The Silence of the Wave (3 page)

I was about to ask him if we could swim right away when I noticed a girl coming toward us. I recognized her, and the sight took my breath away. It was Ginevra.

Ginevra is a classmate of mine. She’s the prettiest girl in the class; she has blue eyes, blonde hair, and lovely dimples in her cheeks when she laughs. She’s already had boyfriends, all much older than us, who come and pick her up from school on their mopeds.

I’m almost always distracted in class. I read books or comics—holding them under the desk—I draw, I write stories and thoughts in my diary, and quite often I look at Ginevra.

“Hi, Giacomo, you finally got here,” she said, hugging me and giving me a kiss.

If Ginevra ever says anything to me in real life, I turn red and stammer and seem even more awkward and embarrassed than usual. So you can imagine how I’d be if she hugged me or actually gave me a kiss. In the dream I pulled it off a bit better than that, even though I was still excited.

“Is this your dog?”

“Yes, his name’s Scott.”

“He’s lovely. It’s one of the first times you’ve been around here, isn’t it?”

“You … you mean here, in this park?”

“Yes, of course.”

“It’s the second time.”

“I’m glad you’re here. We never have time to talk at school. See you soon, OK?” She gave me another kiss—this one was closer to my lips and made me turn really red—and walked away.

“Scott, I have to ask you an important question.”

Go on, chief
.

“How can I make sure I come back here the next few nights?”

Scott stopped and looked at me, but I don’t know if he answered my question, because just then I found myself in my bed with Mom shaking me and saying it was time to get up and get ready for school.

On Thursday, Roberto arrived almost half an hour early. He didn’t realize until he was at the front door, and rather than wait outside—or, worse still, in the doctor’s waiting room—he decided to go for a walk. Strolling slowly around the covered market in the Piazza Alessandria, a stone’s throw from the doctor’s office, he noticed an old drinking fountain with a thin but regular jet of water spurting from it.

In itself it was no great discovery, but at that moment it seemed like a revelation. Noticing that fountain, after passing it by for months, made him strangely cheerful. He washed his hands, stooped to drink a sip of water, and then resumed walking. The area was full of shops, workshops, bars, and restaurants. He stopped outside a small pet shop and stood there looking at a few parrots, a fish tank, and some Siamese kittens.

As he walked back to the doctor’s office, he vowed to explore a bit more of the neighborhood in the next
few weeks. He sat in the waiting room for about ten minutes. Then the doctor said good-bye to someone, and the door leading to the exit opened and closed again. The exit was different from the entrance. When possible, that’s how it works in psychiatrists’ offices: you go in on one side and come out on the other; that way the patients don’t meet. Waiting to see a psychiatrist isn’t like waiting to see an orthopedist, for example. No one has any problem admitting he has something wrong with his ankle or his knee. Nobody has any problem meeting an acquaintance in a dentist’s or an ENT’s waiting room. On the contrary, they have a chat and time passes more quickly.

But practically everyone has a problem admitting there’s something wrong with his head. If there’s something wrong with your head, you might be
mad
, and you have no desire to meet someone you know in your psychiatrist’s waiting room, or when you leave after the visit—or rather, the session.

Hi, how are you? I’m a manic depressive with suicidal tendencies, what about you? I’m sorry, why are you looking at me like that? Oh, yes, I’m also your financial adviser and you’re not all that happy to find out your financial affairs are being handled by a manic depressive with suicidal tendencies.

The doctor opened the door from his office to the waiting room, came out, and stopped, surprised to see Roberto. “Here already?”

“Yes, I got here a few minutes early.”

“It’s the first time that’s happened since you’ve been coming here.”

The tone was neutral and it wasn’t clear if the doctor was asking him a question or simply making an observation.

“I see you’re in a good mood today. I’m pleased.”

How does he know that? I was just sitting here, I only said a few words when I stood up, and I didn’t even smile.

“Sit down. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

The few minutes passed slowly. On the wall of the doctor’s office, the wall Roberto always had his back to during the sessions, was a framed poster: a black-and-white photograph of Louis Armstrong laughing, with his trumpet in his hand, his arm hanging down by his side. The caption at the bottom said:
If you have to ask what jazz is, you’ll never know
. Roberto wondered if the poster was new, or if it had always been there since he started coming.

“Is there a reason you got here early today?”

“No, I don’t think so. Or rather, maybe there is a reason but I don’t know what it is. I suppose there’s a reason for everything.”

“Not necessarily. Some things are pure chance.”

He said this with a smile. Roberto thought it seemed almost a knowing smile, as if there were something else which there was no need to add because both of them already knew it.

“How are you today?”

“Fine.” The sound of the word, as he uttered it, struck him as unusual, as if it had a new meaning.

“Well, better, anyway. For the last few nights I’ve been sleeping at least six hours, maybe even longer, and in the last two days I’ve smoked only five cigarettes in all. I’m still walking a lot and … Oh, I forgot to tell you before: I’ve started exercising again.”

“That sounds like excellent news. What kind of exercise?”

“Nothing special. A few push-ups, a few weights.”

Then, without knowing why, he asked the doctor if he played any sports.

“Karate, ever since I was at university. I started because of this fellow who broke my nose in a stupid argument after my car bumped into his. I wanted to learn how to use my fists.”

Roberto was surprised at this unexpected confidence.

“And did you learn?”

“To use my fists?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t know. I’ve never gotten into any fights with anyone. I imagine you can use yours.”

He shrugged. Sometimes he’d used his fists, and sometimes, as a boy, he’d been at the receiving end of other people’s. As a carabiniere, he had been involved in some fairly lively arrests, and sometimes at the station it had been necessary to calm down a suspect who was
a bit too boisterous. Sometimes, too, it had been necessary to persuade someone to spill the beans without wasting a lot of time. He could clearly remember the face of a young man they had caught with some bags of heroin. He said he didn’t know the name of the person who had given them to him and so he received a few slaps. Maybe a few too many. After a while he started sobbing. I didn’t do anything wrong, he kept repeating. Roberto remembered the young man’s face as he wept, and he felt a sudden, violent spasm of shame, as if for some unspeakably cowardly act.

“Before we continue, I wanted to tell you something.”

“Yes?” Roberto said.

“You’re getting better, we both know that. In a while we’ll be able to start reducing the dosage of your medication. But don’t do anything on your own. That wouldn’t be a good idea.”

“Actually I’d been thinking about that. Reducing the doses, I mean. Couldn’t we—?”

“In a while. And you shouldn’t worry about becoming addicted to the medication. There’s no danger of that.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re afraid of becoming addicted, and that’s the best kind of prevention there is.”

He explained that the people who really ran the risk of becoming addicted to something—anything—were
those who were convinced they could control the situation and stop whenever they wanted, whether it was drinking, smoking, taking drugs, or gambling.

Roberto thought suddenly about cocaine, the fine texture of it, the white or pink color, the slightly medicinal smell. He remembered it as if there were a heap of it right there in front of him, on the doctor’s desk. The memory was like a slap.

He did his best to dismiss it. He nodded: he wouldn’t change the doses.

“Now do you feel like telling me what happened after they took you on at the … what’s the name of the department you were telling me about?”

“The criminal investigations unit.”

“And what are its functions?”

“Much the same as the flying squad in the State Police. In other words, detective work. In a big city like Milan, it’s divided into sections. Robbery, homicide, organized crime, corruption. And narcotics.”

“And what section were you assigned to?”

“I did a few years in robbery and then they moved me to narcotics.”

“Why was that?”

“There was more work and they needed more staff.”

“There were more drug cases?”

“There are
always
more drug cases. Potentially, there’s no end to them. The idea that you can defeat the phenomenon with carabinieri and judges and
trials is complete nonsense. It’s like thinking you can stop a wave by planting a stick in the sand. I’d never say this in public—none of us would ever say it—but the only way to wipe out the whole system and literally bring the Mafia to its knees would be to legalize drugs.”

“But you didn’t think that then?”

“You mean when I started to do that work? Of course not. I never thought we’d arrest them all and clean up society, but I was convinced I was part of the mechanism that would solve the problem.”

“So what happened to change your mind?”

“We’d arrest ten people and confiscate, for example, two kilos of cocaine. After weeks or months of investigation. We had the feeling we’d struck a real blow, but from the point of view of the market it was as if nothing had happened. Nothing
had
happened. The drugs continued to circulate, the dealers—not those ten, but others—continued to deal, and the customers continued to smoke and snort and shoot up.”

He looked at the doctor to see what effect these words were having on him. He couldn’t detect any—his expression was always inscrutable—but for the first time he noticed that the doctor had completely asymmetrical eyes: they were shaped differently, and one was noticeably bigger than the other.

“What exactly did your work consist of?”

“At first they stuck me in the wiretapping room,
listening to phone calls about black and white T-shirts, trousers, and jackets, and cream and chocolate pastries.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Those are some of the terms dealers use to refer to drugs when they’re talking to each other and they’re afraid of being bugged. Or rather, let’s say that they used to use. They’ve realized now that it’s not such a good idea. I remember once two guys talking endlessly about deliveries of jackets, trousers, and T-shirts. The deputy prosecutor asked us to check if the individuals really did deal in clothes, if they had warehouses or even just kept boxes of jackets, T-shirts, and trousers at home. He wanted to rule out any possibility that they could defend themselves by saying they really were talking about clothes.”

“And obviously there were no deliveries of clothes.”

“Obviously not. Anyway, as I was saying, the first months were almost entirely wiretaps and raids. Then I started working on the street, in discos and clubs.”

“How do you mean?”

“Let me explain a few other things first. When we made arrests and took people to the station to do the paperwork before transferring them to prison, there were always a few colleagues who thought they’d take the law into their own hands and give the suspects a good going-over.”

“You mean just beat them up without any reason?”

“Pretty much. Though they’d say that, since we
were arresting them and then the judges were going to let them go, beating them up was the least we could do, from the point of view of justice, so that they didn’t get the idea that it was all a joke and that crime was a risk-free business.”

“Was it true about the judges?”

“Not at all. I never knew a properly conducted arrest—I mean an arrest without strong-arm tactics—that ended up in the criminals walking free. The truth is, most of the people doing the beating up just aren’t very good detectives.”

“But you told me you—”

“Oh, yes, I used my fists—sometimes you can’t avoid it. It was the idea of beating someone up just for the hell of it that I couldn’t take. When colleagues of mine worked a suspect over, I’d intervene and make them stop whenever I could. The suspect gets a good idea of who he’s dealing with. They realized I was stopping my colleagues not because I was playing good-cop-bad-cop, but because I actually wanted them to stop. That was why a lot of them started to trust me. I’d see them when they got out, chat with them, I even became friends with a few of them. To cut a long story short, I started to build up a network of informants. Some of them I’d meet in discos and clubs where we could talk in peace. And in those places I’d get to know other people. They liked me and I made friends easily. Except these weren’t normal friendships. I became friends
with dealers, junkies, pimps, people like that. I’d been in narcotics for a year and I already had more informants than marshals who’d been working there for ten years or more.”

Roberto realized that he was remembering a lot of these things at the very moment he talked about them. Or rather, only because of the fact that he had started talking about them. The time passed quickly, and for the first time the doctor did not notice until a bit later that the fifty minutes of the session were already up.

“All right, I think we’ll call it a day. It’s been very interesting. Keep taking your medication regularly, and I’ll see you on Monday. I’m pleased with your progress.”

Roberto stood up. As usual they shook hands at the door, with Roberto already out on the landing. He had started down the stairs when he heard the doctor’s voice calling him.

“Oh, Roberto …”