"Viola," Joseph said softly, and even now I do not know whether he meant the word as a flourish, a joke, or the sort of command that already contains its own obedience. We had stopped by a narrow bridge in the countryside where the land seemed too ordinary to conceal anything of consequence: a low stone wall, an overgrown verge, a patch of thick brush by the roadside, olives breathing their bitter green smell into the evening air. There was no palace, no gate, no visible estate, nothing that would have justified the name except Joseph's voice, which had a way of making reality sound provisional, as though the world could still be rearranged if one addressed it correctly. I remember looking out through the windscreen and feeling almost embarrassed by my own expectation. "Where?" I asked. "All I see is a bush." Joseph smiled without looking at me. "Give it a moment."
He stepped out first. I followed. The countryside was very still. Somewhere water moved beneath the bridge in a dark, unseen thread. Joseph walked directly towards the tangle of branches and briar as though he had been there a hundred times. "Humour me," he said, "what if it's full of lions?" I told him this was Europe, and he replied, "It is also the countryside," which was the sort of answer he liked — one that did not quite belong to the question but still made it seem childish. Then he raised his hand, not theatrically, not like a magician, but with the absent exactness of a man signalling to workers he need not see. The bushes shuddered. Not with wind — there had been no wind — but from within. The branches parted along a seam I could not previously have detected, and what had looked like wild growth split open to reveal iron gates disguised beneath leaves and mud. Beyond them a road descended sharply into darkness.
What struck me most was not the hidden entrance itself, though that was astonishing enough, but the manner in which Joseph accepted it, as though the concealment of architecture inside foliage were one of the minor courtesies of family life. He neither admired nor explained it. He simply returned to the car and drove through, and I, being already under the authority of that calm, followed the logic of his ease rather than the evidence of my senses. Behind us the branches closed again, swallowing the opening so perfectly that if anyone had passed the bridge a minute later they would have seen only a bush, a wall, a road, and nothing else. The descent lasted several minutes. The tunnel swallowed the last of the daylight almost at once. The deeper we went, the more complete the separation became — not merely from the visible world, but from scale, direction, and proportion. It felt less like driving underground than like being lowered into an argument already decided elsewhere.
At the barrier men emerged from the dark wearing masks, goggles, and grey boiler suits that made them look less like guards than functionaries of some chemical ministry. None of them appeared surprised to see me. None of them appeared to see Joseph at all. One approached my side of the car and held out a respirator attached to a heavy pack. Another placed a pair of goggles in my lap. "Put them on," he said. Joseph was already fastening his own mask, or seemed to be; in memory I can still see him doing it, though if you asked me now whether any of the guards ever handed him anything I could not swear to it. That is one of the difficulties with Joseph. He occupied space too convincingly and yet left so little trace in the spaces others recognised. At the time I thought only that the pack was absurdly heavy and that the cylinder strapped to it suggested some grotesque excursion underwater. "Are we going diving?" I asked. Joseph chuckled and said, "Something like that." The guard tightened one of my straps without speaking to him, only to me. Then they led us through a steel door and into the interior.
The corridors of the palace were not palatial in any conventional sense. There was no marble, no ornament, no ancestral grandeur. If the upper world of DeSantino dealt in cars, linen, wine, and polished surfaces, this underworld had been built by men who mistrusted sunlight. The walls were cut straight into rock where possible and poured in concrete where necessary. Light came from enclosed strips mounted high along the ceiling, weak and colourless, enough only to separate floor from wall and wall from shadow. The air was wrong from the start. Dense. Used. It had the pressure of a room in which too many people have waited too long. Every sound seemed wrapped in cloth. Boots did not echo properly. Doors did not clang so much as conclude. Joseph moved through it without hesitation, taking turn after turn with the confidence of someone not merely familiar with the place but continuous with it, as if the corridors were extensions of a design already present in his thinking. Once or twice guards stepped aside to let me pass. None of them addressed him. None of them seemed curious about my companion. I did not notice the irregularity then. Or rather I noticed it in the way one notices a slight fever in oneself and mistakes it for weather.
At last Joseph stopped before a door plated in black steel. On it was stamped a code: D.LX. Even before it opened the designation disturbed me. It had the bureaucratic elegance of a filing system and the obscenity of a sentence. Joseph opened it. The door sealed behind us with such finality that for one instant I thought not of imprisonment but of burial. Darkness struck at once. Total darkness. Not dimness, not the common night of rural roads, but a black so complete it had weight. My body reacted before my mind did. I felt my hands rise uselessly in front of me, felt my heart begin its ugly hammering, felt the first primitive suspicion that I had been blinded. The mind, when deprived abruptly of sight, does not become noble. It becomes old. Animal. I remember trying to imagine sunlight and failing. That frightened me more than the dark itself. "Joseph?" I heard myself say. "I can't see." His voice came from very near me, amused but not unkind. "Your goggles." I told him I did not know how to activate them. "You should have listened," he murmured, and then his hands — or what I took to be his hands — adjusted the mechanism at my temple. The lenses shivered green. The room returned.
What the goggles gave back was in some ways worse than blindness. Glass chambers lined the walls in a long curved row, and inside them hung men, or remnants of men, in conditions of such controlled degradation that at first I could not take in the whole image. Their bodies were darkened, almost waxen, the skin carrying that strange discolouration one associates with poor oxygen and prolonged confinement. Their hair had thinned unevenly. Their limbs had the spare, insect-like attenuation of bodies fed only enough to continue suffering. The chambers themselves were clouded with filth: dried vomit, layered faeces, old smears of blood, condensation, streaks where fingers had perhaps once tried to write or remember themselves on the glass. Parasites moved in places where movement should have ceased long ago. Some prisoners twitched. Others merely breathed — if what they did could still be called breathing. One had his eyes open. They were not fixed on me, or on anything. They looked like instruments left running after the operator had died.
My chest tightened then, sharply, and the room lurched by half a degree. Joseph turned his head and asked, almost conversationally, whether I had activated my oxygen. I had not. He reached for the valve, and cool air entered the mask with such immediate relief that for a second I understood how dependence can be manufactured in the body before the mind has language for it. This, he told me, was one of the controlled sections of the prison. The atmospheric mix in the room carried more carbon dioxide than oxygen. It weakened the prisoners, slowed them, confused them, and — as he put it with a faint, nearly offensive elegance — kept the imagination tender. He did not explain the place like a guide. He narrated it the way a surgeon might describe a procedure he had long ago ceased to find unusual. These were death sentences, he told me, but not in the crude judicial sense. Death here was administered as duration. They did not want prisoners to die at once. Speed was for rage, not for family business. Here they gave men calibrated suffocations, designed starvations, measured dehydration, intervals of sleep and its refusal, enough bodily function to maintain consciousness, enough deprivation to poison it. Soundproofing so complete, he said, that not even God would hear them if He happened to pass the door.
He warned me not to touch the glass. Once the senses were starved, even a tiny vibration could become an event. That word remained with me long afterwards: event. Joseph had a way of speaking about torture as though it were a branch of aesthetics. Remove sight and every pressure becomes a universe. Remove sound and the smallest tremor acquires the force of revelation. Remove time, and the body begins to manufacture time from pain. He stood before one chamber longer than the others and told me the man inside had once directed the anti-narcotics bureau. Pasquale Moretti. Or perhaps, Joseph corrected himself with one of those tiny, elegant revisions of memory that made him seem at once precise and unreliable, he had been the deputy first, then the director. In any case he had spoken too slowly when speed was required. That slowness, Joseph said, had cost the family millions and nine men, as if the arithmetic mattered more than the names. Moretti had spent his first year in the black cells — D.XLI, Joseph said, another code, another bureaucratic little grave. He had yielded the necessary information within twenty-four hours, but information had arrived late, and lateness in that world was treated as treachery whether intended or not. After the black cells had come the insomnia rooms. Then dehydration. Then starvation. Then whatever Joseph meant by "the boys had their fun", a phrase whose vagueness was more revolting than a detailed account would have been. D.LX, he told me, was the final destination. Here all previous methods were brought together until the body ceased to distinguish one form of suffering from another.
I asked if the code meant sixty prisoners. Joseph nodded and began, with almost playful satisfaction, to tell me what the D stood for. I stopped him. I already knew. Or believed I knew. He smiled and told me I was learning quickly. That pleased him more than it should have. We moved to the chamber beside Moretti's. The man in that one had once been intended for a secretaryship in the Ministry of the Interior, and had refused an offer the family considered generous. He had gone missing years before. "No one heard of him?" I asked. Joseph considered the question as though it were mathematical. Then he asked how many people I thought would truly notice if an unremarkable man vanished. Seventy, I said. Perhaps eighty. He shook his head. That, he told me, was far too generous. Real social circles were tiny. Most men overestimated the extent to which they existed for others. The family had taken not merely the man but everyone whose noticing might have preserved him — a lover, perhaps, a brother, a clerk accustomed to his routine, one or two colleagues who still distinguished him from the furniture of their department. Once those few points of memory were removed, disappearance became natural. In a few months, Joseph said, the sentence would be over. The prison would move on. Not even the room would remember him.
When he lifted his hand towards the glass the prisoner inside convulsed, not from touch but from the disturbance of air or light or presence — I could not tell which. Joseph withdrew at once. "You see?" he said. "Take enough from a man and even the idea of sensation becomes a violence." We left the room after that. The door sealed behind us with the same obscene discretion as before. In the corridor I breathed through the mask until the cool oxygen steadied me. Joseph asked whether I was enjoying myself. I told him no. He smiled, and that pleased him too. Then, with the mercurial shift in tone that was so characteristic of him, he looked down at his white suit as though remembering it suddenly, declared himself bored of dark places on beautiful days, and suggested we go and see something more lively. The boys, he told me, had captured Mansueto Canzano. They were going to show him his son. "That," Joseph said, "will be much more entertaining."
We walked deeper into the complex. I asked what happened in the black cells — the ones he had described so lightly, the pitch-black bunkers in which men began, according to him, to detach from their own minds. For the first time since we entered the palace he answered not with family history but with himself. He told me he had once volunteered to spend nearly fifty hours in one. He called it curiosity, though the word did not fit. There are men who test a weapon by firing it into the air, and men who test it by pressing it to their own ribs. Joseph belonged to the second type. He said the dark there was of a different order from ordinary dark. In a room one usually imagines that sight might return if one waits long enough, if a match is struck, if a curtain opens, if dawn arrives. In the black cells there was no such fantasy. Time broke. The mind first busied itself with trivialities — comments one had made, glances one had misread, minor offences one might have given to dangerous men. Then those trivialities swelled until they became systems. He began, he said, by wondering whether Don Vitelli had placed him there as a lesson. From that single suspicion an entire architecture of paranoia assembled itself with perfect efficiency. Every remembered conversation became evidence. Every kindness became camouflage. Every omission became design. He started thinking not only that he might be left there forever, but that by speaking aloud he might provide his jailers with new ideas. After thirty hours, he told me, hallucinations began. Not melodramatic ones — no demons, no flames — only the more intimate horrors: the certainty of another presence in the room, the sensation that his own thoughts no longer belonged entirely to him, the conviction that if he turned quickly enough he might catch the mind that had entered before his. He said this quietly, almost carelessly, and ended by telling me that he hated dark places. Yet as he said it he was already leading me further down into one.
By then a pattern had begun to form without my admitting it to myself. Every chamber in the palace seemed less like a room than a function. Every floor, every code, every method carried the logic of an intelligence rather than merely a taste for cruelty. The place did not feel built so much as thought. And Joseph moved through it not as a guest or even as an heir, but as a man moving through the interior of his own habit of mind. That was the most disturbing thing of all. Not the suffocating chambers. Not the starved bodies. Not the arithmetic of erasure. It was the ease with which Joseph belonged among them, as though each level of the palace corresponded to something already ordered within him — or within me. At the time I did not yet know how to ask the question properly. I only felt that the deeper we went, the less certain I became that Joseph was showing me a place, and the more terrifying possibility emerged that he was showing me a method. Not the architecture of DeSantino Palace, but the architecture by which a mind teaches itself to hunt.