Chapter 1
I wasn't drunk. I wasn't drunk, for God's sake! I swear, you have to believe me...
Pardon me. I shouldn't express myself this way, but every time I think about it, I react like this. Maybe I'm trying to convince myself more than those who listen to me. To convince myself that what happened that night wasn't a dream or a hallucination.
Oh, I have evidence, all too clear: an extra tombstone at the Cimitero Maggiore. But what's more important is to convince you and myself that things happened the way I remember. I don't have any evidence of this, only Heaven is my witness.
Of course, I could be seriously out of my mind, and then the best thing for me would be a long stay at the Ospedale dei Colli. If only that were the case!
Unfortunately, I am certain that those events happened and there is no defense against forces that go beyond any rational logic, beyond the very concept of reality that man has built over the centuries.
Here, I knew it, I got carried away. By now, you're probably thinking, at the very least, I'm one of those people who speak to taste the air in their mouths.
So let me tell you my version of the events of that night, which is not the one they published in the Mattino di Padova! Then you can even say to me to go to hell, if you want, I certainly won't be any worse than I am now.
It was a December evening, just a few days before Christmas
"At Christmas we all have to be nicer..."
"Yes, Mom"
My friend, whose name I won't mention out of respect for his memory, and I had just left a pub where we'd each had a couple of beers.
We're not drunk, are we?
We looked around while I wrapped myself in my jacket and he turned up the collar of his coat. There was a lot of fog that night, a huge bank that settled on the city.
Like a beautiful woman on a large bed
And didn't let you see anything anymore. The breath out of our mouths was so thick that it made us look like walking chimneys. The spirals disappeared after a few centimeters in the cloudy sea we were moving through. We were at the beginning of Riviera San Benedetto.
Blessed be the saints!
More or less close to the intersection with Corso Milano, and we went down, towards Riviera Paleocapa.
After a few hundred meters, however, my friend got tired of going blindly and said that we had to "look for something stable along the way". I looked at him puzzled: he was not new to these sibylline punch-lines, which in the end, however, always had a concrete meaning.
There is a pedestrian bridge that spans the canal and connects Riviera San Benedetto to Riviera Mussato: thick wooden planks on an iron skeleton, and on that bridge
damned bridge damned bridge damned bridge damned bridge
my friend stopped. He leaned on the railing and looked down, trying to see the water that could be heard slowly flowing beneath us.
A few cars passed by and their noises, already faint, were further muffled by the thick cushion of steam that stretched between us and them. The lighting in the side streets of Padua is not exceptional even when the weather is drier.
If someone attacked you, you wouldn't even see them
But in that immense aquarium which we felt immersed in, only a pale and diffuse light dripped slowly and densely from the street lamps.
Nonetheless, we managed to see the water beneath us. Dark, the same color as crude oil, it flowed slowly. It seemed that the fog, seemingly rising from it, smoking like the steam in a spa, had slowed it down a bit too. All that rising smoke seemed strange; it almost seemed like something was breathing down there.
Apart from that, we spoke little that evening. We didn't know it would be our last time. Up to that moment, a few words now and then were enough for both of us to understand what frequency the other was tuned into.
100,500 megahertz, in FM Stereo, for the whole city... Scream Radio!
We listened to the lapping of the water on the pylons and were probably both thinking about our own business, about women, about life,
about death...
Suddenly, in the silence that had fallen heavily around and between us, in a tone of voice so dark that it surprised me, my friend began:
‐ Have I ever told you how my brother passed away? ‐
I knew that his brother had died a few years earlier; at that time, we didn't know each other yet, and I had never asked him anything about it. There are things that you don't ask a friend, not even the closest.
"Respecting other people's feelings, my son, is already a form of respect"
"Yes, Dad"
My friend was staring at the water, as if he could see beyond the surface, beyond the water itself, into the deepest bowels of the earth. Or into the depths of his soul.
‐ Drowned. During a windsurfing trip on an almost stormy sea. The danger excited him, he said ‐
He continued, after my silence,
‐ I guess it must be terrible to admit, but I never missed him –
then, in a harsher tone ‐ he was an asshole, one of those who think everything is due to them for the simple fact that they are there. Do you want to know everything? –
He was almost shouting. He turned suddenly and stared at me with a look I had never seen on him before. For a moment, I feared he would punch my face if I had even given him a pretext.
‐ When they buried him, on the day of his funeral, my parents were devastated, but I thought "there you are, you asshole, you eventually found something you can't do, something you are not allowed to get. You finally found someone who told you NO. Let this be a lesson for the next time you come back to bother people around here". That's what I thought! –
Now he was completely turned towards me, his fists clenched. I stared at him without letting a single word escape. I had the impression, I don't know why, that at that moment he wasn't seeing me, but someone else
His brother, so bad and so dead
Suddenly, in the muffled silence, I thought I heard something, a sound that at first reminded me of an oar sinking into the water. My friend still had a mad look as he was staring at me, staring at me as if he meant to challenge me. As if he could challenge an entire army...
It's close by
The atomic bomb...
Right below
The devil himself...
It's stopped
But not that thing! Not HIM!
From the fog behind me came the sound of a footstep on the planks of the bridge that made me startle. A heavy, slow, dragging, inexorable step.
Who's on the bridge?
I turned sharply in that direction to look at the face of the witty man I imagined, but... I remained frozen, with my eyes wide open. In front of me, less than a step away, there was a real nightmare…
Water was dripping onto the planks, its flesh seemed to be melted, undone, of an indescribable color. The face seemed to be flaccid. It seemed that the swollen skin would fall off his face at any moment.
But is that a face?
The eyes vanished, sunk into two empty, black, bottomless sockets. The lips, literally gone, exposed a double row of still white teeth.
Look, it seems he's smiling, maybe he's happy.
I don't know how long I remained still, staring at that…that…that thing! I will never be able to forget it! When he stretched out his arms
Fingers stripped of flesh… bits of rotten skin dangling
My mind went blank.
I only remember I was screaming and running without knowing where. I was just running.
I saw shadows coming towards me everywhere, and I kept changing direction, running even faster. I don't know how long I ran.
They told me that the garbage men found me at dawn, huddled in a corner under the porch of a building, under an empty black plastic bag, unable to speak or understand, shaking like a leaf...
This is the story of that night. You won't find it written anywhere else, because there's no one left to tell it but me.
My friend? Yes, they found him too!... They found him that very morning, face down, in the water, on the other side of the bridge. For some reason, the stream hadn't taken him away. At first glance, he seemed to have drowned, but the autopsy report said "due to heart failure, preceding the fall, probable cause of it".
While we were alone for a moment, at the morgue, the coroner asked me if "something strange" had happened that night, because "judging by his expression", he said, my friend seemed "dead of fear".
I tried to explain it to him, but he replied that I was still in shock, after the mental breakdown, the trauma... What do doctors know!
Since then, I can't sleep at night unless I have a lamp on and certainly not without the help of the magic pills, the ones that make you go beyond the dream zone and plunge you into a dark, peaceful, imageless sleep. In the evening, I don't leave the house, lock the door, turn all the lights on, and watch a lot of television.
That's all folks. I don't know what time it is, but it doesn't matter. I'm going to sleep. If you want to believe me, do it. If not, suit yourselves.
