Antonio Tabucchi - The Missing Head of Damasceno Monteiro

“Well then,” said Firmino, “the case is the one you have read about in my paper, even if it isn’t written in a style that you like, and my paper wishes to make you a proposition: Damasceno Monteiro’s family haven’t got the money to pay a lawyer, so my paper has stepped in, we need a lawyer and we thought of you.”

“I’m not sure,” grumbled the obese man, “the fact is I’m busy over Angela, you must have heard of the case, it’s in all the local press.”

Firmino looked at him perplexed and confessed: “No, frankly no.”

“The prostitute who was raped and tortured and practically killed,” said the obese man, “the case is in the Oporto papers, I represent her. It’s a pity that you of the Press follow the papers so little. Angela is a prostitute in Oporto, she was contacted for an evening of ‘fun’ in the provinces, she was taken by her pimp to a villa near Guimarães where a wealthy young man had her bound hand and foot by two thugs and used physical violence on her person, because this was a fancy he wanted to get off his chest but didn’t know who to try it out on, so he tried it out on Angela, after all she was only a prostitute.”

“Horrible,” said Firmino, “and you are representing her?”

“Certainly I am,” confirmed the lawyer, “and do you know why?”

“No,” replied Firmino, “but I’d say to see justice done.”

“Call it that if you want,” murmured the obese man, “after all it’s a definition of sorts. You only have to know that this sadist is the young son of a petty provincial landowner who has got rich thanks to the last few governments, the worst kind of bourgeoisie to surface in Portugal in the last twenty years: money, ignorance, and a lot of arrogance. Dreadful people who have to be reckoned with. My own family has for centuries exploited women like Angela and in some sense violated them, maybe not as this young man did, but let us say in a more elegant manner. We might even hypothesize, if you wish, that what I am doing is a kind of tardy penitence for history, a paradoxical inversion of class consciousness, not as according to the primary mechanisms of your friend Lukács, let us say on a different level, but these, however, are matters entirely my own concern, that I would prefer not to go in to with you.”

“As the civil party in these proceedings,” persisted Firmino staunchly, “we would like to retain you as our lawyer, if we manage to reach an agreement about your fees.”

The old man emitted a couple of those little coughs that sounded like chuckles. He tapped his cigar-ash into an ashtray. He seemed amused. He made a vague sweeping gesture to indicate the room.

“This building is mine,” he said, “it belonged to my family, and the next street belongs to me, belonged to my family. I have no descendants, so as long as the money lasts I can amuse myself.”

“And does this case amuse you?” asked Firmino.

“That’s not exactly what I wanted to say,” replied the lawyer calmly, “but I would like you to be more precise about the facts in your possession.”

“I have a witness,” said Firmino, “I met him this morning in the public gardens.”

“Is your informant prepared to give evidence before an examining magistrate?” asked the lawyer.

“I think he would if you asked him,” replied Firmino.

“Come to the point,” said the lawyer.

“It seems that Damasceno Monteiro was killed at the barracks of the Guardia Nacional,” said Firmino point-blank.

“The Guardia Nacional, eh?” murmured the lawyer. He took a puff at his cigar and chuckled: “but in that case it’s a Grundnorm .”

Firmino gave him a bewildered look and the lawyer read his bewilderment.

“I can’t expect you to know what a Grundnorm is,” continued the lawyer, “I realize that we men of law sometimes speak in code.”

“Then explain it to me,” retorted Firmino, “I only studied literature.”

“Have you heard of Hans Kelsen?” asked the lawyer in such a low voice that he might have been talking to himself.

“Hans Kelsen,” repeated Firmino, rummaging through his scanty knowledge of jurisprudence, “I think I have heard his name, he’s a philosopher of law I think, but you can tell me more about him.”

The lawyer heaved such a deep sigh that it seemed to Firmino that he could hear its echo.

“Berkeley, California, 1952,” he whispered. “You may not be able to imagine what California meant at that time to a young man hailing from the aristocracy of a provincial place such as Oporto and an oppressive country like Portugal, but I can tell you in a word that it meant freedom. Not the stereotyped sort of freedom you see represented in a lot of American movies of the time, even in America in those days there was fierce censorship, but genuine freedom, inward, absolute. Just imagine, I had a fiancee and we even used to play squash, an English game then completely unknown to the rest of Europe. I lived in a wooden house overlooking the ocean, south of Berkeley, it belonged to my distant American cousins, relatives on my mother’s side. But you will be wondering why I went to Berkeley. Because my family was wealthy, there’s no doubt about that, but first and foremost because I wanted to study the reasons which have induced mankind to draw up codes of law. Not the codes of law such as were studied by my contemporaries who have since become famous lawyers, but the underlying, and in a sense abstract, reasons. Do you follow me? And if you don’t follow me, don’t worry.”

The obese man paused for another puff at his cigar. Firmino became aware of a heavy fog hovering in the huge room.

“Well then,” he resumed, “I set my sights on that particular man on the basis of what I had learnt as a student here in Oporto. Hans Kelsen, born in Prague in 1881, a middle-European Jew, in the 1920s he had written a treatise called Hauptprobleme der Staatsrechtslehre , which I had read as a student, because I am a German speaker, you know, all my governesses were German, it’s practically my mother tongue. So I enrolled in his course at Berkeley. He was a gaunt man, bald and gauche, and at first sight no one would have taken him for a great philosopher of jurisprudence, they would have put him down as a civil servant. He had fled first from Vienna and then from Cologne because of the Nazis. He had taught in Switzerland and then he went to the United States. I followed him to the United States. The next year he transferred again to the University of Geneva, and I followed him to Geneva. His theories about the Grundnorm had become my obsession.”

The lawyer fell silent, stubbed out his cigar and drew a deep breath as if he were short of oxygen.

“ Grundnorm ,” he repeated, “do you grasp the concept?”

“Basic norm,” said Firmino, trying to make use of the little German he knew.

“To be sure, basic principle is what it means literally,” specified the obese man, “except that for Kelsen it is situated at the apex of the pyramid, it’s a basic norm in reverse, it’s at the pinnacle of his theory of justice, what he described as the Stufenbau Theorie , the theory of pyramidal construction.”

The lawyer paused. He sighed again, but this time plaintively. “It is a normative proposition,” he continued, “it stands on the pinnacle of what is called Law, but it’s the fruit of this scholar’s imagination, a pure hypothesis.”

Firmino did not manage to discern whether his expression was pedagogical, meditative, or simply melancholy.

“If I may so put it,” said the lawyer, “it’s a metaphysical hypothesis, purely metaphysical. And if you want, this is a truly Kafkaesque thing, it’s the norm that ensnares us all and which, though it may seem incongruous, might account for the arrogance of a little squire who thinks he has the right to whip a prostitute. The ways of the Grundnorm are infinite.”