EIGHT

Holy Friday – Ninth hour

Senator Carofiglio,

I have never been a great lover of escapist literature. It is clear that I had the need and opportunity to devote myself, occasionally, to lighter reading too, and this is why I greatly appreciated your first crime books, which are now called “noir”, with an evident chromatic waste, and not I can only confirm that your “Ad Occhi Chiusi” literally captivated me.

I still have, somewhere, your “L’arte del dubbio”, which is not a novel, but it does not matter.

Doubt is a fundamental element in the life of men, of every man. Because it allows him to look inside himself, to discover that he is fallacious, to look back, to return to the past. Which is not a foreign land, no sir, I do not agree with you on this topic. The past belongs to us, we know it, we have knowledge and awareness of it.

We are the past, it is the integrity that we preserve unharmed in the future, of which, however, we are not masters. However, your essay seems to me more like a manual for defense lawyers. As if you who accuse do not have or do not make use of doubt, sending everything back to a third judge and washing your hands of it, lordly.

Oh, sure, yours is an amazing kind of life! You are not at fault. You do your job. You accuse, you support a thesis that you leave to be examined by others. And in the evening you go home to your children, give them a caress and go to bed peacefully, like someone who says they speak for themselves, but then, actually, decides for others. And if anyone gets involved, amen, it is not your responsibility. Do not you think all this is at least contradictory and grotesque? It is for this reason that I stopped reading it, with the exception of another essay written by you, “La manomissione delle parole” which, however, apart from the title, does not seem to say much.

I know you made a career, and may God preserve it. As a writer, a prosecutor, a politician and a teacher. Even too much grace would be attributed to Saint Anthony. However, tell me, Senator, how does it feel on a bench? And how does one experience the fact of belonging to an inert, complaining, parched and withdrawn political party, up to be pointed out by someone as the bearer of the miasmas of the new fascisms, those of the soul, not the historical ones, which do not have they ever abandoned and have always poisoned the breath of people and the world? How did you manage to be accomplices and government allies of that opportunist right which counted among its ranks exponents convicted of mafia crimes? How can forensic eloquence, of which you are a very skilled bearer, put an end to all this havoc? Of course, you hide, conceal, make it almost invisible. However, the havoc exists, even if no judge will ever condemn anyone for it.

You see, Carofiglio, I have been sentenced to death. My executioner and my defender were the same supreme entity. My creator disdained – dare I say disgusted – to become his creature. He only wrote to me, throughout this life in which I believed that he was the one who left me free. Because, power of contradiction, it was precisely with Him that I felt my being in all his entirety. Instead, it was He who decided, line by line, word by word, my infamous fate. He is the culprit, not me. And, returning to the element of doubt, I am reminded that the Romans, in their own right, used to say in dubio pro reo. That is, if you are not certain whether or not a person has committed a certain act, or even whether or not there is a specific aggravating circumstance, you must choose the solution most favorable to the accused.

A man taught me law as calm and serene as his conscience. He was a convinced Christian Democrat, forced to sit on the benches of a small municipal minority, while at a national level his political party obtained a relative majority. Do you see how human judgment often errs?

I remember that one morning he arrived at class in pain and with a swollen face. They had beaten him up properly. Coincidences, you will say, that in the absence of further clues he is used to not proceeding. However, I have never believed in coincidences. Anyone who believes this is in bad faith. You download onto a coincidence what Jacques Monod instead considers necessity. Never taking anything for granted, but giving yourself, of course, the benefit of the doubt. You were an atheist and could afford it.

I say goodbye definitively, however declaring myself yours.