Unsent Letters #23

You were happy to see me

Dear S.,

At some point, I’m not sure exactly when, someone came and told me that you had been hospitalized again. It might have been your cousin. He said you’d had a relapse. You looked better, the last time I saw you. You looked like the worst was behind you. Chemo had made you pale, weak, with no hair, but you seemed on your way back. You sure hadn’t lost your sense of humor, not even in those circumstances. The first thing I noticed, before your physical appearance, was that your voice was the same, your jokes were the same, and you were still you. How bad could this be, I thought. If the disease doesn’t change you, you’ll eventually change the disease; it’s just a matter of time. I was certain you were going to make it, and we were going to continue spending our days together, the days of two fourteen-year-olds who just wanted to be best friends, as if nothing had happened. At fourteen, one knows nothing about life, let alone death.

I called the number written in bold next to that name, Raimondo. The lady at the little flower kiosk pointed it out to me. Seated on a wicker chair just outside her stand, hair pulled up in a bun, she wore a sleeveless yellow dress and fanned herself in slow motion, her other hand holding a worn-out paperback with her index finger amid the pages as a signpost. She stared at me as I parked the car in the shade of one of the cypresses lining the narrow, upward-sloping road leading to the cemetery, locked it, and slowly walked toward the entrance. She had the gaze of someone who had seen that scene a million times. 

The sound of my footsteps echoed everywhere, birds chirped, and the sky was an intense blue, without a cloud. A small village cemetery couldn’t possibly be that complicated to figure out, I thought. So I ventured in to look for you, only to retrace my steps a few minutes later, overwhelmed, back to the entrance. As if waiting for me, the lady at the flower kiosk asked who I was there for. I told her your name, and it did ring a bell, but she couldn’t help with the exact location. There’s a phone number on the bulletin board over there, she said, pointing with her closed fan. It’s the keeper’s, but he’s not around today.

Raimondo’s voice sounded as if coming from the afterlife. I’m home sick, he said. But tell me who you’re looking for and I’ll try to guide you to their spot. I waited a few seconds without speaking, wondering how he could know all the names by heart, and I figured he was probably in front of a computer screen, ready to interrogate a database of sorts. As small as this cemetery was, it must have housed a few thousand deceased nonetheless. I gave him your name. Yes, I know him; let me think. He clearly had no database. Cause, you know, he’d been at this one spot for over twenty years, and then there was a shakeout -- like, we had to move things around when they finished building the new wing -- and he was relocated to a different spot. I could hear his memory working as he spoke, as if buying time. His entire family, I mean; not just him. They have this family tomb that used to be located down below, near the new wing, and now it’s about three hundred meters from the main entrance. In fact, it’s been there for a couple of decades.

I’d never been to your grave, not once. I’ve always known where you were buried, but could never get myself to come visit. I didn’t even come to see you on your deathbed, back on that June day of nineteen eighty-one. I couldn’t bear to see you lying there, with your eyes closed and skin paper-white, without life. I was mad at the Universe, couldn’t allow the image of you, immobile on that bed, to get imprinted in my mind, and was scared. We were immortal, remember? The realization that life can end so early, and not only at an old age, suddenly changed my world. Your loss was a trauma. On the other hand, not a single day passed without thinking about you, without wondering what you would have done in my shoes, had you been there living the life I was living. You were always present. I caught myself so many times talking aloud to you, as if in conversation. You were there. Perhaps that’s why I never felt the urge to visit your grave. Until last week, when I was at our old family house in my hometown. I’m not sure what prompted it, but I got in the car and drove the few miles to the cemetery. From the top of one hill to another.   

I hung up with Raimondo and followed his instructions, but I still couldn’t find you. I called him back and asked to be guided in real time, while on the phone. A few minutes later, I was standing in front of your grave. I’ve always thought of cemeteries as useless places, where people go to visit their deceased loved ones as if they lived there -- an obvious fabrication aimed at feeling close to them, obtaining peace of mind, and washing away guilt. But there, standing in front of your grave, I felt the shiver of a presence. You were happy to see me. How could it be? I had the strange feeling of being the last in a long series of visitors who had come to pay homage, over the last four plus decades. How many people had stood in my exact spot before me? How many flowers had been brought there? How many grieving tears had been shed in your remembrance? I immediately thought of your brother and sister, your folks, all so close and kind to me when you were around and I frequented your home as if I were one of the family. What happened to them? Maybe if I had stood there a little longer, I might have run into some of them. And would I have been able to recognize them? And would they have recognized me? A lifetime has gone by.

It helps that there is no photograph of you on the grave. I don’t think I have a photograph of you, or of us, anywhere. Seeing one there would probably have upset me. Instead, there’s an image of you drawn on marble. A beautiful depiction of you in your soccer outfit, with a football at your feet and the number eight on your shorts. Eight had always been your number; a left midfielder. Nobody else could wear that number when we played among friends. It was yours and yours alone. And you were the best number eight I had ever played with. You must have been ten or eleven in that drawing. I caught myself saying how beautiful you looked, aloud. And smiling. I was alone -- likely the only one in the whole cemetery -- and a gentle breeze was caressing my face.

Next to the drawing, on the same sheet of marble, I saw the words that our mutual friend Francesco once told me you had written in your diary, among others, during one of your longer stays at the hospital. I knew those words by heart, but reading them for the first time, etched on your grave, where they had always been even in my absence, made my heart thump.

‘Snow is very much like man. It falls from the sky pure and white, it settles on the ground, and the longer it stays, the dirtier it gets. Then it disappears. The sun wants it that way.’ 

I hear a distant piano playing while I write this. A hesitant playing, slowing down here and there to correct the occasional mistake, or work on a part that lacks fluidity. Someone in my building, or the building across from mine, is working on a Chopin Nocturne. Number twelve, perhaps. I remember your sister used to always play one of them. I recall so vividly when we younger kids, in the middle of a football game, running and sweating and panting, heard the music coming from your house windows, and stopped to go stand next to your sister’s piano, to watch her play. We would stay until she finished, then applaud and return to the garden to resume our game. I believe it was number twelve, the one she used to play. Or was it number sixteen?   

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"Unsent Letters" is a series released every other week. These are imaginary letters to fictitious or real individuals who may or may not have influenced my life, not always mirroring actual events.

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