The Presence

So, where do these souls go?

Photo by Tom Frances Palattao on Unsplash

I saw Maria for the last time in 1988, or perhaps it was 1989. Yes, it was 1989, the year of my septoplasty, when, in early November, after years of nasal respiratory difficulties that kept me up at night and made my life an inferno, I gave in and put myself in the hands of doctor Moretti, a highly recommended otolaryngologist at the hospital in Ancona. And when all was said and done, and my unexpectedly long convalescence finally over, I returned to Milano and went to see professor Franco Minerva, my thesis advisor, saying that I was back and ready to resume my work, at which point he, a tall and bald man in his late forties with round glasses and a mustache, who had hairy yet slender hands, was married to an American, and had eyes that hinted at a smile before the rest of his face did, looked me straight in the eyes and said that he was furious with me. You disappeared, he continued, I couldn’t get a hold of you for three months, maybe four; may I remind you that your graduation is scheduled for this coming spring and your thesis is due by mid March? I’m not one for confrontations: when attacked verbally, I freeze and can’t think straight, overwhelmed by an inner activity centered around the observation of minuscule details materializing, out of rage and contempt, in my opponent’s voice, gestures, and face. When I was younger, I seldom forced some response words out, but then I realized that I had always worsened the situation and have remained silent ever since. So that time, too, I remained silent. Once professor Minerva was done and a sufficiently high number of seconds had passed for that inner activity of mine to taper off, I stuttered that I hadn’t been well, that I had an operation, and that I was sorry I hadn’t said a word to him the entire time. Could you at least get some work done, he asked. No, I couldn’t.

I couldn’t get anything done. In fact, besides the hospitalization, the operation, and the recovery -- which, at the end of the day, did take up time and nervous energy, but turned out to be just a line or two in the book of my existence -- I had spent most of that period in physical and emotional idleness, lying on the bed, staring at the ceiling or into the void, looking and not looking, hearing and not hearing: a non-state, I’d say, as if someone had cracked open my skull and stirred its insides, first forcefully, then more fluidly, until they became a magmatic, almost liquid substance ready to be disposed of. Such was the state of my being after I discovered, one foggy morning in January, that Maria was gone. She had vanished overnight, and, with her, all her belongings, her smell, the scribbled notes she used to leave around, her long dark hairs, her presence. No trace of her anywhere.

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Rituals, in writing, I try to have as few as possible, she used to say. It’s already hard as hell, she’d continue; if I also have to check whether I did this or that, or where I am before starting, I’ll be paralyzed and never write anything. So she wrote anywhere, on anything, with any degree of confusion around her, whenever she had something to say, either a reflective, exploratory thought, a let’s-see-where-I’m-going-with-this kind of act, or a clear, well-defined idea she wanted to crystallize. And there she was, a year ago these days, seated across from me in that train compartment, a beige retractable table between us, the blind half‑drawn in the window on my right, or her left, a landscape of green hills flashing fast outside like the multitude of frames one gets a quick glance at while riffling through a book containing one per page, all substantially equal from afar but each decidedly different on close inspection. There she was, I was saying, hunched over that beige retractable table, scribbling words on the back of a leaflet, and taking her time at it.

Why isn’t there an easy way to communicate with the dead?, she suddenly asked, looking up. We weren’t alone in that compartment. It was occupied by three other humans, two men and an old lady, who were the subject of Guess the Animal, a game we used to play via text whenever we found ourselves traveling with strangers, in which we tried to guess which animal people resembled. Maria was excellent at this, as she wouldn’t limit herself to saying dog or cat or horse, but she would be as specific as calling someone a mid-sized Yorkshire or a calico cat with blue eyes and a preponderance of orange patches. Things of that sort. And of course she was always spot on. So, in that compartment there was an owl with black and beige plumage, surely named Ortensia, a platypus, and a magpie (these last two were specific enough and didn’t need any further qualifications). Gosh you’re so right, I texted back. She was mostly right in life, and I attributed her righteousness to the combination of her unusually developed powers of observation and her ability to always ask the right question.

You mean, there’s a hard way to communicate with the dead, but there isn’t an easy one? I asked back, to make the conversation a tad less dramatic than it was about to become. She kept looking out the window, giving my follow-up question no attention, or perhaps without even having heard my voice. Used as I was to her long pauses, which sometimes stretched to tens of minutes, I waited as long as it took for a remark from her, knowing it would come in due course. She indeed belonged to that rare category of those who thought without compromise, as I had christened it over the years -- that is, those who didn’t care that others waited while they searched for the right way to express the output of the often tumultuous activity their brains generated. It wasn’t really carelessness; rather, it was more a sense of forgetfulness about being engaged in a conversation. I was irritated at first by this behavior, but then I realized that it was for them as natural as the sun rising every morning, that it wasn’t a lack of courtesy or politeness, that they weren’t doing it on purpose, and I came to appreciate it as the surfacing of their character’s essence, as if they wanted spontaneously and transparently to reveal who they really were. And in a world where falsehood and façade are the order of the day, where form isn’t a way to express substance but a way to conceal it, those who think without compromise are, to me, a tiny sliver of hope within humanity’s unrelenting march towards rotting and extinction.

And sure enough, after a couple of minutes, her remark did come. No, of course, there isn’t even a hard one, she said, her eyes still fixed on the passing landscape. But the dead are somewhere, aren’t they? Not their flesh and bones, no: those are either decomposing in their caskets or have been turned to dust. I mean their souls, or consciousnesses, she continued. And I thought that this idea of the soul that we’d been told about when we were kids, and that we forgot or neglected or dismissed as a nice fantasy to incorporate into stories, like those where something flies out of a dead body, goes up into the sky and stays there forever, those that make you sleep well at night but that, come on, nobody believes, that this idea of the soul, I was saying, in its simplicity, requires the clean slate of the thought apparatus of a pure human like Maria to be brought up seriously. It’s hard to explain, but right there, right when Maria brought it up, perhaps for the first time in my life, I thought that this idea of the soul should be paid attention to.

That we have something ethereal inside is visible in our faces, don’t you think? she asked. Something impalpable, translucent, invisible. Something that doesn’t abide by the mechanics of the rest of our bodies, and because it doesn’t, what makes our bodies cease to function has no power over it. No power whatsoever. Our souls live on; to me, this is indisputable. And then she retreated into another one of her states of silence. This time, after a brief continuation of her gazing out the window, she hurried to the scrap of paper that lay on the train table and scribbled something for a couple of minutes. They say the eyes are the windows to the soul, don’t they? I replied without conviction, just not to let the thread dissipate. To which she immediately looked up and, bringing the pencil to her mouth, said: not only the eyes. Not only the eyes.

To construct a face, flesh and bones are not enough; this is why the face is the least physical part of the body, she continued. A face is made of gaze, of contractions of the mouth, of folds and creases, of that whole set of subtle, imperceptible attributes and movements through which the soul reveals itself. (Ortensia the owl, meanwhile, had shut her book, taken off her glasses, and started to listen, looking the opposite way and pretending to mind her own business.)

I’m sure you’ve noticed, she resumed after another minute of quiet, that, at the very instant of death, the body suddenly turns into something else, something so different that it makes us think, and often say, “they no longer look like the same person,” even though they have the same bones and the same molecular substance as a moment before -- a moment before that mysterious instant when the soul withdraws from the body, leaving it like a house from which the beings who inhabited it and who, there, above all, had suffered and loved have gone away forever. For it is not the walls, nor the ceiling nor the floor that give a house its character, but the beings who make it alive with their conversations, their laughter, their loves and resentments, the beings who permeate the house with something immaterial yet enduring, even though they do so by means of concrete objects like rugs, books, or colors. The paintings that can be seen on the walls, the colors with which the doors and windows have been painted, the pattern of the rugs, the flowers that can be found in the rooms, the records and the books, however material they may be as objects (just as lips and eyebrows belong to the body), are without a doubt manifestations of the soul. The soul cannot reveal itself to our eyes except through the body or other material things, which is its weakness, but also one of its curious stratagems.

At which point, while the platypus and the magpie were dozing off with their mouths open, Ortensia the owl, clearly interested, tiptoed into the conversation with an innocent and childish, “So, where do these souls go?”

What followed was one of the most interesting, complex, yet exhilarating debates I had ever taken part in in my entire life, and one of the top five memories of my life with Maria.

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From the author (or me):

I know, it’s been a while. Eight months and two days since my last published piece, to be precise. I could say that life has been busy, but I’d be lying. Life has been as it’s always been, with one or two aggravations that, nonetheless, are part of the game. The truth of the matter is that I didn’t feel like writing. I had no inspiration, my muse went on vacation, the well dried up -- call it what you like.

One dilemma, however, took up most of my thinking during this abstinence: should I continue publishing short pieces of fiction here on Substack, or should I concentrate my efforts on trying to write a novel? Immediately followed by another question: should I continue to write in English, or should I switch to Italian (which is, after all, my mother tongue)? And the verdict, at least as of now -- Sunday, January 4th, 2026, at 5:28 pm -- is that I should try to write a novel in Italian. Surprised? Me too. Well, more on this novel thing later.

So you might (legitimately) ask: why did I put out this piece after such a long hiatus? Because I felt like it. I started writing, and the words came.

As you can see, in the best tradition of pretty much everything that’s been published here on Not Quite Real, there’s no end to the piece. This doesn’t mean there won’t be one. I will continue to publish short pieces in English here from time to time, with no regular cadence, including the sequel to this one. I also won’t be hanging around much, reading and commenting on others as I used to, with the exception of a handful of publications that remain dear to me and always will, through thick and thin. For me, it simply boils down to a finite amount of time and focus, at this point. So, as crude as this might sound: if you’re here purely as a matter of reciprocation, you might as well unsubscribe. No hard feelings.

As for the novel, depending on an answer I’m expecting by the end of the month, I will give myself one year and see whether I can pull something off. In the meantime, to re-acclimate myself to Italian (yes, even though it’s my mother tongue, I need to ease back into it, writing-wise), I will open an Italian channel here on my Substack and publish some of my better-received pieces, translated into Italian.

That’s all, for now.

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