Waiting To Be Heard - A Memoir Part 21

"Porto una trenta-nove," I said softly-"I wear a thirty-nine."

"Go and look in the nuns' closet for something," Lupa told Cinema.

The female ward at Capanne had a chaplain and five nuns, who ministered to the inmates six days a week, filling in where the Italian government fell short-which included clothing us, since it turned out there weren't uniforms. The nuns kept a cabinet of donated apparel that they gave prisoners as needed-most of it worn out and poorly fitting.

Lupa pulled a lumpy, black plastic garbage bag out of a large bin and dropped it in front of me. It clanged against the floor. I dug down beneath the coa.r.s.e, gray wool blanket folded on top and found a metal bowl and plate, a spoon and a fork, a plastic cup, a toothbrush and toothpaste, a plastic bag of gigantic feminine hygiene pads, a single roll of rough, brown toilet paper, and two sponges-one for scrubbing myself in the shower and the other for dishes. "Your provisions," Lupa said.

I choked at the back of my throat. I was holding a sack of the only things the government thought were essential to my life. I was in prison, and alone.

At that point, I gave myself as strong a pep talk as I could muster. This is temporary-a stupid bureaucratic system that can't be bent. Like a roller-coaster ride that I've accidentally gotten on and can't get off until it's looped completely around. This is my own fault. I caused the confusion. Now I have to try to straighten it out.

Tears streamed down my cheeks.

"Whoa! No, no. Be brave. You're okay," Lupa said.

Cinema came back carrying a worn pair of rust-colored cloth slippers, which I squeezed on over my socks.

"Those work okay," Lupa said, nodding approvingly. She held my upper arm, I gripped the garbage bag, and Cinema opened the door to the main hall. I walked out in a stranger's discarded house shoes.

Vice-Comandante Argir, whom I'd met just before my strip search, was waiting. He was a thin man, probably in his fifties, with a large hooked nose that took up most of his droopy face and a hunchback that jutted out between his shoulder blades. He spoke his name loudly and slowly. "Ar-gi-r," he'd said. "Capi-sci l'i-taliano?" Did I understand Italian? I nodded. "Bene," he said, picking up speed. "Sono vice-comandante. Capisci?"

"S," I said. Yes, I understood that he was a vice-commander and guessed that meant he was the second-highest person in charge of the prison.

When I'd first been brought inside from the squad car, I'd seen Raffaele through a barred gla.s.s window, locked in a hallway near the prison entrance. He was wearing his gray faux furlined jacket and was pacing back and forth, his head down. It was the first time since we'd been separated that I'd seen more than his feet. He didn't look at me. I'd wondered if he hated me.

Raffaele and I hadn't been together long, but I'd believed I knew him well. Now I felt I didn't know him at all.

I wondered why he was being kept here, what the police thought he knew, what the bureaucratic reasons were for his presence at the prison. I didn't know what was going on in Raffaele's head, but I imagined that he was as scared as I was. I couldn't imagine why he had betrayed me, but I wondered if he had been just as confused as I had been under interrogation, had lost faith in his own memories as well. Now I wonder if he realized then, unlike me, how serious our situation was.

I couldn't catch his eye before I was led away.

The next step was getting my mug shot taken. I was told to sit in a chair bolted to the wall and to look straight ahead into a big, black metal box, like the camera they use at the Washington Department of Motor Vehicles. In the second before they made the picture, it dawned on me that I wasn't supposed to smile for the camera. Later I was struck by how lost, how frazzled I appeared. My hair was wild. My skin was ghostly pale. My eyes were blank with exhaustion.

Argir stared at the hickey on my neck, but said nothing. "Follow me, miss," he said finally.

Agente Lupa took my upper arm again and guided me forward. Argir fit the large, gold key in his hand into the lock of a bulletproof gla.s.s door reinforced with a row of metal bars on either side. All the doors looked the same-and they were all impenetrable without a key. He went in ahead of us, holding the door open until we'd gone through, then closing and locking it behind us.

We walked through a series of dingy cream-colored hallways. Argir unlocked each barred door as we went. Even in my daze, I noticed that none of the doors had k.n.o.bs. The vice-comandante used his keys as handles.

I was inside the women's ward. Incredibly, as I went deeper and deeper into the cage, I didn't have the urge to escape.

Argir led us up a narrow stairwell to il primo piano-"the second floor" (what we call the first floor is known in Europe as the ground floor)-and tapped the key he was holding against the barred door. On the other side, a female guard used her own gold key to unlock the door and usher us into the infirmary. With a patient's table in the middle of the floor, it was the first vaguely familiar-looking room I'd been in since walking into the prison. The doctor, an older man in a lab coat, his hair dyed dark, was sitting behind his desk. He looked down at the folder in front of him and up at me. "Name?" he asked.

"Amanda Knox. K-n-o-x."

"Do you have allergies, illnesses, diseases?"

"No," I replied.

"Well, we'll need to do blood work anyway," he said. Just then I felt a sharp pinch from the back of my head. The nurse had snuck around me and plucked a hair from my scalp. I started to turn and glare at her, but instead asked the doctor, "Blood work? For what?"

"For diseases," he said. "Sign this. For the tests." He pushed a doc.u.ment and a pen in front of me, and I signed it. "How do you feel?"

"Worried," I said. "Worried and confused."

I shrank down in my seat.

"Confused?" he asked.

"I feel terrible about what happened at the police office. No one was listening to me," I said. Tears sprang to my eyes again.

"Hold up there, now," Argir said.

"Wouldn't listen to you?" the doctor asked.

"I was. .h.i.t on the head, twice," I said.

The doctor gestured to the nurse, who parted my hair and looked at my scalp.

"Not hard," I said. "It just startled me. And scared me."

"I've heard similar things about the police from other prisoners," the guard standing in the background said.

Their sympathy gave me the wrongheaded idea that the prison officials were distinct and distant from the police.

"Do you need anything to sleep?" the doctor asked.

I didn't know what he meant, because the idea of taking a sleeping pill was as foreign to me as being handcuffed. "No," I said. "I'm really tired already."

The doctor nodded to Argir and the guards, and Lupa gently grabbed my upper arm, helping me to stand up. "Thank you," I said to the doctor.

I bristled at Lupa's touch, filled with resentment over being held on to like this. Did they think I might spontaneously do something horrible? But I forced myself to relax in her grip-I didn't want my anger and anxiety to be misread. From the start I tried to make it clear that their clasping my arm was unnecessary. The whole time I was at Capanne, I always spoke calmly and moved slowly, deliberately. When an agente grasped my arm, I imagined my arm shrinking until her fingers could encircle it without coming into contact with my skin. The a.s.sumption that I needed to be restrained like this made me furious. I didn't belong in a place where it was necessary to restrict people's movement by holding their biceps or handcuffing them because they might attack without warning. I didn't belong in prison.

Argir led our procession up to il secondo piano-the third floor. "You're not to speak to anyone except the guards," he said. "No one but the guards." I guess he said it twice to make sure I got it. But who else could I have spoken to? There was no one else around. A tall, thin, red-haired female guard opened the next locked door. This hallway was lined with closed metal doors. I could hear the sounds of TVs and women's voices as we walked down the hall, but I saw no one until we came to the end. A pair of eyes peered out from the viewing window in the last door on the right.

The guard stepped forward and unlocked the last door on the left. Argir went in first. He pointed at the TV, sitting on top of a gray metal box, opposite two beds. The TV was wrapped in brown paper and taped up, like a package waiting to be mailed. "Don't touch this," he said. "Don't you even try."

He must have been used to people who were much less compliant than I was. It wouldn't have occurred to me to disobey him. I felt oddly small, like Alice in Wonderland, when everything around her was so much bigger.

The bed looked as uninviting as you'd expect in a prison, with its yellow foam mattress on an orange metal frame pocked with black spots where the paint had chipped off. Two ugly burnt-orange metal cabinets were bolted into the wall-to hold clothes, I guessed.

"Take everything out of the garbage bag," the female guard said. "If you need anything call, 'Agente.' "

"Am I allowed to make a phone call?" In movies, prisoners are allowed one phone call.

Until that moment it hadn't occurred to me to ask. I needed to hear Mom's voice more than I'd ever needed anything in my whole life.

The guard looked at me like I'd asked for caviar and Prosecco.