The View From the Tower (32 page)

She only saw the other door as she was leaving. She tried the handle, opened it and found herself in another bedroom, identical to the first. I’m dreaming, she thought, as she looked at the single bed, the desk, the order, and felt her heart pumping as though she’d been running. She walked across to the desk and would have opened the drawer if she hadn’t heard a noise from somewhere nearby, she couldn’t tell exactly where, whether it was inside or outside the flat. She seemed to have lost all sense of space. She turned tail and hurried down the corridor. Outside the flat, with the empty lift where she’d left it, she leant against the wall and breathed deeply until her pulse had returned to its normal rate.

 

Two days later, the police discovered Aldo Moro’s body stuffed brutally into the boot of a Renault Four in the centre of Rome. When Helen asked her students who they thought had done it, they shook their heads. Some of them shrugged. Nobody seemed upset. They agreed the placing of the car, halfway between the headquarters of the Christian Democrats and the Communists, was a message. But what did the message mean? she asked. At once they divided into feuding camps. Everything meant something else, it seemed. Then someone came in and told them the lesson had been cancelled because a national strike had been declared. A few nights later, in the English pub, Miriam said, What was the point of that? It wouldn’t bring anyone back to life. Any excuse would do for a national strike, it was a wonder anything ever got done in this crazy country. All they were interested in was death and sex.

 

She didn’t tell Federico she’d been to the other flat. She felt ashamed, as though she’d done something wrong herself, as though the lies she would always tell, to protect herself from the truth, were worse than his.

Three weeks later, Giacomo was arrested. He was in jail, awaiting trial, when she and Federico married.

5

 

Helen spots Martha at once, although they’ve rarely met. All their collaboration has been conducted by phone and email. She’s seen her occasionally at press conferences and parties, they’ve chatted a couple of times with glasses in their hands and their eyes not quite on the other, roaming the venue for more congenial company. She’s nothing against the woman, merely a sense that what she offers, beyond an outlet for certain articles no one else would publish, isn’t in Helen’s line. There’s a fussiness about her, an untidiness, the scouring pad of unkempt steel grey hair, over-large hippie-style earrings, a way of positioning herself, face thrust towards the other person, large, nicotine-stained teeth, her lips drawn back, that strikes Helen as aggressive. When Helen steps back, Martha steps forward; she’s the kind of woman who forces other women into corners. Helen has never seen how she behaves with men.

“I’m so glad, and so touched, really, that you’re here,” Martha says. She touches her own heart before patting Helen’s arm with an expression of concern. “I guess what you’re going through must be really hard right now.”

“Yes,” says Helen. “It is.” She turns her face away from the slightly stale odour of Martha’s breath. They are in the office of
Futuri Prossimi
and it is just as Helen imagined it, identical to similar offices all over the world, post-its curling on the walls and monitors, tangles of wires, anti-war posters, too many ashtrays. She has spent time in rooms like this in Cambridge and London and Turin, even, briefly, in Rome, when she first arrived, before she joined the agency and became a real journalist. Today the office has the air of a party that is due to begin before too long. Twenty, twenty-five people, most of them middle-aged, dressed in jeans and shorts and T-shirts against one thing or the other, some of them witty, some not, more than a few home-made. Helen is wearing a well-cut cotton dress, sleeveless, in an olive green that suits her, and moccasins made from tobacco brown leather so soft it might have been used to make gloves. When did she stop dressing like a student? she wonders. When did she and Federico decide not to wear their beliefs on their chests? Martha’s armpits, she notices, are dark with stubble, which is surely the worst of all options.

Giacomo is talking to some young woman Helen doesn’t know by the door. Martha has taken her elbow and is steering her towards a small wicker sofa piled with books. “We can hide ourselves away here,” she says, shifting some to the floor, pushing others to one side, while Helen tries to catch his eye, attract him across the room to rescue her. She is beginning to wonder what made her come. Martha seems determined to talk about Federico.

“You say he didn’t so much as mention me?” she is saying as Helen moves a book from beneath her leg.

“No,” says Helen.
We babble to each other
. She must be thinking we had secrets. Well, she’s right. The secrets we shared and the secrets we didn’t.

“He sent me an article,” Martha says. “It arrived the day after he died. I’ve been so busy I didn’t even realise until this morning. I only just had a chance to read it before this whole crowd started turning up. Not properly, I just took a look at it.” She pulls a face. “It’s pretty weird. I mean, it’s not the kind of thing you’d expect from someone who’s, well, in a position of power,” she says, investing the last words with a disdain that strikes Helen as cruel, given the circumstances, although she isn’t hurt, merely startled. Martha can’t hurt her.

“What does he say?”

“I haven’t read it properly, so don’t get me wrong, but it’s – oh, I don’t know – it’s like he’s defending the kamikaze.” At this Martha grimaces, as if to say, Haven’t we moved on from martyrdom? It’s so last century. “It’s full of quotations. It shifts, like, from Plato to George Galloway, for Christ’s sake. Voltaire. Angela frigging Davis. It’s like he’s using them all up before he dies.” She covers her mouth. “Oh my God, I am
so
sorry.”

“Are you going to run it?” says Helen. “In the magazine.” Should I be asked? she wonders. All this – his legacy – will be up to me.

“Use it? You mean publish it?” Martha is astonished. “Are you kidding?”

“Because it advocates violence?”

Martha shakes her head slowly, hair rigid as a wig. “That would be reason enough,” she says. “I mean, we are a voice for pacifism. But it’s just so weird. Some bits of it don’t make sense. It’s like he’s being dictated to by someone he can’t quite hear, if you get me.” She lowers her voice. “Was he, you know, all right?”

“All right? What do you mean?”

“Let me tell you something. Parts of it read like he’s, I don’t know how to say this. Deranged?”

“I don’t suppose you could let me see this article?”

“I’d have to find it,” says Martha, looking away. She hasn’t got it, it occurs to Helen. She’s given it to someone else to read. But surely she must have realised I’d ask to see it? And who would she have given it to? But now she’s confusing incompetence with conspiracy. She’s been with these people too long. She takes a deep breath, then glances round the room.

“I’d very much like to read it,” she says, briefly enjoying Martha’s embarrassment. “Which desk is yours?” She starts to get up from the sofa, but Martha catches at her arm to prevent her.

“By the way, I heard about Martin Frame,” she says. “I’m stunned.”

Helen sits back, her moment of naughtiness over. She ought to be with Martin, she thinks, not sitting in this sad confusion of a room. Who was that woman with him, what was her name? Alina? Is that a Russian name? Where did she appear from? She seemed to know Martin so well. She saw Martin watching her with what looked like love. Well, Martin deserves a little love, she thinks. He seemed so battered and bruised in that hospital bed. She could never be grateful enough, she thinks, glancing towards the door to see Giacomo, still talking to the same girl, gesticulating as the girl laughs.

“Yes,” she says. “So am I.”

“You think it was a mugging?”

“What do you think it was?”

“I’ve never really understood him,” says Martha. “He’s a strange guy. Not bad, heavens, I don’t mean that.” She touches Helen’s knee. “I know you’re not just colleagues.” She waves a hand to silence Helen. “It’s just that he’s so private. Did I say private? If he were a woman he’d be frigid.” She smiles in a confidential way. “I guess he’s just English,” she says, as though this explains everything. Then, to Helen’s surprise, before Helen can say
I’m English too
, Martha leans in towards her, lowers her voice. “Do you think he’s gay?”

“Martin? Gay? No, I don’t think Martin’s gay,” Helen says, annoyed by the cosiness in the woman’s tone, as though they have something in common. “Do you?”

Martha shrugs. “I guess not.” After a moment, as if that subject has been exhausted, she adds: “It certainly doesn’t look like a mugging to me. Is that what they’re saying, that he’s been mugged?”

To Helen’s relief, Giacomo walks across and crouches beside her, resting his hand on Helen’s knee. “How are you feeling?”

“I’m fine,” says Helen. “Martha’s just been telling me something else I didn’t know about Federico.”

Giacomo’s eyebrows rise. He glances at Martha, who says, hurriedly: “He sent me a piece he’d written. I only read it this morning.”

“A piece he’d written?” The heat is rising. Helen can feel a trickle of sweat running down her back, oddly cold on her skin. “How much longer do we need to wait?” she says, hearing a note of panic in her voice. The girl Giacomo was talking to has wandered across and is standing half behind and half beside him in a wary, proprietorial fashion. Helen is on the brink of tears. Federico was utterly mad and I didn’t know. What was the word this dreadful invasive woman used? Deranged. My husband was deranged and I didn’t notice. Where was I? Where have I been hiding? Helen and Federico. Stefania and Giacomo. And now Federico’s dead and Giacomo’s dumped Stefania for a woman who seems to have dumped him. And I have dumped Giacomo too, she thinks, while his hand squeezes her knee with an air that might express possession or the desire to comfort her, because she has no idea what he thinks of her, or wants from her any longer, now that she has closed him off. Maybe he loves her as much as anyone has ever done, including Federico, although she doesn’t think so. She can see the girl watching his hand. I don’t miss anything, she thinks, I’m always so observant. So why didn’t I notice Federico was deranged? Because I was being loved by someone else? Because I wouldn’t have accepted it if I had known? Because I didn’t care?

I’m sorry, she thinks and almost says, her dry lips moving to accommodate the words. I’m sorry, Federico. But there is no excuse; she has left it too late. Giacomo’s hand is unbearably heavy, but to move it off her knee would lend it more weight than it already has. They were neither of them enough for her, she realises, and now there is only one of them left it is like having no one at all. She thinks of the flat the two men shared in Turin, of what she’d seen there, the list of names, the tick beside Eduardo Cotugno’s name, the passport. What did they do together in that flat, what plots did they contrive, the two of them? Their two, identical rooms like the closed language of twins, so that she has never known which was which. Because it only occurred to her months later, when Giacomo was in jail and she was already married and she’d come across the postcard Giacomo had sent them from South America, that the desk might have belonged to either of them, they had both learnt to be tidy during their national service as soldiers. All she had had to go on was the handwriting on the list. And she had never been able to tell their handwriting apart. But by that time, it was too late. She’d made her choice.

 

Before they left the flat, Helen had checked her email. But she’d also opened Federico’s. As she’d expected, there were over a hundred new messages. Amazon. Harvard. Alitalia. Government stuff. She scrolled down to four days earlier, and saw that among the first unopened messages was one that had been sent by Federico to himself. The subject was ‘final thoughts’. She called Giacomo over. The timeline said: 31/05/2004 19.47. She clicked to open it.

It wasn’t that long. She read the first paragraph.

 

What I don’t understand is how can you be what you are and yet still be the opposite of what you are. There’s a poem by Robespierre I read years ago, at university, and didn’t appreciate at the time, where he says that the worst thing that can happen to a just man is to realise, the moment before he dies, how much he’s hated by those for whom he has given his life. Is this what will happen to me, to realise this?

6

 

Giacomo can’t remember the last demonstration he took part in as a civilian, although perhaps civilian isn’t the word he wants. As no one. Normally, he’d be linking arms with other stars and starlets of the radical protest industry, fringe politicians, philosophers, actresses, performance artists, writers. He’d join in for half an hour, his assistants would have told the press, the television cameras, because there is still this lingering respect for intellectuals, in France at least, as
personalities
at least. What was the expression Topino Bianco had used in that fucking article?
Ageing enfant terrible
. There’d be an interview of some sort and then the usual round of goodbyes and kisses until the next time. Each would give, in his or her own way, what he or she had to give.

Today, though, he finds himself under the banner of a magazine so poorly edited, so insignificant, it has to be paid for through the proceeds of some illicit slush fund, a tax loss, some anxious benefactor buoying it up with conscience money. Because it surely can’t pay for itself. How anachronistic to see these people gathered beneath the handmade placards and swash of cotton sagging with the weight of its own painted slogan, touching in its naïveté: NO MORE IFS AND NO MORE BUTS. As though there could be a world without ifs and buts. As though the world weren’t being re-invented daily through, at best, prevarication and doubt, at worst, mendacity. They might as well all have joined hands to sing “Imagine”. And yet, despite or perhaps because of all this, he is happy to be here. He is happy to be anonymous, at least for now, and to have his arms linked on one side with Helen, who’s been ignoring him for the past hour, and on the other with some girl he’s just met, no more than twenty, a girl who had never heard of him before this morning and now adores him. He is happy to be introduced to Don Giusini, who recognised him, and shook his hand in a rather solemn judgemental way that amused Giacomo, because they were all in the same business in the end, the business of making up stories that made up the world, and there is no moral higher ground. He is happy to find himself caught behind Martha Weinberg, a woman he has never met before today although she also knew him, by name and reputation, and was cool with him, but impressed. She’ll be asking me for an article before the day is out, he thinks. He is happy to have slept with Helen, and to have been left by Yvonne, happy that Stefania is already flying from wherever she has been towards him, ready to allow him what she’s called a seventh chance. Already the idea that he and Helen might be able, after all these years, to live together as a couple strikes him as foolish; he can barely remember having thought of it. How fickle the heart is, he says to himself, the pressure of the girl’s hand warm and vital on his arm. Life, he says to himself, is endless with possibilities.