Italy

Italy is the first named stop in Evan Michaels’s worsening confinement and the jurisdiction of a second sentence imposed in absentia in Rome. Its role in the account is defined less by a described landscape than by the expanding reach of imprisonment: after his confinement in Italy, Evan is sent back to Tunisia, while an Italian sentence adds another twenty-five years to the one already imposed there.

Italy in the Imprisonment Sequence

Evan describes confinement as becoming more barbarous and inhumane with each successive stop, naming Italy first and Tunisia afterward. The account gives no further details about the Italian place of detention or the conditions there; Italy’s significance lies in its position at the start of that worsening sequence and in the contrast with the subsequent return to Tunisia.

The Sentence in Rome

On the same day as Evan’s fifteen-minute proceeding in a side room of the Tunis city jail, he is tried in absentia in Rome. The Tunis proceeding ends with a sentence of twenty-five years without parole; the letter about the Roman judgment specifies another twenty-five years, to run consecutively, for his refusal to cooperate in recovering Jan Vermeer’s The Rendezvous. The parallel sentence makes the effort to recover the painting part of the machinery extending Evan’s imprisonment across national jurisdictions.

Narrative Significance

Italy is presented through the accumulating force of confinement and punishment rather than through a sustained account of its settings. The sentence in Rome turns Evan’s refusal to assist in recovering The Rendezvous into a further, concrete penalty, while his return to Tunisia marks the next stage in the increasingly harsh conditions he recalls. By the time he reflects on the Italian judgment, he believes the painting will never be found and that he has already found his resolve, though the account qualifies that resolve with the words “or so I thought.”