Waiting To Be Heard - A Memoir Part 51

At Capanne there were two kinds of suicide watch.

The first was for people who had previously tried to kill themselves or were mentally ill. They were put in a bare cell with a guard stationed in front of the door 24/7. The second kind was for prisoners who had no history of suicide attempts or mental health issues, just a good reason to try to kill themselves. I was in that group.

It meant a guard would look in on me every five minutes.

I wasn't suicidal, but my insides had already died.

My first stop on arriving back at Capanne from the courthouse was an office just inside the door to the women's prison. "You're going to be okay," said Lupa, the guard who came into my cell on my first day in prison and hugged me. "Your lawyers will appeal the decision, and something good will come of it. You'll see."

You're wrong, I thought, I've been convicted of murder. I will never again be okay. Nothing good will come from this.

The realization of what had happened at the courthouse took the air from my lungs and the heat from my body. I shivered so much an agente brought me hot milk, like you'd give a baby. All I could think was, What the f.u.c.k do I care about warm milk? I don't want milk, I want to go home.

Besides Lupa, a couple of other guards stayed with me. One was from the women's ward, and the other had escorted me on some of my trips to the courthouse. Whether or not they thought I was innocent, they were trying to be nice. But I didn't want to be consoled by them. I said, "Grazie," over and over. But I was sickened, hollowed out, crushed.

I remember turning six. Waiting to turn sixteen. I thought it would be cool to turn twenty-one in Italy. I'd never thought about twenty-six years. Twenty-six was an old number. It wasn't a measurement I ever used. My mom and Chris had been married eight years. My dad and Ca.s.sandra, twenty years. I remembered seeing a bottle of whiskey that said "Aged Twenty-Five Years." But I'd never thought about twenty-six years. It was a year older than the whiskey and four years older than me. I'd be forty-eight when I got out of jail, one year older than my mom's age on the day I was sentenced. I divided twenty-six by what I knew. Twenty-six years was thirteen times as long as I'd been in prison.

I couldn't stop doing the math. Each permutation added up to the same thing: I had been convicted of murder.

"Please, don't take me to my cell," I pleaded.

I didn't want to have to tell Tanya and Fanta or to cry in front of them. Two agenti sat with me for about an hour. Then their shift was over. They had to go home, and so did I. Only I couldn't.

I wept until I felt I was suffocating. Thinking about my family-how much they had sacrificed and how disappointed they were-was the worst. I wanted to be with them, to hold them and be held. Instead, I sat in front of the ispettore's desk lost in anguish.

"Is there anything we can do for you, Kuh-nox?" she asked. It was the same orange-haired ispettore who'd called me out on the local newspaper article about Cera that caused me to be treated as an infame by the other prisoners.

I knew I was too fragile to withstand any more hostility. I was lucky our cell had dwindled to three women, but with two empty beds, anyone could move in and anything could happen. The constant turnover of cellmates made my tiny life even smaller.

"Can you possibly put me on the list for a two-person cell instead of the five-person cell?" I asked, sniffling. "That would mean a lot to me." It was all I had. Begging for a better cell. It had come to this. This was my new life.

I was in a position to ask. Twenty-six-year sentences were uncommon in Italy, especially at Capanne, which usually housed petty criminals and drug dealers serving sentences of a few months to a few years. After twenty-five months, not only had I earned seniority-I'd been there longer than almost everyone else-but I had a reputation as a model prisoner.

Back in my cell, Fanta and Tanya hovered near me, unsure of what to say-or whether to say anything. Tanya finally hugged me, and Fanta said, "I'm so sorry. We watched the reports on TV."

About an hour later, a guard came to the cancello. "Get your things, Kuh-nox. You're moving in with Laura."

This was an unheard-of kindness. It meant they'd moved my friend Laura's cellmate out just to accommodate me.

After so much had gone against me, Laura was the right cellmate at the right time.

When we first met, we'd entertained each other making light of prison's darkest aspects-being subjected to daily strip searches by agenti-and joked endlessly about the ordinary things we missed most from real life. My answer? Sushi. We sang "The Star-Spangled Banner" together each morning in a show of patriotism and homesickness.

Laura grew up in Ecuador in an American military family. She was years older than my mother, and I was younger than her two daughters, but we'd become friends. Besides Don Saulo, she was the only person at Capanne whom I trusted.

In Quito, where she lived, Laura had dated an Italian who invited her to Naples for vacation and bought her a new suitcase. When she landed at the Aeroporto Intern.a.z.ionale di Napoli, it was not her boyfriend who met her plane but the customs police. They arrested her for the cocaine they found sewn into the luggage's lining. The boyfriend, it turned out, had not only turned her into a drug mule, but had lied about his name. He was untraceable. She was sentenced to nearly five years in prison.

Laura held herself as erect as a flagpole and seemed aristocratic even in her sweatpants. She respected the guards but didn't lower herself. She had a job in the kitchen, but as the economy, and the prison pay, shrank, she politely said, "My service is worth more, and I won't work for this little."

They promoted her from scullery maid to chef, and gave her a raise.

Laura was the perfect person to teach me how to stand up for myself.

"You come first, second, and third, then everyone else," she told me when I agonized over whether I was writing my family and friends enough or whether I was treating other prisoners with the right balance of generosity and restraint.

She reminded me, "Amanda, it's okay to say no. Prisoners are asking you to do them favors they know jeopardize you."

The prison was divided into different sections, and we were forbidden to pa.s.s things-coffee, cigarettes, anything-from one section to another. If I got caught, it would cost me months I could otherwise take off my sentence for good behavior. "They can go without coffee," Laura said. "You're thinking too much about other people at your own expense, and you're stretching yourself too thin."

When I'd beat myself up over past mistakes, she reminded me, "You're a much better person than you give yourself credit for."

And when I obsessed over whether certain prisoners might pick a fight with me, she scoffed and said, "If they bark, they won't bite."

Laura's approach was brilliant-if you aren't afraid, it's less likely someone will attack you. "They can smell your fear," she said. "You see how no one messes with me? It's because I'm not afraid of them."

I was never as bold as Laura, but her tough-love encouragement helped me gain self-confidence. She helped me realize that despite my mistakes and unmet expectations, I was a good person.

And while I learned a lot from her, this wasn't a one-way relationship. I made her laugh, a real coup, because she didn't suffer fools. She said I spoke my own goofy language; she called it "Amandish." When I started acting too chipper and silly-impersonating people or making up stories like you'd tell a child at bedtime-she'd tap an imaginary "weirdness gauge" on the wall above her head and say, "You're off the scale, Amanda!"

Laura's friendship and a few others held me together.

Rocco Girlanda and Corrado Daclon came to visit me on the Sunday after my conviction. As the president and vice president, respectively, of the Italy-USA Foundation, they said they wanted to help me. Rocco was a middle-aged conservative politician with a boyish face and smile. Corrado was a talkative professor of economics. Initially, I was suspicious of them. I received, and threw away, plenty of mail from the morbidly curious. Later, the two men told me that they had arrived with trepidations of their own. They were relieved to find that I wasn't as I'd been billed.

Their friendship uplifted me. They visited at least once a month and sent me books once a week. They gave me a Mac computer and bought me an iPod as a birthday present-and somehow they managed to convince the director of the prison to let me use both.

Besides Laura and Don Saulo, there was one other prison friendship I prized. It was with a toddler named Mina, whose mother, Gregora, was at Capanne for stealing.

Completely uneducated, Gregora couldn't name the year, date, or time. She couldn't read, write, add, or subtract. She didn't know how old Mina was, only that she'd been born when it was cold outside.

Fanta had introduced us. "Gregora needs someone to write letters for her," she said. I laid down the same rules with her as I did with everyone I helped write letters: "I won't think up the words, but I'll take down what you want to say. You talk, I write."

Since Gregora and Mina were in the nursery ward, I saw them during pa.s.seggio. A high wall of bars was all that divided our outside areas. Gregora would slip me pen and paper, and I'd dedicate the first half hour of our afternoon outdoor time to her. I'd pause to talk to Mina, who always played by herself. She toddled around in what seemed to be self-imposed silence, gesturing to communicate. Having spent most of her life in prison, Mina never stepped through a doorway without permission, turning her hand to signify a key in a lock. Serious and suspicious of strangers, she seemed to have an ancient soul-weary, alert, and wise. Sometimes she'd bring over a timeworn doll and cradle it for me, nodding her head and meeting my eyes, as though I could pour out my heart to her and she'd understand.

Mothers and their children were also allowed to attend Don Saulo's group activity time. Mina sat on my lap during movies, let me carry her around the room, and chose me as her dance partner when Don Saulo played religious music. She liked to switch shoes with me. She'd hang her own tiny, red plastic ones on my toes and clomp around in mine.

One afternoon Gregora ran up to the bars outside, calling, "Amanda! Amanda!"

I came over, expecting Gregora to hand me the latest letter from her husband, a prisoner on the men's side. Instead she whispered, "Listen!"

I looked around to see Mina playing by herself in the middle of the yard.

"It's the song you sing in church!" Gregora cried.

"Ave-sha-om-ahem ..."

I could hear a tinny, high-pitched voice squeaking out a melody.