In the last few years, I had witnessed the rapid decline and death of people very dear to me. And my act of coming too close to that inglorious mystery—out of an excess of boldness and false confidence, almost as if I wished to prove that I was courageous enough to look someone who was on their way out right in the face, and to see just what would take their place, on that face forever deprived of expression—instead of making me stronger, as I had naïvely fooled myself into believing, naïvely and at the same time arrogantly, like someone who might turn to his audience with a shrug and brazenly declare, “Pshaw! He won’t even tickle me!” before taking on a giant in single combat, it had drained me completely. Proximity to the dying had taken a great deal of life out of me. The nerve had grown thin and now it twanged at the slightest excuse.
Better to leave my old teacher to the more appropriate care of his willing ex-student, I thought. Though, from what he told me, Rummo wasn’t giving him any actual treatment. And it hadn’t been Cosmo who had refused treatment, this time, but Rummo who’d understood how pointless it would have been. No shock therapy, then, much less mild or palliative therapy: only the application of a medical protocol to limit the most painful effects of the condition. A minimal, simple, humane attitude. Sage, just as Gioacchino Rummo had always seemed sage to me, in his unshakable faith. Caught in the maelstrom of the controversy, one might imagine that Catholics erect their bulwark in the die-hard, extreme defense of life as such, at all costs, always and inevitably. An ideological bulwark, more than a religious one. And it is certainly true that there are some vociferous paladins defending this position. But it would be every bit as Christian, indeed, even more so, I believe that it would be a hundred times more so, to accept without too much chatter the will of God. Let blessed death come, in other words, when it must come: seeing that sooner or later it’s bound to come in any case. There probably isn’t a religion on earth that places such faith and hope in dying; and that makes it impossible to understand the position of those who demand that we struggle to forestall death’s arrival, as if allowing a Christian to die Christianly were an outrage. Equally impossible to understand that death (which in the sermons of condolence will be described by those same Christians as a simple transition toward the true life, and something approaching a cause for jubilation) should be pointed to as a shameful defeat and the triumph of malevolent forces. Truly, I cannot understand it, I can’t bring myself to understand this. Luckily, though, Rummo belonged to the empirical school of those who know how far to venture and where to stop. Where to stop to catch your breath.
“We see each other every week,” he had told me about those assistance protocols. “And I get the impression that our teacher smiles, almost without moving his lips, every time I let slip a verb conjugated in the future tense.”
“So, anyway, how long does he still have to live?” I asked him.
Rummo lowered his voice on the phone.
“Well, to hear him talk about it, still too long.”
WHEN COSMO TOOK A TURN FOR THE WORSE, I made up my mind to go see him. I turned onto Via Aurelia, my head stuffed with thoughts I wanted to avoid at any and all costs. The dismay I expected to experience at the sight of him, after forty years, and my likely repugnance at his current state, was something that I acrobatically replaced with a bucolic fantasy in which he, younger though still wrinkled and bowed, and I, a long-haired, overgrown boy, as if we were Socrates and Alcibiades at a symposium, discussed and debated in a leisurely fashion, while he stroked my hair and there issued from my mouth, in response to his comments, simple and truthful statements that, sadly, I immediately forgot. Nothing could be further from the reality that had held sway back during my school days and from the presentday situation. According to what Rummo had told me over the phone, I already knew we wouldn’t exchange any more than a word or two, that by now he no longer spoke, not because of any physical impediment, but because anything that could be said would be superfluous. Any urgent need to communicate that he might once have had ceased within him some weeks ago: he would placidly gaze at the doctor or the nurse, he’d let them do what they would, he’d let them wash him, he listened to the few ritual phrases of encouragement to turn over or lie down: but he said nothing, if not the occasional interjection, “yeah,” “okay,” “yes-yes,” “oh, yes,” “no-no-no.” Sometimes he seemed to sort of sing to himself. Whatever he might have to say, he had already said. And apparently he had also written.
Rummo had confessed to me that his first phone call, early one morning a month earlier, had been on account of that. As he was sorting through the little apartment and doing his best to tidy up a bit, under the gaze, now impassive, now mocking, of its tenant, Rummo had noticed a pile of notebooks with black covers, extremely ordinary, cheap pocket notebooks, extracted from the general chaos and held together by an appearance of order, as if whoever had crumpled their covers through much handling cared very much about them. When he opened the one on the top of the pile, he saw that it was filled to the middle pages with a regular but practically illegible handwriting, spangled with crossing out and overwriting.
Every page contained short blocks of writing separated by blank spaces. Some jottings and parenthetical notes filled the margins above and below and sometimes along the side of the page, continuing vertically only to resume at a point in the block of text already written with a shaky but precise line. With the notebook in hand, Rummo had turned toward its author, who at that point was sitting in the faded velvet armchair, clutching at the armrests that must have been used in the past by some cat to sharpen its claws, and had displayed it to him, with a questioning look.
“Is this your writing,” that gaze had asked, “did you do this?”
“Sure, yeah . . .” Cosmo had murmured, and on his face there appeared a smile, at once chagrined and sly, impudent, as he lifted one hand from the armrest and waved it in the air as if to say, “Leave it there, forget about it . . .” as if, instead of notes, Rummo had just stumbled upon a collection of lewd photos. A minor secret vice that he might have been ashamed of, in other words, if there had still existed even so much as a glimmer of decorum in his surroundings, and inside him: something that Cosmo clearly was ruling out, with that smile and that gesture. Rummo had counted twenty or so notebooks. And other times, never formulating an explicit question, and not daring to peruse them or even peek inside them, he had questioned Cosmo in a silent dialogue as to exactly what those notebooks were, and whether they contained anything significant or precious, receiving in reply evasive glances or else an X traced in midair that meant, without a shadow of doubt, “oh, nothing, just junk,” and “throw it all away.” If Rummo continued in his display of curiosity, the old man reacted by huffing in annoyance and growing agitated. All the same, even in those same glances and gestures of annoyance, Rummo felt sure he had glimpsed an implicit denial of that disinterest and scorn toward those notes on the part of their author.
It had seemed to him, in other words, that Cosmo wanted to put his instincts to the test by simulating a total apparent detachment from something that, in fact, deep down, he considered very important.
“I DON’T WANT TO KNOW ANYTHING more about it. I’d be ashamed to poke my nose into it. But if Cosmo dies without having left any specific instructions to destroy those writings, it’s going to be your responsibility to take those notebooks. Then you can decide what to do with them, even if that means throwing them away without reading them.”
As usual, I hesitated, and Rummo summed up brusquely.
“I believe that you, you in particular, owe him that.”
SO I FOUND MYSELF DRIVING along a coast road from which I could glimpse the sea only in snippets here and here, a good hundred yards away, between one apartment building erected in defiance of the zoning code and the next, diseased palm trees, auto mechanic shops, parking garages. I thought about what old Cosmo might still have to say to me, and whether I had ever really loved him, aside from admiring him and swallowing his indica
tions. Yes, that’s what I’d call them, the things he conveyed to us at school, not lessons, or instructions, or information: but indications, gestures that pointed out far into the distance and revealed the existence of entire continents, invisible beyond the horizon, jagged-edged archipelagoes of names and ideas, characters, stories, disputes, struggles, battles between angels and demons, armies and philosophers, caravans of merchants in the midst of their journeys, adventures and precious substances and knots of stars and schools of deep thinkers and forests and diseases that raged and prisoners dragged into the snow and the lust for supremacy that had dragged them there, until you had worked your way back to an ampule of some sort filled with a pulsating liquid from which that phantasmagoria had originated in the first place, the wisdom that had spilled out of the heads of men, the rite of passage, the nectar that makes you sage and immortal or the poison that kills in a few seconds.
My hope was accentuated by an illusion as banal as it was sincere, almost invariably destined to prove vain: namely that sick men, men whose end is approaching, either rapidly or almost imperceptibly, are ready to dispense a deeper and more sincere truth, that they have, in other words, a final, extreme message to give us before saying farewell forever: a message that, while it might not illuminate the secret of life in general, still ought to give some meaning to the life they have lived. Well, that is in fact an illusion. And it shows just how appropriate the well-known negative argument really is, according to which either this ulterior truth does not exist at all, or even if it does exist, we never come into contact with it, even in the proximity of death, or else, even if that truth were shown in its entirety to the eyes of the dying man, as one final grace bestowed, he still wouldn’t know how to communicate it to others: he wouldn’t know how or he wouldn’t want to, he’d lack the strength, and his words would dry up in his mouth.
Even so, I couldn’t extinguish that illusion.
Surely Cosmo had something in store for me, and for me alone. Let it be his mocking grin resting on some rare word. Not even for a moment did it occur to me that it might be me who was supposed to tell him something. It certainly wouldn’t be me who sat there telling him “what I’d been doing with myself,” “all the news” (of the past forty years?).
But had I really loved him or not? And had he loved me? And if so, how much?
UNFORTUNATELY, I got there too late for confidences and revelations. There was only one revelation, the same one you have in the presence of certain paintings, where the figures become independent of the characters they are portraying, and are nothing more than a head, a torso, some limbs: a thing, that is, that you can see, that you can see clearly, but that is not uttered in words. Corporeal evidence.
I ENTERED THE SHACK. Rummo was there, with a woman. Cosmo had lost consciousness.
“He’s been like this since yesterday.”
“He never comes to?”
The woman shook her head.
I still hadn’t looked at him. The room was cramped, a few square yards, and yet my gaze wandered above and around the corner where I knew he lay sunken in his mattress, somehow managing to avoid seeing him, or seeing him only as an empty space. I could list the details that my eyes perceived in that circumnavigation, but they were insignificant. I have no idea how to describe poverty without a hint of complacency, as if in a genre painting, a special effect. I noticed the notebooks, stacked on the sill of the casement window, only one sash of which could therefore be opened. Had they always been there, or had Rummo put them there? When he saw how hesitant I was, Rummo threw his arms around me. He hugged me and I hugged him back, hard. “Too bad,” he said, “it’s a pity,” and that made it clear to me that, in all likelihood, Cosmo was never going to emerge from that sleep again. But there wasn’t a hint of reproof in the voice of my old SLM classmate, if anything, perhaps, regret, regret for me and for the aged teacher, for the boundless array of confidences and reflections that he and I might still have been able to exchange. The last words, famous, fatal, that hadn’t been uttered, and in fact, never are, save in the imagination of posterity—those last words ought to have been spoken to me, or so thought Rummo. Only then did I think back to the precocious grief of the man who was hugging me with such transport; I thought, that is, of just how old Giaele would have been now, if her family had returned from the outing to Angel Lake tired but happy with their rucksacks full of twigs and branches for Eleonora Rummo’s collage, and one more berry than the ones that actually wound up in the trash can, once they did get home. She would have been forty-five years old, or so, Giaele. She’d have children of her own, blond perhaps, however recessive that characteristic might be in theory. Or perhaps she would have died before her time anyway, falling off her boyfriend’s motor scooter back before helmets became mandatory, from an aneurism or a routine operation on the wrong ear, perhaps it was her fate to remain forever small. Not to grow up. With my chin resting on Rummo’s shoulder, opening my eyes again after that tight hug had made me close them, to hide the tears, which instead now sprayed forth, I finally glimpsed through a damp veil the bed that Cosmo lay in.
LET ME WRITE SOMETHING AWFUL: he was exactly the same as I remembered him from school, even if he was twice that age and was dying.
18
FOUR DAYS LATER, Rummo called me back. Cosmo was dead. He had died without any particular suffering. Rummo had cared for him right up to the end, with the nurse whose presence Cosmo had become accustomed to, and a third person whose identity he was unwilling to disclose.
IT WAS RUMMO WHO HANDED me the keys to the little house. With the unorthodox assignment of removing the notebooks and the rest of whatever original handwritten material I might find. But I would need to move fast: at the end of the month, the hovel where our teacher had lived and then died would return to the jurisdiction of the Cerveteri city office for affordable housing. Rummo had managed to persuade the local functionary to wait two more weeks in exchange for the promise that the place would be left clean and emptied out. He would send two Romanians around with a pickup truck: except for a few suits and a couple of pairs of shoes that needed to be resoled but which were very well made, everything else was to be taken straight to the dump.
“I WANTED YOU TO KNOW SOMETHING about our teacher . . . the last thing.”
“Okay, tell me.”
“It’s something you might not imagine.”
Nothing could be more likely, I thought. I have a harder and harder time imagining what the people I know really do, that is, the people I think I know . . . who they truly are.
“Okay, Rummo, I just hope it’s not yet another terrible thing . . . I’ve had my fill.”
All I want now is joy and happy, lovely things around me. Is it a naïve desire, worthy of a spoiled child? Yes, yes it is.
“Oh, no, it’s not terrible at all . . .” Rummo smiled. “On the contrary, on the contrary . . . but it’s a singular thing for someone like him.”
“Well, what is it?”
“Before losing consciousness, he asked for the comfort of religion.”
“Cosmo?!”
Rummo nodded.
I can’t believe it. I can’t bring myself to believe it. Cosmo, the teacher . . . the most unreligious man. In the History of Mankind. There was a priest at his side, watching over him as he passed away.
DURING THE SAME STRETCH OF DAYS during which Cosmo was dying, a great technological innovator also died, perhaps the greatest and most famous in the field of computers. He, too, had fallen sick with cancer, though he was much younger than my teacher, and even younger than I am now, as I write this, and as I periodically gently touch my balls to ward off bad luck. His name is easy to guess and his slogans too popular for me to think of repeating them here. I read about him that, after “battling with courage,” he had been “defeated” by his cancer. People had spoken on TV and in the newspapers about his “lengthy defiant struggle.” Athletic and military metaphors were lavished. The account of any disease is nowadays translated
into terms out of soccer or tennis, taking it for granted that the sick think like athletes, so that in the end, those who died did so only because they gave up. But that’s not how it is. There really is no struggle, except for the struggle that well-meaning people stuff into the heads of the sick, trying to convince them to fight with all the strength they no longer have.
I LACKED THE NERVE, because it would have been insulting, to ask Rummo whether the priest really had been the dying man’s request or if Rummo hadn’t brought him there of his own initiative. Even though I think only the best of my classmate, the doubt was still rattling around.
19
IT IS POINTLESS AND STUPID to deplore and mock fear, because it is always linked, a mirror image, to hope, which means that to laugh at the fears of given individuals means denying them all hope.
FEAR DOESN’T ALLOW ITSELF to be defeated once and for all. A man seeking advice within himself will find his privileged interlocutor in fear. In order to conquer it, it is necessary to approach very close to death, even, one might say, cross through it. He who triumphs over fear gains access to the kingdom of the dead, just like Christ. In a variant of the wonderful poem “The Green Knight,” Sir Gawain, one of the knights of the Round Table, who has faced death and has escaped with a scratch on the neck instead of being beheaded entirely by the mysterious knight of the title (who reveals himself to be none other than Death, in the green attire of a chatelain), finds himself wandering, befuddled, in a world he cannot recognize, estranged, where things are no longer what they used to be, where voices ring differently, and likewise colors and sounds.
It is the world of the dead.
Because you, my dear Gawain, that threshold you were so sure you’d managed to avoid, you actually crossed it . . . without noticing.
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