Waiting to Be Heard: A Memoir (16 page)

Chapter 16

November 9–14, 2007

T
he best part of my day was the few seconds between waking and remembering. During that moment, with my eyes not yet open, I was in my cozy lemon yellow room at Mom’s house in Seattle. I was happy.

Then I’d remember that I was locked in a cold cell where the radiators were turned on for only a few hours a day. And panic would overtake me.
How can I be in prison? How can I be accused of something so horrible?
It seems impossible. Yet here I am.

Getting up, I’d look out the barred window and envy the rabbits hopping across the empty, dank fields. I wasn’t even exactly sure where Capanne was—all I knew was that it was somewhere between Perugia and Rome.

Some days I felt as if I were in limbo, because I wasn’t able to connect to the real world. I was adrift. Mom and Dad were my anchors, and I measured time by their visits.
Two days until they’re here. Four days until they can come back.

In spite of all that had happened, I believed that the police, the prosecutor, a judge—some official—would look at the facts and realize how wrong they’d been. They’d be jolted by the obvious: that I was incapable of murder. Surely someone would see that there was no evidence. My belief that my imprisonment was temporary was all that kept me from being overwhelmed. I guess my faith in eventual justice is what psychologists call a coping mechanism.

In the days after Meredith’s death I’d insisted on staying in Perugia. Back then, going home meant defeat. But my wants flipped with my arrest. Now the only thing that mattered was to reclaim my life in Seattle. I considered what I would do once my ordeal was over—how I’d rebuild myself, whether I’d live with Mom or find a place of my own, whether I’d go back to school or get a job, how much I wanted to reunite with the people I loved.

I was determined not to settle in at Capanne. I saw that as a victory for the officials who thought I was guilty. I told myself I’d leave no trace of having been there; I’d carry out only what I’d carried in—a lesson my family had taught me when we went camping. In my mind, I
was
camping.
This is no more permanent than a week in the mountains
, I told myself. My only possessions were the few impersonal supplies that came in the garbage bag I was handed the first night and a few utilitarian items from the nuns’ closet—sheets and a stiff bath towel. I was determined to make do. The idea of getting comfortable was terrifying.

Mom begged me to tell her what I needed. “To leave this place,” I said. But knowing I couldn’t, I asked for a couple of pairs of underwear and a few T-shirts.

A guard gave me an order form for groceries and other basics—ranging from salt to sewing needles—and a
libretto
, an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven-inch piece of paper folded in half with a handwritten spreadsheet inside to track what I spent. I had two hundred euros—about three hundred dollars—in my prison account from the purse/book bag they’d impounded upon my arrival. The order form was divided into three columns for the name of the item, the code number, and the quantity. Gufa badgered me to buy her a camp stove and a coffeemaker, but I refused to order so much as a carton of milk. I’d be gone before it reached its expiration date.

Getting me out of jail was the first priority whenever I talked to Carlo and Luciano. Their take was that when the media frenzy died down in a couple of weeks, a judge would probably put me under house arrest, either with my family or in a religious community. Then, when the prosecution saw they had no evidence against me, they would let me go.

As the days crept by, though, I renegotiated my deal with myself.
Amanda, you’re going to need a few things. Buying won’t mean you’re staying.

I filled in the columns for a toothbrush, toothpaste, and a hairbrush.

A few days later a short, thin young woman dressed as an adolescent—in jeans, a sweatshirt, and Miss Piggy sneakers—brought me my order, passing it through the meal slot in the bars. One of the items completely baffled me. “No, no,” I said, realizing what it was. “I want it for the hair.”

“Oh,” she said. She laughed good-naturedly and showed the guard my mistake. I was mortified, as I always was, when my ignorance tripped me up.

In filling out the order form, I’d requested a men’s shaving brush—a
spazzola da barba
—instead of a
spazzola per i capelli
.

“Don’t worry, I’ll see if I can exchange it,” she offered.

“Thank you,” I said. “You’re so kind to prisoners.”

She laughed heartily this time and caught Lupa’s eye. “Fanta
is
a prisoner,” Lupa explained to me. “All the workers you see are prisoners.”

It wasn’t just the language that threw me. Almost every aspect of life at Capanne was foreign. (The garbage bag I’d been given upon my arrival hadn’t come with a prison “user’s manual.”) Gufa quickly nicknamed me “Bimba”—“little girl.” She said it in a playful way, but at the same time it underscored how clueless I was.

I was at the mercy of my jailers. I had no idea what to anticipate or how to act. What should my relationship with other prisoners, guards, prison officials, be? How open could I—or should I—be and with whom? As naïve as I now realize this was, when guards and prison officials, psychologists and doctors, asked me about myself, I didn’t know if I was allowed to keep my thoughts private or if I always had to tell them exactly what was on my mind.

I wondered about the basic rhythm of things. How was I supposed to wash my clothes? How did I perform the essential routines of daily life? And whom should I ask? I found out that in order to get an appointment with the prison
comandante
, to buy anything that wasn’t on the grocery list, to switch out clothing or books in the storage room, to get a prison job, to pass your belongings on to another prisoner, to change cells—for nearly everything—you had to fill out a
domandina
, to ask permission.

No one explained to me how anything worked unless I made a mistake. When my family brought me a puffy ski jacket, I found out that padded material was off-limits, apparently because drugs could be hidden inside. Many items were on the “No” list for this reason. Among them: comforters, soft cheese, homemade cookies, and some types of buttons. Even nutmeg was forbidden. Apparently, when eaten in large quantities or smoked, it can make people drunk or high. Gloves were allowed only if the fingers had been cut off. When I got mail, a guard would bring the envelope to my door and open it in front of me. She always tore the stamps off my letters—drugs could be glued on the back—and gave the letters to me page by excruciating page. If I wanted the envelope, it had to be checked first for poison, razors, and, of course, drugs.

During the first month, I found out that most
agenti
kept an emotional distance from prisoners. Many would ask you about yourself but would never tell you their name or anything about their lives outside prison. One day, when a guard called Rossa was walking me upstairs from a visit with the doctor, I asked her, “Are you having a good day?”

“You need to stop kidding yourself and acting like we’re friends,” she snapped. “I’m an
agente
, and you’re a prisoner. You need to behave like one. I’m doing you a favor by warning you.”

I felt my face go red, humiliated by the reality of my situation.

One of the few things that didn’t upset me was Capanne’s clockwork consistency—coffee, tea, or milk at 7:30
A.M.
, lunch at 11:45
A.M.
, dinner at 5:45
P.M
. The routine helped the days blur together and the waiting go faster.

But time stretches in prison. I was awake at least sixteen tedious, empty hours a day—with few options for filling them. I tried to block out my claustrophobia with reading, writing, and sit-ups. Lupa had rummaged through the prison book closet to bring me
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
in Italian, along with an Italian grammar book, and a dictionary. I still cared about learning Italian, even then, and I spent hours looking up definitions and diagramming each sentence into subject and predicate. Anything that made me feel purposeful gave me emotional comfort, and it was psychologically essential for me to find a silver lining in my imprisonment. Later, learning Italian became more about self-defense and survival: I had to speak Italian if I wanted to communicate and, ultimately, defend myself.

Early on, I started keeping a journal, which I titled “
Il
mio diario del prigione
”—“My Prison Diary”—on the cover:

My friend was murdered. My roommate, my friend. She was beautiful, smart, fun, and caring and she was murdered. Everyone I know is devastated for her, but we are also all at odds. We are angry. We want justice. But against who? We all want to know, but we all don’t . . .

Now there’s the sound of women wailing through bars and the sounds of wheels of the medicine carts rolling down the hard floors of the echoing halls.

November 2007

But I spent most of my time sitting on my bed wondering what was happening beyond the sixty-foot-high walls topped with coiled razor wire. What were my parents and family and friends doing and thinking? What was happening with the investigation? How long would it take to examine the forensic evidence that would clear me?

Underneath every thought there was a bigger, louder one looping through my head.
How could I have been so weak when I was interrogated? How did I lose my grip on the truth? Why didn’t I stand up to the police?
I’d failed myself, Meredith, Patrick, Raffaele.

Just about the only relief from the excruciating boredom and relentless self-criticism was
passeggio
, the hour a day I got to leave my cell and exercise outdoors. Because I was still separated from the prison population, and Gufa didn’t take full advantage of her exercise periods, I didn’t realize that other prisoners could go outside twice a day for two hours at a time. Even if they didn’t want to work out, it was an opportunity to socialize that I didn’t have.

I was being treated differently from the other prisoners. While I exercised, I could see other inmates through the barred glass doors, chatting and moving around freely inside without an
agente
. A guard watched me at all times. There was no conversation.

During that hour I also noticed toddlers being led through the halls by a nun. The sight of them delighted and perplexed me. Who were they? Where had they come from? I thought they might be orphans, but when I asked an
agente
about them, I discovered that the female prison had a separate
nido
—literally “nest,” or nursery ward—where women lived with their children until the children turned three. It made sense not to separate mother and child, but why did they live in prison? Couldn’t these women be held under house arrest, or in religious communities, so the little kids wouldn’t have to be behind bars?

For the first few days, the toddlers I saw were shy. They either scampered off or stood watching me wave to them, their hands in their mouths, expressionless. I didn’t know where the nun was taking them, but I was thrilled that their passage coincided with my outside time. After a couple of days the children in the mini parade would stop and watch me through the bars. I tried everything to make them laugh—I danced, sang, played peek-a-boo, and we chased each other on opposite sides of the window, with them on the inside, me on the outside. Some days, the nun had to cajole them into leaving.

My
passeggio
was in a small courtyard outside the chapel—really just a wide path surrounding a muddy, round patch of a garden with a crudely done abstract sculpture in the center. I could never decide if the matte-gray metal blob was supposed to be two wings or splashing waves rising out of the ground and tipping toward each other. But I was sure of one thing: it was ugly.

Prison was not the place to find inspiration.

I exercised as much to stay warm as to stay in shape. Breaking a sweat cleared my mind and tamped down my anxiety. After I exhausted myself, I’d walk in the tight, hypnotic circles available to me, singing or repeating the mantra
It’s going to be okay. Just hold on. It’s going to be okay.
Or I’d pace and cry, remembering how scared I was during my interrogation, remembering fragments of my time with Meredith and trying to process her death. And I thought about my family; I hated that I’d put this burden on my parents.

No matter what mood I was in, I’d stoop to pick up earthworms that were washed onto the pavement when it rained and lay them gently back in the dirt.

The person inside the prison who came closest to taking care of me was Don Saulo Scarabattoli, the Catholic chaplain for Capanne’s women’s ward. A few days after I moved in, he appeared at my cell door, introduced himself, and asked, “Would you like to come talk with me in my office?” He was smiling and grasping my hands through the bars.

“I’m not religious,” I said. “I wouldn’t really have much to say.”

“That’s not a problem. You’re always welcome,” he answered.

A short man with a large bald spot and a little gray hair, Don Saulo was in his early seventies. His wire-frame glasses and the white stubble on his jaw made him appear gentle. But I was put off by the small cross pinned on his navy blue sweater and the Virgin Mother medallion around his neck. I was not interested in being converted.

I wasn’t baptized as a baby. Growing up, I never went to Sunday school, never said grace before meals, never prayed before bed. I stereotyped religion as a backward institution that offered false comfort and prevented people from coming to their own conclusions. Early in my freshman year at my Jesuit high school, I figured out that by showing up late on Fridays I could ditch Mass without repercussions, and I gave short shrift to my required religion classes. Once, when we were assigned a paper on how our belief in God had influenced our life, I curtly wrote that it hadn’t affected mine because I didn’t believe in God. My tone made it obvious that I thought the assignment was inane, and earned me my only C in high school, which frustrated me even more. Who was my teacher to grade me on my personal beliefs?