2023-05-29 07:58:11
A windy angry night. A child being born. A lonely man and a woman who reappears… We anticipate the text that the writer will read on Thursday 1 June in Sondrio for the event conceived and directed by Elisabetta Sgarbi
IThe plan isn’t great: go out and walk. My sister has just had her labor pains, in the hospital, but I don’t want to go to her. I don’t want to go anywhere, I want to walk. And walking just means walking, not walking to a certain place and spending hours in a waiting room waiting to see an asshole father holding a newborn baby who will one day call me uncle. I no longer have any faith in this city where I spent my youth repeating the same mistakes over and over again, I no longer have any faith in others or even in myself. Walking tonight means starting to walk and go on and on and on and get away from everything that suffocated me, or that I suffocated — that would be the plan. One step after another, without stopping, until my heart is light again, as Patrick Leigh Fermor did at eighteen, when he left Holland one morning and crossed a Europe that was about to flare up again. and walking for three years arrived in Istanbul – and when he stopped he had become a man, and he was different. I am now ten years older than him, I have read and failed much more than him, and perhaps I would not achieve anything if I only walked to Istanbul. Maybe I should go on to Kabul, to purge everything, to Beijing.
a gloomy night, angry with the wind. A night in which it seems impossible for anyone to come into the world: It’s already amazing that the few people I meet don’t fall dead on the ground. And I stop early, long before Istanbul. I stop at the Sax Bar. Stefano behind the counter, Sergio already tipsy from Ca’ del Bosco, the usual story. A stop, I think, and then I’ll get back on the road. She arrives almost immediately.
With the sports bag over his shoulder, he comes back from volleyball — he keeps playing volleyball, he doesn’t get bored. All these months I’ve avoided her, and surely she avoided me, since she never showed up at the Sax Bar again, so the miracle happened that we never saw each other again, not even in this city where we always see each other again. Not once, not even by accident, and without either of them leaving and staying out for a long time. A miracle, indeed.
We start talking, but we don’t have much to say to each other. At least I don’t have any. She is beautiful, as always, but I’ve never regretted it, I never regretted pushing her away like that; I just felt guilty for a while but then, since we never saw each other again, neither did that. Only a few vague news through my sister, who fueled my sense of guilt for a while – but then, too, with the story of expecting the baby, she never mentioned it again; my brother-in-law and I had a fight because I didn’t give him dad’s hunting rifles, even with my sister we saw less and less, and it was over. Nobody told me about it anymore. Lost. cancelled. Thing of the past. And now here she is.
I came for you, she says.
I came because I would like to go to Marta’s with you, she says.
Marta my sister, in labor, in the hospital.
Many questions rush through my head, suddenly, impetuously. Did Marta send it? How did he know I was here? Was he following me? Was it Stefano, did he call you? Why does he want to take me to my sister? But as I stare into her face so familiar and now so far away, one question sweeps away all the others. A crazy, egregious question.
Possible? Is it possible that she wants to come back with me after what I did to her? Is it possible that her love is so pure and tenacious as to give me, who have not been worthy of it, the possibility of enjoying it again? To redeem myself, to start all over again? Yet she’s come for me, she’s just said it, she’s here, and she looks at me, and there’s no resentment in her eyes, no hard feelings. Does he still love me? Or too late? Maybe just sympathy: my nephew is born and I’m at the bar, alone, unable to even get excited about this. Do I pity her? But if it were pity, why didn’t she just come and tell me that she pities me? Does he still love me? In short, she knows me like no one else in the world, she has already heard all my lies, she has already laughed at all my stories, she has already ripped my clothes off: I could not bring anything new into her life, she she knows very well, and for — she said it — she came for me. Does she want us to get back together tonight now? Has she forgiven me?
Sure, I wouldn’t do to her again what I did to her, if we get back together, I’ll be grateful, faithful, but how does she know? But then I would be truly grateful and faithful? Forever? I couldn’t swear to it, how can you believe it? I never thought I could hurt her until I did. Our souls touched, really touched, but I wasted everything. We dreamed the same dream, but then I ripped that dream to shreds. Wasn’t that enough for you?
I didn’t even explain to her the reasons for my behavior, I didn’t even tell her the most important, the most terrible, and also the simplest thing, that I didn’t love her anymore. I didn’t tell her that hers, of love, was left alone, and that I now experienced it as oppression. We didn’t say anything, we didn’t argue, I didn’t even concede that to her. And she reacts like this? Is it possible that her love for her is formidable enough to keep her so firm, so safe? Like Martin Sheen in that movie when he hears the girl say that her father doesn’t want and never will want her to go out with him, and in response he greets her smiling and waving his arm in that tree-lined street as if everything were in place and the world waited for nothing but their happiness. I once told a friend of mine that nothing really ends, because things mostly stop and you never have proof that they’re really finished — but I said it like that, just to say, like everything I say: it’s possible that you were right? Does she still love me? Do I really have another chance?
I was very impressed by the pace of the lost paradise in which Satan sees Adam and Eve naked in Eden for the first time, and his evil nature wavers before their beauty, and wonders if there is still time to submit to Good to share that beauty rather than destroy it. Well, now it’s my turn. Satan however did not wish to change, while I do, I crave it. But is there really a need to walk to Beijing to become different? Am I not being told that it would be enough to go to my sister in the hospital with her?
If I take all the good from her, will her love be enough for both of us? If I take all the love from her, can the good she carries with her save us both?
Author’s note
This story is not only inspired by, but was evoked by and literally traced on a beautiful song by dEUS from 2005 entitled precisely
Nothing really ends
. The singer of the group, Tom Barman, wrote the text and music, and he kindly authorized me to squeeze the piece out of him to get my story out of it. Obviously the story dedicated to him.
While I’m at it, I have two more debts to acknowledge. The first with Vinicio Capossela, who in his last album entitled Thirteen urgent songs he dug up (for me) a beautiful book I read more than ten years ago which I would never have thought of again, Time for gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor, who is mentioned at the beginning. The second debt I have to acknowledge to Enrico Palandri due to his recent book of essays entitled Seven windows. there that I came across the step of the lost paradise by John Milton quoted at the end. More than ever, therefore, for this short story the general concept expressed by two verses by Milo De Angelis that I don’t remember exactly but whose meaning I can paraphrase thus applies: if I were to give back everything that is not mine, I would be left with nothing.
The appointment
The writer Sandro Veronesi read the story Nothing really ends, Thursday 1 June in Sondrio within the Milanesiana, the event conceived and directed by Elisabetta Sgarbi, who will introduce the event. Veronesi will propose the text at 9 pm in the Teatro Sociale in an evening opened by the mayor Marco Scaramellini and the councilor Marcella Fratta, with a prologue by Dori Ghezzi and a reading by Salvatore Niffoi. Also on Thursday 1 June Sandro Veronesi and Elisabetta Sgarbi will take part at the inauguration of the exhibition at 7 pm Igor. Tetiana’s story (Ukrainian notebooks)curated by the artist and cartoonist Igort (Igor Tuveri, Cagliari, 1958), set up at the Mvsa (Valtellinese Museum of History and Art).
May 29, 2023 (change May 29, 2023 | 07:35)
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