A Walk in the Dark (7 page)

“Has she ever been in therapy, ever suffered from depression, ever had a nervous breakdown, that kind of thing?”

Is she
crazy
?

“Why are you asking me these things? What do they have to do with the trial?” The same kind of tone. Or even a bit worse.

All right, you don’t want to cooperate. Which means I’m going to make a fool of myself in court, and then when it’s all over I’ll become the kind of lawyer who deals only with road accidents. If I’m lucky.

I paused for a long time, breathing deeply through my nose. As if to say, I’m being very patient here, but damn it, you have to let me do my job. She said nothing, just waited. She was making me nervous.

“Listen to me, Sister Claudia. Trials are tricky things, they can be quite complicated. That’s what lawyers are there for, basically. The fact that a man or woman may be right is almost never enough. In a trial, witnesses
are examined and cross-examined, and when a defence attorney cross-examines a prosecution witness, he uses every legitimate means at his disposal to try to discredit that witness. Sometimes illegitimate means too. If we’re bringing a civil action, I have to know what Scianatico’s lawyer is going to dig up. I have to know if they’re going to try and claim that Martina is unbalanced, unreliable, or whatever, so that I can be ready to disprove it.”

“I don’t follow you. If it can be proved that the man did certain things, isn’t that enough? What have Martina’s health problems got to do with it?”

“I’m trying to make this as clear as possible, but obviously I’m not succeeding. That’s precisely the point: we have to prove that he did certain things. And the only evidence we have is Signorina Fumai’s statements. There’s not much else to her case. Everything turns on her reliability. Or her unreliability. It’s in the interests of a defendant in a case like this, if he has a good lawyer – and in this case he has a
very
good lawyer, and a dangerous one – to spring a surprise and reveal that the presumed victim—”

“
Presumed
victim?”

“Until it’s demonstrated in court that someone has committed an offence, that person is presumed innocent. And if he’s presumed innocent, then his victim is nothing more than a presumed victim. Whether you like it or not, that’s the way it works in this country.”

I hadn’t raised my voice, but my tone was decidedly tense.

“Martina has had psychiatric problems,” Sister Claudia finally said.

“What kind of problems?”

“I don’t know if I’m authorized to talk about them. I don’t know if Martina wants these things to be known.”

“They’re already known. I mean: Scianatico knows them and his lawyer knows them. He phoned me yesterday afternoon. He more or less threatened me, and told me my client is crazy. I can’t not know these things. I could talk to her directly, of course. In fact I’ll have to talk to her some time. Even if only to tell her what to expect in court. But when I talk to her, it’s better if I know
what
I’m talking about. Do you follow me?”

She leaned her elbow on the armrest of her chair and propped her head on her open hand. She remained in that position for about a minute, without looking at me. Without looking at anything in the room.

“Martina had problems as a child. I’m sure they don’t know anything about that. As an adult, she’s suffered in the past few years from a form of depression, combined with anorexia nervosa. That must be what they know about.”

“When did this happen?”

“Maybe five years ago, maybe more. As far as the anorexia is concerned, the doctors said it was a particularly severe form. She was admitted to hospital and for a few days they had to feed her artificially. With a stomach tube.”

“Had she already met Scianatico?”

“No. After she left hospital she was in therapy for a long time. By the time she met that . . . that man, she was cured. Insofar as you can be cured of that kind of problem.”

“You mean she had relapses?”

“No. At least not in the sense of being admitted to hospital again. When she’s going through a hard time, she has eating difficulties, but that’s something she can keep under control. She managed that even at the most difficult moments of her relationship with that man. But there’s a doctor following up on her case.”

“A psychiatrist?”

“A psychiatrist.”

I paused. For personal reasons. A sudden fissure opening on to my past: memories I dismissed, though I couldn’t free myself entirely from all the cacophony that went with them.

“And Scianatico knows all about this.” It wasn’t a question.

“I think he does now.”

There wasn’t much else to add. I’d feared worse. I mean: Martina wasn’t crazy, she wasn’t schizophrenic or manic depressive or whatever. She’d suffered from depression and eating disorders, but had recovered. More or less. That was something I could handle in court. Clearly, it wasn’t ideal, but I’d feared worse.

“Now all I need is for Martina to tell me about these things herself. Firstly, because I need more details, papers, medical records. The lot. And secondly, because it’s the right thing to do. She’ll tell me what her problems are – or were – and I’ll tell her what we’re likely to come up against in court. In the end she’s the one who has to decide.”

Sister Claudia said all right, she’d come to my office in a few days with Martina. Before that, she’d explain to her what I needed and
why
I needed it.

There followed a few moments of tense silence. Then we both stood up, almost simultaneously. Time to go.

“Can I ask you something?”

She looked me in the eyes for a few moments, then nodded.

“Why did you let me come here?”

After looking at me some more, she shrugged and didn’t reply.

We left the farmhouse and walked back the way we’d
come. There was no trace of the girls who lived there. There was nobody. Around us, the wind shook the branches of the olive trees, dislodging the leaves, which were changing colour, brown on one side, a mysterious silvery grey on the other.

We walked slowly until we reached my car.

“Sometimes I’m aggressive. For no reason.”

I looked at her without replying, because clearly she hadn’t finished.

“It’s just that I find it difficult to trust people. Even those who are on the right side. It’s a problem of mine.”

“I try to get rid of my aggression with my fists.” The words just came out, and immediately I’d said them I realized she might take them the wrong way. “I mean I do a bit of boxing. It helps, I think. Like martial arts.”

Claudia looked up, slightly surprised. “Strange.”

“Why?”

“I teach Chinese boxing.”

Well, that was a turn-up for the books.

“Chinese boxing? You mean kung fu?”

“The expression ‘kung fu’ doesn’t mean anything. Or rather it means a lot of things, but doesn’t describe any martial art in particular. Roughly translated, kung fu means hard work.”

The conversation was slightly surreal. We’d gone from Martina’s psychiatric problems to martial arts and Chinese philosophy, with a bit of philology thrown in.

I asked Sister Claudia what kind of Chinese boxing she taught. She told me it was a discipline called wing tsun, which according to legend had been developed in China by a young nun in the sixteenth century. Sister Claudia gave lessons twice a week, in a gym where they did dance and yoga.

I said I’d like to watch one of her lessons. She looked
straight at me for a moment – as if to make sure I was serious and not just making conversation – and said she’d invite me along some time.

We’d reached the end of our conversation. So I made a rather clumsy gesture of farewell with my hand, got in my car and started it, while she went and opened the gate to let me out.

Moving away slowly along the dirt road, I looked in the rear-view mirror. Sister Claudia had not gone inside yet. She was standing next to the gatepost and seemed to be watching as my car drew away.

Or maybe she was watching something else, in some place I didn’t know and couldn’t even imagine. There was something in the way she stood there, alone, against the background of that solitary, unreal landscape, which gave me a sudden twinge of sadness.

After ten minutes spent in a kind of semi-consciousness, I found myself on an asphalt road, back in the outside world.

The following morning I had a trial in Lecce. So I got up early and after a shower and a shave put on one of the serious suits I wore whenever I was working out of town. Wearing a serious suit, usually dark grey, was a habit I’d adopted when I was a very young lawyer. I’d passed my exams at the age of twenty-five, when I still looked like a first-year college student. To look like a real lawyer I had to become older, I thought, and a dark grey suit was perfect for that.

As the years passed, the grey uniform stopped being essential. People knew me in Bari, and besides, as the years passed, I have to admit I looked less and less like a first-year student.

By the time I turned forty, I only put on a grey suit when I went out of town. To make it clear, in places where I wasn’t known, that I really was a lawyer. A concept I still secretly had doubts about myself.

Anyway, I put on a grey suit, a blue shirt, a regimental tie, picked up the briefcase I’d brought home from the office the previous evening, left a cup of coffee on Margherita’s bedside table, and went out. Margherita was still asleep, breathing peacefully but resolutely.

I’d reached the garage and was just about to get in my car when my mobile rang.

It was my colleague from Lecce, who’d got me involved in that case. He told me that the judge who was dealing with it was ill, which meant that the trial was going to be postponed. So there was no point in
my going all the way to Lecce just to hear the order for the postponement. I agreed, there was no point. But how had he found out, at seven-thirty in the morning, that the judge was ill? Oh, he’d known since the day before, but it had been a very heavy day and he’d forgotten to tell me. Bravo. But he would tell me the new date for the trial. Oh, thanks, very kind of you. Bye then. OK, bye. And fuck you.

I don’t generally like to get up early in the morning if it isn’t absolutely necessary. If I want to see the dawn – it sometimes happens – I’d rather stay up all night and then go to sleep in the morning. Not easy to do, when you’ve got work the next day. Waking up early –
having
to wake up early – makes me quite nervous.

That morning, I’d woken up early because of my colleague from Lecce. So now I found myself adrift in the city on a lovely November morning. Without anything to do, since I’d supposed the whole day would be devoted to that out-of-town trial which had been adjourned.

Obviously, in a while I’d start to feel anxious and end up in my office going through papers that weren’t urgent and making phone calls that weren’t necessary. I knew that perfectly well. I know all about anxiety. Sometimes I’m even wise to its tricks and manage to beat it.

Most of the time, it wins and makes me do stupid things, even though I know perfectly well that they are stupid things. Like going to the office on a day when I could go somewhere else and read a book, listen to a record, see a film in one of those cinemas where they have morning shows.

So I would go to my office, but it wasn’t eight yet: too early to get sucked back into the vortex of the work ethic. So I thought I’d take a stroll, maybe as far as the
sea. I could have breakfast in one of those bars I liked on the seafront.

I could have a nice smoke.

No, not that.

Stupid idea to quit smoking, I thought as I headed towards the Corso Vittorio Emmanuele.

I’d almost reached the ruins of the Teatro Margherita, which was endlessly in the process of restoration, when I saw a vaguely familiar face coming towards me. I screwed up my eyes – I never wore glasses except to go to the cinema or to drive a car – and saw that the man was giving me a kind of smile and raising his arm to greet me.

“Guido!”

“Emilio?”

Emilio Ranieri. We hadn’t seen each other for fifteen years. Maybe more. We came level with each other, and after a moment’s hesitation he embraced me. After another moment’s hesitation I responded to his embrace.

Emilio Ranieri had been my classmate at secondary school, and then we’d been at university together for two or three years. He’d quit before graduating, to become a journalist. He’d started out at a radio station in Tuscany and then was hired by
L’Unità
, where he’d stayed until the paper shut down.

Every now and again I’d hear something about him from mutual friends, though less and less as the years went by. In the mythical period of my life that straddled the end of the Seventies and the beginning of the Eighties, Emilio had been one of my very few real friends. Then he’d vanished, and in a way I’d vanished too.

“Guido. How nice to see you. Damn it, you’re just the same, except for a bit less hair.”

He wasn’t the same. He still had all his hair but it was completely white. There were lines at the corners of his eyes that looked as if they’d been carved in leather: harsh and painful, they seemed to me. Even his smile looked different somehow. There was something scared, defeated, about it.

But it
was
nice to see him. In fact, I was really pleased. My friend Emilio.

“Yes, it is nice to see you. What are you doing in Bari?”

“I work here now.”

“What do you mean: you work here?”

“I was unemployed after they closed
L’Unità
. Then I heard they were looking for people here in Bari to join the editorial staff of ANSA, so I applied and they hired me. The way things are these days, I think I was lucky.”

“You mean you’re back here for good?”

“If they don’t throw me out. Not impossible, but I’ll try to behave.”