30
When I was a child and they asked me what I wanted
to be when I grew up I always said “a sheriff”. My idol was Gary
Cooper in High Noon. When they told me there weren’t any
sheriffs in Italy, but only policemen, I promptly replied that I
would be a policeman sheriff. I was a good child and wanted to hunt
down wrongdoers one way or another.
Then – I must have been about eight or nine – I
witnessed the arrest of a bag snatcher in the street. As a matter
of fact I don’t know if he was a bag snatcher or a pickpocket or
some other kind of petty crook. My memories are slightly vague.
They only become clear for one short sequence.
I am with my father walking along the street. There
is a rumpus behind us and then a skinny youngster rushes past us
like greased lightning, it seems to me. My father clasps me to him,
just in time to prevent me being knocked over by another man, also
running. He is wearing a black sweater and yelling out as he runs.
Yelling in dialect. He is yelling to the boy to stop or else he’ll
kill him. The boy doesn’t stop of his own accord, but perhaps
twenty yards further on he crashes into a pedestrian. He falls. The
man in the black sweater is on top of him and now a third man is
coming up, bigger and slower on his feet. I wriggle free from my
father and get near them. The man in the black sweater strikes the
boy, who from close up looks little
more than a child. He hits him in the face with his fists, and
when the other tries to protect himself, he tears his hands away
and starts hitting him again, yelling in dialect, “You son of a
whore. Go fuck your mother. Damn you, you fucking bastard.” And
another smash on the head with his clenched fist. The boy cries
out, “Stop it, stop it”, also in dialect. Then he stops shouting
and bursts into tears.
I watch the scene, hypnotized. I feel physically
sick and also ashamed at the sight of it. But I can’t tear my eyes
away.
Now the other man, the big one, comes up. He has a
placid look and I think he’s going to intervene, to put an end to
that horror. He stops running five or six yards from the boy, who
is now huddled on the ground. He covers that distance at a walk,
panting hard. When he is standing right over the boy, he takes a
deep breath and kicks him in the stomach. Only one kick, but really
hard. The boy stops weeping even. He opens his mouth and stays that
way, unable to breathe. My father, who until then has also been
petrified with horror, steps forward to intervene, says something.
Of all the people around, he is the only one to make a move. The
man in the black sweater tells him to mind his own bloody business.
“Police!” he barks. But they both stop hitting the boy. The big man
lifts him, grasping him by the jacket from behind, and forces him
onto his knees. Hands behind his back, held by the hair,
handcuffed. This is the most obscene memory in the whole sequence:
a helpless boy at the mercy of two men.
My father pulls me away and the scene fades.
From then on I gave up saying I wanted to be a
sheriff.
That episode had occasionally come to mind over
the years. Sometimes I told myself I had become a lawyer as a sort
of reaction to the disgust I had felt. Sometimes, in moments of
self-glorification, I had even believed it.
The truth, however, was quite different. I had
become a lawyer by sheer chance, because I had found nothing better
to do or wasn’t up to looking for it. Which comes to the same thing
of course.
I had enrolled in law school because I hoped to
gain time, because my ideas were none too clear. When I graduated,
I sought to gain more time by parking myself in a law firm while
waiting for my ideas to clarify.
For some years after that I thought I was working
as a lawyer only until I got my ideas clear.
Then I gave up thinking this, because time was
passing and I was afraid that if I did get my ideas clear I would
be forced to draw some unpleasant conclusions. Little by little I
had anaesthetized my emotions, my desires, my memories, everything.
Year after year. Until the time when Sara showed me the door.
Then the lid blew off and from the pan emerged a
lot of things I had never imagined and didn’t want to see. That no
one would want to see.
Every man has reminiscences that he would not
tell to everyone, but only to his friends. He has other matters in
his mind that he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to
himself, and that in secret. But there are other things which a man
is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a
number of such things stored away in his mind.
Dostoyevsky. Notes from Underground.
It isn’t good when those stored-away things come
out. All at once.
I reflected on all these things, and others, while
working through piles of routine matters in the office. I checked
on expiry dates, wrote simple deeds and, above all, made out some
bills. I had to, in view of the fact that defending Abdou would not
make me a rich man. The room was cool, thanks to the
air-conditioning, whereas outside the heat had set in, for
keeps.
I finished at about seven. My room is north-facing
and has a big window to the left of the desk. Looking out, I
noticed the sun on the terrace of the building opposite, then I
lent an ear to the faint buzzing of the air-conditioning and the
muffled music coming from the apartment below.
Such awareness was unusual for me and made me feel
good. It occurred to me that I wanted a cigarette, but not in the
usual way. I wanted to do things with calm. I picked up the packet
lying on the desk and held it in my hand for a while. I popped one
out by tapping with two fingers on the bottom end and took it
directly between my lips. I remembered the infinite number of times
I had made that series of gestures like an automaton. I felt that
now I was able to look into the void without being overcome with
dizziness. Able not to tear my eyes away. I felt a kind of shiver
pass through my whole body and simultaneous exaltation and sadness.
I had a vision of a ship leaving harbour for a long voyage. I put a
match to the cigarette and felt the smoke strike my lungs as
another sequence of memories burst upon me. But they held no terror
for me now. I could tell you exactly what I thought at each puff of
that cigarette.
They were eleven in number. When I stubbed out the
butt in the little glass bowl I used as an ashtray I knew that
after the trial was over there was something I must do.
Something important.