Pushing Past the Night (5 page)

In contrast to her negative thoughts and premonitions of earlier weeks, my mother now seemed more inclined to deny that anything might have happened. To survive the next few moments, she grasped at flimsy explanations and improbable coincidences, hoping to somehow alter the course of destiny.

Until the doorbell rang. When she went to open it, she found our neighbor, Mr. Franco Federico, a tailor and a friend of my grandfather. In the spirit of true friendship, he had bravely shouldered one of the worst tasks that life can assign to you. “Signor Federico, to what do I owe this pleasure?” my mother asked, forcing herself to smile. But he couldn't speak, and he stood there in silence. In an instant the castle of hope that was still standing, despite everything, came crashing down. She retreated into the house, howling, “No!,” trying to flee the truth. My memory begins with her cry of despair. He tried to speak with her, but
she kept running away, walking from room to room while I clung to her skirt. Frozen in my memory is the image of the two of us, in black-and-white, circling for a long, long time. I was worried that he wanted to hurt her, but I didn't know how to defend her. Finally she stood still, he spoke with her, she wept, and I hugged her legs, feeling lost.

For years I was afraid of Signor Federico. Whenever he came near me, I would start to cry uncontrollably. Every Christmas he would bring me a nice present, but I would keep my distance, and in the first few years I even refused to open his gifts. Over time we were able to reach a compromise: he would place the package in the middle of my grandparent's living room and then walk away. Slowly, furtively, like a cat getting ready to pounce, I would sneak up to it, grab it, and steal away with it quickly to another room. I would circle it for a while and then open it warily. No one came with me. They would leave me alone, giving me all the time I needed. When Signor Federico was about to go, my grandfather would call out to me. Only then would I peek out from behind the door to say thank you.

The last time I saw him, he still had a white mustache and white hair, very thick and shiny. More than ten years had gone by since our last encounter. He was in a bed at the San Carlo hospital, the same place they had taken my father. He was dying. Although he hadn't seen me since I was a little boy, he recognized me and brightened up as soon as I came into the room. We spoke for a fairly long time and then I stroked his hair. It was still smooth, and he told me, “You have given me the nicest gift I could have ever wished for.”

People often make lists of wasted opportunities. I also keep a list of the opportunities that were not wasted. That afternoon figures at the very top of it.

•   •   •

Signor Federico told her, “Gemma, they shot him. He's in critical condition, and they're doing everything they can to save him.” With a broad gesture of her arms, taking in the apartment and everything in it, she uttered words to the effect that nothing made sense anymore. I do not remember voices or colors, only images, not unlike Japanese cartoons, in which everything freezes during key moments, especially during combat or athletic competitions. The image goes from color to black-and-white and zooms in slowly for a detailed close-up. As an adult, I used to watch these cartoons with my little brother, Uber, and I was startled at their resemblance to the way my own memories operate.

None of us ever went back to that house. My grandparents packed everything up. Mama would never take another step down that street, where a plaque in his memory would never be placed. She promised that she wouldn't set foot there until the day the city finally made up its mind to remember him.

I did go back, almost secretly, without telling my mother or brothers. I felt guilty about breaking a taboo, but I was going to the house of my favorite classmate, Alessandra. One day in junior high, she asked me if I would walk her home—I already knew where she lived—and I didn't refuse. Thanks to her, I was able to reconcile myself with the place where my father was killed. Every time I studied its details and imagined my father's footsteps, I tried to imagine what he had seen in the last minutes of his life.

The night before, my father and I had played hide-and-seek, as fate would have it. He had been given one more day with his wife and children. One more dinner, a few more pages from the book he kept on his night table,
Khrushchev Remembers
—he used to read early in the morning before having his coffee—and enough time to choose that white tie over the pink one. Fate prolonged his life by exactly twenty-four hours. Fate in the form of a parking garage. Let me explain. Since he didn't have an assigned spot in the garage downstairs, he always had to park the Fiat on the street at night. There was just enough space on the ramp to the garage to park a small car, and whoever got there first could take it. Though my father always tried, especially because it made him feel safer, he almost never got it, since he came home so late.
But on May 15 he got home early for a change, and he was able to claim the spot on the ramp. And the next morning, he was late leaving the apartment. The combination of these two circumstances gave us the gift of an extra evening of play.

We did not discover this until many years later, in 1990, during the first trial. Leonardo Marino, the driver of the getaway car who turned state's witness, testified that the murder had initially been planned for May 16. The criminals had staked out a position on the street very early, but after surveying the area a few times they still couldn't find the blue Fiat. The appointed time came and went. They waited for another half hour, until 9:30, and then, figuring that he had probably left at dawn, they decided to try again the next day.

The evidence for this development did not emerge until the day of my mother's testimony. On the witness stand, she described how a few months before the murder she had started to keep a diary of my father's schedule. She wrote it in a small date book, a gift from the Dutch Tourism Board, with “Holland '72” written on the cover. Her reasons for doing it were partly for fun, partly to make a point. She used to claim that my father wasn't getting paid for all the overtime that he did, so she jotted down in the date book at what times he left in the morning and at what times he came back—often in the dead of night. In the courtroom, she was asked to read the date book aloud. When she came to May 15, she understood why. On that date, she had written, “Gigi came home early tonight.” It meant that he had found a spot on the garage ramp and the car was in the inner courtyard, where you couldn't see it from the street. On May 16, she had written, “Gigi leaves at 9:30.” On the same page, at the bottom, there are a couple of other lines. “Gigi comes home with chocolates and candies and we play hide-and-seek with Mario.”

On May 17, there is a single line. On that day he had been more punctual. “Gigi leaves at 9:10.”

My only memory of my father is from the last Sunday that we spent together. The Dutch date book also helped me to reconstruct what we had done that day. “May 14. Gigi takes Mario to see the Alpine Soldiers parade. He comes home with pastries, ice cream, and roses.” My mother still has a rose from that bouquet. It's dry, but you can still get a sense of its color—pink tinged with red. She keeps it in a box together with the thousands of letters she has received over the years.

The diary that came back to life and played such a significant part in the trial also brought my mother and me to the memory of that day. The first time we had spoken about it was actually two or three years before the first trial, when I was in junior high school. One afternoon in the kitchen, after having kept it to myself for years, I told her, “Mama, I have a memory of Papà Gigi. It's a strong, beautiful sensation, but I can't place it. If I tell you, can you help me?” I told her about a crowd of people, a public square, and a marching band. I was sitting on his shoulders, a little frightened of the crowd and the noise, but incredibly drawn to the big golden horn of a trombone. He asked me if I wanted to touch it, but I was shy and no one was going anywhere near the band. People were lined up and down the street to watch the parade. No one crossed the imaginary line. Except him. He climbed over something and passed the police barriers. I held on to his hair while he gripped my legs: I was afraid. I felt like we were breaking the rules, but he gave me confidence. We approached the band. He had a word with someone, asked something, leaned toward the trombone, and made me touch it, for just a second. We turned back. I was happy. I felt grown-up, strong, proud to be on his shoulders. I felt like we were doing
something very brave. I wasn't afraid of the crowd anymore. Everything felt sunny and warm.

I can still feel that sensation today: vivid, sharp, clean. A feeling of calm and fullness that has descended on me often since then. At school. Amid the crowds exiting the soccer stadium. At Rockefeller Center in New York, when people were fleeing after someone found an envelope containing anthrax spores at the NBC studios. On March 11, 2004, when we were putting together a team of reporters to send to Madrid a few minutes after the bombs had exploded on the trains. On the night we put together the special edition marking the beginning of the war in Iraq.

On all these occasions, different though they were, I felt a warm sensation and I thought of him. It is the legacy he has bequeathed to me. He gave me tranquillity in the midst of chaos, a serenity that settles over me when everything around me is accelerating. The faster it gets, the more things inside me slow down, become clearer, simpler. Maybe it was only the Alpine Forces marching band, but it's a memory I've been carrying around inside for almost thirty-five years.

When I finished telling the story, my mother smiled at me, shaking her head. “How can you remember after all these years? … And why did you wait so long to tell me? For days and days after, you couldn't stop talking about that trombone and how you'd touched it. It's incredible that you still remember.”

S
ATURDAY AFTERNOON IN
R
OME.
A group of youths breaks away from a protest rally. They're wearing bandannas over their faces and carrying cans of spray paint. On a wall in the center of the city, they spray in large letters
Calabresi Assassino
—Calabresi the Murderer.

From their actions, you would never guess that it is November 2006, not 1970. Telephone booths have long disappeared from the streets and young people are listening to iPods. There are pro-Palestinian demonstrations in the streets, and controversial slogans attacking the victims of Nassiriya, the Iraqi city where a truck bomb killed seventeen Italian soldiers in 2003. And not far away from the rally, a new president, Giorgio Napolitano, has been installed in the Quirinale Palace. The elder statesman of the Italian Communist Party until its dissolution in 1991, his appointment to the highest office in Italy—the first former Communist to be so honored—is a rare moment of reconciliation between the right and the left.