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shot after shot in the midst of the battle. A few days later, however, he received death threats and was forced to give up his film rolls.”
    â€œI have never been to Via De Amicis or to Milan. I reject that city and I don’t have the courage to go there. But is there any indication on the street of what happened?” Antonia asks.
    â€œNothing,” I reply. I had been there the day before, stopping at the point where the police had lined up. I went to the corner from where the shots had been fired and the doorway where two of the photographers had been standing. The copy shop is still there. It’s been renovated and is very nice, but there is no remembrance on the outside wall of what happened there.
    â€œWhat a shame. Anything that would make people remember would be welcome. There is a middle school named after Papà in Cercola, not far from the house where he was born. It was a happy day when they inaugurated it, seven or eight years ago.
    â€œMaybe I should go to Milan. I should read the transcripts of the trial and finally keep my appointment with sorrow. It might help me to get over, to articulate, the grief weighing down on me. I never read detective stories. I’m also wary of the news. I keep my distance from the newspapers, with all their death and violence. The fact that I never knew exactly what had happened filled me with rage, a rage that has no outlet. My mother did tell me—now I remember—that she had gone to the trial and seen the faces of the boys in the cage. She felt sorry for them. I would have murdered them, in the sense that I would have screamed all my rage in their faces.
    â€œTwice a week I see a psychologist. I go from anorexia to bulimia: I have an emptiness I can’t fill that leaves me helpless. I lost both my father and my mother. I have to pay the psychologist myself. The state has never taken any interest in providing this kind of assistance. It’s not about the money. It’s just that they never thought it was their job to support the widows and orphans economically, psychologically, or emotionally. No one has ever assumed this responsibility.”
    We go for a bite. She doesn’t want pizza, so she orders two salads. I try to speak to her the way my mother always spoke to us: about the future, the importance of living again, thedestructive power of grudges that devour everything—love, passion, energy.
    She looks at me tenderly and replies, “I know you’re right, but I can’t help thinking what my life would have been like if I had had a father, if I had had brothers and sisters I could play with and confide in. My parents would have had a lot of kids and my mother wouldn’t have been the way she is today. Sometimes I obsess over it so much that I can’t take it anymore. I fall apart. I’m not at peace. I am alone with too much anger at what they took away from me and all the things I could have had but did not.”

4.
the blue fiat 500
    I n the spring of 1972, I had just turned two. Our memories don’t normally go back that far. They get erased. Some impressions may remain, like a spin on the merry-go-round, fish in an aquarium, a ride on a motorbike, a scolding from your parents, a joke by an uncle.
    I have two memories from that period. The first is from Sunday, May 14. It’s a vague memory of a wonderful feeling, and the only real, palpable recollection that I have of my father. The second is from the morning of Wednesday, May 17, the day of his murder. It’s sharp, detailed, precise.
    It’s as if I had put all my childhood thoughts in a box, a special place I had created where they could survive intact the oblivion of time and maturity. For years I kept them inside me. To avoid ruining them, I took them out gingerly, in the dark, at night, before falling asleep. Then one day I shared them with my mother, but I was already in high school, and it was not until the trials that I spoke