«I’ll come down but only if you accompany me. I don’t want to go to hospital». He didn’t remember her like that, he didn’t think that the teacher she loved so much when she attended accounting near the Palazzo dei Congressi ofEur if he were such a fragile person instead. Because that’s what she repeated to him as he took her down in the elevator from a building on Atlantic Ocean Avenue. “Or maybe it was before, but I never noticed,” he says Alessandro Olivetti, chosen agent of the Exhibition police station, who last June 6, at lunchtime, saved his former law teacher from suicide. The 67-year-old, now retired, was taken to the Sant’Eugenio hospital to undergo a series of tests.
What happened that afternoon?
“With my colleague Francesco Pellegrino we had just gone into service with one of the police station’s car radios when the radio call came in for an intervention in that building for a woman with suicidal intentions. So as always we got closer. It was the tenant’s doctor who had called 112 after having been informed by her husband who, however, like his son, was not at home. When we arrived I saw the names on the intercom and read that of the woman, I began to doubt that she was actually the school teacher who I hadn’t seen for more than ten years. I asked the operations room for confirmation of age and the answer was yes. I realized it was her. We are with my colleague I ran eight floors up the stairs, up to his landing.”
And then?
«We rang and knocked several times. At a certain point I heard a voice beyond the double locked armored door. I recognized her. I remember her because she was the same as when I was sitting at school. Only this time he was sick, so sick. “Prof? I’m Alessandro Olivetti? I’m one of your students, do you remember?”, I told her several times. She was crying, I heard her approaching the peephole. She recognized me immediately. “How you’ve grown up! She – she told me -, I’m done, no one listens to me anymore. Now I’m going to throw myself down.” My colleague went down to the street to wait for the firefighters with the ladder truck, a tenant showed him the windows of the apartment: the teacher had lowered all the shutters, except the one in the bedroom.”
How did he convince her to give up her intention?
«I started talking to her. Every now and then she answered me. I thought I’d tell her everything we did at school when she was there too. The final exam, when she insisted on getting me a good grade while another teacher didn’t want it. “You also called me at home, do you remember?”, I told her. I’ve tried them all, even romanticising a bit., that I had been having problems at work. I tried to shake her, in short, not to make her think about what was happening. Then she got worried. I remembered that you were a lawyer. “What did they do to you?”, she replied. She went on like this for about twenty minutes, then the firefighters managed to enter the apartment through the open window and a fireman stopped her from behind. She was still crying, screaming. Then they opened the door for us from the inside.”
And when he saw her, what did he do?
«He cried again, he hugged me. What an impression to see her in that circumstance. I remembered her as tough and precise at school, but also very prepared. A real pleasure, I never missed a lesson. I wanted to be a policeman since I was a boy, the laws and how to respect them were exactly what she followed. But then she was also a person who put us in a good mood, we had a lot of laughs in class.”
Have you heard it again yet?
«Not yet, but I plan to. I accompanied her to the ambulance, I didn’t feel like leaving her alone. Just as I would never forgive myself for arriving late. I spoke to her husband and her son, who arrived later. I understood that they were aware of the gesture he was about to make. A complicated story, like others that I have faced during patrol services in seven years in the police force. In Rome as in Milan, in the same Lambrate police station (the one where Christian Di Martino, the inspector, works seriously stabbed at the station last May 9th, ed.). Luckily this time we managed to avoid it.”
