Читать книгу A Rebel In Love - Cristiano Parafioriti - Страница 6

At five o'clock in the afternoon, my mother took a chance and offered me an inviting hot coffee. She knew I longed to see the square and my old friends from the village after so many months spent more than 1,700 kilometres away. I am forty years old, twenty of which have been spent in the North, half a life that seems like a whole one, actually.

The caffeine immediately kicked in. At six o'clock I took the road to the square. Walking through my old neighbourhood, I had the bittersweet feeling of flipping through an album of memories, I felt my chest tighten around my heart. It's all in the past now. There, of Via Pilieri, only the stones of the houses remain standing, while here, at the bottom of my heart, lie the much heavier rocks of memory.

Calogero Bau was the first villager I met. I couldn’t refuse to drink a coffee with him at the Bar Ciccio. He told me about his children, especially Ilenia, the eldest, who had told him over the phone that she was very excited about reading my stories. Then he began to talk to me about his work at the records office and how, over time, he had become fascinated by reading about old birth and death certificates, some particular registry events, surnames that have now disappeared, or rather, as he called them, old stuff.

I would never have imagined that Calogero Bau could somehow arouse such curiosity in me. He was a good man, no doubt about it, humble and friendly, but he certainly never looked like someone who could discuss such specific and particular topics with me. But he managed to intrigue me incredibly. I even took the trouble of breathing the passive smoke of his umpteenth cigarette and, outside the bar, we went for a walk in Piazza San Giacomo. For a moment I caught a glimpse of my father sitting at the Circolo dei Maestri Artigiani, reading the Gazzetta del Sud. It was in that brief moment that I felt truly at home. Calogero Bau spoke to me again about the records. Actually, he couldn't tell me much more, but it didn't spoil my burning and inquisitive desire to check the papers he had told me about. At dusk, I picked up my father from his last evening chores, and together we made our way home. As soon as we were out of the door, however, thanks to the clear sky, I was assailed by an uncontrollable desire to go towards the Mount of Rafa.

From there, the view is unparalleled at any time of day, but the Rafa evening is pure poetry! At sunset, the sun gives way to the moon and the stars, and yet, before it dies, it manages to ignite the view of the Tyrrhenian Sea and the Aeolian Islands looming in the distance. The islands seem on the verge of being swallowed up by the waters, but they never drown. They remain in constant balance, as if protected by a celestial pact that has placed them there forever. Well, I know what the truth is: those islands are us, exiled children of this land, now detached from it. So close to our hearts but so far away from our bodies that we can only touch each other every now and then. One day it happened that we, the exiles, were cut off from our roots, because of the unfair fate that has condemned this land and its children for at least two centuries now.

A dark will, entirely devoted to evil, that turns us into islands of exiles. In the North, in Germany, in the USA, in Australia. Small, large islands of children stolen from their mother island.

An archipelago of lonely souls.