It had seemed, at the time, that she wasn’t afraid of anything, and that she hated the police for deeply rooted ideological reasons.

Then I looked again at the date beneath the charge.

5 July 1987.

In other words, when we were still seeing each other. We had met in the spring of that same year.

55

Lorenza

The only things I remember clearly are the beginning and the end.

The rest of it, in my memory, is as disjointed and haphazard as a painting by Braque. I don’t know which episodes happened first and which later. Not with any accuracy, at least.

The beginning is when I met Lorenza, one evening in March 1987.

I had graduated the previous year and was a trainee in a legal practice. Becoming a defence lawyer wasn’t my dream, but it should be said that I’d never had clear ideas about what my dream was. Anyway, I was a trainee while waiting to clarify my ideas. Sooner or later.

It was the mid-eighties. The moral decline of that period is represented with almost metaphorical effectiveness by padded shoulders. When we wore jackets or coats we all of us, male or female, looked like mannequins. You just have to look at the photos.

It was a time when the soundscape of our lives was starting to change irreversibly. A period still full of noises and sounds that no longer exist today.

For example, the noise of a token or a coin inserted in a public telephone, and the noise, similar and yet very different, of the click when a token or its equivalent value in lire was used up.56

The noise as you turned the dial of a home telephone – a strange grey object, pot-bellied and reassuring. The different sounds of a typewriter. The sound of the keys – rhythmical or tentative depending on how good the typist was – which was also, and above all, produced by the heads of the keys, with the letters on them, beating on the paper. The sound of the platen, which you turned with grainy black knobs. The sound of the little lever that took you back to the beginning. The sound of the paper bail that hit the sheet as if to inflict a wound on it and render it powerless.

The click of the tape recorder when you started and stopped it; the urgent, slightly dizzying noise of the tape winding back.

The almost frenetic tapping of the calculator as it printed the result on a roll of paper.

It was an analogue world still made up (not for much longer, though we didn’t know that then) of wheels, gears and switches.