a cell with two others. Devoid of draught and privacy, assimilated into a world of homosexuality, thieving, deprivation. Food inedible, boredom impossible, company illiterate. Hatred and loathing bit deep in the boy when he was the guest of the Queen of Heaven. Hatred and loathing of those who had put him there, of the polizia who had clubbed him and spat in his face in the truck and laughed in their dialect at the little, humbled intellettuale.
Giancarlo sought his counterstrike and found the potential for revenge in the top-floor cells of the 'B' Wing where the men of the Nuclei Armati Proletaria were incarcerated, some on remand, some sentenced. They could read in the boy's eyes and in the twist of his lower lip that here was a progeny that could be useful and exploited. He learned in those Heated, sweating cells the theory and the practice, the expertise and the strategy of urban guerrilla conflict. A new recruit, a new volunteer. The men gave him diagrams to memorize of the mechanism of weapons, lectured him in the study of concealment and ambush, droned at him of the politics of their struggle, hectored him with the case histories of corruption and malpractice in government and capitalist business. These men would not see the fruits of their work but took comfort that they had found one so malleable, so supple to their will. They were pleased with what they saw. Word of his friendship spread along the landings of his own wing. The homosexuals did not sidle close and flash their hands at his genitals, the thieves left undisturbed the bag under his bunk where he kept his few personal possessions, the Agenti did not bully.
In the months in gaol he passed from the student of casual and fashionable protest to the political militant.
His parents never visited him in the Queen of Heaven. He had not seen them since they had stood at the back of the court, half masked from his sight by the guard's shoulders. Anger on his father's face, tears making the mascara run on his mother's cheeks. His father wore a Sunday suit, his mother dressed in a black coat as if that would impress the magistrate. The chains on his wrists had been long and loose, and they gave him the opportunity to raise his right arm, clenched fist, the salute of the left, the gesture of the fighter. Screw them. Give them something to think on when they took the autostrada back across the mountains to Pescara. And his picture would be in the Adriatic paper and would be seen by the ladies who came to buy from the shop and they would whisper and titter behind their hands. In all his time in the gaol he received only one letter, written in the spider hand of his brother Fabrizio, a graduate lawyer and five years his elder. There was a room for him at home, Mama still kept his bedroom as it had been before he had gone to Rome. Papa would find work for him. Therecould be a new start, he would be forgiven. Methodically Giancarlo had torn the single sheet of notepaper into many pieces that flaked to the cell floor.
When the time came for Giancarlo's release he was clear on the instructions that had been given him from the men in 'B'
Wing. He had walked out through the steel gates and on to the Lungotevere and not looked back at the crumbling plaster of the high ochre-stained walls. The car was waiting as he had been told it would be and a girl had moved across the back seat to make room for him. First names they called themselves by, and they took him for a coffee and poured a measure of Scotch whisky into the foaming milk of the cappuccino and brought him cigarettes that were imported and expensive.
Half a year now of being hunted, half a year of running and caution and care, and he had wondered what was the life expectancy of freedom, thought of how long his wings would stay undipped by cell bars and locked doors.
Once he had been in the same flat as the one they called the Chief, had seen his profile through an opened door, bushy-bearded, short, vital in the eyes and mouth – the Chief who stayed now on the island prison of Asinara and who they said had been betrayed.
Once he had strayed into the bedroom of a covo carrying the cigarettes he had been sent to buy, looking for the man who had dispatched him, and recognized the sleeping form of the one they said was expert with explosives. He too, they said, had been betrayed to a life sentence on the island.
Once he had been taken to stand for a moment on the steps of a church where Antonio La Muscio and Mia Vianale had sat and eaten plums on a summer evening, and he now in his grave with half a carabinieri magazine to put him there, and the fruit unfinished, and La Vianale rotting in the gaol at Messina.
Hard and dangerous times, only recently made safer by the skill and calm of Franca.
But as the net grew closer, shrinking around the group, Franca had disowned the safety of inactivity.
'Two hundred and fifty political prisoners of the left in the gaols, and they believe we are close to the moment of our destruction, that is what they say on the RAI, that is what they say at the DC congress. So we must fight, demonstrate beyond their concealment that we are not crushed, not neutered.'
Franca did not talk in the slogans of the kids of his first covo.
She had no use for the parrot words of 'enemies of the proletariat', the 'forces of repression', 'capitalist exploitation'. It confused the boy because they had become a part of his life, a habit of his tongue, cemented to his vocabulary. Franca vented her anger without words, displayed her dedication with the squeezed, arctic index finger of her right hand. Three bedridden victims in the Policlinico, another in a private room of the nursing home on the Trionfale, they were her vengeance – men who might never walk again with freedom, would not run with their children, and one among them who would not sleep with and satisfy his wife.
Inevitable that it must end. The risks were too great, the pace too heady, the struggle unequal.
Giancarlo crossed a road, not looking for the cars, nor for the green-lit 'Avanti' sign, not hearing the shriek of the brakes, ignorant of the bellowed insult. Perhaps he would have brought her flowers that evening. Perhaps he would have gone to the piazza and bought from the gypsy woman some violets, or a sprig of pansies. Nothing gaudy, nothing that would win a sneer from her. Simple flowers from the fields to make her smile and her face soften, to erase the harshness of her mouth that he had first seen as she walked from the shooting of the personnel officer.
But flowers would not help her now, not from the boy who had declined to step forward, who had walked away.
There was a hunger already in his stomach and little chance to appease it. His wallet still lay in the flat on the small table beside his unused bed. There was some loose change in his hip pocket and the mini-assegni notes that were worth not more than a hundred and a hundred and fifty lire apiece. In all he had enough for a bowl of pasta or a sandwich, and a coffee or a beer, and after that – nothing. He must keep two hundred lire for an afternoon paper when they came on the news stands – Paese Sera or Momento Sera. Meanwhile his wallet was in the flat. His wallet that he touched and handled through the day, held with his finger-tips, the contour whorls that were only his own and that the police fingerprint dust would find and feed to the files. They had taken his fingerprints months back in the police station after his arrest.
They will have your name by the afternoon, Giancarlo, and your photograph. All they want about you they will have.
Time to begin to think again, to throw off the weight of depression and self-examination. Stupid bastard, take a hold.
Behave like a man of the NAP. Save yourself and survive.
Where to start?
The University.
In the vacation, in the summer? When there is no one there?
Where else? Where else do you go to, Giancarlo? Home to Mama, to tell her it was all a mistake, that you met bad people…?
Perhaps there would be someone at the University.
The University offered him the best chance of a bed with no questions asked among the students of the Autonomia whom he had known many months before. He had not been there since his release and he would have to exercise the utmost care as he approached the faculties. The campus was heavy with informers and policemen who carried books and mingled. But if he could find the right boys, then they would hide him, and they would respect him because he had graduated from the sit-ins and the lock-ins and the Molotovs to the real war of the fully fledged, of the men.
They would look after him at the University.
A long walk it would be, across the wide Ponte Flaminio, through the Parioli, along the tree-lined ribbon of the Viale Regina Margherita. With the decision taken and his mind clearing he quickened his step. It was a risk to go that far and his name and description and his clothing would soon be radioed to the polizia who cruised and watched over the city, but there were no alternatives.
