The View From the Tower (27 page)

“It’s a mercy he died the way he did, then,” says Helen. She is fighting back her anger with Federico, his reticence. His deceit. So this was the illness. He spoke to his parents, to Giulia and Fausto. Why not to her? Because there was that wall of – what was that word he’d used? Babble.

“And so he knew that in any case he was going to die,” says Don Giusini in a soft, cautious voice that alarms Helen. “And that gave him freedom–”

“What do you mean?” she says, startled.

“He had a plan.”

“What kind of plan?”

“He wrote it all down, he told me. He had started to make notes for his speech for the conference before he had the news about his tumour. He’d wanted to shake them up, in a gentle way at first, to make them think. The conference wasn’t really about reconstruction after the war, he told me, whatever people thought. At first he’d wanted to talk about what peace might mean. He’d wanted to surprise them, lead them somewhere new. And then he learnt that he would outlive the conference by what? A matter of weeks? Two months at best. And so he changed his mind.”

“Is what he wrote called Juggernaut?”

“You know about it?”

“Yes. I think I’ve read some. The first part, before he knew.” She is silent for a moment. “And then other bits. A later part, I think it must be. After he’d been told.”

“He never showed me what he had done,” says Don Giusini. “Not all of it, anyway. He would read sections to me, but he said it was a work in progress, it would never be finished except with his death.”

“He was right. He told his parents about it as well, you know. His mother, anyway.”

“Yes, he told me that he’d spoken to them. He would have spoken to you as well, before the end. He promised me that.”

“The end?”

“I said that he came to confess to a crime,” Don Giusini says.

“I should be, I know,” says Helen, still thinking about Turin, “but I’m not surprised he let someone down like that. They thought they had a right to do anything. I should say ‘we’. I was there, after all. We thought we could take the world into our own hands. We had no respect for anyone who got in our way.”

“You don’t understand. That wasn’t the crime he confessed to.”

“I’m sorry?”

She watches Don Giusini stand up and walk around the room, staring at the floor as though he has lost something. After a moment, during which she finds herself wanting to reach out and grab him to make him stop, he sits down beside her. He is very young, his face is smooth. There are traces of acne around his mouth, beneath the fine beard.

“He wanted my approval, my absolution I suppose, for something he still hadn’t done.”

8

 

 

One day, just after lunch, Giacomo met Helen off the tram. She’d finished her morning’s teaching at Fiat and was on her way home. It was a fine day, one of those spring days that felt like summer, although there was still snow high on the mountains outside the city and out of the sun the air was cold, even bitter. He took her arm and frog-marched her off, ignoring her protests. He wouldn’t say where he was taking her. Helen had a scarf on but her coat was open; Giacomo was wearing the parka he’d been wearing when he came back from South America, and a T-shirt ragged at the neck, and jeans; he looked the way he had done then, his hair had grown a little, he hadn’t shaved for a day or two. After a few paces, he stopped and they both laughed. There was something about his manner that intrigued her; he was the way he’d been at first: playful, charming. He pulled a bar of chocolate out of his pocket and broke some off for her; it was the kind she liked; milk with hazelnuts. He knew that, things like that; Giacomo was always observant, attentive to detail. He seemed to know more about her than Federico did, she thought, her foibles, her preferences. In the cinema he would let her sit beside the aisle, something Federico never did until she reminded him that otherwise she’d panic. Federico still had to ask her if she wanted sugar in her coffee, or added long-life milk – the only kind they could find – which was worse. I’m sorry, he’d say, as she poured it away. I always forget you don’t like it; and she would think, how can you always forget? Giacomo never does.

She should have found this attractive. Perhaps, deep down, she did. But, however much she told herself they were party tricks, like remembering which court card someone had chosen from a pack, Giacomo’s awareness of what she wanted or didn’t want, his awareness of her, upset her and left her on edge. It made her wary, as though there would be a price she would have to pay one day for this attention.

They walked for a few moments, not speaking. Then Giacomo said, in a teasing way: “I’ve got something to show you.”

She stopped. “What do you mean?”

“It’s nothing forbidden,” he said. “Don’t worry.”

“I’m not worried, Giacomo. I’m just in no mood for games.”

He took the ends of her scarf and tied them together, pulling her in towards him until their faces almost touched, she could smell the chocolate on his breath. If he’d pulled any tighter, she might have choked. She thought he was going to kiss her, and she’d have let him; but he moved away.

“It isn’t a game,” he said, in a quieter voice. “It’s important. Well, maybe not important. But, well, significant. I think you’ll like it.” He was pleading, almost pathetic. She wanted to laugh. Is there any difference between important and significant? As if the first were my word and the second his? Perhaps they would never have the same language.

“All right, all right,” she said. “But let me go. I won’t run away.”

They stopped at the corner of a street she didn’t recognise, in the university quarter, not far from the department where he worked with Federico. “Close your eyes now,” he said. She did. She let him lead her twenty, thirty yards; her heart was beating absurdly, she felt like a child in thrall to an older, more dangerous child. “Keep them closed,” he whispered. “Trust me.” They were in the shade of the buildings; the air was colder, she began to shiver. She heard him turn a key and open a door. “Come on,” he said, coaxing. He guided her up steps, and then more steps, closing the door behind them. The temperature dropped once again. His hand was strong and warm around hers. “You can open them now. Just for a minute.”

She was in an enormous room, bare, decorated in a formal way, some sort of entrance hall. There was scaffolding on the far side. Giacomo took her across the marble floor to a lift. “Close them again,” he said. She held her breath as the lift went up. It took far longer than she’d expected. He led her out of the lift and into a biting, unexpected wind. “Open them,” he said, and she did.

She could see the city of Turin laid out beneath her, the roofs of the old centre, the station with the mesh and tangle of rails out to the rest of Italy and Europe, the tramline to the factories, the dull grey ribbon of the river, the parks; the city’s layers, one on the other, nothing quite concealed however concerted the effort, nothing quite whole; and beyond it all the broken bowl of mountain, its summits frilled white with snow, where the cold air started. Giacomo pointed the sights out to her, one by one, Superga, Mirafiori, Palazzo Reale, the Duomo, the Chapel of the Holy Shroud. He didn’t need to; she knew where she was. She was equal to him, she thought, pulling her coat around her. I live here too. He pointed down to the streets filled with traffic, the headlights on by now, to the people, tiny, mysterious, banal, about their business.

“Tempted?” he said, with a grin, sweeping his arm towards the horizon. “It’s all yours. If you want it enough.”

“Don’t be stupid. How did you do it?” she said.

“Do what?”

“Get us into this place. Get the key. It’s always been closed, ever since I got here.”

He put his arm round her shoulders.

“Friends.”

“That’s a very Italian answer. I thought you hated all that. Favours. I thought you said no favour came free.”

“Don’t complain. You know how much you wanted to come up here and now you have. Be grateful, Helen. Learn to be grateful.” Leaning out, he waved his other arm towards the street below. “Just look at the people. This is the point at which we’re supposed to say they resemble ants, right?”

She laughed. That was the problem with Giacomo, that he had the power to amuse her. “Well, they do, a little. Less organised perhaps.”

“Look, you see that woman there,” he said, pointing. “The fat one with the shopping trolley and the fur coat.”

“Not really.”

“Use your imagination, Helen! Say yes.”

She laughed. “Yes.”

“What would you say if I told you it was all her fault?”

“If all what was her fault?”

“Oh everything. War, death, torture, everything. All the injustice, all the cruelty.” He squeezed her tighter. “All the bloodshed.”

“I’d think you were mad.”

“But suppose it was true,” he said, the pleading tone back in his voice. “All the world’s evil concentrated into that one small figure there. And you had a gun. What would you do?”

“I’d miss,” she said. “Obviously. I can’t aim for toffee.”

“So, you’d shoot?”

“Don’t be silly. Of course I wouldn’t.”

“But how could you justify not shooting?”

“Because you can’t just shoot people. That’s how.”

Giacomo moved away from her. “There’s a story I read,” he said, “I don’t remember who wrote it. About a perfect world, without injustice or suffering, it’s fairly vague about the economic details of course, it would have to be, but there’s a sense of harmony and balance, it’s just what anyone would want. A bit too mediaeval for my taste, but a perfect world in practically every aspect. There’s only one snag.” He paused, one eyebrow raised. She did what he expected. She asked:

“Which is?”

“In the heart of the capital there’s a house with a cellar and inside the cellar there’s a child, naked and starving, covered in sores, bleeding, in constant pain. And the child is forced to work at some menial task, day in day out, without interruption except for the briefest sleep, deprived of all but water and the most basic food, without attention, without love, provided with just enough heat and air to keep it alive. Gradually going blind as it works, although never enough to stop.”

“And why doesn’t somebody do something?” she said, playing her part.

“Because everyone’s wellbeing depends on the suffering of the child. Without the child their perfect world would collapse like a house of cards. As long as the child is ill they can be well, as long as the child works they have leisure, as long as the child is denied love they can love. Their clothes and food are ensured by the nakedness and hunger of the child.”

“And if they let the child go? What would happen then?”

Giacomo shrugged. “Well, obviously, everything would go wrong. They’d have to get their hands dirty. One person’s suffering, on the other hand, and everyone else is safe, and happy, and well. The equation’s the same. One death, a hundred million lives.”

“So, what would you do?”

He held his right hand up in the air, index and middle finger pressed together, the other two gripped by the thumb, his strong hard hand in the shape of a pistol as a boy would understand it, then brought it down to point towards the street. The woman with the shopping trolley and the fur coat, if she had ever been there, had disappeared, but that didn’t matter. Giacomo aimed his pistol, the weapon of a child, into the distant crowd of shoppers and people hurrying to their homes from offices and factories and shops, exhausted, hungry, startlingly cold as the warmth of the spring sun drained from the air and the streetlights came on and the park was swallowed up by the darkness. His whole heart was in it, this make-believe that wasn’t. He said:

“I’d kill the child.” He shook his head. “I can’t bear suffering.”

“You don’t mean that,” she said. “You couldn’t kill a child. Besides, there’s no comparison. Your stories aren’t analogous at all.”

He pulled her to him with his free arm. He gave her his hand, the gun.

“Go on,” he said. “Fire.”

 

After they’d left the building and were walking towards the flat, Giacomo said: “Do you miss me?”

“What do you mean?”

He stopped, so that she was obliged to stop. “You know. What we did? Do you miss that?”

Of course she knew. “Yes, I do.” Whatever he said, or did, she missed him physically. She wondered how often he made love to Stefania, if they were fulfilled. She wondered, for a moment, if she was.

“We must be very different,” he said. “Federico and I. In that way, I mean.”

“Yes,” she said, thinking, How coy he is, he can’t say the words. He can’t say
fuck
. He can’t even say
make love
. “You are. You’re very different.”

“Some people, women especially, used to think we were lovers at Yale, did you know that? Because we were always together there, we did everything together. And we’re more physical than you Anglo-Saxons, we’d touch each other and so on, and people assumed there was, well, more to it.” He smiled. “I’d have been more than willing, to tell you the truth, out of curiosity as much as anything. I’d have slept with Federico. I still would, given the chance. You know what Voltaire was supposed to have said: Once a philosopher. I’d have allowed myself that, with Federico. You think you know a person, but how can you? What can you know when that whole sphere is excluded?” He stared into her eyes, until she felt abashed and wanted to turn away. “I know you better than I’ll ever know Federico. And you’ll know me better than he ever will. And that’s a pity, I think. He’s missing out on something.”

“Sex isn’t that important,” Helen said, because she had to say something and she couldn’t say what she thought. What she thought was that maybe Giacomo had explained to her why both men loved her and allowed her to love them back.