There’s nothing worse for an enraged spirit than unleashing his anger with violence only to become the laughing stock of his surroundings. Our manager, who we would all call Debby to mark our democratic spirit, could not help but laugh when she learned about unfortunate Zamani, and she was the only one, along with the administrators, who knew about the change, , because every week somebody would break a window during the night, until the one day she resolved that bulletproof windows were what was needed.
A few weeks later Zamani appeared in our office. Helenka, the receptionist, rushed over to tell me to deal with him. I had a reputation of being good with difficult clients.
-Fab, there’s a pretty pretty guy here. Can you take care of him?
-Of course- I said without hesitation. Nobody liked dealing with violent, dangerous, or cry-baby clients. But I was of the view that these were the only interesting service users. Partly due to my ethical predisposition to help those most in need. But partly due to a very selfish reason. It had become a game.
Yes, a game. Dangerous, but a game. And fun, too. I learned this in Venezuela from the famously untamed llaneros. I remembered once the pride with which a brave tamer said that he’d mounted the wildest horse, an impossible mare, and had left her meek. And so it was that one day I said to myself, "with clients I will do the same". So if one of them arrived in a serious sweat, furious, red, with protuberant veins, bulging eyes, a contained scream, and clenched teeth I would say to myself, in silence:
-Here you are papito... I’ll have you meek in no time.
Little by little I became the expert in all types of fury and Hallucinations. And my dear Helenka knew of my longing to deal with all kinds of demonized clients and for that reason she immediately called on me to deal with Zamani.
-Fab, he's the one who broke his head with the brick, he's furious. He still has a bandaged head. Doesn't speak. Says nothing. His eyes are going to pop out. Right up your street. - Helenka said to me, laughing, for she didn't understand how I could be mad enough to deal with someone like that. But she knew the other option was to call William, Paul or Vicky, and they’d end up reciting the institutional mantra, very much aligned to our policies, that we simply do not tolerate assaults or insults. Helenka knew our policies all too well, without Vanessa or I everything would end up with the police involved. Zamani would punch the table, break something, yell, throw a chair against a wall, and the security guard would come, and with his black belt of I don't know how many martial arts, he would tie him up and ten minutes later the police too. For that, and more, Helenka adored me.
-Please Helenka,
try to tell him where the door for the security room is. I’ll wait for him
there.
He came in through
the door on one side of the room, I came in through the other. Both at the same
time. The security guard followed behind him.
-Please leave me
alone with Mr Zamani, I asked the security guard.
-Are you sure?
-Yes.
I sat down in my
chair, facing the desk where my computer was placed, and he sat in front of me.
-Good morning Mr
Zamani.
He did not answer. He
put one elbow on the table, with force, as if he wanted to break the table.
Then his other elbow. Then he leaned forward a little to put his hands on both
sides of his face, his elbows firmly fixed to the table. I was calm, or at
least calm in appearance, let's say that if someone had looked at me, they
would have said yeah, that guy is calm, but I couldn't have been because I am
really rather terrible with physical attacks - at school I was the worst at
fighting, in any case I just defended myself with words, don’t get distracted,
Fabrizio, you know nobody is interested in that so go back to telling the
story, and as I was saying I could see that elbows on the table were
aggressive, but people that are after a fight don’t put their elbows on the
table. My expectation was that it would end well, but I knew that with the
faintest negative stimulus the man would jump me. I waited for a bit and Zamani
didn’t return the greeting.
-I’ll do my best to help you, -"I’ll wait for you to explain". I waited patiently for his response.
And I waited. I didn't
rush to follow the procedures that were specifically outlined by the
organization where I worked. The first step was to ask for the name, confirm
the person’s identity, ask for their identity document and to confirm date of
birth, nationality and so on. If my boss had been supervising me, she would
have already marked several Xs under "things to improve". I of course
ignored that procedure, or to say it in true Venezuelan, which is how it should
be said here, I passed it through the very lining of my balls. This guy was
furious and needed to be heard, to let it all out. I waited, then added:
-I’ll wait, don't worry, I'm here to help you.
And Zamani only moved
his chest for take deep and controlled breaths. His arms were thick, muscular,
and his veins were visible. I imagined that the air he expired when he breathed
came out hot and vaporous. It seemed as though he wanted to avoid an explosion.
And so that he didn’t explode, I continued to wait a few seconds longer. “Maybe he needs his adrenaline to drop”, I thought, a little worried about my safety. I visualized my escape plan in case he jumped across to strangle me, since it looked like I wouldn't have time to activate the emergency button. And just when I glanced at the door, I saw my manager beckoning me through the window with a gesture, something along the lines of “we-have-to-talk". I didn't pay any attention to her, of course. And I focused on Zamani. Nothing happened after allowing a reasonable amount of time to pass so his adrenaline to drop, what do I know if I am not a shrink, but thus, unarmed:
-I'm here to help
you, Sir -I repeated, and left a short pause to add - And to help you I need to
know what's wrong.
I waited for a few more
seconds to pass, which felt more like hours to me, possibly also for him, but I
knew that this phrase needed to break into his consciousness, of which there
was little. Little, yes, but enough to get him here, the right place to get
help. Like a true Venezuelan I know very well how to react in moments of
extreme tension because we’ve all gone through the training of being detained
by the terrible Guardia Nacional, the fearsome malandros or any
of the new police forces created by the dictatorship which I was spared the
doubtful honour of meeting. Anyway, I tried to hold the silence for as long as
possible so that the discomfort made him speak.
But I was the one
that felt uncomfortable when out of the corner of my eye I saw the
manager making a gesture to me that I pretended not to notice. And it suddenly
occurred to me that the problem was perhaps that neither of us spoke English as
the primary language. So in slightly tarzan-esque English I repeated:
-To help, I need
to know. I know, I help, I don´t know, I don’t help. You tell me, I
help.
Nothing. There he was;
still looking at the table. Firm elbows. His head propped up by his
hands. There wasn’t a single movement coming from his extremities, only
his breathing, always heavy, deep and sonorous. For me it wasn’t altogether
easy to imagine what he was feeling. He was frightening, rather than pitiful,
and that's why I continued to play tamer.
Certainly, I didn't yet
know he’d been accumulating rage since he was a child. Less still, that his
fate by birth was not to become a traumatised child, but the spoiled child of
an Iranian upper middle class, with studies abroad and all the sophistication
of Persian culture. He had a quiet and privileged childhood in Tehran. He had
not learned much about the Islamic revolution, as he lived in the protected
world of his home, which included domestic workers, and frequent visits from
family and friends of his parents. They frequently travelled to Turkey, where
they would go to the beach, and his mother enjoyed the markets of Istanbul, a
city she preferred to Paris or Rome. But master Zamani was not impressed by
Anatolian beaches because he preferred to play in the pool at home, originally
built for an English diplomat, always clean and more often than not featuring
some carefully selected family guest. Who would have thought that this child
would have metamorphosed into this monster that everyone feared?
-Take your time,
Mr. Zamani. I am also a foreigner and I have become very angry in this country.
Not everyone understands us, I know.
And I decided to wait a
few seconds longer. Maybe minutes. But hours according to my warped perception
of time. And I was trying to understand what he was thinking but he didn't give
me such a kinetic indication, his body motionless. I only managed to suppose
that the night before the incident of the vengeful brick, Zamani travelled
across the north of the city of Leeds, went downtown, grabbed a huge brick from
a nearby building site and walked south of the city. He arrived at our
office to release all the anger he had against us, the Home Office, the United
Nations, God and life. And all that with a brick against the vengeful window;
and this time, as with all other occasions both in this country and in his native
Iran, he was down on his luck, and with all his muscles he merely managed to
get bricked by the window in return. Poor Zamani.
And poor me, that the
man was still silent. And poor me that the manager had disappeared and the
internal phone had begun to ring, and I knew why. Obviously the manager, Debby.
I unplugged it. My full attention available for Zamani once more .
-I don't know what
happened to you, but things have happened to me in this country too, that's why
I came to work here, to help people like you, people like me.
I still didn't know what
his problem was, but it was easy to guess from his fury that he was in a grave
situation , or at least according to himself. For my part, I had to make him
understand that there is a them and there is an us, there is a “you-and-I"
that is us. It’s not very fair to my colleagues, but it’s the way to break this
barrier. But nothing worked. He was still there, pinned down. I could still
hear his breathing. His elbows were still pinned firmly to the table. Still I couldn't
see a single sign that he was hearing me, that there was empathy. And of
course, I hadn’t yet learned that his family fell into disgrace due to his
father's political membership, and that the revolution stripped them of all
their privileges at great speed. The final privilege to be lost was his
mother's freedom to wear a half-covered veil, in clear contravention of the
rules imposed by the Ayatollahs and rigorously imposed by the moral guards.
While still accustomed to the privileges of being a wealthy child in an
unequal society, he was forced as a child to see his mother stoned to death
following a brutal trial. And with each stone came insults, to add humiliation
to the pain. Every stone the mother received wounded him in the chest with a
burning pain that would never leave him. And so he saw her die. And she died
not only with the pain of stones and humiliation, but with the pain of seeing
her son watching, to add more suffering. What a death!
I kept asking
myself how to break the ice. I couldn't let him go without solving his problem
or he would kill someone, or would kill himself, or he would throw another
brick at a window, preferably not ours again. And the manager reappeared at the
window with her talk-later or I-have-something-to-say grimace. I
made a gesture for later, a gesture indicating to wait, hoping
for the best ... I waited a while and said:
-Listen , Zamani,
we’re not from the Home Office here. The Home Office is often wrong, maybe we
can help you.
I waited some
more. Nothing. I kept waiting.
-Zamani, listen, I
need to help you. Look, I'm not doing it for the Refugee Council. I do it for
me. To give my life some peace. I came to help because I want to help people
like you: but I can't help you if you don't tell me the problem.
And he finally
looked up. He looked at me and made a gesture as if to say
"yes", yes something. I waited. I thought; "Looking at me, he
won’t bear the silence," but he held on. And I had no choice but to
carefully process his gaze, of only a few seconds, but it’s very intense when a
gesture is all you have to go on to understand somebody. He had that look of
doubt, of enquiry and of will-you-be-the-one-who-understands? A look
of I can't cope any longer.
Until finally he took
out a bunch of papers, documents, and various things he had in his pockets.
They were wrinkled, folded, stained with coffee. I took the papers and saw
notifications from the Home Office about housing…and also that one about his
“liability to detention”, in other words that they can put you in prison
without reason, for the simple fact that you applied for asylum, for, you
see, claiming asylum is your human right, but for asserting your right they can
put you in jail, as vulgar as that, almost as much as Chavez threatening to put
people in jail by national TV broadcast. Now here they’re more “civilized” than
in Venezuela or Iran, they have judges with white wigs, and what they do is
send you a little letter with your name and current address, and later on the
judges with white wigs don’t question the legality of putting you in jail
without having committed a crime. Civilised my arse. Callous beasts. This
letter is not exactly comforting when they hand it to you while informing you
that they’ll analyse your asylum application and you’ll have to wait for
months or years. Years in limbo - better limbo than hell - but with the threat
of hell, and to make it more pleasant, years you can be detained, just like
that, for nothing more than ‘a stitch in their ass’, as they would say in
Venezuela.
That letter, that piece
of paper saying liability to detention always came up among the documents of
refugees. It was one of many. It was never relevant. And yet there he was
yelling at me about the injustices of the world. I am Venezuelan, just like
Carlos, just like Sofía, just like my mate Arturo, the
scientist-turned-entrepreneur. But there’s something different about me,
something for which I cannot take credit. I’m also Italian, my parents are.
It’s written in the Italian constitution, article 4. It’s just their luck
that the others receive this letter and I do not. For me if I go to prison it’s
because I’ve killed somebody, no matter how stupid they are. Or I’ll go to jail
for writing these stories, who knows. Or because some story offends one of these
white wigs from a bygone nineteenth-century era. And now, in leaving the
European Union, Europeans get goosebumps because of their newly insecure
status, and look at Zamani, his status permits detention and deportation to
hell rather than the horrors of Paris or tortures of the dolce vita.
A few sentences later,
this was followed by "there are no reasonable grounds for your fears
" because "the experience suffered by your mother, father and older
brother are not related to your own circumstances..." which, by the way,
is correct, if it’s being analysed by a computer that has been programmed by an
extra-terrestrial robot. How can they say that his fear is unfounded because he
wasn’t killed and that they will therefore not want to do anything to him? What
kind of reasoning is that? Malparidos!
You have to eat a lot of
tinned ravioli to think like this. Or could it be the effect of fries
with vinegar? I kept looking and it was not easy to reassemble the sheaf of
papers that made up his asylum application because they were folded, curled,
and unstapled. Filled with tiny little words, handwritten in Persian,
underlined, fist marks, and of course, they were torn and stuck back together
with sticky tape, all sorts, and with all kinds of marks to make you think the
documents had been on tables, floors, trash cans, dumpsters. The papers had
been trampled on, spat on, insulted. When those sheets of paper left the
factory, they didn't know they would go through so many forms of harassment.
They were themselves wondering what could possibly be said by these words that
could drive someone so crazy.
-You’ve come to
solve this problem, I imagine? I said showing him the document in which he was
denied asylum.
Zamani finally
moved. He stared at me and something in his eyes said you get it, at last
someone who understands. But right then during that magical moment,
the manager, Debby, appeared. She first appeared through the window, and then,
breaking common practice and the established protocols, she opened the
door.
-Fabrizio, sorry,
but can we talk for a minute?
I looked at Zamani
to see if he looked like the type to smash her face in, which would have been
convenient for me, so she can learn for once and for all not to interrupt these
kinds of sessions. But unfortunately Zamani was more reasonable than Debby, so
the manager managed to keep all her teeth, preserving the work of her
dentist, and leaving her uneven jaw bones, intact. I looked at the manager
again and said:
-Sure Debby,
I'll be there in a moment,- I said, knowing that I had no intention of
interrupting the session with Zamani.
-If you could come now,
that’d be better, she said with a face of "once-again-Fabrizio-you-just-do-what-you-want"
Zamani looked at
me and somehow saw my face of "this-bastard-doesn't-understand-anything".
-English
people- said Zamani.
Victory, I
thought. This Zamani is more reasonable than the boss, as expected. So I
made a gesture to Zamani and asked him to wait for a moment. I went to the door
and walked out of the room. From the corner of my eye I saw Zamani saying no
with his head and he repeated:
-English people.
When we went out
Debby, with her cryptic smile and her usual rictus, showing her dentist's
teeth, began her sermon.
-Fabrizio, there are procedures. And today there are special circumstances. We have many service users so you have to be quick with this client.
-Don't worry,
Debby, I'll be as fast as possible.- I said knowing that I wouldn’t do it and
that I would get into trouble, but at least the trouble would come later.
-What's his
problem?- She asked.
-They denied him asylum.
-Ah, something
simple,- she said with a look of someone that knows it all - Refer him to the
immigration office to arrange the return to his country and that way he can
complete his section 4”. Section 4 is the bureaucratic jargon used to
refer to a request for financial support, by means of supermarket vouchers and
temporary housing, while a return is being organized.
-Ah, section 4,
what a good idea,- I said knowing that this was a bad idea, let alone being far
down the list of Zamani's priorities, although nobody cares about that. Not to
mention that if the first thing I’d said to Zamani had been that his only
solution was to get packing, he would do nothing less than pack his
things and go to Iran and make friends among the Ayatollahs, in any case, if I
recommended that, the only things that would need packing would have been
little fragments from my head, skull on one side and brains on the other,
to send them back to Venezuela together with my coffin.
-Remember not to take
too long-, Debby told me, - so far from what I thought and what I wanted to
say: "Sure, motherfucker."
And I was about to
open the door to return to the room with Zamani when Debby stressed:
-And remember
you’ve got to follow the procedures, Fabrizio. You need the security guard.
He’s a dangerous person and we have confidential information saying he’s
intransigent,” and she gave me a little pat on the back and a wink as if to say“you’re-a-naughty-child-and-we-need-to-keep-an-eye-on-you”.
-He’s calmed down
now, don't worry” I replied “and I don't think he’s too intransigent” I said,
without adding, since I wasn’t yet aware myself, you are far more
intransigent, after all she was the one that hadinterrupted the
session to tell me to hurry while he, who fears for his life and saw the death
of his assassinated mother, agreed to the session’s interruption. And I
suddenly become lost in the thought of her ease to classify him as
intransigent. And it does happen to me that sometimes I get stuck wrapped up in
the things that people say, especially when they’re very stupid and I
cannot respond. And I said to myself what about you, motherfucker, are
you really so tolerant and open to negotiation, you call him intransigent and
you interrupted me lots of times,what would you do if you punctured your shitty
fucking bicycle, and you criticize him for being intransigent, go fry a monkey
as we say in Venezuela.
-Are you sure?- she said.
-sure about
what?-; My thoughts had made me lose track.
-What else would it be, Fabrizio, that he calmed down.
-Oh, sure, yes.
I'm completely sure” I said, not being sure in the slightest, but I needed at
all costs to avoid having a security guard put inside there. It would have
destroyed the atmosphere that we’d only just managed to build.
At last I returned
to the room where Zamani was. What a relief. I sat down. Took a breath. In
truth, I was rather missing the bulging veins, and the elbows firmly
nailed to Zamani’s side of the table. Much better than that crazy woman with
her worthless institutionalism that forces me into being a hypocrite.
-What did your
boss want?- said Zamani.
-Nothing. It
doesn't have anything to do with you, don't worry. It's that we have a problem
with the alarms, do not worry” I lied. Of course I wouldn’t tell him that she
doesn't like us solving problems to do with access to justice.
I took the handful of
papers that at some point were the answer to his asylum request into my hands .
I already imagined, as was often the case, that his problem was that the
lawyer didn’t want to continue to represent him but Zamani wanted him to
continue. The logic in this country was very simple. Lawyers are paid by none
other than the Home Office itself, and the condition for payment is that
they win 50% of cases or more before a Court of Appeal. That’s in Anglo-Saxon
parlance, because in Venezuelan we’d be a little more prolific in our
explanation, in other words that it’s is like a bet of sorts between the Home
Office and the lawyer, and in this bet the Home Office says something along the
lines of :
“Hey lawyer, come here , something ‘ere for the both of us, so let's bet. If you beat me for half the cases, I’ll pay you for all of them; if you don’t, you’ll lose your contract, go find yourself another job and write stories with Fabrizio, which nobody reads, or you can both go sing Mexican rancheras together in the London underground. Wanna bet?”
“OK, says the lawyer that has a mortgage to pay,
on top of dental treatment for his children who need to smile like Debby.”
"Well, mate, I’m not going to pay you for all your work, only for a very small number of hours, not many, I don’t want this to be a walk in the park for you, and if you start to investigate and get interpreters, hey pal, just let it be known I won’t pay for any of those little luxuries, not even the luxury of understanding what it is that your victim’s got to say through somebody that speaks their language, don’t take me for a fool, no soy pendejo, hell, I don’t need to tell you that if you start to find out exactly how it is that everything we make up is a lie, well it’ll come out your own pocket and you’ll lose. Up to you. We’ll go halfsies. There’s enough bacon to go around here.”.
The Home Office pays the solicitor a set number of hours. And if the case can be appealed using a simple copy-paste from other cases, asylum seekers have a chance, if not, then no. So lawyers, who believe in justice and who are democratic and support human rights, end up more committed to staying afloat on easy money, instead of combating injustice at their own cost. As such, having registered the situation, I asked Zamani:
-So you want us to find you a lawyer or do you want us to talk to yours?
-Please,- he said. As if the answer was clear.
-Do not worry. The first thing will be to call your lawyer,- which would apply to whatever obvious response he thought he’d given. .
I called his lawyer. The receptionist answered. After some formalities and generic greetings she told me:
-Oh, excuse me, but what nationality is our client?
-Iranian.
-Oh no, it can’t be done.
-What do you mean can’t be done, why?
-I’ve been instructed.
No Iranians.
-Well, I understand
that,”-clearly there is much to understand. It’s shameless discrimination
and confirmation that, in this country, if there’s a particular kind
of fuckery that is not banned, forbidden, prosecutable, then that is exactly
how they’ll fuck you over. Asylum claims aren’t assessed on merit but
by discrimination on the grounds of nationality, wow..
-Can I help you with anything else?- She recited with the usual do-not-bother-more-with-this-issue tone, and get-ready-to-turn-the-phone-off-without-you-being-able-to-say-that-I didn't-give-you-the-courteous-opportunity-to-talk-about-something. Typical.
- Yes, I understand, no Iranians. But this person used to be your client. He waited for years and was counting on your services as their lawyer and all of a sudden he’s abandoned, just like that. No further details..
And how do you know if you are a secretary without legal training? I felt like asking. But it wasn't worth it. I had long known the explanation, it's very simple: If your client is Iraqi, your asylum application will be accepted, if they’re Iranian, it won´t. In Germany judges were of the opposite view. But it couldn’t end here.
-Date of birth?
And we continued the standard data privacy protocol.
-Well, as I said before, Sir, it says here he received his information. He doesn’t have a strong case. As far we’re concerned the case is closed, I’m sorry.-
-I am sorry,” repeated Zamani, from his chair. From the tone he was using I was made to think that he must also scoff at how much they say I'm sorry when this is far from how they feel, especially when their tone indicates only their great contempt and disinterest. For my part, I wanted to shout at her that they’re a bunch of penny pinchers, they have no commitment to justice, but my rage could only lead to them filing a complaint against me, although risking a complaint was perhaps worth it, I could have thought, at least that way Zamani would know I was on his side.
- The British are like that, I can imagine what she is saying,” said Zamani, having guessed the receptionist's replies correctly. .
And I began to realise that Zamani knew surprisingly more than what it first seemed about the country where we lived. On the one hand, I wanted to tell him that there are English people who are not like that, like Sue. But greater was the temptation to yell at that secretary so that he understood I was on his side. But by the time it got to this point I gathered he must understand that I had no choice but to uphold professional etiquette, where being professional means being indifferent. And as soon as I finished the phone call, Zamani told me:
- Well, now is the time to look for another lawyer, one that believes in justice.
I suddenly confirmed that I was dealing with someone of great intelligence and not some wild beast, no matter how mad it was to throw stones at our bulletproof windows. No wonder that when I asked him whether to call his lawyer or look for another he simply said "please". He already knew the script in advance. What a relief, finally. Now I was going to look in my notebook for an Iranian lawyer’s phone number, of Italian culture, who had studied at the same university as my father, La Sapienza. I wanted to tell Zamani about this lawyer, to whom by the way I certainly enjoyed talking to, and who would reward me for allowing him to speak Italian by taking on more Iranian cases than was reasonable. But luck is often in short supply and at that moment, just then, Debby appeared through the window again. Again with her I-have-something-to-say grimace and circular hand movements, akin to a robot.
- There's your boss again- Zamani said, and pounded his fist on the table.
-I'd prefer if you call this one,- and he pulled out a card.
What a great coincidence. It was the same lawyer. Except this wasn’t at all a coincidence; it’s not like there were many committed Iranian lawyers, and in this very region to boot. I started to dial the phone number, but Debby came in with the security guard.
-Are you all right?
-Of course, as soon as I finish, I'm on the phone with someone.
-You can call them
later.
-No, I can't, I'm on hold because they’re looking for some documents for me, they’re on the other line and asked me to wait- I lied, holding the phone right up against my ear so that she wouldn’t hear the monotone beep indicating that the line was busy.
-Ok, I'll wait for you,” said the boss. And she left.
-What do you think she wants- asked Zamani as soon as the door was closed.
-Nothing. She wants me to hurry up and was frightened by you punching the table. She thought you were going to kill me,- I said jokingly.
As the lawyer did not answer due to the line still being busy, I went out to speak to the boss. After many questions on her part I explained that Zamani had decided to apply to Section 4. The boss congratulated me. I went back to Zamani.
-We have a few more minutes, Zamani,- I said.
-Do you want to speak once they respond?- I asked.
-Do not!!! Please! That's the problem; the secretary won't let me speak to the lawyer.
Suddenly I remembered that my dad once said something along the lines of to have a friend who’s a minister is to have a good contact but is of little use without making friends with their secretary. And here was Zamani giving me evidence that my father's sociological intuition was correct. I waited on the phone, the famous secretary, who held the keys to power, answered, until I finally spoke with Izadi, the Iranian lawyer. We had a relatively long conversation as a greeting, without mentioning for whom I was making a referral. Izadi just liked to talk in Italian, whatever the topic. But when I told him about Zamani, a cold water bath fell on me, which luckily was in a language that Zamani did not understand.
-Me ne vado, I'm done, I'm leaving. I'm moving country. I’m going to Canada where I have family and where I don't have to go through the things that happen here
-I'm glad for you, Izadi. I’ve heard very good things about Canada. Many friends live there and love that country. Lucky you. In bocca al lupo!
-Hey, why did you call me?”
-I wanted to refer you to an Iranian client. Typical case where lawyers appear to represent their clients, but when it’s time to take it to the court for appeal, they say the case is weak.
-I won't be able to take the client, sorry. My departure is imminent.
-I figured Iza, but can't you leave the case to one of your colleagues?
-Impossible, I already left them a lot of cases that they think are lost. My clients will be abandoned.
-Well, Iza, that's a shame for my service user, I'll let him know. Again, in bocca al lupo, good luck.
Now it was time to talk to Zamani. I tried to gather my strength. How do I tell him that the Iranian-friendly lawyer who also speaks Farsi is leaving the country? I was about to speak to Zamani but Debby, the manager appeared again.
-Fabrizio, can we talk for a minute?”
She left and Zamani came to my rescue, in the most unexpected way. For a second I thought he had understood the conversation, but I realised that no, was simply helping me control my boss.
-Hey Fabrizio," said Zamani" tell her I'm going to commit suicide.
-What do you mean? Are you going to commit suicide?
-Do not be silly. Listen. If you tell her I told you I'm going to commit suicide, we have more time to talk" and winked" You are going to have to follow another protocol. You can make sure that everything in the notes is fine and that's it! And in the meantime we can continue speaking with the lawyer.
-Ok, I think it's a
good idea," I said, admiring his cunning.
-Hello Debby, I have a delicate situation- I said.
-Fabrizio, you have to finish. You have to be professional. It can't be that it takes you so long to fill out a worksheet for a section 4! I know you're a good member of staff but you have to respect the boundaries. Again, she looked at me and I could read her expression as “Fabrizio, you are a nice cheeky child but we have to control you”.
-Debby, he just told me that he is going to commit suicide.
-Well you know what you have to say. Go and make sure to refer him properly so that they take care of his mental health. And don't forget to write your notes very carefully.
-Sure.- And I went to talk to Zamani.
-You got rid of that monster?
-For a while. I'm supposed to refer you to specialised medical services and alert other organisations about your intentions
-And you forgot that you have to tell me that you have to breach my expectations of confidentiality because you have to protect a life.
-Exactly.
I explained everything to Zamani about the lawyer. Poor man. I followed the procedure for referrals of this kind, of course. And we agreed that he would return so that we could refer him to lawyers in London. He told me that he knew lawyers in London. And Zamani left calmly. Very calm indeed. I was happy because he helped me control Debby, which turned out to be a far more difficult endeavour.
And a few weeks later the boss called me to her office. She had an indecipherable face. And she said:
I have two bits news, one good and one bad. We start with the bad”
-They were investigating you. You did everything right. You referred him, you alerted the competent authorities, you disclosed the information according to the Data Protection Act, followed all the procedures and you wrote perfect casenotes. All very professional.
-Thank you.
Translated by Fabiana Macor
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