Involuntary Witness

that lift ever since I had used it.

I thought: what the hell.

And I put the first foot right between two slabs. I was not concerned about the second, but turned to close the lift doors with intense concentration. First the two inner flaps, then the metal door, which I pushed to gently until I heard it click.

I stayed there leaning against the wall of the landing for maybe ten minutes. I held my briefcase in front of me with both hands, my arms stiff. From time to time I swung it to and fro. I looked into space with half-closed eyes and, I think, a slight smile on my lips.

When enough time had passed I pushed myself away from the wall. I recalled how a year before I had met Signor Strisciuglio, and thought now of knocking at his door. To tell him how it had all ended.

But I didn’t. I stepped back into the lift, which no one had summoned in the meantime, and left the building.

High time to get home.

30

When I was a child and they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up I always said “a sheriff”. My idol was Gary Cooper in High Noon. When they told me there weren’t any sheriffs in Italy, but only policemen, I promptly replied that I would be a policeman sheriff. I was a good child and wanted to hunt down wrongdoers one way or another.

Then – I must have been about eight or nine – I witnessed the arrest of a bag snatcher in the street. As a matter of fact I don’t know if he was a bag snatcher or a pickpocket or some other kind of petty crook. My memories are slightly vague. They only become clear for one short sequence.

I am with my father walking along the street. There is a rumpus behind us and then a skinny youngster rushes past us like greased lightning, it seems to me. My father clasps me to him, just in time to prevent me being knocked over by another man, also running. He is wearing a black sweater and yelling out as he runs. Yelling in dialect. He is yelling to the boy to stop or else he’ll kill him. The boy doesn’t stop of his own accord, but perhaps twenty yards further on he crashes into a pedestrian. He falls. The man in the black sweater is on top of him and now a third man is coming up, bigger and slower on his feet. I wriggle free from my father and get near them. The man in the black sweater strikes the boy, who from close up looks little more than a child. He hits him in the face with his fists, and when the other tries to protect himself, he tears his hands away and starts hitting him again, yelling in dialect, “You son of a whore. Go fuck your mother. Damn you, you fucking bastard.” And another smash on the head with his clenched fist. The boy cries out, “Stop it, stop it”, also in dialect. Then he stops shouting and bursts into tears.

I watch the scene, hypnotized. I feel physically sick and also ashamed at the sight of it. But I can’t tear my eyes away.

Now the other man, the big one, comes up. He has a placid look and I think he’s going to intervene, to put an end to that horror. He stops running five or six yards from the boy, who is now huddled on the ground. He covers that distance at a walk, panting hard. When he is standing right over the boy, he takes a deep breath and kicks him in the stomach. Only one kick, but really hard. The boy stops weeping even. He opens his mouth and stays that way, unable to breathe. My father, who until then has also been petrified with horror, steps forward to intervene, says something. Of all the people around, he is the only one to make a move. The man in the black sweater tells him to mind his own bloody business. “Police!” he barks. But they both stop hitting the boy. The big man lifts him, grasping him by the jacket from behind, and forces him onto his knees. Hands behind his back, held by the hair, handcuffed. This is the most obscene memory in the whole sequence: a helpless boy at the mercy of two men.

My father pulls me away and the scene fades.

From then on I gave up saying I wanted to be a sheriff.

That episode had occasionally come to mind over the years. Sometimes I told myself I had become a lawyer as a sort of reaction to the disgust I had felt. Sometimes, in moments of self-glorification, I had even believed it.

The truth, however, was quite different. I had become a lawyer by sheer chance, because I had found nothing better to do or wasn’t up to looking for it. Which comes to the same thing of course.

I had enrolled in law school because I hoped to gain time, because my ideas were none too clear. When I graduated, I sought to gain more time by parking myself in a law firm while waiting for my ideas to clarify.

For some years after that I thought I was working as a lawyer only until I got my ideas clear.

Then I gave up thinking this, because time was passing and I was afraid that if I did get my ideas clear I would be forced to draw some unpleasant conclusions. Little by little I had anaesthetized my emotions, my desires, my memories, everything. Year after year. Until the time when Sara showed me the door.

Then the lid blew off and from the pan emerged a lot of things I had never imagined and didn’t want to see. That no one would want to see.

Every man has reminiscences that he would not tell to everyone, but only to his friends. He has other matters in his mind that he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself, and that in secret. But there are other things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind.

Dostoyevsky. Notes from Underground.

It isn’t good when those stored-away things come out. All at once.

I reflected on all these things, and others, while working through piles of routine matters in the office. I checked on expiry dates, wrote simple deeds and, above all, made out some bills. I had to, in view of the fact that defending Abdou would not make me a rich man. The room was cool, thanks to the air-conditioning, whereas outside the heat had set in, for keeps.

I finished at about seven. My room is north-facing and has a big window to the left of the desk. Looking out, I noticed the sun on the terrace of the building opposite, then I lent an ear to the faint buzzing of the air-conditioning and the muffled music coming from the apartment below.

Such awareness was unusual for me and made me feel good. It occurred to me that I wanted a cigarette, but not in the usual way. I wanted to do things with calm. I picked up the packet lying on the desk and held it in my hand for a while. I popped one out by tapping with two fingers on the bottom end and took it directly between my lips. I remembered the infinite number of times I had made that series of gestures like an automaton. I felt that now I was able to look into the void without being overcome with dizziness. Able not to tear my eyes away. I felt a kind of shiver pass through my whole body and simultaneous exaltation and sadness. I had a vision of a ship leaving harbour for a long voyage. I put a match to the cigarette and felt the smoke strike my lungs as another sequence of memories burst upon me. But they held no terror for me now. I could tell you exactly what I thought at each puff of that cigarette.

They were eleven in number. When I stubbed out the butt in the little glass bowl I used as an ashtray I knew that after the trial was over there was something I must do.

Something important.

31

On the Friday morning, having dropped in at the law courts for a preliminary hearing, I went to see Abdou in prison. His interrogation was fixed for the following Monday and we had to prepare for it.

The warder in charge of the register ushered me into the interview room and, with what seemed to me a malevolent smirk, closed the door. The heat was suffocating, worse than I’d expected. I removed my jacket, loosened my tie, unbuttoned my collar, and finally decided that I was not a prisoner, that there was no rule that said I had to stay shut in there gasping for breath, so I opened the door. The warder in the corridor gave me a