If bizarre court rulings had their hall of fame, the case of Carla, an Italian woman from the Tuscany coast, would deserve a special mention. A local court had convicted Carla of giving false testimony to the police to hide an extra-marital affair, but Italy’s highest appeal court ruled that married Italian women who commit adultery are entitled to lie about it to protect their honour, the BBC recently reported. Carla had denied in her testimony that she had lent her mobile to her lover, who used it to verbally abuse her estranged husband. The cradle of Catholic faith chose to condone her lie, but it makes one ponder on the possibilities that such rulings might open out, in other mores, in different societies.Does such a leeway to licentious women call for a celebration of the new brand of ultra-liberalism, which any day would be preferable to having a scarlet ‘A’ emblazoned on the chest, a shame that Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne endured in 17th-century Boston? Does it not herald a new horizon even by contemporary standards, where radical societies condemn an adulteress to be stoned to death? The licence to lie, however, was not granted for the sake of love, happiness, contentment, carnal necessity or any other emotion that might have driven Carla to another’s arms. It had been granted to protect her honour —that larger, universal, sacred coda — that governs female lives from the rugged terrains of Waziristan to the refined climes of multi-cultural Europe. It is the urge to preserve this ‘honour’ which necessitated that the adultery, with all the betrayal of trust it connotes, be swept under the carpet so that the stolid ‘family is supreme’ boat is not rocked. Portia triumphs in the courtroom (a man’s world), wearing a man’s clothes, speaking a man’s tongue. Quite like Portia, Carla’s hour of glory and liberation also marks her ultimate defeat. What do such judgments portend for women who err on the side of promiscuity? Would the late Princess Diana, who spent the better part of her wedded life tumbling in and out of her lovers’ beds, have been happy with a legal cloak to hide her indiscreet behaviour? She might or might not, but while the dearth of unsavoury details would have hurled the British tabloids into an existential crisis, it would have spared the venerable, stiff-upper-lipped monarch the mortifications of many an ‘Annus Horribilis’.
