Sgozzata Studentessa

The murdered British student killed abroad last Friday was studying in a town where I lived for almost a year when still in my teens. As a result I can imagine only too well the innocence with which she would no doubt have taken her growing self through those first few doors into suddenly unpredictable early adulthood. Any tale of innocence slain is a sobering one, but this one for me is made especially sad when I remember only the abiding warmth and loveliness of the city where she died. They say she was a Facebook user. Perhaps her killer - or killers - saw postings about the upcoming party and planned the moment from there. Maybe they were the three friends or acquaintances arrested today. Or was this all a terrible mistake? I survey in my mind the romantic contours of the centre, like a torch down ancient lanes. A friend of mine died this year. He was an internationally recognised thriller writer whose central character was a detective from the country in question. (He, the writer, like me, also studied in this town.) Anyway, the writer's alter ego police commissioner with his existential manners and love of simple cuisine would have been baffled by this one, certainly by the seeming absence of anything bigger than a penknife and, once again, the poignancy of innocence. For what it is worth, I can remember wandering this provincial city whilst enjoying the company of people from all over the world, and I find it hard to imagine now such a ghastly event taking place within the old walls. We had no Facebook then but did have our own magazine, a small journal I began with a Mexican muralist friend. We did not have CCTV cameras but did have borrowed cine ones, usually on their last legs. It would be better if something simply went wrong for this reportedly witty and caring young woman, this much loved daughter of a freelance journalist and his wife? Did a hand slip, a bottle break, a fall take place? After meeting someone and fumbling back home with them through a kind of crazed courtship one drunken and unplanned night, did an accident take place? Or did a true kind of darkness, the kind we cannot and must not tolerate, be it in domesticity or terrorism, raise its head? I remember walking home alone close to where she died. I would sometimes have to walk a full six or so miles to the small farmhouse out of town where at first I lived. Okay, it was not an entirely peaceful time. Political kidnappings and executions were not that uncommon. But there was courtship and poetry and song and young love and manners in the air, and the waters in the fountains danced with joy, and there was no mention of the fact that we lived in a world where people might slit your throat. So what a shame, a crying shame, we have to know that now. It is like the artist's work. Innocence through experienced eyes.