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The church is full of men who loved Aldo Moro. This is what they will say, afterward, in the newspapers and the parliamentary speeches and the long retrospective pieces that Italian journalism produces with the exhausted eloquence of a country that has had too much practice writing about its own wounds.
They will say: the church was full of men who loved him. And it will be partially true, in the way that many things in Italy are partially true.
Veneziano is crying. He has been crying since the Via Caetani, since the news came, since the image of the red Renault and the boot and what was inside the boot entered his eyes and became a thing he now carries behind them permanently, the way certain things cannot be unseen. He cried through the night and he cried through the morning and he is crying now in the nave of the church with his handkerchief pressed to his face and his shoulders moving in small, irregular ways.
He is not performing the crying, the tears are real, the grief is real, the grief of a country that loves its dead better than it protects its living, which is a grief he has felt ten thousand times and which does not become easier with repetition, only more familiar, the way a scar is familiar.
Beside him, Romano does not cry. He stands with his hands at his sides and his jaw set and his eyes very dry and very bright, and looks at the coffin with a very still expression. His grief is in there, Veneziano can feel it present, structural, looking for an exit and not finding one.
They do not speak in the church.
They are very good, the two of them, at the specific language of standing next to each other in silence.
Afterward, in the courtyard, in the May light that has no interest in the occasion and is being beautiful anyway with cheerful indifference, Romano lights a cigarette. He hasn't smoked in forty years. Today is a day for exceptions.
Veneziano watches him and doesn't say anything about the cigarette.
"They gave him a state funeral," Romano says.
"Yes."
"Without the family."
This is the thing he cannot stop thinking about - Moro's family, who asked for a private funeral, who asked for the body to be buried in their village away from Rome, away from the men who fill this courtyard with their dark suits and their correct expressions, and who were given a state funeral instead, because the Repubblica needed to bury him on its own terms, needed to perform its own grief at its own scale in its own way, needed the coffin to be here and not in the village where his family could stand around it without cameras and without all of this.
"Eleonora asked," Veneziano says, then stops. Moro's wife: "She asked them not to."
"Yes," Romano takes a long pull of the cigarette and looks at the courtyard through the smoke and says nothing else.
This is the conversation, the whole conversation, conducted in the gaps between what is said, in the weight that accumulates in the pauses, in the specific meaning of saying almost nothing and understanding everything.
Fifty-five days of almost nothing.
A family's request, refused.
A state funeral that is for the state.
The men in the courtyard who loved Aldo Moro.
"He wrote letters," Veneziano says after a while.
"Yes."
"To a lot of people."
"Yes."
"Did you," he stops. Starts again: "Did you read them?"
Romano is quiet for a moment. The cigarette burns.
"I read some of them," he replies at last, in the tone of someone who has chosen the words with great care, who has considered and rejected other possible words before settling on these, which will do regardless of how incomplete they feel.
Veneziano nods. He doesn't ask which ones, what Romano thought of them, or whether the letters changed anything in his understanding of the fifty-five days and what happened inside them, the precise nature of the looking-away that occurred during them.
He doesn't ask any of this.
The courtyard is full of people and the people are full of ears and this is Italy and this is May 1978 and there are things that do not get said out loud in courtyards, particularly this courtyard, particularly today.
They are Italy, both of them, and Aldo Moro was theirs, and he is dead, and the room where the decision was made about whether he would live or die is a room they were not invited into, a room that officially doesn't exist in a building that officially is not there.
"He deserved better."
It's the simplest thing, the smallest thing, and it is the only thing he is completely sure of.
Romano drops the cigarette and steps on it: "Yes," his voice is very level and very final, a verdict delivered without appeal, "He did."
There is nothing else that can be said here, in this courtyard, among these men, in this register.
He appears at Veneziano's left shoulder without announcement, the way he always appears - as though he was simply always there.
Giulio.
Feliciano startles. Beside him, Lovino does the same.
"A great loss," Andreotti says.
His voice is, as always, mild, measured. He is a small man and he speaks like a small man, quietly, without the projection of someone who needs to fill a room, because he has never needed to fill a room. The rooms arrange themselves around him without being asked.
"For the Repubblica," he adds, "For all of us."
"Yes," Romano says, looking like he is exercising the most extreme version of self control. .
Andreotti nods. He looks at the courtyard, at the men moving through it, at the church doors, at the sky above the Roman rooftops, blue and indifferent. He looks at all of it with an expression that Veneziano, who is very old and has seen a great many expressions on a great many faces, cannot read.
He cannot read the expression.
He is two thousand years old. He has read the faces of emperors and popes and condottieri and dictators and every variety of powerful man the peninsula has produced across the full length of its recorded history. He knows the face of calculation and the face of guilt and the face of grief and the face of satisfaction and the face of a man performing grief to cover satisfaction.
He knows all of these faces, he has a complete catalogue.
Andreotti's face is not in the catalogue.
It's not blank - blankness is readable, blankness is the face of someone who has decided to show nothing, which is itself a kind of showing. It is not cold - coldness has a temperature you can identify it. It's not the face of a man performing emotion and it is not the face of a man suppressing emotion and it is not the face of a man who feels nothing.
It's something else, something that doesn't map onto any of his existing categories.
The shiver moves through him slowly, finding the cracks, the way cold finds the cracks in stone.
Romano's arm presses against his, very slightly. Just contact. Just the reminder.
Andreotti turns to look at them.
The eyes are the same as the face - unreadable, present, neither warm nor cold nor anything else Veneziano can name. They rest on him for a moment and then move to Romano and rest there. Just attention, a man that is looking at them and doing just that.
The man is here and they are here and he is looking at them and Veneziano cannot find in that look anything that he can name or use or bring to any court of any kind, internal or external. Which is the worst part.
He has learned to read the thing beneath the thing, the meaning beneath the word, the intention beneath the gesture, all the layered complexity of a country that communicates primarily in what it does not say. He has thought, many times, that this knowledge was complete, that there is nothing on this peninsula that he cannot eventually parse.
Andreotti looks at them and Veneziano cannot parse it and the not-parsing is its own information, is perhaps the most complete information he has received all day - the information that there exists a depth he cannot reach, a room he cannot enter, a face that has been worn so long and so thoroughly that the face beneath it, if there is a face beneath it, is no longer accessible to anyone including possibly its owner.
Andreotti inclines his head.
"A voi," he says.
The word is correct. The gesture is correct. The tone is correct. Everything is correct and nothing is readable and he turns with the unhurried movement someone who has somewhere to be and is not in any way hurrying to get there, and walks across the courtyard toward a group of men who part for him slightly, unconsciously, the way people part for things that have a certain kind of gravity, and he joins them and says something and one of them laughs, a quiet laugh, appropriate to the occasion.
Veneziano still feels the shivers in the cracks of his being.
"Let's go," Romano's voice is very quiet.
Veneziano doesn't move immediately. He is still looking at the back of Andreotti's head, at the small unremarkable figure in the dark suit, at the man who has survived everything - every government, every crisis, every room where difficult things were decided - with that face, that perfectly correct and perfectly opaque face, giving nothing and receiving everything, processing it all with mild efficiency.
"Feli."
He turns away.
They walk out of the courtyard together, through the side gate, into the street, into the Rome that continues to its life outside the church loudly and with no interest in adjusting its pace for the grief of anyone passing through it.
A bus. A Vespa. An argument about parking conducted with commitment between two men who will have forgotten it by this evening. The smell of coffee from a bar on the corner.
Veneziano is still crying. He has not stopped. The tears are still coming, quiet and persistent, and he wipes at them with the handkerchief that is by now completely inadequate to the task and keeps walking.
Romano walks beside him. He doesn't say anything.
He has not lit another cigarette.
"He looked at us."
"Yes," Romano says.
"What did you..." He stops. Tries again: "What did you see? In his face?"
A long pause. Long enough that the bus has come and gone and the argument about parking has reached its conclusion and the coffee smell from the bar has been replaced by petrol and then by coffee again from a different bar further up the street.
"Nothing."
He absorbs this.
"That's what I saw too," he says.
They walk in silence for another block. The light continues to be excessive and beautiful.
Rome continues to be Rome.
"Is that-"
"Yes,"
He doesn't need to finish.
Veneziano folds his handkerchief into his pocket and walks beside his brother into the enormous indifferent afternoon.