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Her clothes were a little crumpled, but she had hidden them under a long black coat that cleverly made her stand out from the slender figure that Mother Nature had given her.
That figure, and the haughty-looking poise, had always made her look older than her age.
If by some women, like those in the alley where her grandmother lived and where she spent most afternoons after school she was admired, by her classmates she was envied and criticized: too tall, too thin or her butt too protruding.
The truth was that Marta had always been a beautiful girl and certainly did not go unnoticed among teenage girls.
The latter, humiliated by a sense of impotence to beauty, had such feelings that she was paradoxically inadequate and unworthy compared to the others.
Except for Alessandra, she was a faithful friend.
They met in kindergarten and since then they have grown up together: the same elementary school, then in middle school and high school, even in the gym.
Alessandra's house was four, maybe five kilometres away, but with a long uphill stretch heavy to do on foot.
When they were little, they often rode their bikes. The bus suddenly nailed to the bus stop.
-Damn the brakes! - exclaimed the driver.
Finally, after a long time, she saw her friend again, visibly excited about that ride together at the mall.
Between the two girls there was affection, constant and industrious, and he was happy to see her standing up and feeling good.
She pulled out of her closet a black miniskirt that she wore with a turquoise t-shirt with little glitter that made her glow in her clumsiness as an overweight girl.
- Do you think I've lost weight? How do I look in skirts? You, on the other hand, well... you're damn skinny as a button! Are you eating? –
Alessandra, among her schoolmates, was famous for her exaggeratedly worn-out speech: she could speak for more than an hour without being interrupted.
Her need to speak was so great that, in the absence of interlocutors, she was able to speak to herself in the third person.
She was that high school student who was always expected to speak.
The one the school headmaster couldn't stand and who, in school meetings, was not afraid to take the microphone and leave it until the school administration was challenged and demolished, point by point.
Marta was one of the rare people to whom, if Alessandra asked something, she would even listen to the answer. Because despite all her problems, she felt she was tied to her, for a reason unknown to her, with an invisible red thread.
She loved pass her temperas when she painted a canvas, to hear those ramblings that even her mother didn't waste any more time listening to.
She went to the kitchen and in the bowl she emptied pockets on a cabinet, took the keys to her mother's Fiesta. In Marta's company she felt more beautiful.
On the other hand, it is known that at school boys look for the alpha, the leader of the pack to feel stronger and girls the prettiest to feel more beautiful.
Their friendship was beautiful, the kind that everyone in life should remember they had in time. They always shared everything, when they had to vent, talk about a problem, do their homework or have fun, the first contact was just the best friend. And yet, because of one boy, Alessandra was put aside for a while.
He was a guy everyone knew how to use drugs, a junkie.
As a good friend, she advised her to stay away from him, but she didn't want to understand until the boy was taken away from his father. Not even the judgment of the people was able to affect the purity of such a natural and innocent feeling, that first love, even if on the other side so violent.
They headed for the mall, visited the shoe store, then a clothing store.
Finally, they went shopping at Arca, a pet shop, where Alessandra bought a pink leather collar with fake glitter for Goga, her beagle.
The girl was not used to make judgements about past events and Marta liked this: she was simply a person who could listen to another one in trouble.
They drove through the underground parking lot to get to the car when, suddenly, Marta felt a strange sensation, a sort of déjà-vu.
The round, red and green lamps above each parking space, the ones that indicate whether it is free or not, had suddenly turned all red. The light reflected intermittently on the white border strip below had become similar to the slow motion effect of American films.
- Ale, we hadn't parked here, our parking was S3 not F8. -
Even Alessandra's steps had become slower, less fluid.
A dry leaf fluttered very slowly, completely asynchronically with the wind that had pushed it upwards, a fraction of the time sequence certainly altered.
Time seemed to have stopped, but she seemed to be the only one who felt it. She turned left, saw the two shadows passing in front of her, unconsciously brushing against Alessandra and vanishing into thin air. Once dissolved, Marta breathed again, saw the leaf hanging in the air falling on the leaden concrete at the usual speed.
Her friend turned around and asked her something she did not understand, still dazed by the vision. It was the first time she saw them clearly outside her home, and this was enough to convince her that something horrible was about to happen.
Alessandra started the engine with a keystroke after sitting in the Audi.
- This is all wrong, something is wrong. -
- What's wrong? - Asked Alessandra intrigued as they surfaced from the underground garages.
- The car was in the wrong place. First something happened in the garages and now we're in an Audi.
- Of course we're in an Audi, it's my car, don't you remember? I don't understand, what's going on?
- Your mother's car is a Fiesta, not an Audi. Pull over. We have to stop now!
- I can't pull over now, I'm cornering. Calm down and tell me what's wrong with you!
The weather was beautiful, the road was strangely lonely, the one that was always the same, travelled thousands of times in traffic was no longer so.
The car slid smoothly from corner to corner where there was supposed to be a straight.
- Stop now please, something's happening. How can you not see that? –
Marta took off her seatbelt, tried to open the door but Alessandra locked it through the central controls.
- I'm sorry, I can't let you get off, I love you very much, but it's better this way. Trust me one more time. –
- What's better like this? Ale...-
At that exact moment, the perception of time and space was altered again.
Marta saw dazzling headlamps aimed at her friend and realized that her time was over.
In a split second, she remembered the relative definition of time and space that her philosophy professor made one day during a lecture.
"The unit of measurement of time, among the people of the ancient Near East, was the day, the month and the year. In Mesopotamia, the day began at sunset and not at sunrise, so it was the interval of time between two successive sunsets.
For this reason, when for me the day begins, I have to accept the idea that for another it ends.
It is an entirely human concept to count time, all the more so if I apply it to my personal dimension of body and spirit.
Jung once said, "Body and spirit are two aspects of the human being, and that's all we know, which is why I prefer to say that the two things happen together in a mysterious way by staying here, because you can't imagine the two things as one.
For my own use, I have conceived a principle that must show this fact of "being together", I affirm that the strange principle of synchronicity acts in the world, when certain things are produced in a more or less simultaneous way, behaving as if they were the same thing, even though they are not so from our point of view.
It was only then that I fully understood its meaning, that continuum of which the professor spoke, had been broken.
He felt the blood dripping on her face and from there it flowed on her left hand.
The acrid smoke from the airbag saturated the air in the car, and went up her nose, pinching her throat. Alessandra's body was leaning forward, towards the steering wheel, held by the seatbelt which had probably jammed in the crash.
A woman with a strange smile was driving the other car, the one that crashed into them, and seemed to have been unharmed.
She also saw a couple of pedestrians on the road, immobile, a man and a girl who were merely observing what had happened and who did not seem to have any intention of providing any kind of assistance.
Then, nothing else.
She realized her time was over.
2. STEFANO
Stefano Mencarini was a man of curious and lively intelligence, short black hair with a tuft that, from a young age, he never managed to keep down.
He had been married for about six years to Anna, his work colleague, and did not disdain good company and beers with friends on Saturday nights.
In short, a very ordinary man, as many can find around the world.
They hadn't had children, despite the thousands of visits made by specialists from all over Italy and all in all, he had never represented a real problem for the couple, taken as they both were by their career priorities in the biomedical engineering sector.
His life proceeded regularly, until the day he was appointed to personally oversee the opening of a new office in Havana.
He discussed it with his wife who advised him to accept the proposal.
After a few months away, the relocation would certainly have benefited their income, they could finally renovate their house, a matter always postponed for economic reasons. Moreover, the promotion that had already been in the air for some time, would almost certainly have materialized.
So after a few weeks, he left.
Upon arrival, he realized how small José Martí International Airport was, and to an inversely proportional extent, how many mustard-colored police uniforms there were.
Obliged to go through the whole process of checking, he noticed the presence of only one detector at gate number two and realized that it would not be quick.
His high enough forehead surmounted a regular, rather handsome, but common face.
What made it special was a scar on the corner of his right eye.
It was that something lived, unique and personal.
The fact that he always wore a suit and tie made a loud squeak with his appearance, to which a leather jacket would be more in tune.
An overwhelming smell of fried food rose up his nostrils, so much so that he felt as if he had gone straight into a fryer, the predominance of red present and the anachronistic structure of the building made it look like an old bus station from the fifties.
After recovering his suitcase, he changed some money into pesos, stopped in the bar near the waiting room, according to the recommendations of friends who had already been there and enjoyed that glass of rum that many found fantastic.
It was so good that it made him forget the bad smell of fried food.
Once outside the airport, he passed under yellow columns and was run over by a host of hands, arms and eyes determined to give him the keys to houses of all prices and all kinds.
Dodging them, he approached a taxi that was not far away.
He asked the sweaty man, in white shirt, to be accompanied to the hotel indicated on a business card that he showed him.
Stephen found himself with his suitcase on the edge of Plaza Vieja, opposite the entrance to a typical Cuban building of colonial architecture.
His attention was drawn to the distraught voice of a waiter on the other side of the square who was railing against some kids who were playing football and had bumped into the chairs and wrought iron table in front of his bar.
Some arches introduced him into a small alleyway paved with red bricks and framed by flowered balconies, then he passed through a very well-kept and ancient courtyard, certainly restored.
He noticed how wonderfully baroque mixed with Spanish influences before entering the lobby of his hotel.
He approached the reception desk, where a young mulatto concierge in a green suit cordially welcomed him.
He put the suitcase on the floor and handed her the papers. She went away to make photocopies, Stefano followed her with his eyes until the girl returned to the counter.
The girl gave him the key to room 28 and the documents.
- Obrigado, senhorita...Azuleya. –
He thanked her, with the few words in Portuguese he knew.
She looked at him with an air of questioning, he pointed to her with his index finger the badge, pinned on the green jacket and from which you could clearly read the name.
- Oh, Claro. Or badge! –
He exclaimed by touching his badge. Then she smiled and shook his hand.
- You are from Italy eu vejo. I speak your language. Nice to meet you. -
He pulled the bangs out of his eyes with his hand.
- Can I help you again? -
-No thanks. In fact, maybe you could set an alarm clock for me by 7:00 tomorrow morning?
