Eva Mikula - Loose End

Not really headlong, but Biagio followed the advice. He kept a little distance, a retro thought, more than anything else. According to him I missed the culture, the study, the Italian style. It was as if I was expecting nothing else. After all, one of the deepest frustrations I carried inside was precisely that of having interrupted school when I ran away from home.

I loved books, I wanted to grow culturally, to learn, to understand, to know. Incidentally, I began to study jurisprudence, a subject of which empirically, in the field, I had learned not everything, but a lot, especially of the thousand streams of the criminal law.

I was looking for answers in my memories: what had struck me about him? Why had he somehow managed to win me over? I believe the apparent refinement; a feeling perhaps accentuated by the fact that he came out of the canons of the people I had known and frequented until then. Already from that clutch bag that I took out of his pocket, it was evident that he was a man of good taste, well dressed at least, but his humility and modesty did not dwell in him. I thought he would be, in some ways, a good guide. And I can say that, in some areas, such as the professional one, it went like this.

In the period in which I began to attend him, the story that in spite of myself had brought me into the spotlight of notoriety and that had made me live under protection brought in the courtrooms, very far from the life I dreamed of, was still very well known.

Although it was a past that I still wanted to leave behind, I talked about it to Biagio although I avoided describing too many details. He never judged me. But he too had asked a few questions, and, perhaps for this very reason, I began to ask them too.

Passion, in my imagination, was another thing. Another secret wish? Who knows, you can't have everything in life; someone like me, not a saint with a skirt and dancers, with a regular life in the parlor of mommy and daddy; one who had lived on the edge, in short, a woman already passed through the meat grinder of life experiences, could have ruined his reputation, his balance as a scion of a good Roma family. Rather, I found myself in the words of Loredana Berté's song: “I am not a lady, one with all stars in life... but one for whom the war is never over”.

I don't know if it was good or not, but Biagio consulted with his friend, the one who acted as a navigator when he came to visit me for the first time in my place. “Don't care about her past” he told him “Eva is beautiful, smart, autonomous, independent, she has a welcoming home. In your place I would throw myself headlong”.

Not really headlong, but Biagio followed the advice. He kept a little distance, a retro thought, more than anything else. According to him I missed the culture, the study, the Italian style. It was as if I was expecting nothing else. After all, one of the deepest frustrations I carried inside was precisely that of having interrupted school when I ran away from home. I loved books, I wanted to grow culturally, to learn, to understand, to know. Incidentally, I began to study jurisprudence, a subject of which empirically, in the field, I had learned not everything, but a lot, especially of the thousand streams of the criminal law.

During the five years of judicial proceedings and the seven trials against me, from 1994 to 1999, I carefully read all the procedural documents and proceeded side by side with my lawyer.

I really understood many aspects of your way of setting up criminal trials. But I was interested in civil law and so I began to study it; it would have been very useful to face a new professional challenge that I was convinced I could launch and win: the real estate sector, as an entrepreneur and expert, and not in the role of intermediary agent, because facing people and public opinion, still gave me anxiety.

I also added a little practice to the books; initially Biagio gave me a hand, especially when I had to write letters, he wrote them for me, or corrected them. However, when I told him that I wanted to try my hand at judicial auctions, a difficult and difficult environment, consolidated in the classic “Italian tours”, he got a little sideways.

Biagio did not look favorably on this choice. “It's not for beginners” he advised me against, but very politely, he let me go down that road. And he did well, very well! I started my new professional experience as a secretary in a company that paid me very little, but the practice in the field I needed to gain experience.

In fact, then I took off, and from secretary I passed first to head and then to manager: I had people to manage and increasingly difficult and demanding tasks.

Naturally, as if it were the consequence of what I had quickly built up also in this field, carrying on the challenge launched, I found myself again the arbiter of myself and, once again, I got back on my own.

With Biagio, from the sentimental point of view, the story had cooled down a lot. It could not be otherwise: we had very different characters and visions of life, almost at the antipodes. My eyes had seen things he couldn't even imagine. He lived with a film noir and didn't realize it. I was the film and he was a single in the family. He did not even know how to seize the opportunity that this woman could represent for his growth in the real world, not the easy one of good neighborhoods, with his back always covered in all senses, by his parents. It was certain that I could not expect to change a man over forty. Strangely, however, the agreement on work was progressing well, it worked, we were like two partners without a formalized company. In order not to think about the sentimental emptiness, the unhappiness of the couple, I worked more and more intensely, so almost without realizing it, I took away important time also from my son, from his growth.

Biagio, however, continued to represent a milestone for me, at least in what we had professionally built together. He was a fair person, of his word and who didn't hurt me, at least physically.

Psychologically, however, when my success began to gallop, his attempts to attack my self-esteem became more and more frequent: “You don't know how things work in Italy”, a phrase already heard in the past by another person whose name was Fabio Savi.

In his opinion, I was not adequate to the Italian system; he knew it better than me and therefore, by default, only his way of thinking and his way of acting were right. In short, he mortified me, he was a great provocateur and quarrelsome of character, he loved Neapolitan dramas. I would not have imagined, however, that this attitude of him would also manifest itself in the home, for the education of our son. I tried to impose some rules, to try hard not to give in on everything, not to consent to every request of the child. To say some no. Of course it is easier to always say yes; it is at the moment, then who knows when he will grow up what he can expect if he is used to having everything he wants. Biagio did just that, he raised him by spoiling him and excluding me from the educational process. So dad was God and mom a nuisance. The space and the role of mother were canceled, I was put aside in a corner: “Mum doesn't understand anyway, she comes from Romania”.

I lived this double drama at home: excluded as a mother and lacking in love. Biagio seemed less and less empathetic to me, I was a woman who did not feel loved, not because he did not love me, I am convinced that, in his own way, he had a lot of love for me, but I almost never perceived it.

Life, the vicissitudes, the pains, the fears had had on me the effect of never letting me give up, of not leaving things in half and of splitting hairs to understand, to give myself and to give explanations. So the word “empathy” caught me. It captured my thoughts, my logic, and then I started studying it and learning its meaning. I understood the importance of this aspect of the human being, of his nature.