White as Silence, Red as Song Read online

  Silvia stops and asks me if all this business about blood might upset Beatrice, who has probably had enough of needles, hospitals, and blood. Silvia is always right. How can she work out my doubts before me and better than I do? It’s almost as if she sees the world through my eyes. So scrap the bit about the blood.

  Beatrice, I would do anything for you to get better. I gave blood for you. I hope it helps. Beatrice, I have a dream, and you and I are in that dream. That’s why you’ll get better, because dreams, if you really believe in them, come true. I know that you are tired and thinner now and perhaps you feel awkward about being seen by others, but I want you to know that for me you’re fine the way you are. You’re just as beautiful. I’m sure you will get better and, if you want, I’ll come and visit soon and we can talk. I have a million things to say and tell you about, even though I think you probably know them all already. In any case, if you’re tired and don’t feel like talking, we can sit in silence and that’s okay too. For me it’s enough to be near you.

  I stop because my voice breaks, because the image of Beatrice not making it sweeps away all the words in a flash, the image of Beatrice quietly closing her eyes. Not opening them again. The whole world around me becomes dark. The light goes out. The bulb burns out. If Beatrice’s eyes don’t look at things, those things are lifeless. I’ve always been afraid of the dark, and I still am, but I don’t tell anybody because I’m embarrassed. Silvia looks at me without saying a word. She brings her hand to my eyes and with her finger wipes the tear I’ve tried to hold back.

  “Silvia, I’m still afraid of the dark.”

  I don’t know what made me come out with something so idiotic that it would make even one of those stone statues on Easter Island laugh . . . But Silvia says nothing. She strokes my face. And I stroke hers. Her skin isn’t skin: it’s Silvia. Then she writes on the letter to Beatrice: “Yours, Leo.”

  And that “Leo” is written in a way I’ve never been able to do. And it’s written as if it were me. Without Silvia I would be nobody and my soul would remain white. And white is the blood cancer of life.

  Silvia dictates the address of the hospital that Beatrice is in. It’s different from the first one, because apparently the chemo treatment is different now, longer or something like that. Or perhaps they need to prepare her for surgery.

  I’m at home. I take a seriously long shower. I cover every square inch of my body in oodles of deodorant. I look at myself in the mirror for three quarters of an hour, but I’m not satisfied with my appearance. I must be absolutely evident to Beatrice. She must see me and understand who I am. So I try all kinds of combinations of colors and clothes, but I’m unsure about all of them. Something is wrong.

  Mom yells at me to get out of the bathroom and stop doing indecent things. Why don’t grown-ups understand anything? What do they know about what’s going on in your head? They’re convinced that the only things in your head are the ones they can’t do anymore. Then they complain if you don’t ask them for advice. “You’re always locked away in your room, I no longer recognize you, you were such a sweet child . . .” Anyway, you already know the answer: “Don’t worry, it’ll pass.” Locked in the bathroom, I try and try again. With my right arm still somewhat inflexible, getting dressed is quite an undertaking, but at least I don’t have to die of embarrassment while Mom buttons up my shirt and takes the opportunity to give me a kiss and tell me how handsome I am . . . Maybe a shirt. Maybe a polo with a fleece. Maybe . . . maybe I call Niko.

  “Wear a shirt and you’ll make a good impression.”

  Thanks, Niko, you’re right. You saved me. Niko always has the right answer, the right recipe, even if he doesn’t know the situation. I wonder how he does it. I’d like to be like him and have clear reference points on what to wear in any given situation.

  But Niko didn’t even ask which girl we were talking about . . .

  Chapter 59

  I’m ready. It’s already dark outside, but I carry light within. I have the letter Silvia wrote. I’m hoping to talk directly to Beatrice, and this is also why I’ve dressed up—because my appearance has to be enough to make her realize how much I love her. Anyway, it’ll be enough to leave her the letter.

  When I walk into the hospital, a nurse asks me where I’m going and I tell her that I’m going to see a friend.

  “What’s her name?” she wants to know, with the typical face of a suspicious nurse.

  “Beatrice,” I reply, looking at her defiantly. The nurse is super skinny—scarecrow-style—and unfriendly. She doesn’t know what I’m capable of. I turn my back to her without saying a thing. Then look for Beatrice. And can’t find her. No, I really can’t find her. After an hour, I’m still wandering around and can’t find her.

  I’ve seen all kinds of things. I’ve visited the museum of suffering, with vomit-green walls and that typical hospital smell of disinfectant. Some people smile when I mistakenly walk into their room. One old man gets angry. He tells me to go to hell, and I tell him to do the same. I walk out of the room and I bump into the scarecrow nurse who glares at me. I lower my gaze.

  “Room 405,” she says with good-natured satisfaction, crossing her arms as if it were a reprimand.

  “How did you know that?” I reply, my eyes lowered.

  “She’s the only Beatrice in the computer.”

  I look at her and smile. I blow her a kiss and give her a wink.

  “The other way,” the nurse shouts at me, shaking her head. “Fourth floor.”

  I head up the stairs at full speed. I head up and can feel that Beatrice is getting closer. I head up because Beatrice is there and I want to reach her, and every step I climb is a step toward heaven, as it was for Dante in The Divine Comedy. The door is closed, or rather, ajar. I open it very slowly.

  There is only one bed in the semidarkness of the room, and on that immense, white rectangle there is a tiny, curled-up silhouette. I slowly step closer. It isn’t Beatrice. That dim-witted nurse got the wrong room, and who knows where she’s sent me. Before leaving, I observe the curled-up figure on the bed. It’s a little girl, though at first I thought it was a boy. She has a gaunt, drawn face. Her skin is colorless, an almost translucent paleness. Her arm is purple around the needle that pierces her wrist. But she is sleeping peacefully. She has no hair. She looks like a tiny Martian curled up like a baby in its mother’s womb. She seems to smile as she sleeps.

  On the bedside table lay a book, a bottle of water, a bracelet made of pale-blue and orange beads, one of those shells that encloses the sound of the sea, and a photo. A photo of that child with her mother’s arms around her. On the photo the words: “I am beside you, don’t be afraid, my little Beatrice.” That child has red hair.

  That child is Beatrice.

  Chapter 60

  Silence.

  It’s midnight. I’m sitting in the place where I sit when the world needs to go back to spinning in the right direction. It’s one of those places with a built-in button, the one for going back to the previous song. You push it and the world clicks back into place. You push it and the problem not only disappears, but never existed at all. Basically, one of those places that doesn’t exist. That place is a red bench along the river. A place only I know about. And Silvia.

  I’m holding my head in my hands, as best I can with my arm in a cast . . . and I haven’t stopped crying since I ran away. Yes, because I ran away from my dream. My crushed dream. My hands are clutching the letter for Beatrice that Silvia wrote, drenched by my tears. I rip it into a thousand pieces with my teeth and my good hand. I discard the pieces into the current. There lies my black soul. My written soul.

  And now every single fragment of my soul is drowning in the water, each going its own way so no one, no one, will ever be able to gather them up again. I’m drowning in each of those pieces of paper. I’m drowning a million times. Now my soul has gone, the current has carried it away. I want to be alone. In silence. Cell phone off. I want the whole world to suffer because it do
esn’t know where I’ve ended up. I want the whole world to feel as alone and abandoned as I do right now. Without Beatrice who is dying, without hair. Without Beatrice, who won’t make it. And I didn’t even recognize the other half of my dream. I ran away from the girl I wanted to protect for the rest of my life. I am a coward.

  I do not exist.

  God does not exist.

  Chapter 61

  I wake up suddenly. Happy. It was just a dream. Beatrice is fine. She has red hair. And that is my real dream. God still exists, even if I don’t believe in him. It makes no difference anyway. Then I hear somebody’s voice saying:

  “Leo?”

  I shake myself and don’t recognize the face I’m seeing. I’m not in my bed. Jack Sparrow isn’t looking at me from the wall with his wild eyes, and I’m freezing cold. I’m on my bench and Silvia is standing in front of me with a policeman. This really is a dream. My magic place, Silvia, and a policeman? I stare blankly.

  “Are you okay?” Silvia asks, her eyes swollen from lack of sleep or perhaps from crying. I look at her and don’t understand.

  “No.”

  The cop speaks into something that I can’t make out in the dark.

  “. . . found him.”

  Silvia sits down next to me, puts her arm around my shoulders, and, holding me gently, says, “Let’s go home.”

  I look at the black water of the river, in which the car headlights are reflected like trapped fish. My soul is like that right now. Myriads of paper fish that have flown away. Prisoners of the water. They will never come back. And the word home is the same as all the others, worse in fact, for who knows what awaits me? I lean my head on Silvia’s shoulder and start to cry because of how bad I am.

  Chapter 62

  I don’t want to play the guitar. I don’t want to eat. I don’t want to speak. I’m being punished for what happened. It’s only fair, I deserve it. Mom and Dad were desperate when I got back home: bags under their eyes, wretched faces. I had never seen them like that. Because of me. It was four o’clock in the morning. But I got what I wanted. I finally found a way to defend myself from the poisonous scorpion that is reality. To hate is the only way of being more poisonous than the scorpion. Hatred as swift as the fire that devours paper and straw, hatred that burns all that it touches, and the more it touches the more it intensifies. Be bad. Be alone. Be fire. Be iron.

  This is the solution. Destroy and resist.

  Chapter 63

  Five hours of lessons. Five hours of war. I tell that dog-fur-wearing Ms. Massaroni to go to hell when she asks me what I was doing with my cell phone. A disciplinary note in my file. I also skip English class and nobody notices. I beat my record in Snake during philosophy, while The Dreamer talks about a guy who claimed that death doesn’t exist, because when you’re alive there’s no death and when you’re dead you’re dead, so there’s no death even then.

  To me it seems like total garbage for once. Beatrice was alive before, but now she’s dying. Like that poet who wrote that “death is lived by living.” I had considered it one of those random claims that poets make, but unfortunately it’s true. Beatrice has become unrecognizable, and worse, I didn’t recognize her. Death poisons everything about life. Philosophy is useless. T9 doesn’t have the word God, which proves that God doesn’t exist. Snake is the only option left for not thinking about it.

  Then The Dreamer opens his usual briefcase from which he can pull out any book, like from Eega Beeva’s shorts. And in fact he too—like Eega Beeva—occasionally seems kind of like an alien. Sometimes he doesn’t even use any of those books but just leaves them on his desk. He says that to him books are like a piece of his home, and wherever he has them, he feels at home. Books . . . What a load of crap! All those lines full of stories and dreams are not worth the number of the hospital room that Beatrice is in. She’s been transformed into a child who is returning to the womb of the earth: swallowed up.

  The Dreamer reads out a few letters written by members of the Italian Resistance before being executed, one of his ad hoc lessons. I don’t know how he does it, but The Dreamer always has something to say that you can’t just switch off. Why doesn’t he just leave me in peace? I only listen to him because I can’t avoid it, given that you can’t close your ears like you can your eyes, but I won’t believe a word of it. And when he’s finished he can go to hell. This is what he reads:

  “‘August 4, 1944: Mom and Dad, I die crushed by the grim tempest of hatred, I who wanted to live only for love. God is love and God doesn’t die. Love doesn’t die . . .’”

  The Dreamer pauses.

  “Lies!”

  I leap up like a fire, burning paper dreams and words of straw. That word hurls itself violently against the teacher’s face, like the spiked fist of a night warrior. Everyone turns toward me looking hopeless instead of being gobsmacked by the first declaration of truth ever to be pronounced at school. I’d burn all of them, except Silvia. The Dreamer looks at me too, convinced he hasn’t understood.

  “Lies!” I repeat, challenging him.

  Let’s see what you do now, when someone has the courage to say things straight and destroy your castle of literary cards.

  For a moment he says nothing. He seems to be searching for something within that he can’t find. Then, in a completely calm voice, he asks:

  “Who are you to judge this man’s life?”

  My answer comes out like a barrage. He has thrown fuel on my fire.

  “They’re all illusions. Life is an empty box that we fill with crap so we can enjoy it, but it takes just one small thing, and poof . . .” A silent pause follows the dramatic gesture of my hands mimicking a soap bubble bursting. “You find yourself with nothing. That man was kidding himself, that dying for a cause he regarded as just gave meaning to his life. Good for him. But it’s only a sugar coating to make the pill less bitter. The box remains empty.”

  The Dreamer looks at me again and remains quiet. Then he breaks the silence with a calm and blunt:

  “Lies!”

  His against mine. Whichever it is, it’s still a lie. But it upsets me. I pick up my backpack and walk out, without giving The Dreamer time to say another word. The fire burns and continues to destroy. There’s no turning back to offer explanations. They can suspend me, they can even make me repeat the year, I don’t care. Nobody can explain what’s happening, and if that’s the way things stand, why on earth should I make an effort to do anything? I’m alone, and for the first time I am strong. I am fire and I will burn down the whole world. I won’t call Niko because he wouldn’t understand anything. I won’t call Silvia because I no longer need her.

  And the image of that child without hair, the pale shadow of Beatrice, makes me want to curse God. I curse repeatedly, over and over again, vehemently. And now I feel better. And I realize that God exists, otherwise I wouldn’t feel better. You don’t feel any better if you take things out on Father Christmas. But if you take it out on God, you do.

  Chapter 64

  When the fire subsides, I’m drained. Emptied. Around me just dust, ash, blackness. I drift away into the world of the internet: the solution to all problems. You can find Greek homework solutions, essays, films, songs, hot chick calendars. So I type two words in Google: death and God. Together. Not separate. Together. I get a page about a philosopher called Nietzsche, who said that God died. And we already knew this: on the cross. The next page says the opposite: God rose again, conquering death and freeing mankind from death. This too is unsatisfying, because it’s a lie.

  Beatrice is dying and nothing can be done about it. This time the internet has got it all wrong. Who cares if Beatrice will rise again? I want her here and now. I want to live with her for every single day of my life and stroke her red hair and her face, look into her eyes and laugh with her and make her laugh and talk, talk, talk without saying anything yet saying everything. Death is a problem that no longer concerns me. Now I just have to deal with life, and since it’s so scarce and fragile, I have
to make it lavish and strong, full and indestructible. As hard as iron.

  Message from Silvia: “Can we study together?” I’m not studying anymore. It’s useless. I reply, “No, sorry.”

  Silvia texts immediately: “Afraid? Afraid of what???” What’s she talking about? Silvia’s going nuts too. Then I have a thought. I check the message I sent her: “No, afraid.” Good old T9. I wrote “afraid” instead of “sorry” without realizing. I hadn’t double-checked it and sent it off automatically. “No, afraid.” Unfortunately T9 is right. I reply to her message truthfully: “Of everything.”

  Silence. A silence that drives you mad, a silence that makes you rip your clothes off and scream naked from the balcony that you’ve had it up to your eyeballs. I am not iron, I am not fire, I am nobody.

  Message from Silvia: “Let’s meet in the park in a half hour.” I reply yes by letting her cell phone ring once. But then I don’t go. I let her wait there alone, as alone as I am. I’m a coward and my face is drenched in the most bitter tears I know, the kind where the salt of solitude makes up at least ninety percent and water only ten.