Chapter 1
He was haunted by the sound of her screams long after everything had ended. He feared they would not let him alone for eternity or perhaps, they would only chase him to the border of his insanity behind which not a single recollection of who he was, would ever be allowed.
On some days, he felt guilty for the lack of grief, especially when lifting his head to look into his mother’s eyes, where the light from the candle she had lit outside the chapel still danced on its glistening surface. His mother would say she was lost in the maze built within her head, clinging onto the only memory she could remember while trying to fit it into the world that had changed long ago, for a way too long to be constricted by four thick, cold and damp walls no matter how saint the place promised to be. She believed to find the peace, her soul needed a freedom; an open space.
To her, freedom meant the infinite field of blue brightened by the rays of the warm sun, or the stormy clouds raging with thunderbolts, or the beauty of stars and moon above her head, not a small, wooden door tucked away in the most distant corner from the altar.
On a hot summer day after school, they broke the news to Ermano that his grandmother had passed away. Somehow, he remembered the icy feeling on his chest after spilling ice cream on his school blazer while running to catch the bus with his friends more vividly than the beginning of emptiness that crept into his heart when he lost someone close to him.
For an eight-year-old Ermano at that time, it was more about the realisation that death was real after all, which made him rush up to his room and bury his face into his pillow as tears streamed down his cheeks.
The truth was, despite living in the same house for eight years, he had never really known her. For Ermano, she was only a picture taken out of its frame or a video played outside the tape. She was the face, lined with wrinkles and age, he knew so well, the rasp of the voice that he had never failed to recognise, she was the name that had always widened his eyes when he heard it as if it was his own, but then, someone had pressed the delete button.
Ermano didn’t remember days when his grandmother wasn’t sick.
Maida Giacinto wasn’t the kind of grandmother who baked warm cookies or who took her grandchildren on hikes through the mountains, sharing stories from a long-gone past. Those stories, if they had ever existed, had long since been swallowed by the fog that had settled over her mind, erasing the woman she once was.
She didn’t greet Ermano and Catia, Ermano’s younger sister, with a warm smile when they came home from school. Instead, she sat quietly by the window, staring out at the world that she no longer recognised, her fingers absently tracing patterns on the armrest of her chair as if trying to remember something that lay just beyond her nail.
Often, she would also wander through the halls, her voice rising in desperate, trembling cries as she searched for someone. She would call out a name, over and over, her voice cracking with the strain, but no one ever answered. Sometimes it was a whisper, a soft plea that barely reached his ears, and other times it was a scream, raw and filled with agony, as if the person she was searching for so much was just out of reach, slipping away before she could grasp them.
The sound of her calling haunted Ermano, especially at night when the darkness seemed only to add to her desperation. He would lie in his bed, staring at the ceiling, listening to the echo of her cries as they travelled through the foundations of their house, growing fainter as she moved from room to room. She would cry out for her husband, for her lost siblings, or sometimes for a name Ermano didn’t know. The worst were the nights when her calls turned into screams, so filled with terror and loss that they sent chills down his spine. Maida Giacinto never seemed to find the peace she was so desperately searching for. If that peace meant a person.
Sometimes, she would look at Ermano with wide, unseeing eyes, as if trying to place him within the fragments of her shattered mind. He would stand there, frozen, hoping that she might remember, but the recognition never came. The trembling hand would slip down his cheek and she would leave, accompanied by the low murmur of unintelligible words slipping through her cracked lips.
The house was filled with the heaviness that followed her everywhere, broken only by the occasional creak of the floorboards or the soft rustle of her dress as she moved slowly from room to room, as if looking for something she had lost a long time ago.
To Ermano, Maida Giacinto was not the grandmother who cared or protected. She was a figure in misery, a living ghost whose presence was more a reminder of what had been taken away than of what had once been. Ermano didn’t remember the times when his grandmother wasn’t sick because, for him, those times had never existed. He couldn’t recall a single moment when she had been well. He had no memories of her teaching him how to tie his shoes or showing him how to knead dough for bread.
Ermano’s grandmother was a part of his life, but not in the way that grandmothers were meant to be. She was not a source of comfort, but rather a presence that filled the house with cries for someone who would never come. And as the years passed, Ermano carried that voice with him.
