White as Silence, Red as Song

by Alessandro D'Avenia

  “But we have the solution that Job did not have. Do you know what the pelican does when its nestlings are hungry and it has no food to offer them?

  “It gashes its breast with its long beak until nourishing blood flows out for its chicks, who will drink from that wound like a fountain. Like Christ did for us. And it is because of this that he is often represented as a pelican. He defeated the death of children, hungry for life, with his blood, his indestructible love, for us. And his gift is stronger than death. Without this blood we die twice . . .”

  Everything turns silent inside me. I am a rock of pain suspended in the vacuum of love. Completely impenetrable.

  “Only this kind of love overcomes death. He who receives it and gives it does not die, but is born twice. Like Beatrice!”

  Silence.

  Silence.

  Silence.

  “I now invite up anyone who wishes to remember her.”

  A long, awkward silence follows, then I get up, under everyone’s gaze. Gandalf watches with apprehension as I approach. He’s worried I might say something foolish.

  “I just wanted to read the last words in Beatrice’s diary, words that she dictated and that I wrote down. I’m convinced that she would have wanted to make them known to everyone present.”

  My voice cracks and I swallow unstoppable tears, but I continue reading anyway.

  “Dear God, today Leo is writing to you because I can’t manage it. But even though I feel so weak, I want to tell you that I’m not afraid, because I know that you will take me in your arms and cradle me like a newborn baby. The medicines haven’t cured me, but I’m happy. I’m happy because I share a secret with you: the secret of seeing you, of touching you. Dear God, if you hold me in your arms, death no longer scares me.”

  I look up and the church seems flooded by the Dead Sea of my tears on which I float in a boat that Beatrice built for me. My eyes meet Silvia’s, and she’s staring at me and trying to comfort me with her gaze. I look down. I move quickly away from the microphone because, despite my wooden raft, I too am about to drown in tears. The last words I remember are those of Gandalf’s:

  “Take this and drink from it, all of you. It is the blood I have spilled for you . . .”

  Even God wastes his blood: an infinite downpour of blood-red love that falls on the world every day in an attempt to make us alive, but we remain deader than the dead. I have always wondered why love and blood are the same color: Now I know. It is all God’s fault!

  That rain doesn’t touch me. I am impermeable. I remain dead.

  Chapter 107

  Last day of school. Last hour. Last minute.

  The bell rings: the last one.

  A cry of freedom accompanies the cackle, as if prisoners are suddenly being freed from their life sentences after being granted clemency from goodness knows who.

  I’m left alone in class. It’s like a cemetery in here. The seats and desks that have been alive for a whole year, animated by our fears and follies, wounded by our pens and pencils, sit there as still as gravestones. A deadly silence shrouds everything. The blackboard still bears signs of The Dreamer’s hurried scribbles, wishing us nice holidays in his way:

  “He who awaits attains what he was waiting for, but he who hopes attains what he wasn’t hoping for.”

  A phrase from Heraclitus.

  As far as I’m concerned it’s a farce. I have lost everything in which I laid my hopes.

  So the school year goes out like a firework. This year has lasted a lifetime. I was born on the first day of school, then grew up and old in just two hundred days. Now the almost universal judgment of grades awaits me, and then I hope that holiday paradise can begin. I will pass the year, with reasonably good grades.

  There is one thing I have realized, though, thanks to Beatrice: I can’t afford to throw away a single day of my life. I thought I had everything and I had nothing, the opposite of Beatrice, who had nothing and yet she had everything.

  I’ve had nothing more to do with Niko and the others. The Pirates lost the tournament because of me. I never explained what happened. I don’t care. I don’t care at all. Silvia has given me a letter, but I’m not opening it. I don’t have the courage to suffer anymore.

  Chapter 108

  BeardFace, the janitor, peers in and finds me sitting there, motionless, staring into space.

  “In three years I’ve never seen you be the last to leave. What’s up? Have you flunked the year?”

  “No, I was just thinking.”

  “Well then, it’s a miracle!”

  We laugh together, and a pat on the back is enough for me to come back to life.

  Halfway down the corridor, I turn back and shout out to him:

  “Don’t erase it!”

  School is the world back to front: nothing is written black on white, but vice versa. At school everything is designed to be forgotten, like the flimsy white dust of chalk.

  BeardFace doesn’t hear me, and with the chalk duster, protagonist of so many battles, relentlessly wipes over the hopes of a dreamer.

  After the Summer

  Then crying, alone in my lament,

  I call on Beatrice and say: “Are you dead?”

  And while I call on her, it comforts me.

  DANTE ALIGHIERI, VITA NOVA, XXXI

  Chapter 109

  Summer is the reason for living, but this one has been different. It hasn’t been a time of commotion, but one of silence. I didn’t see or hear from anybody for the entire summer. I spent nearly three months in the mountains, in the hotel that we always go to. This is the first year I actually wanted to go. I needed silence. I needed to walk alone. I needed to not make new friends. I need to not find a girlfriend at all costs, just to have something to tell Niko after the holidays. I needed Mom and Dad. I needed Beatrice’s diary because in there I found a glimmer of happiness. I needed the bare minimum, and in the mountains that’s easier to find.

  In the mountains, at night, you can see the stars like nowhere else. Dad often tells me stories about the stars. Mom sits there listening, looking at us more than the stars. One evening Dad tells me the story of the star I gave to Silvia and that light, still warm, irradiates a corner of my heart that I had shut away with a thousand locks.

  I haven’t been able to open Silvia’s letter. I didn’t even bring it with me. I keep writing her text messages, but I can’t bring myself to send them. But I save them all: filed under MNS.

  Just as I save all the ones she has sent me in the past. I can’t bring myself to delete them. I must have over a hundred of them on my phone, and occasionally, when I don’t know what to do, when I’m not thinking about anything, when I’m bored, when I need to, I reread them randomly. I skim through and choose the message number that most inspires me. Thirty-three: “You’re the stupidest guy I know, but at least you’re not boring.” Twelve: “Remember to bring your history book, idiot!” Fifty-six: “Stop being a fool. Let’s go out and you can tell me everything.” Twenty-one: “What’s your shoe size? What’s your favorite color?” One hundred: “Me too.”

  The best message: I could fill it with whatever I wanted and it would always say “me too.” I was never alone. It was number one hundred and it brought good luck. I could write a novel with just text messages. For now there are only a few protagonists: Silvia, Niko, Beatrice and her mother, The Dreamer, and me. Yes, The Dreamer. I had his number, and over the summer I sent him a message to say hello and to ask him if his friend, the one with the problem with his father, was feeling better. He replied that thanks to Beatrice’s words that I read at the funeral, his friend’s wound had started to heal. I then asked him how his friend knew about Beatrice. Had he invited him to the funeral?

  “In a way . . . Thank you, Leo. I’m happy to have met you.”

  I reply, “But what for?”

  Can one have such conversations via text? Yes, I’m convinced of it.

  “For having the courage to read those words. We will meet those we have lov
ed again, and we have our whole life to ask for forgiveness.”

  I read that reply at least a hundred and twenty-seven times. It was too philosophical, but by the hundred and twenty-eighth time, I realize three things:

  1. I call all “things” that are truly important philosophical, and perhaps that’s what philosophy is for.

  2. I must answer The Dreamer’s message: “It’s thanks to Beatrice. See you soon!”

  3. I can’t wait to go home and read Silvia’s letter.

  I spend the evening looking at her star, then Mom comes and sits next to me in the heart of night, with the scent of fir trees and the moonlight shining on her rested face.

  “Mom, how can you love when you don’t love anymore?”

  Mom keeps gazing at the sky. Now she is lying next to me as I stare at the White Dwarf Red Giant known as Silvia.

  “Leo, love is a verb, not a noun. It’s not something established once and for all, but it evolves, it grows, it goes up and down, it becomes submerged like the rivers hidden in the earth’s core, but that never interrupt their journey toward the sea. At times they leave the ground dry, but they still flow beneath the surface in dark cavities and, from time to time, they resurface and gush out, nourishing everything.”

  The sky appears to resonate with those gentle words, which only on a night like this don’t sound rhetorical.

  “So what do I have to do?”

  Mom says nothing for at least two minutes, then her words emerge from the silence like a river that after a great deal of effort reaches the sea.

  “You should love anyway. You can do it all the time: to love is an action.”

  “Even when it means loving someone who’s hurt you?”

  “But that’s normal. There are two types of people that hurt us, Leo. Those who hate us and those who love us.”

  “I don’t get it. Why would those who love us hurt us?”

  “Because whenever love is involved, people sometimes behave stupidly. Perhaps they do things the wrong way, but they are still trying . . . You should worry when those who love you stop hurting you, because it means they have stopped trying or that you have stopped caring.”

  “And if you still aren’t able to love?”

  “You haven’t tried hard enough. We often get things wrong, Leo. We think that love is in trouble, but it is actually love itself asking to grow . . . Think of the moon: You only see a sliver sometimes, but the moon is always there in its entirety, with its oceans and its peaks. You just have to wait for it to grow, for light to slowly illuminate all the hidden surfaces . . . and that takes time.”

  “Mom, why did you marry Dad?”

  “Why do you think?”

  “Because he gave you a star?”

  Mom smiles, and the moonlight glistens on her perfect teeth, framed by a face that can calm my every storm.

  “Because I wanted to love him.”

  Mom ruffles my hair to free the sullen thoughts that are still lodged inside me, like she used to do when I was a child filled with fears and hiding in her arms.

  Then there is nothing but the complete silence of those who gaze at the moon and the sky and speak to whomever they want to, there beyond the stars.

  Chapter 110

  Where did I put it? I can’t find it, I can’t find it anywhere. Cosmic disaster. School starts the day after tomorrow and I can’t find Silvia’s letter. Fin, help me out—at least this time! Then I saw the light: my history book. Thank goodness I didn’t sell it like the others, just to avoid upsetting The Dreamer who sees so much in that book, more than what’s actually written in it.

  That’s where I’d left it, but I don’t want to read it yet. My dreams come true on a park bench, and that’s where I want to read it and think about things calmly.

  “Mom, I’m taking Terminator out for a pee!”

  I run, run, run. I run like I’ve never run in my life. Terminator drags his tongue on the ground, collecting all the dirt in the universe. He can’t keep up with me. It’s as if between the two of us Terminator is the one taking me for a walk and trying to slow me down.

  There it is, my bench: empty, solitary, red, waiting for my dreams. I let Terminator wander about on his own because he’s also happy here and behaves.

  I open the letter and see Silvia’s handwriting, the handwriting I’ve always wanted to have and never will.

  Dear Leo,

  Here I am writing to tell you about something that made me think of you and that I couldn’t stop myself from sharing. I know you’re livid with me and that you don’t want to talk to me. Take this letter as an outburst that only you can help with.

  The other day I went on a trip with a group of family friends. Suddenly I found myself on my own with the son of one of them. His name is Andrea and he has a crush on me. When we were left alone, he came up to me and tried to kiss me. I pushed him away and he was stunned. He turned around and walked off like you did that day. But as I stared at Andrea’s back, I couldn’t find the strength inside me to feel bad. Andrea means nothing to me. When I stared at your back that day, from your bench, something inside me broke. I realized that I can only imagine the world with you.

  The Greeks claimed that man was originally spherical and that Zeus, as punishment for his wrongdoings, had broken him in two. The two halves wander around the world looking for each other. Nostalgia drives them to keep searching, and when they find each other that sphere wants to be reunited. There is some truth in this story, but it isn’t quite enough. When the two halves meet again, they have lived their own lives up until that moment. They are not the same as they were when they first separated. Their edges no longer fit together. They have flaws, weaknesses, wounds. It’s not enough just to meet again and recognize each other. They must now choose each other too, because the two halves no longer match perfectly and only love leads to accepting the sharp edges that don’t line up, only an embrace can soften them, even if it hurts. That day, Leo, I realized that our halves don’t match perfectly and only an embrace can make us fit together. Without your presence, the world has become empty. I miss everything about you: your laughter, your gaze, your wrong subjunctives, your text messages, your conversations. All those trivial things that mean everything to me, because they are yours.

  There. That’s all I wanted to tell you. Your back will never be like anybody else’s to me. When you turn your back on me, it’s life turning its back on me. Forgive me. And if you can, take me back with my flaws. Embrace me as I am. As I will embrace you. Our embraces are what will change us. I love you as you are, and hope you can do the same, even if I am not perfect like Beatrice. I would like your bench to become ours: two hearts and one bench. As you can see, I don’t need much . . .

  I look up and the river is flowing, indifferent to global changes, this river that has collected centuries of tears, joy, and pain, carrying them to where tears should be—in the sea, which is salty precisely for this reason. I clutch my lucky charm that glistens blue in the blue of the morning, and I feel Beatrice near, so near that it’s as if I’m living with two hearts, mine and hers, with four eyes, mine and hers, with two lives, mine and hers.

  And life is the only thing that you can’t deceive if you, heart, have the courage to accept it . . .

  Chapter 111

  It’s evening already. One of those September evenings when scents, colors, and sounds are like a rainbow that can join earth and sky. Beatrice is looking at me from her star. I have my guitar in hand and an ancient dachshund at my feet: Terminator was the necessary excuse to leave the house at this time of night without arousing too many suspicions. I ring the buzzer and ask her to look out of her bedroom window.

  “Who is it?”

  When she leans out from the second floor of what has become a fairy-tale castle by now, she can barely make me out in the darkness of the dimly lit street. But she can hear my voice.

  “When you wrote out that letter for me, I promised I’d sing for you . . .”

  Silence. As I tune
my guitar I get carried away by the dark blue of the sky and start singing:

  “You know

  In this way are born

  The fairy tales I’d like to have

  In all my dreams—

  And I will tell them

  So that I can fly to heavens I don’t have

  And it’s not easy to be left without fairies to catch

  And it’s not easy to play if you’re not there . . .”

  In the darkness I imagine Silvia’s face as she listens, listens to my voice, and I no longer feel embarrassed about anything, because if I have a good voice, it’s so I can give it to her:

  “Take me with you

  Among angelic secrets

  And devilish smiles

  And I will turn them

  Into tiny gentle lights

  And I will always manage to escape

  Among colors to be discovered . . .”

  I’m immersed in all the world’s fairy tales and am reinventing them in an urban context to make them real. More faces appear at the windows of the enchanted building, intrigued by that serenade. But I don’t care. I’m like the freest of men prepared to face the entire world just to avoid losing what really counts.

  “Air, breathe in the silence for me,

  Don’t ever say goodbye,

  But lift up the world . . .”

  My voice feels free and heavy at the same time. Its heaviness caused by past events that have, however, been transformed into wings and feathers that allow it to soar, light and earnest at the same time. Only now that I am burdened can I fly.

  “Air, embrace me.

  I will fly, I will fly, I will fly,