Sometimes I try not to remember how my father died. Sometimes, however, I hear his voice that still asks me how I am. My father always asked me how I was.
My mother never asked me, on the contrary she told me that I should have died and not my father. Sometimes I try to forget certain bad words from my mother.
I light a candle, light incense, pretend he's home and wait to celebrate something with me. I miss him very much.
My mother was always there to draw fashion sketches, perhaps for this reason I don't like fashion. My father had a passion for watches in his spare time.
He liked to fix broken mechanisms, stood with the magnifying glass and tried to fix them. It was good to see those miracles and after all they were ticking again.
It was magic and I was a child and I looked at him as if he were a magician.
Your words, clear and clear in appearance, stun me. Maybe I'm the one who heard wrong, maybe you really said it, but I still can't believe it. I finally find the courage to ask you to repeat. "Four weeks" is the answer that, immediately, materializes on my temple like sweat that slides along the entire length of my profile, up to the neck, exhausting itself on the collar of my khaki shirt. You look down, but you look happy.
Now, listen to me because I'm not capable of being as good as you, smiling from the other end of the table, and not brave enough to repeat myself. Turn off. Put out the spark that burns in your belly, which in another eight months will ignite the projects we had of our lives reducing them to miserable ashes. Drown her in the bitter tears of a mother's ghost, let her not follow into this world. It is not to sadden you or to extinguish your hopes, but for your own good. "Mom" and "Dad" are not the nicknames for us, moody and distracted, who barely make ends meet. Would you say that my son could ever feel loved in my calloused hands and your soiled with paint? Would you say that his eyes are the same blue as your oil paints and his voice resembles the notes of my guitar? Would you ever say that we could be up to the task entrusted to us? I tremble for another split second when I realize I've already called him my son. I realize that I love him, out of nowhere, that I have given him a role in our future. Just as I would like to be able to see if it is as I imagined it, if it will derive order from chance, if it will make knowledge of our inexperience and of its own life as art, if light will flow from an incendiary spark.
"We will have a baby," I say in a faint voice that dies in my throat, suppressed by emotion.
Dear Dad,
I am writing to tell you that I have grown up.
I know that now you will think "it is normal that you have grown up", but I am talking to you about growing up without you. So I start again:
Dear Dad,
I wanted to tell you that I grew up, even without you. Growing up without you is not growing like others grow up, growing up without you means sweating, it means watching a sunset and being sad, it means feeling stupid because at night you talk to yourself, because you hope someone hears you. You are my someone, but hoping hurts too much when I beg you to come back. Growing up without you means loving different, it means loving wrong. Yes dad, that's right. The absence of your love in my life has turned my heart into a boulder. And I'm not saying it just for effect. I haven't been able to love since I lost you, because watching you go was so painful that I no longer have the courage to let myself go. I don't want to relive a pain like that.
I wanted to tell you that I grew up, but that I wanted to see myself grow up with you. And you? Have you ever thought of me? Did you feel like kissing my forehead? To touch my hands? To sit at the table on Sunday? You should try the chicken cacciatore that mom makes ... It's really special. We eat a lot of it and then we compete to see who finishes first, so we take what is left. We often fight over this and if you only knew how much we laugh at each other. Maybe if you were there there would still be no chicken left in the pan, maybe the dishes would be right […] I wanted to tell you that I grew up, even without you. And I would like to show you how much my face has changed. I look a lot like you, the square jaw, the huge smile and the straight teeth. Besides, I like wine, like you.
I grew up but I still can't tell about us, I can't admit that I know what I'm missing. I can't say it out loud. The other day my mother and I had a fight, she said I don't open up to her, that I don't trust her because I never cry. He said "talk to me, tell me it still hurts too much." But I didn't answer her. I didn't even have the strength to look at her, but I felt her dead eyes on me. "I'm sorry you came across it." And he wept. In front of us he always tries to resist, but punctually cries a lot. She really can't do it. She is not afraid to cry, she is not ashamed to be seen. You were his great love, and his great pain. And now if he smiles, he smiles differently. This to God I will never forgive him.
… You really didn't have to go away.
I always listen to your favourite song to feel you with me every day.
I called it that, with that mixture of lack of delicacy and naivety typical of age. In reality he was also mute, the child in question. And maybe he wasn't even that child, in the sense that he was a couple of years older than me. I was, however, a child. And there was nothing nicer for me than spending time with my dad. I followed him to the bar in the evening, at work, when he went to his customers (he had his own company), when he stopped for coffee with friends, when he made deliveries with the van. In short, everywhere, our relationship was special and I a little maliciously enjoyed that exclusive relationship that cut off my sister and my mother, my father was only mine, period. And he gladly took me with him wherever he went. Even at the home of this deaf child. I spent time with him playing as best I could, I didn't like his company so much because I didn't know how to relate to someone who had that kind of disability. As I remember, he also found me likable, sometimes he got angry when I couldn't understand what he wanted and I proceeded by trial and error, making mistakes until finally I got the right option. I dare say we got along well even though we weren't really friends. I remember in a few frames the way to get to him, which we did for just one summer. I remember that the countryside around was yellow and warm on those sunny afternoons. What became of him, then? How did the "deaf child" experience that period? Do you still remember me, that playmate who occasionally pissed him off because he didn't understand what he tried in vain to say? Maybe. But the question that I have been asking myself for years to tell the truth is another: why? Why did we go to his house? Why have I only ever seen the mother of that child and never the father? Why did my daddy take me with him and then leave me there to play with someone who he called my friend but who in effect was not? Why didn't we ever go there with mom? They weren't family friends, why did we end up there from time to time? I don't know, I can't know, my father has been dead for a quarter of a century and of that summer I am left with only this memory and the echo of all those because they are destined to be orphaned of an answer. (Maybe) unwitting witness of something I didn't understand or knew, sometimes I think about it, sometimes with rancor and sometimes with disdain, I tell myself that no one is perfect, not even my father was. But how much I wish he were still in the world to ask him something ... Two things I hate in life: waiting and not knowing.
Yesterday Virginia asked me: “Dad, but if you and your mother break up, who is it who has two daughters and who one?” I was in the kitchen slicing onions, the question took me by surprise. “In what sense, Virginia?” I said. “We are three sisters”, she said, “you can’t divide the third sister in half!” I felt like laughing. I was going to answer her: “Don’t worry, love, Mom and I will never break up”, but I didn’t want to lie to her, because I know that every relationship is made up every day, and the biggest wrong you can do to yourself, and to others, it is just that to believe you invincible. “Virginia”, I said, “if by chance my mother and I parted ways one day we would see you all three, a little bit me and a little mom, don’t worry.” “But in Mrs. Doubtfire the dad saw only the children Saturday, ”he said. “Virginia, sometimes when two parents break up things can happen,” I said. “Maybe they didn’t break up well, but arguing. But Mom and I have always agreed that, even if we break up, you will always come first. You have I got it? Always.” He stared at me in silence. “Dad,” he said suddenly. “But can love end?” I thought for a moment before replying. “Love doesn’t end,” I said, “it’s people who change.” “People?” He said. “Virginia,” I said, “adults grow up too, you know? You are now a big girl, seven years ago you were a little girl. It works a little like that for moms and dads too. When I met my mother I was a different person, she was too. The important thing, when two people love each other, is to be able to change together or respect each other’s changes. Parents, with their children, do just that thing there, but sometimes they can’t. It is for this reason that love for children is the only one that never ends. “But you,” she said, “when you met Mom, how did you know it was Mom?” I didn’t understand, “I said. “How did you know you wanted to love her?” He said. “Ah, that,” I said. “I figured it out after about ten minutes. “And from what?” He said. “When we first met, she pulled her hair up behind her neck, over her head, and pulled up a bun without even a rubber band, just knotting it,” I said. “So what?” He said. “And then I realized that she desperately needed a rubber band,” I said. “And I her hair.” “And you had it, the rubber band?” He said. “No,” I said, “but when Mom found out, she already loved me.” “Dad!” She said, “but then you cheated her.” “Maybe a little bit,” I said, “but the point is, Mom was the first one who ever made me want to look for a rubber band, you know what I mean?” He looked at me for a few seconds. “Here daddy,” she told me, pulling off the elastic that was holding up her hair. “So you and mom don’t break up.” She laughed, luckily I was slicing the onions.
THE PRODIGY OF IDEAS 