Loose End

The heart of each of us cannot be closed to love forever, not even mine. What is certain is that all the experience led me to develop a sense of mistrust towards people, in particular for the male gender. I necessarily had to protect myself a little, but I didn't put my feelings in a safe locked with an impenetrable combination. Another unspeakable, tragic suffering had to come, and it did. But nothing happens by chance and nothing happened by chance coincidence.

I had started putting short stays in Hungary and Romania on my agenda. The painful scam I ran into had made me think a lot and I began to think that perhaps it would be appropriate to leave Italy to plan a new life in Hungary.

Perhaps this involved ceasing from action, giving up some dreams. The relationship with my parents had reconnected and consolidated in recent years. My brother, on the other hand, had died a while ago, at 37. His wife found him lifeless in bed due to a heart attack, perhaps...

I started a new relationship with these assumptions. Through my sister-in-law, in Budapest, I met a man of sound principles, a hard worker. After a few months of dating and the ritual introductions to the family, we longed for a life together. I also thought about drawing up some work projects in Hungary, referring to my now familiar restaurant business, with the addition of hospitality. I had in mind to build a hotel with a restaurant, a children's playground, a swimming pool and a tennis court.

There was also the availability of land that was perfectly suited to the project: I had just received it from my parents. I had taken action to have the funds allocated by the European Union, so I was able to enter and benefit from a tender aimed at developing rural areas.

I was a 35-year-old woman who had started living in a fulfilling love relationship again, in fact I got pregnant. Somehow fate was giving me the opportunity to fill that inner void that prevented me from feeling one hundred percent mother with the firstborn. My possible mother-in-law, however, did not agree on the relationship between me and her son. She did not agree with the idea that she was having a nephew and that we were not yet married. Furthermore, I still lived in Rome, there was my son whom I could not give up and the real estate company that had to be followed. We would have had to wait at least a year to get organized and to create our nest in Hungary. There was a timing discrepancy between the objective situation and the pregnancy, a reflection that could also make sense. Also, my man's mother didn't like the past of “Eva Mikula”. For her I was the ex of a criminal, involved in a bad story of the Italian underworld, so I could not be included in the group of reliable people.

In summary: I would never have been a good wife. She hammered her son from morning to night with these considerations.

The fate tragically thought to resolve the dispute in the worst possible way. A referee decided for us that no one would ever know if I would be a good wife and what kind of dad and husband he would be. While he was traveling to Rome by car, just to organize our future together, he had a fatal accident on the highway. Our life flew to heaven with him. I will never forget the phone call from his friend informing me of the crash, of his tragic death. From his mother an embarrassing and absolute silence.

After the phone call, I felt bad. It was 5 in the morning, I was 3 months pregnant and I started bleeding. I called the ambulance and the operator questioned me instead of understanding the emergency, and then told me that the ambulance could arrive in 30 minutes. How could I wait so long alone and bleeding? I had only one support on which I could, however, count in Rome: Biagio. He picked me up and rushed me to the hospital, where I was stuffed with tranquilizers and injections for ten days to avoid losing the baby.

I had had a 50 percent placental abruption. A cruel unknown began to torture me: would my daughter be affected? The doctor, on the other hand, recommended not to underestimate the evidence that she would have offered me a life as an unmarried mother, with a son without a father. In fact, the daily difficulties I would have to face were evident. I imagined them very well, and I knew that the only person I could actually count on, namely Biagio, didn't take very well the fact that I had set foot in another relationship. However, I carried on with serenity the months until the birth. I rolled up my sleeves, worked out the mantra within myself, the guideline: “Yes, raising a child alone is one more reason to fight, to give myself new goals”. I did not want to remain anchored to the past, to the problems and conflicts with Biagio, even on how to educate our son. It was another important step. Responsibilities increased; I could no longer make mistakes and take risks that could then fall on the creature that was growing in me. No more wrong paths and inadequate men; I had already suffered too many disappointments from them.

In the meantime, we had reached 2010; the reputation that preceded me in the private sphere was excellent.

I was able to build a good image of a decent person and a hard worker with my work, seriousness and professional reliability. With neighbors, with the employees of the restaurant bar. In my real estate business, I had good feedback and some rewarding friendships. Instead, among those who had no direct contact with me, for the outside world, I was always and only the Eva Mikula of the White One Gang. I wanted to get out of that discriminatory aura that surrounded me due to the indelible history of judicial news in which I was involved in spite of myself. People outside my circle of relationships, “the insignificant others”, continued to perceive me as the complicit woman of murderers, the sly and ruthless dark lady seen in the courtrooms, on TV and in newspapers and told following the construction of a a convenient truth that had little to do with due process.

My image was as if embedded in that indelible story, very heavy to bear; an oppressive prejudice of public opinion that did not reflect the truth of the facts, neither yesterday nor today. “Don't care Eva” I said to myself, “you have the most beautiful thing in the world, soon you will be a mother again”.

After my daughter's dad died, I waited for a call from what would be my little girl's grandmother. It never came. I called her, out of a form of due respect, when her niece was about to be born, a week earlier. I was kind and loving. She answered me badly, very badly indeed, and slammed the phone down. I have never seen her again, never heard her again, never looked for her again.

All my vicissitudes, meanwhile, seemed to never end, it seemed there could be no peace for me. I still had my belly, it was June 2010, I was having lunch alone, in peace, sitting in the kitchen and stroking my baby who was about to come into the world. I was watching Tg5 of one p.m. as usual. I was lost in thought. I rubbed my eyes, maybe I was wrong, it couldn't still be me in the photo they were broadcasting.

Instead, alas, it was me, Eva Mikula, they were talking about me. My fork dropped to the ground, “Oh my God, what have I done now?” The reporter said: “Eva Mikula's husband arrested for robbery”. “But who is he?” I wondered, they didn't even mention his name, I didn't understand who they were referring to. They only transmitted my photo and my personal details. In the evening edition they slightly corrected the game: “Ex-husband arrested”. Finally, at the end of the service, I realized who they were talking about: a person I hadn't seen and heard from for fifteen years.

It was a guy I married in 1996, during my trial period. After two years of marriage, we separated and after three, we divorced. We no longer had any kind of connection. His parents were important Roman merchants, owners of some bakeries; most likely influential enough not to allow the personal details of the son arrested for robbery to be disseminated to the press. When we got together he was a clean boy, from a bourgeois family, but with the habit of gambling. Our relationship ended precisely because of this, we were too different, our respective visions of life were irreconcilable.

After 15 years from the end of our marriage, this person, by agreeing with an accomplice, a cashier of a banking institution, had organized a robbery. A stunt that probably would have served him to have money to throw in some gambling den or to pay his gambling debts, he was certainly not a serial robber. The news of the arrests, in itself, would not even have caused a sensation, it would have passed trivially without interest in the local news, good only to increase the aseptic statistics on the productivity of the police: people controlled, people reported, people arrested.

Thus, to satisfy the need to appear in the headlines, the marketing of the carabinieri, to whom that arrest was due, came into action, combined with the incorrectness of the journalists who did not filter the news. I thought that, surely, some press officer of their command fed the reporters without specifying the details, merely saying that one of the responsible was my husband, indeed my ex-husband, obviously taking care not to mention his name, precisely because he belonged to a family very much in sight of the capital.

What a godsend also for journalists eager to be able to chroma key the photo of a beautiful irregular girl, with the past from crime news. Who knows, maybe it was useful for someone to associate my name again with a crime, to sell more copies or to make more audiences, it did not matter to check the news first. Of course, the story ended up in all the news and newspapers, for the benefit of their ratings and their balance sheets.

So I called my lawyer and, through some acquaintances, I tried to understand where the news came from and what the source had been. Thus I had the confirmation that it was an official press release from the carabinieri that issued it to the press. I was told that, while the arrested man was handing his identity document to the carabinieri, a photograph of me slipped from his wallet and he was carrying it with him (he still kept it!). They recognized me and did not miss the wonderful opportunity to be able to go on all the national news. They had gone so far as not to let the details of the robber leak out, preferring to throw my name at the news fairs, without even caring in the least about the effects and consequences that this unfortunate thought of theirs could cause me.

The person who passed that news to the press, in fact, had no reservations about what this senseless and out-of-context news could cause to Mrs. Eva Mikula. What could interest him in the path taken by Eva Mikula after 15 years from the closure of her legal case? Virtually nothing. Such a character, unscrupulous to say the least, could not think that Eva Mikula had an image of a mother and an entrepreneur to defend. He had to emphasize the result of a job at any cost, even passing over the rights of others. To make himself beautiful with the garments by bringing them the rich press review with my photo. Who I had nothing to do with all this. Marketing 1 - right to be forgotten and confidentiality 0.

A truly low-level cunning. I was angry and intent on making a mess. My lawyer stopped me, I don't know if he did well or not, not even why he did it, he told me: “You can't denounce the Carabinieri, it's just news, it goes by. With the story behind you, denouncing them would be a wrong step, the spotlight would turn back on you again”. I gave up, but the incorrectness of that news continues to circulate on the web and, above all, contributes to fueling the final equation in public opinion: Eva Mikula equals crime. There was, in fact, the cynical phone call from Biagio who had heard the news, but not from television. Some friends had called him saying:”What's going on? Are you crazy? Did you make a robbery?”

5.

6.

5. Eva Mikula New Year's dinner 2006

6.The first day of kindergarten of her son Francesco, 2005

4. PERSECUTION OF PREJUDICES

My path and my life path were once again crossed by bad people. I was getting the idea that there could be no peace for me. Another oppression, a pure evil was waiting for me around the corner, which took shape through the madness of a person who hurt my good faith towards others.

I lived in a large building, but the needs deriving from the increase in the economic commitments undertaken, the higher real estate expenses at a time when the sector was in crisis, and other personal events (a small girl, a son of whom I tok care for my economic part, the expenses for the babysitter, the mortgage) pushed me to transform the property, obtaining a very nice small two-room apartment, with an independent entrance. In November 2014 I decided to put it on income and looked for who to rent it to. An Italian couple showed up, sent by a local real estate agency to which I had granted the mandate. They made a couple of visits and looked carefully at the small apartment. They seemed immediately interested, the real estate agent told me. In fact, after a while, they called me to confirm their interest and they became my tenants. I handed them the keys on December 12, 2014, I explained in detail all the features of the two-room apartment, they paid the first month and the security deposit as if it were a trial period, with the agreement that upon expiry they would confirm whether to stay, and then sign a long-term contract, or leave.

The numerous work commitments would often take me out of Rome and, in any case, with very busy hours: practically I always returned home very late and went out shortly after dawn. Also, at that time, I often commuted to London. These rhythms, mandatory to cope with everything that can weigh on the shoulders of a single woman, also gave me management problems with my daughter. Today I cannot explain how she at the time was able to get by, untangling myself between professional and family commitments, however I managed, with the strength of a mother, all this tortuous path. I only remember that I often took the baby with me.

One day my mobile phone rang: it was Lucia, a neighbor. I state that I got along very well with the whole neighborhood. Relations were cordial, sometimes even friendly. They appreciated me for who I was, not for the past or for the stories told about me in newspapers and on TV. Lucia told me: “Your tenant is on the balcony yelling with his partner. He wants to attract attention by shouting unique phrases about you”. “On me? And why?” I asked her. “He makes very bad statements about your past” Lucia replied, “it is really shameful” she continued, “I don't even want to repeat what he is screaming. Please do something, call him back”.

Instead of calling the tenant, another solution came to mind. I had learned little shrewdness, with everything I've been through in my life. I told Lucia: “Do this: record his words. Then I call him and ask him what the problem is”. And so it went. On the phone, he pretended nothing happened, it was to be expected. I urged him: “They tell me that you are screaming, disturbing the quiet of the building”. He took on a mortified tone, to try to reassure me: “No madam, nothing special. I had a little argument with my wife. But now everything is fine”. He didn't have the courage to repeat to me the insulting phrases he shouted from the balcony, he didn't say any of this.

The next day, Lucia called me back on the phone. Unfortunately I was out and about and didn't have the ability to manage what was happening at home. She turned me the recording of the umpteenth scene of my tenant. They were all insults to my person: “That is a criminal, a delinquent!” he repeated at the top of his voice on the balcony, “surely she was the cashier of the gang. She will have bought the house with the money from the robberies”. Then, turning to his wife, he continued: “But do you realize who we rented the apartment from, whose house we are?". These utterances continued the following day, due to a question of parking.

He had parked his car in a space owned by another tenant, who when he pointed out that the parking spaces were all numbered, was verbally attacked with words and insults also addressed to me: “It is the lady who told us that this parking lot was ours! You see, she is not even capable of being a landlord? Let her go back to her country!” And so other racist and discriminatory insults. So it was that I called him again, I wanted to understand what his problem was and at the same time protect myself from this subject. But he made a second silent scene, then I took the initiative and told him: “Listen here, if the property, despite you and your partner having viewed it far and wide before giving the monthly salary, does not match your expectations, given the vehement complaints you would have made in front of the neighbors so that they would hear them loud and clear, you are free to leave; not only that, I also return the monthly payment already paid”.

I stopped for a few moments and then resumed determined: “On the contrary, I'd really ask you to leave, I wouldn't want to have to see you every month, because in case you want to stay, in fact, we would have to stipulate a long-term contract”. I was very angry while talking to him, however I kept a certain calm. However, I wanted to tell him something: “You must not allow yourself to make statements about my person and about my past. I don't have to explain anything to you, you think as you please, but don't involve people in my private sphere, who certainly know me better than you, don't disturb my life anymore and go elsewhere to read about me on the internet. Don't create any other problems for me”.

So I thought I had silenced him. Instead, he changed the focus of his rants to add to the dose of slander and began listing alleged anomalies of the house: “You rented me the apartment without doing any maintenance. Every evening we smell gas from the boiler, there is certainly a leak, the television is not visible, the antenna must be replaced, there is an electrical outlet in the kitchen that has flying wires. How did you dare to rent a house in these conditions?” I was surprised the technician had assured me that everything was in order, as was the cleaning lady, and then I was present on site when I entrusted the property to the agency. However, faced with these complaints, I made the commitment to review any defects complained of and asked for an appointment the next day to go with the technician. The tenant told me that he had to stay at work late and gave me trustee permission to enter the house. While the technician did his work and I inspected every corner of the house for faults or imperfections, his eyes fell on a sheet of paper placed on a shelf in the living room.

He had hit me because I had read my name on a sheet of letterhead from the financial police. I read it without touching it and amazement assailed me. It was a complaint against me filed the previous day. He had insinuated that I was a scammer, because, according to him, probably I was not the owner of the house and I had collected the rent, without issuing the payment receipt. “But how can someone be so mean and liar?” - I wondered.

He seemed to have discovered a fugitive delinquent in me and wanted to prove his good faith as a model citizen. The same day I rushed to the Rome Provincial Command of the Guardia di Finanza where a complaint was recorded, providing all the documents at the same time.

I was intent on making a counter-complaint for slander, but I wanted to consult with a lawyer first.

Meanwhile, at home, the technician had not found the defects that the tenant complained of, except for a door to be adjusted in height and a burned-out light bulb. No problems with the gas, nor with the antenna signal. The next day the tenant called me back and, with an almost threatening voice, told me: “Here the gas comes out every day, even from the stove, I smell the stench!”. Not happy, he continued with the personal offenses: “You had to tell me right away that your name is Eva Mikula and you are the one of the White One. I discovered it, however, from the Internet, there is a lot about your past as a criminal. I suffered damage because of you”. I could hardly believe that a person could talk to me like that, in what capacity did he do it? I couldn't understand where he was going.

It was him who made me understand. Money. He did not finish his delusional phone call that the answer to my doubt arrived on time. “For the inconvenience I demand double the deposit, plus the monthly salary I paid, because to leave I have to face expenses”. So I immediately got the idea that, in addition to being in bad faith, he might be a bit disturbed. So I closed the phone call, which like all the others with him, I had been recording regularly for days now.

I went to the carabinieri to formalize a complaint for all the crimes for which he was responsible: slander, defamation, attempted extortion, blackmail and telephone harassment with requests for money.

In the barracks I explained all the facts in detail, I had also transcribed the telephone records, I provided the traceability of the payments made by him and my proposal for a full refund, as long as they left the house I owned. When the next day he was notified of the complaint, the neighbors told me, he too railed at the carabinieri, insulting me once again out loud in front of them: “But how! Have you taken a complaint against me from such a person? But do you realize? But do you know who Eva Mikula is?”. The military personnel did their best to calm him down. “The best thing is for you to get out of this house,” they told him. He had the nerve to call me for the umpteenth time: “You reported me for extortion, are we kidding? You are a poor fool who only seeks free publicity by hanging out with criminals, from this moment on don't address to me anymore. Forget you frightened me with the complaint, we will stay at home as long as we like”.

His partner called me back to tell me that if I didn't withdraw the complaint, they wouldn't leave. I had entered a state of total stress. After two days, the couple left the two-room apartment. I gave him back what they had left and also the month he had paid; obviously not twice as much as they claimed. The important thing was that they went away forever.

I thought that my complaint would have followed the expected procedure, however, more than two years after the facts, despite the testimony and incontrovertible evidence, the prosecutor strangely asked for dismissal, which was welcomed by the judge. Basically, after two years and a month of investigation, the law had come to the conclusion that my tenant's actions had not been slanderous, detrimental to my personal dignity, extortionate and therefore punishable by law. Perhaps because the plaintiff was named Eva Mikula. From my perspective, however, this umpteenth episode that I had to close in the basket of my dramatic experiences, upset me and all the good reputation hard earned over the years. It had touched my neighbors with brutality and, in particular, it had also muddied my working sphere, especially the relationships with the real estate agency, with which I often collaborated, here in the area and which was managed by some dear friends of mine. It was an episode that affected my daily life, my acquaintances with people who appreciated me for my seriousness, humanity and professionalism. Fortunately, I kept their esteem intact.

However, I felt an unbearable anguish that threatened to undermine everything I had been able to build up to that moment. I also went to the doctor, who prescribed me some anxiolytics and, for a couple of times, I underwent sessions by a psychologist. I feared that all these events would jeopardize the achievement of my full integration into civil society. Once again, however, I found the solution within myself, it could not be external interventions, pharmacological or psychoanalytic, the tool to resume the right path of my path. The right medicine was inner strength, the one I had trained by bearing the enormous weight of the past on my shoulders.