The train slid along inside its steel bed, aligning its trajectory to the curves. Reminding people that it’s not natural to go too fast. I’m sitting in seat thirty-four, carriage seven. And I have been dead for exactly one week. I’ve always wondered what the great beyond was like. And now I understand that no one ever leaves this world. You remain attached to the life you no longer have. On second thought, it’s even more difficult. You can no longer be part of your own affairs, which are in a continual state of change.
Which align their course, like a train. And you can do nothing except stay seated where you are.
I’m still wearing the same clothes I had on when I died. The only comfort is that they didn’t get stained by blood. Concussion. Gravel on the road I was travelling down on my Vespa. What a dumb way to die! Of all the spots I might have chosen to shatter my future, it was my luck to choose the column of a portico. One of thousands. All of them alike. I still have a slight hospital smell on me. When they pronounced me dead, I simply got up from the bed. As though I was bored. I crossed the street and my parents’ car almost ran me over. At least that’s what it felt like. They ran towards their son’s already motionless body. The only thing I managed to do was sit at the bus shelter. And wait. Nobody noticed I was there.
The train is carrying me to the city. I’m coming back from the seaside. I’d wanted a look at the sea through the eyes of someone who no longer exists. Eyes like marbles of wax statues. Chosen with care among many others. Mirror grey. Unnatural. Like me, passed on to a better life, which in the end is still the same. I think of Laura, of the silence she’ll be expressing, shut up inside herself. I think of the strong coffee she’ll be pouring into her stomach, with the mp3 at her ear while she rereads the words we’ve written to one another over the years. It’s her I’m going to see now, with the smell of the beach on my vaporous body.
They’ve already buried me. On Wednesday, and it was sunny. That’s the way it always happens. In the end you get married in the rain and you die in an untimely light. I stayed outside the church. I didn’t have the courage to go in, to sit down and say goodbye to myself. It seemed such a useless thing to do. I was afraid I would start crying and I wasn’t sure I wanted to. If I know my parents, I imagine them saying thank you to one and all, still surprised at what had happened. My mother will find it hard to grasp, even with my absence staring her in the eyes. My father is already crying, shut in the bathroom with a towel against his face and the faucets open. He combs his hair and shaves above all for her.
The day before the funeral, my lifelong friends got drunk in my honour. They went to the stadium car-park. I discovered them there by chance. Or maybe I’d already guessed, who knows! While they swallowed straight rum, they talked about the things I’d done. They laughed at the jokes I used to make. Every once in a while one of them collapsed. They cried for me, hugging each other. It may be worth dying just for this strange wave of affection that comes back to you. There are certain things you simply know. Only rarely do you realize them fully. You seem them now, while no one sees you. My transparency cancels any censure, any inhibitions. I wasn’t old enough to learn this from within things. I had to learn from outside.
Sara told Matteo and Andrea that Laura wasn’t coming. She wasn’t up to it. No one answered the question, “how did she take it?”
From the station I run towards the city centre. The evening is calm. Clear. For a while I think about how to get into Laura’s house without having to ring the bell. And while I’m thinking, I shut my eyes. When I open them I’m already in her room. I can’t see her right away. She’s there, lying motionless on the bed. She’s clenching a paper handkerchief in her fist. Her eyes are swollen and her nose is red. Her hair is uncombed. I wish she’d push it behind her ear, as she always does, with that cute, well-mannered little-girl way she has. I wish I could see her whole face.
It feels strangely disconcerting not to be able to tell her that I’m here, that after all no one is really lost or gone forever. That when you die it’s only your body that is cancelled, and not love. On her bedside table there’s a steaming cup of tea, but she won’t drink it. Her mother won’t know what to do. A woman who has always worried too much. When I think that one day Laura will fall in love again, will get married and have children with another person, I understand how much I miss my life.
My voice. I wish I could sleep, or even feel the need to. I lie down for a second on the striped rug beside her bed. Hearing her sobbing is like dying another time.
Will this be my destiny then: to accompany my loved ones with their memories of me, memories that will dissolve with time?
Laura whispers something. She asks why. I want to tell her that I don’t know. To think that it just happened like that is not enough, not for me or for her. But that’s the way it is, in reality.
A moment later I’m at the doorway of my house. My father is already in the car, dressed for work. He’s started to smoke again. Looking at him, I realize there isn’t much time left. It’s a sudden sensation that grips me, I don’t know where from. I go up close to him. The reflection of the street lights covers the car window – to see him, I have to make out his shape within the darkness of the space he’s left open to let the smoke out of the car. A man who asks himself how many things he’d have liked to tell me before it was too late; that’s what I’m seeing. My father, the serious man dressed in faultless jacket and tie. With him I only talked about the gaping future that awaited me, about taxes and politicians. When I was a little boy at school, I used to write that I wanted to be like him. As I grew up I forgot him, and I’m afraid he realized it. I look at him, and quickly say good-bye.
My mother is sitting in the kitchen. She’s holding her hair in her hands. The fridge door has been left open. I can hear her speaking as I draw closer to see her better:
-- You can’t have gone without telling me. You always told me where you were going. I’m really angry at you …
Suddenly the idea comes to me that she can feel my presence.
-- You can’t have gone…
My mother starts crying. I think these are her first tears. I realize this because they are full, watery, dense, as though they’d been held back for a precise moment. She doesn’t know we are sharing that moment. She collapses onto the table, covering her face. I can smell her perfume. She’s never changed it. Her perfume is the perfume of my home, of evenings spent on the sofa together watching late-night films, while she asked if I was in love. And a shy smile on my part that threw her live to the maws of her curiosity. My vapour surrounds her.
I walk towards a dawn that refracts against everything, but not against me. I look at my city, now. It is completely still, as though posing for a Christmas snapshot. I wish I didn’t remember my name. I wish my memory would slip away from my fingers and be lost. Dying hasn’t been fun. But you already guess that without having to go through it. You are forced to say good-bye, to let everything drift away. The farewells give a sense to your having been alive, even if for too short a time, and that is what makes the separation so hard.
In the end I cried, too.
And then I discovered that you are the one who chooses paradise. I understand this now, as I float on the surface of a sea I don’t believe exists in nature. No part of my body has any weight now. Under the sun. When I was a child my father would make me do the dead man’s float in the shallow water near the shore. From time to time my mother would look up from where she was reading under the beach umbrella to wave. Now that I am really dead, I’ve chosen this corner of myself, of my landscape, for my eternity.
And it is like losing oneself forever.
Alessandro Ledda graduated from the Classical Lyceum D. A. Azuni in Sassari in 1998. He is now studying sociology at the Faculty of Political Science of the University of Bologna.