Three women and three men. Two of the women were unassuming ladies in their fifties, who were looking around with bewildered expressions on their faces; one resembled a catechism teacher of mine who’d been in the habit of searching us at the start of the lesson ever since a joker had let off a stink bomb in class (more than one, to be honest).

I wondered what they did and couldn’t think of anything more original than: housewives.

The youngest of the women had a nondescript face but bright, penetrating eyes. The minimum age to be appointed a juror is thirty, but she looked much younger, and in any other context I would have taken her for a university student.

The men were very different from each other. One was a gentleman in his sixties, in a jacket and an unbuttoned shirt, sporting a seventies hairstyle. I could imagine him haunting dance halls back then. Another one looked like a sacristan and had a nervous tic: every two or three seconds he touched first his chin, then his chest, with his right hand. There was something morbidly hypnotic about it, and I had to force myself to look away. The third one was a tanned, friendly looking man in his forties; I pegged him for a sporty type, maybe a yachtsman. I decided it would be good to address my remarks mainly to the young woman, both during the testimonies and during my closing statement.144

I made my requests, reducing my arguments to the minimum given that we were already in agreement, and the assistant prosecutor made no comments. Judge Marinelli, after quickly exchanging a few words in a low voice with his associate, dictated an order extending the time limit for adding grounds to the appeal and submitting new evidence. Then he adjourned until 7 April. Even longer than the month he’d promised.

I thanked Marinelli and Valentini, nodded to the jurors, looking at all of them, one by one, for a moment or two, shook hands with the assistant prosecutor and walked out.

145

Lorenza

By the time I got home, my head was all over the place – to put it euphemistically. I kept being hit by waves of narcissistic exhilaration: a beautiful, fascinating woman, older than me – a grown-up – had noticed me at a party, had approached me, had found my conversation amusing, had gone to the trouble of conducting an investigation to track me down, had come to fetch me – technically: to pick me up – at my place of work and had taken me first to dinner, then to her place, with all that had ensued.

The exhilaration, however, was mixed with a sense that I had totally lost control. An awareness that my part in what had happened had been completely passive, that my intentions – let alone whatever decisions I might have made – had been completely irrelevant.