I answer like a burst from a machine gun; he has thrown gasoline on my fire. “They are all illusions. Life is an empty box that we fill up with all kinds of shit we like, but then all it takes is some small thing and poof … ” A silent pause follows my very theatrical gesture in which my hands imitate a soap bubble bursting. “You find yourself with nothing. That man had the illusion that dying for a cause he regarded as just gave meaning to his life. Happy fool. But it’s only a sugar coating to make the pill less bitter. The box is empty.”
The Dreamer looks at me again and remains silent. Then he emerges from that silence with an exacting and very tranquil, “bullshit.”
His against mine. No matter what, we are always dealing with shit. However, it hurt me. I take my backpack and leave, without giving The Dreamer time to say anything more. The fire burns and continues to destroy. It doesn’t return and explain itself.
They can suspend me, they can even make me repeat the whole year, I don’t care. Nobody knows how to justify what is happening and, if that’s the way things are, why in the world should I make myself do anything? I am alone and strong for the first time. I am fire, and I will burn down the entire world. I’m not going to call Niko, he wouldn’t understand jack shit. I’m not going to call Silvia, because I don’t need her anymore.
The image of that child without hair, the pale shadow of Beatrice, makes me feel like cursing God. I slander Him many times over, repeatedly … loudly. And now I feel better. And I understand that God exists, otherwise I wouldn’t feel any better. To take it out on Santa Claus wouldn’t make you feel any better. If you take it out on God, it does.
61
When the fire placates itself, I am without energy. Burned out. Around me, only dust, ashes, blackness. I lose myself on the Internet: the solution to all problems. There are the answers to the Latin translations, there are essays, there are films, there are songs, there are calendars of hot chicks. Then I type two words on Google: death and God. Together. Not separate. Together. The page and name of a philosopher, Nietzsche, comes up on my screen: the one who said that God is dead. And this we already know, he died on the cross. The next page appearing on the screen says the opposite; God has risen, conquering death and liberating mankind from death. This too is unsatisfying, because it is a pack of lies.
Beatrice is dying and nothing can be done about it. This time, the Internet got it all wrong. Who the hell gives a damn whether Beatrice will rise again or not. I want her here now, I want to live with her for all the days of my life and caress her red hair and her face, look into her eyes and laugh with her, and make her laugh and speak, speak, speak without saying anything in particular but saying everything. Death is a problem that no longer has anything to do with me. For now, I have to only think about life, and since that is short and fragile I have to make it long and strong, full and indestructible. Hard like iron.
A message from Silvia: “Should we study together?” I no longer study. There is no point to it. I answer: “No, sorry … ” Silvia answers me right away: “Afraid of what? Afraid of what???” What is she talking about? Silvia is going crazy, too. Then I suspect something. I check the message I just sent her: “No, afraid … ” The usual T9. I wrote afraid instead of sorry without realizing it. I didn’t check it and sent it off automatically: “No, afraid … ” T9 was right after all. I answer her message truthfully: “Of everything.”
Silence. A silence that drives me crazy, a silence that makes you tear off your clothes and shout naked from the balcony that you’ve had it up to here. I am not iron, I am not fire, I am nobody.
A message from Silvia: “Let’s meet up in the park in half an hour.” I answer yes by ringing her once. But I stand her up, I leave her waiting there, as alone as I am. I am a coward, and I have my face covered in the most bitter tears I’ve ever known, those in which the salt of solitude makes up at least ninety percent and water only ten.
This pain is so thick that you could float on it without having to swim.
62
Evening.
Black outside, white inside. I feel guilty. I made the only person who didn’t do anything to me and wanted to help me pay for my pain. Silvia says nothing. And I imagine her alone on the bench, abandoned, with her blue gaze looking at the ground, then looking up at every person who approaches. Now I feel even worse. I write her another message: “Sorry. See you tomorrow.” White silence. But why do I seek out solitude, and then when I am drowning in its whiteness without clinging to anything, does it terrorize me? Why do I want someone to toss me a life preserver but then do nothing to grab onto it? Maybe I will come to understand my capabilities, my dreams, but will I really ever know how to do something, besides drowning without letting anyone help me? I will take Terminator out to do his business.
Today he is also fine with silence.
63
I spent the whole night thinking about what to say to Silvia in order to apologize. My iron shield has softened to the point of becoming cream, within the time frame of a few hours. I’m not worth anything.
Whatever, I enter school and try to catch a glimpse of Silvia. Only for an instant, her eyes meet mine, which search the crowd: they are glassy eyes in which I manage to see only myself and not her; she turns her gaze away, as if I were nobody in particular. That dismissive glance propels me into the crowd of many, and I again plummet into the white nothingness of a perfect nobody.
I run after Silvia. I grab her arm with more force than I intended. I have never touched her like this, not even as a joke. Silvia frees herself with a face contorted by disappointment.
“I deluded myself into thinking I had a friend. Leave me alone. You ask for help but don’t care about anybody but yourself.”
I don’t even have time to open my mouth before I see her go off into the distance as if a vortex were sucking her in. I chase after her in the forest of low-rise pants, bumping into two or three senior bullies, who give me a sharp kick in the ass.
“Fuck you.”
I see her head for the bathroom corridor, and without realizing it, I enter into a bathroom full of girls who are making themselves up, smoking, and comparing brands of jeans. They look at me wide-mouthed, while Silvia closes herself off in a stall.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” asks one brunette with two black slits for eyes, immersed in splotches of purple makeup.
“I … I’ve gotta speak with a girl,” I mutter, as if it were the most normal thing in the world.
“Wait for her outside. Better yet, forget about it; she is too cute for a loser like you.”
They’re laughing. Those words push me out of the girls’ bathroom as if they were the foam on the growling teeth of a rabid dog. I step backward, trying to stay cool, and I collapse in a hidden corner. There is no parachute in a bottomless, abandoned well.
“What in the heck are you doing here?”
Naturally, this is the voice of the principal, who is shouting at me to accompany him to the principal’s office. First, the flight from Beatrice. Then, the pursuit of Silvia. Now, I am even taken for a voyeur. In the span of forty-eight hours, I have discovered the existence of gradations of black. I have just been through at least three of them, going in the direction of absolute darkness … too bad it’s not the end of a tragic film, only the beginning.
64
My parents, having been called in for a meeting by the principal of the school because of my bad behavior, are convinced that I can’t curb my raging adolescent hormones since I violently sneak into the girls’ bathroom.
Dad says in a low voice, “Consider your bones reduced to the dust of your shadow.”
Thus, they suspend me for a day, with the threat of slapping me with a whopping grade of five in behavior, which means I would have to repeat the whole year. I dismiss the punishment given by my parents: an immediate sequestration of my PlayStation until the end of year and a canceling of my small monthly allowance. This is nothing compared to the fact that the day after the suspen
sion, all the girls look at me and laugh behind my back:
“There’s the pig!”
“Loser!”
And this is still nothing compared to how the guys are berating me, “Faggot! Look, your bathroom is the one without a skirt drawn on top of the little man. Maybe we’ll also add a small stick so you remember what you have between your legs!”
Can somebody tell me if there is any possibility of getting off this carousel of horrors? Or at least if there’s an instruction manual on how to become the invisible man?
65
An entire day staring at the hands of the guitarist of Green Day on the poster hung on my bedroom door. I start throwing a tennis ball against it, until I make a hole in the poster and render the guitarist an invalid.
I am waiting for two things:
Someone to save me, or simply that the world comes to an end in this precise moment.
The second is easier than the first one.
The telephone rings: Niko.
“We won, Pirate! The next game is the decisive one for the final. … Vandal is shitting his pants!”
I end the call and hope the bed swallows me up without chewing me first.
66
The intercom. The intercom rings. It’s for me. Who can it be at nine in the evening? Silvia. Surely she has given in to the twenty-three messages I’ve sent her today, regretting each time the one before. …
“Come down.”
It’s her.
“Mom, I’m going down for a second. It’s Silvia.”
I go down, but there is no Silvia waiting for me. I dreamed her voice, I was so convinced it was her. It’s The Dreamer. Shit. That’s all I need. Surely he has come to tell me, yes even he, “You’re a spineless good for nothing.”
“Hi, Prof. What did I do?” I ask while looking at a random point on his left shoulder.
He smiles.
“I decided to stop by, maybe you might feel like finishing the talk from the other day.”
I knew it. Profs are profs until death, they have to give you a lecture even in front of your own house.
“Prof, let’s forget the discussion from the other day … ”
I don’t really know where to start, and I would like this all to end as soon as possible, like I always do when I don’t like something. You change the channel and the scene is gone. Vanished, cancelled, finished.
“Let’s go get an ice cream.”
He smiles at me. … Yes, he said it like this: an-ice-cream. Profs eat ice cream. Yes, profs eat ice cream, and they get their mouths sticky just like everybody else. These are two discoveries that should never be forgotten, maybe one day I can write about them.
Speaking of writing, “Your blog is beautiful, at times a bit too philosophical, but when I can, I read it … ”
The prof thanks me and continues licking his ice cream, pistachio and coffee—the usual boring flavors of profs—and he reminds me of Terminator, who licks my tennis shoes.
“So what happened to you the other day?”
I knew he wouldn’t let it go. Profs are like boa constrictors; they coil around you when you’re distracted, then they wait until you let your breath out and tighten their grasp, and with each exhalation they tighten even more, until it’s impossible for you to enlarge your rib cage again, and you die by asphyxiation.
“Why do you care, Prof?”
The Dreamer looks me straight in the eyes, and I can barely hold his gaze.
“Maybe you need a hand, some advice … ”
I remain silent. My eyes are downcast. I look at the asphalt, as if each inch of pavement has suddenly become quite interesting. There is someone inside me who doesn’t expect anything else, someone who wants to come out but stays hidden within; he defends himself and is afraid to let the others see him as he really is, because to come out would engage the other one with the wild hair and sly look, and he would find himself dealing with a large quantity of water and salt in the form of tears. So I keep staring at the ground out of fear that someone might come out like toothpaste, too much and all at once.
The Dreamer waits in silence. He is not in a hurry; not he, just like all those others that cause you distress. And I can play the same game and give him back some of his own medicine.
“What would you do, Prof, if your girlfriend died?”
And this time, I stare into his eyes. The Dreamer takes full measure of me and remains silent. He stops eating. Maybe he has never thought about this. Maybe he feels terrible. At this point, he begins to understand something and stops with his theories. He answers that he doesn’t know, and that probably he wouldn’t be able to bear the weight of such an event.
He doesn’t know. It’s the first time that The Dreamer doesn’t have an answer ready. It’s the first time he isn’t so sure of himself, nor brilliant like the window displays at Christmas in the center of town. He doesn’t know.
“Well, Prof, that is what I am going through, and all the rest for me has become nothing but bullshit.”
The Dreamer has now begun to look at the sky.
“Beatrice.”
He remains in silence. Then, he asks me if she is the girl everyone is talking about at school: the girl who is sick with leukemia. I lower my head, almost wounded by those words, which unfortunately are true: the girl who is sick with leukemia … Silence. The silence of adults is one of the greatest victories we can imagine. Then, I speak.
“She is not really my girl, but it’s just as if she were. You see, Prof, when I was speaking to you of my dream I was speaking of Beatrice. I know that whatever my road may be, she will be my companion on that road, and if she is not on that journey with me, I won’t know where to go.”
The Dreamer continues to be silent. He places a hand on my shoulder and doesn’t say a thing.
“Now she’s pale. She’s lost her red hair, the hair that made me fall in love with her. And I didn’t even have the courage to speak to her, to help her, to ask her how she was feeling. I saw her in this state and I ran away. I ran away like a coward. I was convinced that I loved her, I was convinced of going to the top of the world with her, I was ready to do anything, I even gave blood, and then when I find her in front of me, I run. I run like a coward. I don’t love her. Someone that runs away doesn’t truly love. She was small, she was defenseless, she was pale, and I ran away. I am vile.”
The last words break a reinforced concrete wall that had climbed slowly from my belly up to my throat, and then it comes down in fragments from my eyes, transforming itself into painful tears, as heavy as stones. I am sobbing with all the pain that I have, because it feels good, almost like when I donated blood. I can cry, and I don’t know when it will happen again, even if I feel like an all-time idiot.
The Dreamer stands silently next to me, with his strong hand on my shoulder. I feel like a dumbass. I am a sixteen-year-old guy, and I am crying. I am crying in front of my History and Philosophy prof, with his mouth still sticky from ice cream. Patience has left by now. The dam has broken, and at this moment a million cubic yards of suffering is flooding the world because of me. But at least it is no longer only inside of me.
67
After having let myself go overboard for at least fifteen minutes (behind the fire of rage is hidden at least double the amount of salty water … ), The Dreamer breaks the silence that follows my crying, like the silence of the sand after a violent storm.
“I will tell you a story.”
He tells me the following, and he gives me a tissue (vanilla scented … ):
“A friend of mine had an argument with his father. He loved him very much, but that time he lost his patience and told him to go to hell. In the evening, they were seated at the dinner table and his father tried to speak to him, but he got up and went out without saying a word. He didn’t even want to listen to him. My friend felt strong. He felt that he had won, that he was right. The day after, the father’s place at the table was empty. His father had suffered a heart attack. This is how they
had left each other. Without a word. But how could he know this? Since that day, my friend has known no peace because of that error; he is ashamed of it, as might be the worst assassin. And do you know the reason why that guy will never forgive himself for having refused a good-bye to his father?”
I shake my head while I sniffle.
“Because his father, in a moment of rage, had told him that he was a good-for-nothing, that he had chosen the job of a loser, despite the fact that he, the father, had a well-established studio that his son could have easily taken over. Tell me if this isn’t something to be ashamed of, to run away from?”
It takes me a while before breaking the silence following his question.
“How did your friend overcome that moment, Prof?”
The Dreamer kicks an abandoned can on the sidewalk, with anger.
“By living with it. Well aware of being like that, but with a promise to himself of not allowing a single opportunity to slip by of mending some deteriorating relationship, motivated by any reason whatsoever, important or not. One can always do something.”
I already feel better. I, who, confronted by an error, would like life to have a rewind button. Instead, life doesn’t have that button. Life goes on anyway, and it plays on if you want it to or not, and you can only raise or lower the volume. And you have to dance. The best you can. However, in some way now, I have less fear. My thoughts are interrupted by The Dreamer.
“We all have something we’re ashamed of. We’ve all run away, Leo. But this makes us men. Only when we have something tattooed on our face that we are ashamed of do we begin to have a real face. … ”
“Do you cry, Prof?”
The Dreamer remains in silence.
“Every time I peel onions.”