They didn’t arrest me, but only because they couldn’t. Mariastella’s corpse had been recovered forty kilometres from where they had found me. They concluded that I couldn’t possibly have taken her all that way, and then walked back through the whole forest from end to end, alone and on foot. They came up with so many theories and finally took into consideration the idea that some other person might have been involved.
However, my nightmare wasn’t over yet. I submitted myself voluntarily to a lie detector test, to show them that I wasn’t lying. But the fact that I genuinely couldn’t remember what had happened didn’t clear my name.
In the end, the investigation fell apart, just like my marriage. When my father came to collect me from his sister’s house, I found out that Aldo had kicked me out of the house, and had already filed for divorce. At my parents’ house, I found four suitcases, containing everything that I had left.
Life carried on, with excruciating slowness.
Once again, I faced the loss of everything. The loss of my marriage, although that no longer mattered much to me. The loss of my daughter, which in contrast had become the focus of my entire existence. And I had to live wracked with guilt, obsessively blaming myself for her death.
However, time gradually softened my memories and alleviated my guilt. I found a job in the post office; a monotonous, mechanical job which was perfect for me. I lost my mother first, and then my father a few years later. I was left alone in that big, empty house.
At thirty-four years old, I met Guido. It was during a festival at the local church, which I had started to attend after Mariastella’s death.
He was forty years old, had been a widower for two years, and he had a four-year-old son: Michele. They were very kind to me, from the very first moment.
Perhaps the loneliness was a factor, but I soon realised that I truly loved them. Guido wasn’t Patrick, and what we had wasn’t even the shadow of the passion of my first love, but neither was he Aldo: he wasn’t so perfect, or so selfish.
He loved his child desperately; he would have done anything for him, to give him a mother. And I needed them too, to try again, to try to love.
We married three months later, and I found that I could love them both. Not like Patrick, not like Mariastella, but I loved them. I loved Michele as if he were my own son, even when the miracle happened and I discovered that I was pregnant.
It wasn’t planned, that time; we had even taken precautions so that it wouldn’t happen, but all the same, we were both delighted. My only concern was how Michele would take it, and whether I would still be able to love him like my own son.
When Christian arrived, and Michele saw him for the first time, and I spied on him while he was looking at his little brother, I knew that all my fears had been unfounded. I loved them both, and they would love each other.
It was all as I had hoped. Guido was a marvellous husband to me, and a perfect father to the children. Michele was always protective of his little brother, and Christian was always proud of his big brother.
Our life was complete, I had finally found peace. I could think over the loved ones that I had lost without breaking down in tears, remembering them affectionately and comforting myself by embracing my boys.
Then, when Christian turned six and started school, everything collapsed once again.
That morning is seared into my memory forever. Michele came home from school, having finished an hour early. He had come home by himself because by then he was quite grown up, he was eleven years old. Guido was going to pick up Christian on his way back from work.
Michele came in, exuberant as always, throwing his schoolbag in a corner of the kitchen, and grabbing my arm.
“Mummy! Mummy! Come and see, come and see the horses!”
The world came crashing down around me and I seemed to fall into a nightmare. But it was just for a few seconds, I recovered myself and I even managed to smile.
“What horses, darling?”
And he replied, still pulling at my arm,
“Right here outside, come and see. It’s incredible, I’ve never seen them in the city before.”
Like a sleepwalker, I let him drag me to a window, but there was nothing to see. Not satisfied, Michele opened the door and went out onto the porch.
“I don’t understand, they were right here, completely calm. They’ve gone away.”
Knowing full well that I would regret it, I couldn’t help asking him:
“What horses, Michele? What did they look like?”
The reply came, mercilessly:
“There were four, two of them were foals. They were so pretty, Mummy.”
I grabbed hold of him immediately and I pushed him into the house. My heart was in my mouth and I was terrified. “Go to your room, right now.”
Surprised, he objected immediately.
“But Mummy! It’s too early for lunch, I want to play.”
I grabbed his arm. “No, you are not leaving the house! Go to your room!”
I fear that I must have upset him; maybe I really scared him, because I had never treated him like that before. Dispirited, he complied without argument, realising that something had really disturbed me.
But as I watched him climbing those stairs, I was struck by a sudden fear that this would be the last time that I saw him. I called him back immediately. “Come down to the kitchen with me, I need some help.”
Would it be enough? Mariastella had been with me when that tragedy occurred. Who were those cursed horses, and what did they want from us? No, not from us, from me. They were connected with me, somehow.
I tried to keep him busy, and he stayed by my side the whole time. He was in a sulk at first, but soon I managed to make him smile again.
As time passed, I realised that I had got it all wrong. The table was set, the food was starting to burn, but Guido and Christian still hadn’t appeared.
I should have called, but I couldn’t face it. I just remained sitting at the table, my eyes fixed on the empty plate in front of me, whilst Michele kept asking,
“Shall we start, Mummy? Daddy and Christian will be here soon.”
Guido arrived an hour later, and as soon as I saw him coming in alone, before I even saw his face, I realised that it had all been in vain, that I had lost. That it hadn’t been Michele who was in danger.
Christian was missing, he told me between sobs. He had been delayed, and when he had arrived Christian was no longer there. Some of the children had seen him running off into the distance, chasing some horses.
There was no trace of him, nothing at all. Once again, I lived through the nightmare, hour after hour. Anyone would have noticed the strange parallel with the tragedy that had cost me my daughter, but this time no one dared to accuse me, because it was clear that I was the victim.
Guido was distraught, overcome with remorse. I realised how much he was suffering and I desperately wanted to tell him that it had had nothing to do with him, that I was the one who was cursed. But I didn’t do it.
They found Christian just two days later, after a thorough search that had gone as far as the neighbouring cities. The tragedy had taken place some twenty kilometres from our home: Christian’s body was at the bottom of a gorge. They worked out that he had died shortly after his disappearance.
It was deemed an accident, because it there was no other explanation. Christian had run off alone, and there were no signs of violence on his body. He had just died and that was that, even if no one could ever explain how he had managed to get so far away.
Strangely, I got over it quickly. Perhaps because I had Michele to keep me busy, as he was suffering over his brother’s death. But above all because I had to look after Guido, who was wracked with guilt.
I stayed close to him, and told him time and time again that he wasn’t at all to blame, until he finally believed it himself. Our family didn’t fall apart, as had happened with my previous marriage, but in fact the bonds that united us only grew stronger.
; But the true, real love, the brick and mortar that held us together, that was dead, that was no longer with us. And our lives were never again as happy as we wished them to be, we forever lived with a shadow overhead, weighing us down.
Michele grew up. Initially, we were too protective of him, desperately afraid that something might happen to him, but in time, we calmed down. He grew into a superb young man: he achieved excellent results at school, he went to live independently in a big city and finally he got married. We frequently went to visit him, and were overjoyed when his little girl was born and we became grandparents.
Guido died a few months later, whilst he was sitting on the porch, and I was in the kitchen making dinner. It was a heart attack – a real heart attack – no one ever saw any horses anywhere near him.
Michele came for the funeral, just him on his own because his wife couldn’t leave the little girl. He asked me to come back with him, to leave the now-empty house and come and live with them, to be a full-time grandmother.
I refused.
I got into the habit of sitting on the porch by myself, just like my poor husband, watching life going on around me.
Sometimes I thought about him, and how we had been happy despite our tragedy, but more often my mind wandered to those whom I had lost. To my children, Mariastella and Christian, and to the man – no, the boy – whom I had first loved. My beloved Patrick, the only true love of my life. And to some degree, I managed to become young again.
In the meantime, I waited, waited for them to come for me too. My horses.
By now, I was almost sixty years old, and it was too late to start a new life. I desperately felt the need for a bit of peace.
But it never came.
One year later, Aunt Vera died, aged over eighty. To my amazement, she left the farm to me. I wasn’t her only living relative and we hadn’t seen each other for more than thirty years, but she remembered me in her will.
A strange joy overcame me, and I didn’t waste a single moment. I packed my bags, I shut up my house and I went to catch the train.
I knew, in my heart of hearts, that I was going to meet my fate; that there, I would see the horses again.
However, when I found myself in that house once again, I was overwhelmed by my memories, and I collapsed.
The farm was in a disastrous state. Aunt Vera had insisted on maintaining her independence throughout the last years of her life, even when she hadn’t been completely self-sufficient.
And I had only to glance at the nearby forest to feel an excruciating sense of oppression.
I did exactly what I had been trying to avoid: I withdrew into myself. More specifically, I shut myself away in that house, and it became my prison.
By now, I didn’t even open the shutters any more, and I made do with what I could find in the store cupboard, which Aunt Vera had left well stocked. Each day, I became more and more estranged from humanity. I realised that I had made a mistake in going there, but I couldn’t find the strength to leave.
Perhaps I would have died right there in that shell of a house, if it hadn’t been for something extraordinary.
One day, they came for me.
It was definitely the male, the most powerful one, who came tapping on my shutters. The female and the two foals stayed behind, waiting.
I recognised them at once, but I found that I didn’t feel any fear. They may have taken from me everything that I had held most dear, but they were still beautiful, still wild. Nature itself, in all its splendour.
I went outside, but the horse dropped back and distanced himself, re-joining his family.
And yet I knew that they had come for me, it simply couldn’t be otherwise. I walked towards them.
“I’m here! I’ve been waiting for you! Come and get me!”
But still they retreated, towards the forest. They trotted, unhurried, as if to give me time to follow them.
The idea of going in there once again terrified me. Down there, in the heart of that green monster, I had lost my daughter and my memory. Perhaps I was also afraid to remember.
I followed them all the same. Because I was tired, and because I needed to. I suddenly understood that they were bringing me to the place where I had seen Mariastella for the last time.
In the morning light, everything seemed exactly how I remembered it. But perhaps I was the only one who could see it like that.
The horses stopped there, lazily swishing their tails. The male and the two foals. The female, alone, had wandered a little deeper into the forest.
I caught up with them and, to my amazement, they allowed me to stroke them. They were beautiful, the most beautiful horses that I had ever seen. Free horses, whom no one had ever tamed.
“Have you come for me”, I asked them. “To take me away?”
“Only if you think that you’re ready”, replied the male. “If you think that you have done everything that you need to.”
Unable to think of anything else that I would do, I nodded. I wasn’t even surprised to hear that voice in my head.
“What else do I need to do?” I asked them.
The horse shook his head.
“I don’t know, my love. You’re the one who should decide. This is your reality.”
That was when my blood ran cold, because I knew that voice, even though it had been more than forty years since I heard it. My eyes filled with tears.
“Patrick?” I whispered.
“I’ve been waiting for you for so long.”
“But you’re dead.”
“There was no other way. I understand. I don’t blame you at all.”
An awful fear overcame me.
“Was it me? Was it my fault?”
There was so much affection in his voice, and so much understanding.
“It wasn’t easy to accept it at first, because I hadn’t met them yet. But then I understood why it was so important.”
At that moment, I looked at the foals, and I saw beyond their outward appearance, who was really hiding within those bodies. My voice shook. “Mariastella! Christian!”
“You were right, they are wonderful. Now I understand, they needed to be born, it was too important. And they wouldn’t have existed if I were alive.”
“What are you?”
“Your reality, I’ve already told you. What you’ve always wanted. What you’ve most loved. Those with whom you’ve decided to spend eternity.”
“It was me that created you?”
I heard him whinny. It almost sounded like a laugh.
“You created these exteriors, because you always liked them. And you gave them to us.”
I stroked the muzzle of the female foal, little Mariastella. “I killed you. I killed my daughter.”
She replied in a voice that I had never heard before.
“It had to happen, Mummy. If I were alive, Christian would never have been born.”
I looked at Christian, still confused.
“But why you too?”
“So that we could be together, Mummy”, he replied. “Us four. So that we could be a family, the family that you wanted so badly and which you could never have.”
“But why not?”
“Because that was our fate. You couldn’t have us all, not together. We couldn’t exist at the same time.”
“But here, we can.”
“Yes, we’re all here.”
“And where is here? What happens now? What do I have to do?”
Patrick answered. “We don’t know. You’re the one who created us, you are our future. We’re just waiting for you.”
At that, I went past them, and walked up to the mare. Her eyes were black, but there was no life inside her. She was just a shell, waiting for me.
Because now I could re-join my family and bring them into my reality. And we could run, free, through the infinite forests and meadows.
Oh yes, it was worth any sacrifice to be able to have them all, even the suffering that I had borne. To allow Mariastella and Chris
tian to be born, to bring them into existence.
In that moment, I remembered everything. Every secret thought, every hope. I relived the moment in which all this had been planned.
In front of me were the infinite possibilities of existence, and I alone was able to perceive them. I could have married Patrick, and we would have been happy, we would always have loved each other. But alone, without children, however much we may have wanted them.
Mariastella would have grown up, amid continuous arguments, and she would have run away from home, hating me and her father. She would have squandered her life away, without ever knowing real love.
We would have lost Christian. He would have left us, a slave to drugs until he died alone, in an alley, with a syringe in his arm.
That was the future; those were all the possible futures that were waiting for me. But there was an alternative, a special future, in which we would be together, and happy forever.
I could make it happen; I could bring together our lives in just one. But there was a price to pay. A terrible price.
I saw their deaths.
The moments in which the horses had taken them, leaving in their places mere empty, useless shells. I saw them running Patrick off the road, taking Mariastella away from me, pushing Christian down into the gorge. And the pain was too much, more than I could bear. I would have borne the suffering forever, for every moment of my existence.
There, in that moment, when I chose what my destiny would be, I also chose to forget, because otherwise I would never have had the strength to make it to the end.
I stroked the muzzle of the mare as she stood in front of me. She was magnificent, everything that I had always wanted to be, ever since I was a child, in my most secret dreams. Such a free, strong creature.
“Are you ready, Mummy? Are you really ready?”
I looked at Christian and I smiled. By now, Michele had his own life. He didn’t need me anymore; he would be happy whatever happened. If Guido was alive, I would never have been able to leave him, I loved him too much. But now, now I was free, and the moment had come.
The Prison Page 23