Читать книгу Loose End - Eva Mikula - Страница 9

Fear, disappointment, insecurities. The end of the story with a person I had discovered terribly different from the idea I had of him, when for love I left Budapest to follow him to Italy. In reality he was a robber, a murderer. The arrest, the interrogations, the trials, the police escort to the hearings, the secret hiding places reserved for witnesses under protection. I was very young, bewildered and fragile. Then, the flow of life turned the pages of my existence. The episodes, the stories settled on each other and, finally, a coexistence that lasted years and a desired but absent child arrived. I don't know what I would have given for a hug, for a little love, if it had happened to me I would have melted. It was as if I had called it.

Thus, an evening happened in which I tried to distract myself by going out with a friend. I was in need of affection, hugs, consolation and approval. But, without too many words, I made a big “bullshit”. I tied myself to the most different person of how, in reality, should have been the man with whom to have a relationship in that particular period of inner fragility. He was a man of few scruples, cynical, apparently adorable. A sentimental scammer who managed to land a blow against me, taking advantage of my emotional situation. Indeed, precisely because he had noticed the condition in which I was, he only pretended to love me and I fell completely.

In four months he took away all my savings, a sum that corresponded to about seventy thousand euros. I was so foggy that I didn't notice anything, until one day two agents of the finance police in civilian clothes showed up at the house: a man and a woman. They exhibited the badges and showed me a photo of a man: “Do you know this person?” It was him, he had left my house two hours earlier. I made them sit down and we sat down in the living room.

My legs were shaking, they explained that his real name was different from the one I knew him by. He actually wasn't called as he had always told me: Roberto Marzotto. “Mrs. Mikula” they told me, “this is a swindler by trade, he is a hunter of women who find themselves in a situation of emotional weakness. With the unfortunate he passes himself off as an entrepreneur well positioned in the upper middle class, and plucks them”. I understood the whole situation on the fly and denounced him immediately. I told the two agents about the trap I had been living in during those months; the world collapsed on me, a bolt from the blue.

I called myself stupid, I even felt guilty. I couldn't get over the fact that I had been so inexperienced. After a life spent without receiving a hug from the heart, authentic, it was hard to discover how a despicable individual had used my need for love to cheat me. It seemed incredible: a brutal and inhuman behavior because it was not carried out by a stranger, but by a person with whom there was an emotional involvement, at least on my part.

If I had suffered a scam at work, maybe a bad deal, a failed investment, anything else, it wouldn't have weighed on me that much. But he frequented my house, he had stroked my son's head and touched my body. No, I couldn't think about it, at least not rationally. I still feel the deep pain and existential discouragement: an incredible discomfort, which was mounting while the two financiers were talking to me. They also suffered for me. I came out, metaphorically speaking, with bruises and broken bones from that story too.

Meanwhile, Biagio, my son's father, would not give up. Just relying on the bad experience I had lived, he insisted: “Do you see what people are out there? People who use you for money, for your skills, for your beauty. You will hardly find someone who is looking for you and who wants you for who you are, for what the real Eve is”. Biagio was really helpful to me at that juncture, but I still had no intention of resuming the relationship with him. I was more and more fragile and he proposed to me to get back together, not me, I felt inside me that nothing would change, that soon everything would return to the situation as before, to quarrels, to misunderstandings. But I was certainly interested in maintaining a good relationship: we had a child together and we had to take care of making him grow up peacefully.

The heart of each of us cannot be closed to love forever, not even mine. What is certain is that all the experience led me to develop a sense of mistrust towards people, in particular for the male gender. I necessarily had to protect myself a little, but I didn't put my feelings in a safe locked with an impenetrable combination. Another unspeakable, tragic suffering had to come, and it did. But nothing happens by chance and nothing happened by chance coincidence.

I had started putting short stays in Hungary and Romania on my agenda. The painful scam I ran into had made me think a lot and I began to think that perhaps it would be appropriate to leave Italy to plan a new life in Hungary.

Perhaps this involved ceasing from action, giving up some dreams. The relationship with my parents had reconnected and consolidated in recent years. My brother, on the other hand, had died a while ago, at 37. His wife found him lifeless in bed due to a heart attack, perhaps...

I started a new relationship with these assumptions. Through my sister-in-law, in Budapest, I met a man of sound principles, a hard worker. After a few months of dating and the ritual introductions to the family, we longed for a life together. I also thought about drawing up some work projects in Hungary, referring to my now familiar restaurant business, with the addition of hospitality. I had in mind to build a hotel with a restaurant, a children's playground, a swimming pool and a tennis court.

There was also the availability of land that was perfectly suited to the project: I had just received it from my parents. I had taken action to have the funds allocated by the European Union, so I was able to enter and benefit from a tender aimed at developing rural areas.

I was a 35-year-old woman who had started living in a fulfilling love relationship again, in fact I got pregnant. Somehow fate was giving me the opportunity to fill that inner void that prevented me from feeling one hundred percent mother with the firstborn. My possible mother-in-law, however, did not agree on the relationship between me and her son. She did not agree with the idea that she was having a nephew and that we were not yet married. Furthermore, I still lived in Rome, there was my son whom I could not give up and the real estate company that had to be followed. We would have had to wait at least a year to get organized and to create our nest in Hungary. There was a timing discrepancy between the objective situation and the pregnancy, a reflection that could also make sense. Also, my man's mother didn't like the past of “Eva Mikula”. For her I was the ex of a criminal, involved in a bad story of the Italian underworld, so I could not be included in the group of reliable people.

In summary: I would never have been a good wife. She hammered her son from morning to night with these considerations.

The fate tragically thought to resolve the dispute in the worst possible way. A referee decided for us that no one would ever know if I would be a good wife and what kind of dad and husband he would be. While he was traveling to Rome by car, just to organize our future together, he had a fatal accident on the highway. Our life flew to heaven with him. I will never forget the phone call from his friend informing me of the crash, of his tragic death. From his mother an embarrassing and absolute silence.

After the phone call, I felt bad. It was 5 in the morning, I was 3 months pregnant and I started bleeding. I called the ambulance and the operator questioned me instead of understanding the emergency, and then told me that the ambulance could arrive in 30 minutes. How could I wait so long alone and bleeding? I had only one support on which I could, however, count in Rome: Biagio. He picked me up and rushed me to the hospital, where I was stuffed with tranquilizers and injections for ten days to avoid losing the baby.

I had had a 50 percent placental abruption. A cruel unknown began to torture me: would my daughter be affected? The doctor, on the other hand, recommended not to underestimate the evidence that she would have offered me a life as an unmarried mother, with a son without a father. In fact, the daily difficulties I would have to face were evident. I imagined them very well, and I knew that the only person I could actually count on, namely Biagio, didn't take very well the fact that I had set foot in another relationship. However, I carried on with serenity the months until the birth. I rolled up my sleeves, worked out the mantra within myself, the guideline: “Yes, raising a child alone is one more reason to fight, to give myself new goals”. I did not want to remain anchored to the past, to the problems and conflicts with Biagio, even on how to educate our son. It was another important step. Responsibilities increased; I could no longer make mistakes and take risks that could then fall on the creature that was growing in me. No more wrong paths and inadequate men; I had already suffered too many disappointments from them.

In the meantime, we had reached 2010; the reputation that preceded me in the private sphere was excellent.

I was able to build a good image of a decent person and a hard worker with my work, seriousness and professional reliability. With neighbors, with the employees of the restaurant bar. In my real estate business, I had good feedback and some rewarding friendships. Instead, among those who had no direct contact with me, for the outside world, I was always and only the Eva Mikula of the White One Gang. I wanted to get out of that discriminatory aura that surrounded me due to the indelible history of judicial news in which I was involved in spite of myself. People outside my circle of relationships, “the insignificant others”, continued to perceive me as the complicit woman of murderers, the sly and ruthless dark lady seen in the courtrooms, on TV and in newspapers and told following the construction of a a convenient truth that had little to do with due process.

My image was as if embedded in that indelible story, very heavy to bear; an oppressive prejudice of public opinion that did not reflect the truth of the facts, neither yesterday nor today. “Don't care Eva” I said to myself, “you have the most beautiful thing in the world, soon you will be a mother again”.

After my daughter's dad died, I waited for a call from what would be my little girl's grandmother. It never came. I called her, out of a form of due respect, when her niece was about to be born, a week earlier. I was kind and loving. She answered me badly, very badly indeed, and slammed the phone down. I have never seen her again, never heard her again, never looked for her again.

All my vicissitudes, meanwhile, seemed to never end, it seemed there could be no peace for me. I still had my belly, it was June 2010, I was having lunch alone, in peace, sitting in the kitchen and stroking my baby who was about to come into the world. I was watching Tg5 of one p.m. as usual. I was lost in thought. I rubbed my eyes, maybe I was wrong, it couldn't still be me in the photo they were broadcasting.

Instead, alas, it was me, Eva Mikula, they were talking about me. My fork dropped to the ground, “Oh my God, what have I done now?” The reporter said: “Eva Mikula's husband arrested for robbery”. “But who is he?” I wondered, they didn't even mention his name, I didn't understand who they were referring to. They only transmitted my photo and my personal details. In the evening edition they slightly corrected the game: “Ex-husband arrested”. Finally, at the end of the service, I realized who they were talking about: a person I hadn't seen and heard from for fifteen years.

It was a guy I married in 1996, during my trial period. After two years of marriage, we separated and after three, we divorced. We no longer had any kind of connection. His parents were important Roman merchants, owners of some bakeries; most likely influential enough not to allow the personal details of the son arrested for robbery to be disseminated to the press. When we got together he was a clean boy, from a bourgeois family, but with the habit of gambling. Our relationship ended precisely because of this, we were too different, our respective visions of life were irreconcilable.

After 15 years from the end of our marriage, this person, by agreeing with an accomplice, a cashier of a banking institution, had organized a robbery. A stunt that probably would have served him to have money to throw in some gambling den or to pay his gambling debts, he was certainly not a serial robber. The news of the arrests, in itself, would not even have caused a sensation, it would have passed trivially without interest in the local news, good only to increase the aseptic statistics on the productivity of the police: people controlled, people reported, people arrested.

Thus, to satisfy the need to appear in the headlines, the marketing of the carabinieri, to whom that arrest was due, came into action, combined with the incorrectness of the journalists who did not filter the news. I thought that, surely, some press officer of their command fed the reporters without specifying the details, merely saying that one of the responsible was my husband, indeed my ex-husband, obviously taking care not to mention his name, precisely because he belonged to a family very much in sight of the capital.

What a godsend also for journalists eager to be able to chroma key the photo of a beautiful irregular girl, with the past from crime news. Who knows, maybe it was useful for someone to associate my name again with a crime, to sell more copies or to make more audiences, it did not matter to check the news first. Of course, the story ended up in all the news and newspapers, for the benefit of their ratings and their balance sheets.

So I called my lawyer and, through some acquaintances, I tried to understand where the news came from and what the source had been. Thus I had the confirmation that it was an official press release from the carabinieri that issued it to the press. I was told that, while the arrested man was handing his identity document to the carabinieri, a photograph of me slipped from his wallet and he was carrying it with him (he still kept it!). They recognized me and did not miss the wonderful opportunity to be able to go on all the national news. They had gone so far as not to let the details of the robber leak out, preferring to throw my name at the news fairs, without even caring in the least about the effects and consequences that this unfortunate thought of theirs could cause me.

The person who passed that news to the press, in fact, had no reservations about what this senseless and out-of-context news could cause to Mrs. Eva Mikula. What could interest him in the path taken by Eva Mikula after 15 years from the closure of her legal case? Virtually nothing. Such a character, unscrupulous to say the least, could not think that Eva Mikula had an image of a mother and an entrepreneur to defend. He had to emphasize the result of a job at any cost, even passing over the rights of others. To make himself beautiful with the garments by bringing them the rich press review with my photo. Who I had nothing to do with all this. Marketing 1 - right to be forgotten and confidentiality 0.

A truly low-level cunning. I was angry and intent on making a mess. My lawyer stopped me, I don't know if he did well or not, not even why he did it, he told me: “You can't denounce the Carabinieri, it's just news, it goes by. With the story behind you, denouncing them would be a wrong step, the spotlight would turn back on you again”. I gave up, but the incorrectness of that news continues to circulate on the web and, above all, contributes to fueling the final equation in public opinion: Eva Mikula equals crime. There was, in fact, the cynical phone call from Biagio who had heard the news, but not from television. Some friends had called him saying:”What's going on? Are you crazy? Did you make a robbery?”