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"The ticking became louder, you could hear the noise even over the rooftops. The medium was at the window to check what was going on. The fog had lifted outside. But we still saw the coal hit the building."
"Coal? Coal falling from the sky?"
"That's right. Pieces of burning coal. It was banging on the tiles, on the wall. "Big and hard enough to dent the gutters."
"How did you react? Did you get scared?"
"Look, it's funny to say, but I was calm. An unusual calm. In fact, I was almost happy. I had deluded myself that it was a signal from my son. I was certain of it. But the psychic was terrified. I found myself calming her because Luca was there. He was there with me. And it was because of her. But she said it had nothing to do with what was happening. All she had to do was read me the papers, or something, she said.
Like all the other bums, she was shuffling holy with the layman. Then the window suddenly opened wide. Pieces of coal fell into the room and hit the medium. The poor thing fell to the floor and lost a slipper.
I don't know why the slipper stuck me. But it was all a blur at that point. Everything else, except the slipper that stuck to the carpet, is vague. I remember the table hit by the burning coal, the carpet that started to catch fire. It almost seemed as if that rain was hitting us as if to get us out of that place.
A sort of warning coming from the sky. I tried to escape but the door was closed and wouldn't open. I was hit by some kind of fire. I got scalded and bruised. The blows hurt. Well, I don't know if what I saw was real. I just know that I wasn't calm or happy anymore. At that moment, I felt a dark and evil presence. I was terrified. I screamed. I realized no, it couldn't be my son. The last thing I remember was the statue of the patron saint. It was made of marble, very heavy, at least that's what it looked like to me. Before I fainted, I saw the statue fall. Madame Geneve was on her knees, hit on her back by large pieces of coal, but unable to find her slipper.With all that was going on, she was thinking about that shoe. I understood that she was trying to escape from that malignant reality by diverting it to simple, banal thoughts. What would be the point of fixing on a stupid wool slipper? That's when the statue fell on her and hit her on the back of the head. The poor woman's eyes turned to stare at the ceiling, the white of the sclera glittering in the light of the
fire. A bloodstain came out of her head, spreading across the carpet. Then darkness. They found me an hour later at the bus stop. I don't know how I got there. I hoped I'd imagined it all. I thought the stress of losing my son, the medication I was taking to withstand pain that can't be explained, was causing the hallucinations. I held on unnecessarily to that hope. The night the police arrived in the neighbourhood. Madame Geneve had been found dead. Everyone thinks it was a murder. But I know what happened. It was something bad that killed her. The same thing that killed my son."
(witness begins crying again)
"Why didn't you go straight to the police?"
"Because I was afraid! I couldn't tell them what I saw. They'd think I was crazy. Above all, I didn't want to be accused of murder."
"You are aware that when the medium was found on the ground with a broken skull, there was an inscription on the wall marked with a piece of coal: 'Decus et Damnationisʹ. Beauty and Damnation. What do you think that means?"
"I… I don't know. I swear I don't know."
(Crying)
"Thank you for your testimony. I have no further questions."
"Just one last thing: the coal… the house was full of coal. Has anyone seen it?"
"No. They didn't find anything."
End of recording.
3
Professor Marzioli was a stiff and dusty guy, with his goggles hovering on the tip of his aquiline nose, with his jacket and a bow tie worn to give him the appearance of an intellectual.
Torquato Tasso had a Catholic upbringing. The influence of Petrarch's poetry can be recognized in the Rhymes of Love…'.
As usual, Marzioli would explain the lesson with the enthusiasm of a gravedigger who was measuring a deceased. Guido noticed that Daisy was not taking notes. She was nervously drumming her pen on the counter, the air of those chasing distant thoughts.
When the badger lesson was over, a collective sigh of relief rose up. The professor had managed to make even the scholar's restless life surprisingly boring. Lorena said goodbye to Daisy and left in a hurry. Her father waited for her at the entrance in overalls, sitting in the van loaded with boiler tubes. He was supposed to take her to the Leopardians' high school team match. Lorraine didn't like football, but she had a crush on Christian Skendery, a full-back with solid shoulders and a fiery gaze.
Daisy greeted her friend and crossed the dark avenue in the face. Guido hurried to catch up with her.
"Daisy, can I talk to you?" he asked nervously, hoping she would not tell him to go to hell. She stopped. She looked at the boy arching her eyebrows, abandoning her thoughts and concentrating on his contrite face.
"I'm sorry about the picture" he exclaimed with a shrug of his shoulders, as if to say that the damage was done and could no longer be repaired.
"It's not that important" Daisy dismissed, noting how nervous the boy was. She, the grumpy air of those she hadn't completely forgiven, walked down the avenue, assuming he would follow her.
Guido took courage and hastened to catch up with her. They walked side by side through the row of plane trees that led to the exit. Autumn spread the first leaves on the pavement. Two boys would pass each other a joint sitting under a sycamore tree with an imposing bark, the sunlight slipping through the branches and breaking into many small, glistening rays. ‘Apart from that, it's a very romantic picture’ Daisy thought. Guido tried to have a little conversation. She replied in monosyllable, single-syllable fashion, because she was thinking about the comment posted on You Tube again.
Adriano must stop looking for me. Or he'll come to a bad end.
She found it a horrible joke. All his friends knew he was sick. What was the point of hurting a disabled person?
"Daisy, are you all right? You've got a strange face" Guido worried.
"No, it's nothing. It's just that I'm lost behind certain thoughts” she replied by having her lower lip sticking out to blow on her bangs. Sandra waited for her in the car while a traffic policeman watched the four lighted arrows without patience.
Guido watched Daisy turn the corner. Although he didn't see him raise his hand to greet her, his gaze was captivated by her curves moving seductively under her grey coat. She walked with the certainty that her eyes were on her.
ʺShit. Guido Gobbi… Shitʺ thought, but she could no longer deceive herself, or deny that her feelings could change just because she tried so hard to avoid it. She realized it was time to face reality. She turned to Guido with a careless
expression. "Ah… I forgot” she said. She hadn't really forgotten anything.
She had imagined an infinity of times.
ʺOk. I'll have to pretend it's nothing. It has to give me an idea that it's not that important to me. It's nothing… Be brave and keep calm… ʺ.
Daisy told him at the drop of a hat.
Guido faded from surprise. He thought he didn't quite understand.
"S… Sorry, can you repeat that?" he asked.
She huffed and puffed. "But if you don't want to, I can't make you."
"Of course I want to. Saturday's perfect” he said, his ears lit up with a red steal.
Guido couldn't focus on the magnitude of it.
Daisy had invited him to go out with her.
"So I'll see you Saturday” said the girl with a pout, as if she had a hard time with fate, guilty of setting her on the path she had tried so hard to avoid.
He saw her get into her mother's Cherokee. She did not turn around to greet him.
Guido walked down the road without really knowing where he was going.
ʺI have an appointmentʺ repeatedʺ. The grey patina of his life was as if it had been blown away suddenly, and now everything around him shone with colour. A rainbow of emotions that he could grasp without feeling it slipping through his fingers. He felt so happy and so in tune with the world that he wanted to embrace everyone he met on the way home: a mother pushing a stroller, a child enchanted by a balloon vendor, an old man sitting on a bench, a gentleman in a suit looking for a taxi, a tramp lying on the sidewalk resting between the folds of a cardboard box…
Yes, he would have wanted to embrace the whole world.
He and Daisy would have seen each other on the weekend.
He began counting the hours that separated him from her, the clock hands that suddenly became unbearably large, heavy, and slow.
The low pressure weighed down the sky with grey, threatening clouds. Leponex's tablet was on the medicine drawer, put there to remind Daisy's mother how tragic and complicated her life still was.
Adriano, with his face emaciated and tired, his black hair crushed on his forehead, his gaze wandering about without ever deciding where to settle, had not attended school since the age of twelve. The disease was cruel, the support teachers non-existent, beheaded by linear government cuts.
Adriano was followed by a teacher who constantly visited him once a week. Forty-five thousand euros spent in four years. The doctors said that his father's suicide had awakened an evil already written in his genes.
The first symptoms appeared when he was twelve, a surprisingly early age for the disease. Sandra began to suspect that something was wrong when Adriano, who was round and rosy, suddenly began to lose weight. She washed lightly, refused to study, slept on the carpet, and when she went to the bathroom she got dirty everywhere.
One day he started lowering the shutters on all the windows in the house.
He said he was being spied on by someone. Evidence of a dark evil that had begun to seriously worry his mother. The psychologist deduced that Adriano had failed to process the trauma of the suicide. The tragedy occupied all his thoughts and left no room for anything else. As for feeling spied on, it could be interpreted as an indication of a persecution mania.
Then the hallucinations began: Adriano watched the inhabitants of Castelmuso die one by one. He gave names and surnames, even writing down the date of their death.
One day he took a can of gasoline from the garage and dragged it to the entrance of the cathedral. He was stopped firmly by the chaplain.
Adriano insisted that he had seen a face all black beyond the iron grille of the confessional. He thought it was a demon, which is why he wanted to purify the cathedral with fire. That same afternoon, Sandra accompanied him to the Umberto II hygiene and mental health centre, where the boy was kept under observation for seventeen days. That was the first of four hospitalizations.
It had been three years since he was diagnosed with severe paranoid schizophrenia. Since then, Sandra Magnoli had visited the office of Professor Roberto Salieri, the psychiatrist who followed Adriano, every week.
Sandra parked on the white lines reserved for a modest restaurant, a few steps from the study.
Adriano got out of the car with the slowness of an old man. The active ingredient of clozapine prevented hallucinations, but the side effects caused him drowsiness, obesity, muscle spasms, speech and walking problems. Medication was a necessary evil. Without them, a dog could become a monster covered in scales. With medication, a dog remained a dog.
Sandra took her son under her arm. They turned the corner and were greeted by the waiter at the restaurant, who was hastening to put up the chairs and take the tables off the sidewalk because the sky was threatening to rain.
The study was on the second floor of an austere mansion, with the entrance door surmounted by an important travertine arch. The windows overlooked the boulevard that cut through the old town, just a stone's throw from the old water tower that still supplied the country today.
Sandra and Adriano slipped into the elevator, an elegant wrought-iron cage with wooden doors, purple-red interior and Art Nouveau mirror. Adriano, who suffered from
claustrophobia, gasped until the elevator opened onto the second-floor corridor.
The name of the psychiatrist Roberto Salieri was clearly engraved on the front door. Greta, the doctor's assistant, had them sit in the waiting room, a room with high, frescoed ceilings, furnished with two large damask velvet sofas with smooth, worn-out pillows, as if they had succumbed over the years under the weight of patients' neurosis.
Although they scheduled the appointment for 10:00 a.m., one patient took longer than she should have, and Sandra took the opportunity to read a two-month-old supplement. The sky reflected a dark colour over the country. The rain began ticking on the windows. Adriano observed the drops set one by one on the window. First they appeared sparse, then they started pounding insistently, becoming a rough downpour of water. The roar of thunder made Sandra jerk.
The professor's assistant entered the waiting room, his hand pressed his chest, and the air was a little frightened by the roar.
"Come, Adriano. Dr. Salieri is waiting for you."
The doctor's office was furnished in an unusual and refined manner.
Some people thought it was a whim that underscored a certain megalomaniac in Salieri. In reality the psychiatrist simply wanted to respect the dignity of the patients by surrounding them with objects of good taste.
The desk was the last purchase of a certain value: a mahogany table with a magnificent mother-of-pearl inlay in the centre. Adriano noticed that the sofa filled with fluffy Chinese silk cushions had been moved to the wall, the silver service and the majolica vases removed from the old desk and resting on the Victorian-style septet. The ruby Persian rug was laid proudly in the centre of the room. The office, as always, was pervaded by the scent of orchids in tall, thin crystal vases.
The psychiatrist placed the mobile phone on the table, to use it as a tape recorder. The professor, with the consent of Adriano's mother, always recorded the sessions, and then attached the audio files to the boy's medical records.
"So, Adriano, how are you?" the doctor asked, looking at the notebook to review the notes taken during the last session.
Adriano did not answer. He reached the window. He wanted to see the rain, which now fell less insistent. The doctor, his forehead furrowed with thick horizontal wrinkles, lifted his deep, black eyes toward the window. The mist was turning the sloping roofs of the buildings grey.
"It's not raining anymore. But there is fog…" he said with a thickly voice.
Adriano moved the heavy velvet curtains away. The storm was moving north, thunder farther and thinner.
"It is like the mist of I’m Rose."
"How many times have you watched this video in the last month?"
Adriano muttered something the doctor didn't quite understand.
"Come on, Adriano, make an effort and be clear. Don't you have anything to tell me about the video?"
"There's fog… on the video… but I didn't put it there…" Adriano muttered.
"You're repeating yourself, boy."
Adriano replied with an anxious moan. As always, he was impatient with the idea of taking the session.
"Let's watch the film together, shall we?" proposed Salieri.
"I… no… I…"
"Are you always afraid of what's inside?"
Adriano nervously smoothed his pale hands. After a long silence, he painstakingly said, "He knows. He knows that I have seen him. The fog has put him there…"
"Go on” the psychiatrist encouraged him, focused on writing in his notebook.
"I get it. I understand that he's putting down roots…" said the boy, while outside the mist covered the whole course in grey. The tower of the old aqueduct disappeared from the horizon. Adriano stared at the fog as if he were watching an unbearable threat.
"He will rain down on the wicked burning coals. Fire and sulphur and fiery wind will be their portion" he said, reciting a passage from the Bible with anguished reluctance.
Salieri deduced that Adriano had become accustomed to Marxotal, an antipsychotropic that he had been taking for two months, and delirium was the first sign that the drug was ceasing its effect.
"So now read the Old Testament. You quoted Psalm number eleven, if I'm not mistaken. A psalm by David. I know it. I recited it during my bar mitzvah."
As the doctor pondered the drug to be discontinued, Adriano babbled in monosyllables, "I only hear his voice… in here… and I must pray."
Dr. Salieri continued to take notes regardless of Adriano's delirium. Schizophrenics often became obsessed with mysticism or religion in general. And Adriano's case could not even be considered among the most serious. In the past he had treated a hysterical nun who stabbed her palms with the irons she used to embroider.
Fortunately, the hallucinations did not induce the boy to behave dangerously. The only exception was at the onset of the disease, when Adriano wanted to set fire to the cathedral's confessional.
The boy began to walk around the studio, breaking his steps to avoid stepping on certain red lilies drawn on the carpet.
