The American (15 page)

The ordinary murderer does not. He is an amateur. He acts on impulse or through panic. He does not think his actions through, does not see the authority he holds by an almost divine right. He blunders and wonders afterwards, as the cuffs lock on his wrists or the megaphones demand he comes out with his hands up, what it was all about.

The assassin knows.

So do I.

This is the utter, phenomenal miracle of it all.

The newspaper stand close by Milo’s pitch in the Piazza del Duomo sometimes offers foreign journals and magazines, in the summer when the tourists are about. Today there is
Time, Newsweek
and the English
Daily Telegraph
, as well as the
International Herald Tribune
and last Sunday’s
New York Times
. The front cover of
Time
portrays a revolutionary of indeterminate nationality wearing the international terrorist uniform of flak jacket and balaclava helmet with a Yasser Arafat scarf bunched at the throat, standing before a pile of burning car tyres and brandishing what is clearly, to my practised eye, a Chinese Type 68 automatic rifle.

I study the picture under the shade of the newsstand awning. It is an interesting rifle. I have not handled one for a number of years. It looks like the Russian Simonov SKS but the barrel is longer and the gas regulator different. The bolt locking is similar to the AK47, the magazine dissimilar. To use AK47 magazines on this rifle one has to file down the bolt stop: I had to do so once. I remember the statistics: a heavyish weapon at nearly four kilos loaded, a 15-round magazine – 30 if the AK47 version is attached – cyclic rate 750 rounds per minute, muzzle velocity 730 metres per second. Fires a 7.62 mm round, Soviet M43 ball slug, 25 gr charge weight, 122 gr bullet weight. The title over the portrait, which is a half-length photograph, reads ‘Men of Violence: the enemy in our midst’.

I thumb over the pages. The drift of the article is that we must root out these forces of brutality, these perpetrators of quick death and the transistor-radio bomb. There is no place in the world for the priests of gunfire, the missionaries of pain.

I put the magazine down. I have no time for proselytizing. Life is too short to spend it reading messages from presidential aides in political bunkers preaching peace from behind the stock of a legal weapon.

Men of violence. There is no such exclusive category. Everyone is a terrorist. Everyone carries a gun in his heart. Most do not fire simply because they have no cause to pursue. For want of a rationale, or courage, we are all assassins.

The propensity men have for causing terror is boundless. The British and, even here in the heart of civilization, the Italians, hunt foxes and throw live cubs to the hounds for the pleasure of seeing the blood, hearing the pain, sensing the thrills of agony pulse in their own veins; the Swedish hamstring wolves; the Americans disembowel live rattlesnakes. Violence is an inherent characteristic of the species
Homo
. I should know. I am a man.

There is no difference between a Simonov lookalike in the fist of a freedom fighter, my bastardized Socimi in a young person’s briefcase, and an M16 carbine in the hands of a US Marine.

People accept violence. On television men die by the gun, by the fist of righteousness, as if every film producer was a finger on the hand of his God. Death by violence is a commonplace. No one crowds to see the drunk dead of booze in the gutter, the old man dead of cancer in the terminal ward. A few relatives mourn, cluck about like grateful hens, thankful the departed was not in pain long. A dignified death: that is what they want for him, want for themselves. Yet look at the rubbernecking drivers at a pile-up on the autostrada, the sightseeing hordes massing at the trackside of a railway crash, flocking to see where the plane came down, where the unfortunates were killed.

And the brutalities of law: people accept violence if it is legitimized by authority, accept it as a way of doling out justice. Certain people, certain classes of people may be dealt violence rightfully, no matter who governs it, who dispenses it. It has always been like this. It always will be.

I am one of that class, one of those who may be gunned down in the name of peace. I am the bounty. I and my visitor whom I am to meet again in a few days.

Violence is the monopoly of the state, like the post office and the revenue department. We buy violence with our taxes, live under its protection.

Or most do. I do not. I pay no taxes. No one knows me. I have no long, sleek yachts moored in the best marinas.

I live by the rule of Malcolm X: I am peaceful, I am courteous, I obey the law, I respect all the world. Yet if someone puts his hand on me, I send him to the cemetery.

I should expand this a little, for you will otherwise label me a liar. The law I obey is that of natural justice. The peace to which I adhere is that of quietude.

As I sit in the second bedroom, the compact disc quietly playing, let us say, Pachelbel, and work on the connectors, fashioning them from the smashed steel gear, I think of assassination and I think of poison, the coward’s way of killing, and I think of Italy, the home of poisoning.

It was the Romans who refined the poisoner’s prowess and the Church of Rome which perfected it. Livia, the Emperor Augustus’ wife, was an expert: she drugged and laid low half her family. In ancient Rome there was a guild of poisoners, but it was popes and cardinals who were the real experts.

To bring death by the gun is noble. To bring it by poison is not: it is to corrupt. It is born of a corruption, of the machinations of a malignant and ruthless soul. True assassination is impersonal, yet the assassin takes an active part in the process. Poisoning involves hatred and envy and is, therefore, personal, but the perpetrator merely applies the drug and runs, does not join in the meting out of death.

I always think it so ironic it was the Vatican which made so much use of toxins and venoms.

The first pope to be murdered, John VIII, was done away with poison in the year 882: his followers did it, but they were apprentices at the game and eventually had to club him to death. In this way, they were not true poisoners, for they had an active, if reluctant, hand in the matter.

A decade later, Formosus was poisoned; then, in the worst act of brutality ever committed by a killer, his successor Stephen VII had the body exhumed, excommunicated, mangled and dragged through the streets of Rome before being tipped into the Tiber like a sack of household waste, a bucket of night soil. Draw your own conclusions: poisoners are driven by hatred, assassins by justice and a cause, by the tide of history.

It did not end there. John X was poisoned by his mistress’s daughter: similarly disposed of were John XIV, Benedict VI, Clement II and Silvester II. Benedict XI ate figs in sugar, save the sugar was adulterated with powdered glass. Paul II ate dosed watermelons. Alexander VI drank wine laced with white arsenic which was intended for his enemy. How sweet is right! His flesh turned black, his tongue darkened like Satan’s and swelled to fill his mouth. Gas frothed from every orifice and, it is said, they had to jump on his belly to compress him into his sarcophagus.

Such disgusting exhibitions those must have been. All committed by hatred and avarice. No true assassin would behave so. Death of this variety displays the nadir of human capability. This is not my business.

In preparation for my excursion into the mountains, I packed myself a picnic: a bottle of Frascati, chilled in the refrigerator and packed with ice inside a polystyrene coolbox such as vintners use to mail their wares; a loaf of coarse bread; 50 gm of pecorino; 100 gm of prosciutto; a small jar of black olives; two oranges and a Thermos of black, sweet coffee. All these are stuffed into a large rucksack with my pocket binoculars, drawing pad and crayons and a magnifying glass. A second rucksack carries the rest of my equipment.

Signora Prasca asked me, as I left, if I was going to paint more butterflies: I replied I was not. This was an expedition to the high mountains to draw the flowers upon which the butterflies feed. A gallery in Luxembourg, I informed her, had requested a series of butterflies on blooms. The insects themselves I knew. The blossoms I did not.

‘
Sta’ attento!
’ were her last words, called as I closed the courtyard door.

I have every intention, my dear Signora Prasca, of taking care in every waking moment. Great care. I have always done so. It is why I am still here.

She envisages me crawling along the rims of precipices, leaning over precariously to focus my glass upon some obscure weed clinging to the rock, or jumping from boulder to boulder, chamois-like, at the foot of what in winter is a glacier of white death, the conception of the avalanches one sometimes hears rumbling in the February night. If this were winter, she would be afraid of my getting lost in the snowfields to be killed and eaten by wolves or the packs of feral dogs which prey upon loose horses and the wandering shepherds’ flocks.

The road climbs the escarpment of the valley, cutting through steep, narrow gorges and meandering across near-vertical hillsides. It passes meagre settlements, the houses stunted by the enormity of the mountains, the churches falling into a slow and senatorial decline for lack of congregations. Up here there are few trees: a few stunted walnuts and, in sheltered spots, copses of oak and sweet chestnut.

After half an hour’s continuous ascent, the Citroën – like
il camoscio
, the chamois, its namesake – gains the summit of the pass where the road levels on to the Piano di Campo Staffi. This plateau is a rich place of alfalfa, wheat and barley fields. Buffalo graze here and provide the town’s daily fresh supply of mozzarella, driven down the mountain road in a fleet of rattling vans and pickup trucks, some sufficiently antiquated to have seen service in the Mussolini era.

A few kilometres from the pass is the village of Terranera, Black Earth. I decide to stop here, at the bar, and take a coffee. It is not a sunny day, and I am high in the mountains, yet it is still hot and I need the refreshment.

‘
Sì?
’

The woman behind the counter is young, perhaps twenty years of age. She has full lips and large breasts. Her eyes are dark, sullen with the boredom of village life. The fleeting thought occurs to me that it will not be long before she joins Maria’s ranks at the end of the Via Lampedusa.

‘
Un caffè lungo
.’

I do not want the strong stuff. She turns to pour the coffee into a small, thick cup which rattles on the saucer. I spoon sugar into it from a bowl by the till.

‘
Fare caldo
,’ I say as I pay her.

She nods dismissively.

There is an ice-cream counter at the back of the bar. I drain my coffee and look at it. One of the delights of Italy is the ice cream.

‘
E un gelato, per favore
.’

She moves lazily to the counter and walks behind it, lifting the Perspex cover.

‘
Abbiamo cioccolata, caffè, fragola, limone, pistacchio
. . .’

‘
Limone e cioccolata
.’

She scoops the ice cream into a cone and I pay. The tariff is chalked on a child’s blackboard suspended from hooks in the ceiling by orange plastic baling string.

Standing in the doorway licking the ice cream, the lemon acidic and the chocolate cloying, I survey the fields through the buildings. The earth is truly black where the plough has turned it. Some people call this the Plain of the Fields of the Inquisition. The black earth is, it is suggested, the result of melted human flesh. Burn a body slowly and it chars then melts like rubber. I have seen it.

On the road once more, I drive for ten minutes then take a track off to the left. I halt the Citroën a hundred metres along it and get out, leaving the driver’s door open. Standing by the car, I piss into the bushes. I do not need to relieve myself, for the coffee has not run through me yet. I am not so old. I am just checking that no one has seen the car turn off. There is not a soul in sight, not so far as I can see over the black earth and waving brown grass.

The track has not been used by a vehicle for a long while. I halt again, once I am into the trees, and study the blades of grass growing from the hump in the centre of the track: there is no oil, no sludge of a car belly upon them. There are sheep droppings here and there, but even they are old. The cow dung is desiccated into patches of insect-masticated dust.

Setting the tripmeter to zero, I drive on, the Citroën bouncing on its soft springs like a toy boat in a rough pond. I do not halt again until I have counted off ten kilometres. For the penultimate three or four, the track has been just an elongated clearing through woodland, dropping some two hundred metres in altitude. The Citroën makes tracks in the grass, which is still green here under the trees, but it will spring back in a few hours and cover my presence.

Eventually, passing a ruined shepherd’s hut, turning a corner by a pile of boulders and descending a slope through the last of the woods, I arrive at what I had expected to find, an alpine meadow about a kilometre long and four hundred metres wide at the centre. At the far end is a small lake, the banks overrun with reeds. To the right is a heavily wooded ridge behind which tower steep grey cliffs, perhaps 700 metres high. To the left is another ridge upon which stands the ruined
pagliara
which I had also anticipated.

Paglia
: straw. Many of the mountain villages have a
pagliara
, a second settlement still higher up the mountains to which the inhabitants used to migrate for the summer grazing. Today these places are abandoned, the footpaths overgrown, the buildings roofless, the windows bereft of shutters and the chimneys of smoke. Occasionally cross-country skiers may come upon these places, but they seldom stop.

Locking my knapsacks in the car boot, I walk across the meadows and make my way up to the ruined hamlet. The sun comes out but this is of no consequence now. No one can see the flash of a windscreen here.