks tangled up inside me, like the thin brown tape snagging out of a snarled cassette. They formed a knot of shame and guilt for something that, I now begin to see, had been done to me too. They left me, as it seemed back then, with nothing more to say.
Even now, trying to look back, to recall what happened after we went down the steps from the court building, it’s still almost impossible to conjure up anything else of our brief visit to Milan. We must have returned to the hotel and collected our luggage, and definitely walked back to the Central Station taking exactly the same avenues down which we had come. Perhaps it was approaching the station this first time that I noticed the oddly Italianized name Giorgio Stephenson carved around the roofline of its over-decorated façade.
Again under the enormous vault of the booking hall, we agreed that there was money enough from the expenses to book couchettes for our night’s journey back across Europe. With an hour and a half to spare, we ate a hasty dinner in a restaurant by Via Scarlatti. Then there will have been just time enough to make it back to the right platform and into our seats before the express pulled out across the maze of lines and points beyond that fascist station’s high glass arch. Under gantries past its signal box we trundled, off towards Domodossola, the Swiss border, Paris, a stormy crossing, and an English winter.