When we left the chamber of the suffocating prisoners I expected we would return to the upper corridors of the palace. Instead Joseph led me deeper still, though the path did not at first feel like a descent. We walked back through the corridor where the guards had been waiting, returned the respirators and goggles, and passed again into the dim passage where the air carried that same heavy, recycled quality. Several of the masked men approached us as we emerged, lowering their heads with a formality that bordered on ritual. One by one they kissed Joseph's hand. Then they did the same to me.
It is difficult to describe the sensation of that moment honestly.
Power does not arrive like thunder. It arrives quietly, in small gestures that others perform on your behalf before you have even decided whether you deserve them. I remember thinking, with a sudden and embarrassing warmth in my chest, that I had never in my life felt such gravity around my own presence. Doors were opened for us. The car was brought forward. The guards stepped aside as though our movement through the corridor were not merely permitted but expected by the building itself.
We drove again through the long internal passage that cut through the underground structure of the palace. Joseph said nothing during the drive. The engine hummed softly while the walls passed by in slow repetition. Cells appeared behind reinforced glass at irregular intervals. Some contained men lying on metal platforms. Others contained nothing but shadows. Occasionally I glimpsed apparatus whose function I could not understand — frames, restraints, instruments suspended from rails. It was like driving through the backstage corridors of some enormous theatre in which the audience had never been invited.
Seven minutes, perhaps longer.
Then the tunnel ended.
The doors ahead opened and daylight flooded the passage with a sudden violence that forced me to shield my eyes. When my sight adjusted we had emerged into a clearing beyond the underground complex, a wide open field surrounded by low trees and earth embankments that concealed the true scale of the palace behind us.
At first I thought the field was empty.
Then I saw them.
They stood scattered across the grass like a grotesque orchard.
Human figures enclosed inside hollowed tree trunks that had been driven into the ground. Some protruded from the wood at the shoulders. Others only at the head. Their limbs were fixed inside the trunks in ways that suggested deliberate design rather than improvisation. The bark had been cut away in sections so that the exposed skin of the prisoners was visible in irregular strips.
Insects gathered there.
Bees, flies, wasps.
They moved over the exposed flesh slowly, methodically, as though the men had become part of the landscape.
For several seconds I could not understand what I was seeing. My mind kept trying to convert the image into something more familiar — statues perhaps, or agricultural machines. But the small movements of breathing destroyed those illusions.
"Perbacco…" I heard myself whisper. "What is this?"
Joseph followed my gaze calmly.
"A lesson," he said.
He did not raise his voice. He never needed to.
"This," he continued, "is a very old method. The Persians were particularly fond of it. They discovered something interesting about the human mind — that anticipation can be more destructive than injury."
We drove slowly across the field towards one of the figures. The man inside the trunk appeared unconscious, his head slumped forward, the skin around his temples bruised and swollen. The insects moved across his face without resistance.
Joseph leaned forward slightly as if examining a specimen.
"He has just been placed there," he said. "He will wake soon."
I asked who he was.
Joseph smiled faintly.
"Not the one we came to see."
He turned his head and called for one of the soldiers standing further down the field.
The man approached quickly, removing his cap as he reached the car.
They spoke in low voices I could not fully hear. The soldier looked uneasy, as though something had gone wrong before our arrival. Joseph listened without interruption, his expression unreadable.
Then he dismissed him.
The man retreated several paces but did not leave the clearing.
I remember thinking then that Joseph possessed a strange ability to rearrange the emotional gravity of a room simply by standing in it. No threats were spoken. No weapons were raised. Yet the men around him moved with the nervous attentiveness of animals near a fire.
Joseph finally turned back to me.
"You were asking about Mansueto Canzano," he said.
"Yes."
"He will arrive shortly."
"What will happen to him here?"
Joseph considered the question carefully.
"The family has learned many things over the years," he said. "But one lesson stands above the rest."
He gestured slowly towards the prisoners fixed inside the trees.
"Pain alone rarely achieves what people imagine it will."
He paused.
"The worst suffering is recognition."
I did not understand.
Joseph continued.
"A man can endure extraordinary hardship if he believes that his story still belongs to him. If he believes his wife remembers him. If he believes his children still know his name."
He turned his eyes back to the field.
"But remove him from their story…"
He allowed the sentence to trail off.
I felt a strange tightening in my chest again.
"You mean… forget him?"
Joseph shook his head.
"Not forget."
"Rewrite."
At that moment another vehicle approached the clearing from the far end of the field. Two guards stepped out and opened the rear door.
A boy emerged.
He could not have been older than twelve.
He looked around the clearing with the quiet curiosity of a child who has been told he is visiting an unfamiliar place but has not yet been given a reason to fear it.
Joseph watched him carefully.
"That," he said softly, "is Mansueto Canzano's son."
I looked at the boy again.
He seemed healthy. Well dressed. Confused perhaps, but not frightened.
"Does he know why he is here?" I asked.
Joseph smiled.
"No."
The boy was guided towards a wooden chair placed in the centre of the field. He sat obediently, swinging his legs slightly as children do when waiting.
A few minutes later another vehicle arrived.
This time the guards dragged a man from the back seat.
Even from a distance I could see the difference between the two figures immediately.
The man's movements carried the stiffness of long confinement. His beard had grown unevenly across his face. His eyes scanned the field with desperate concentration.
Joseph leaned back in his seat.
"Watch carefully," he said.
The man was forced to stand several metres from the boy.
For a moment neither of them spoke.
Then the prisoner's body froze.
Recognition had struck him like a physical blow.
"My son…" he whispered.
The boy looked up.
His expression was not recognition.
It was confusion.
Joseph spoke quietly beside me.
"The boy was raised under a different story."
"What story?"
"That his father abandoned him."
The prisoner fell to his knees.
He called the boy's name again.
The child hesitated, uncertain whether he was expected to respond.
Finally he looked towards one of the guards.
"Is he mad?" the boy asked.
Joseph exhaled slowly.
"You see?"
He turned to me.
"The body breaks quickly. Identity takes longer."
In the field the man continued speaking to the child who no longer believed him.
And for the first time since entering the palace I realised that what Joseph had been showing me all afternoon was not merely cruelty.
It was authorship.
The family did not simply destroy lives.
They edited them.
And somewhere behind that calm voice beside me, a quieter thought began to form — one that I could not yet name but could no longer entirely dismiss.
That Joseph spoke about these systems with the ease of someone who did not merely understand them.
But had already learned how to think like them.