The Light

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Curve to the right, straight stretch. At the end of the descent, a strip of sea and night. Every time I picked up speed. As if I thought the sea were there, where the road merged with the horizon, so I could dive headfirst into it. And instead you just went down, and that was it, all the way to the gate.

 No sound except, in the distance, the murmur of the waves. The day was closing its eyes but the lampposts, rusted by salt, tried to keep it awake, to improvise an afternoon of light.

The humidity and the winter tramontana pierced through clothes. They ignited that sort of euphoria, feverish, shining eyes, like a wounded animal seized by terror.

I hadn’t been back in a long time, but the memories were still there, waiting for me. They gathered all around me, children demanding attention after being ignored for too long. Something from the seabed of time resurfaced…

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A dive into the past

“Tomorrow, half past four here?” “Maybe… quarter to three…” “…damn them… they could at least pay us night rates, those bastards” “You’re a little prince, I already told you… here you stick out like parmesan on fish” “Again…” “Bye handsome…” “…”

Surely there would be no traffic, the state road deserted at the beginning of an autumn week. He wasn’t someone who lived on bursts anymore, in recent years. A constant-sad, that’s what his friends had started to call him—joking, but not too much. But the road… the road was his enchantment, his own personal siren. Speed, knocked-down poles, clenched jaws, curses chewed until they cracked his teeth. Alone, then, there was nothing that could hold those runs back. He felt uneasy instead when that sick desire caught him off guard, passenger seats occupied by people he cared about.

He opened the car door, as always flinging it. The last colleagues: heads down, half-hearted goodbyes, few smiles and little desire to joke. Someone whistled the chorus of a summer hit already gone, the way people do in hospital corridors to fill the silence. The return was the worst moment of the day for everyone, no one knew what to do with the hours left before the next shift.

It wasn’t a job. It looked more like a group therapy session. Every day they gathered in the same place, at the same time, to celebrate an unchanged ritual: a methodical emptying, a systematic erosion of the self. They didn’t produce something, they came to work to consume themselves. Day after day, they left a fragment of their inner life on the table. Until only a functional surface remained, smooth, manageable. “Thanks everyone, see you next time,” and the circle closed. Ready to reopen the same the following day.

They didn’t do it for money. Money was a pretext, an acceptable justification. They did it not to think. To tire themselves enough not to feel anything anymore. To reach the evening emptied out, light like plastic containers. That was the real payment: that numbness that protects you from facing what awaits you outside. Or maybe, inside.

They had mocked him from the very beginning, when during introductions he had told his story as it was. Boy from a good family, apparently bright childhood, impeccable résumé. He had kept quiet, though, about the darker deviations, the secrets still too alive and potentially scandalous to be offered to the gaze of new colleagues. Maybe he himself wasn’t ready to look at them.

And yet, for the part he had told, he had been sincere. As always. He didn’t know that that world worked in reverse, its rules overturned. Lies were the only way to earn respect. Truth—and those who dared to speak it—slid to the bottom of the hierarchy. They met every day precisely for that: to repeat those shared falsehoods like a mantra, until they sounded true.

Maybe work is nothing more than this: a tacit agreement to believe together in the same lie. So as not to have to sustain the gaze of truth. To go on, unchanged, upheld by that false and mutual dream.

Sometimes, after a shift, he would sit in the car, insert the key, turn the ignition on. Then, emptiness. His gaze fixed ahead, unfocused. Thoughts piling up without taking shape. He couldn’t hear his own voice. Motionless, suspended. He wasn’t the only one. When he finally decided to leave he would slide past his colleagues’ cars, still like his had been a moment before. Silent, each with their own invisible shipwreck. Souls adrift, sedated.

The asphalt in early November sweated. That year autumn had been warmer than usual. He turned off the radio: he loved listening to the engine’s suffering, the wheels devouring kilometers, the air struck by that wrecked projectile. A utility car driven like a supercar, a flat life headbutted in the nose.

The phone rang.

“Tell me.”

 “Where you at.” 

“Just leaving work.”

 “Ah…”

 “You?”

 “Industrial area, but I’m moving toward the place.”

 “You alone?”

 “Yeah but I heard people… they should be inside.”

 “Alright… I’ll stop by later, I’ll take a ride first.”

 “Ok bye.”

 “…”

“People.” Not names, faces, lived and shared life. Anonymous, insignificant dots, books thrown there to fill space, T-shirts never worn left to rot at the bottom of a drawer. Exactly what he was looking for.

In the past year many things had changed, his body first of all. He had neglected himself, yes, but it hadn’t been only inertia. He had put effort into it. A scientifically carried out operation. Self-sabotage. He hated his passivity and thought that this fault could not go unpunished. Shoot the coward. “You’ve become a mollusk, I’ll turn you into a mollusk.” One must be consistent, always. Muscles atrophied, beard and hair unkempt, joints cracking at the slightest resistance. There was no tension left in his body—as in his life. Let everything slide, since everything is already written… poor bastard. Just a year earlier, at the sight of a man reduced to that state, he would have immediately thought of a flamethrower. No bullshit. Nothing personal, no. He had always been an empathetic person. He would have thought about it—actually, maybe precisely for that reason. To drive away, let’s say, even the mere possibility of empathizing. Of “understanding,” which on the path precedes “justifying” by two steps. Renouncing life is a nasty beast, virulent. It must be crushed, for God’s sake, yes…

The car had been making strange noises for quite some time now. Warning lights on, sharp little squeals coming from under the hood. The tires worn down, smooth like children’s bike tires at the end of summer. The air conditioning had been gone for a while, but the windows rolled down loosened the grip of the heat.

In winter he deliberately never went below three thousand revs. When the cold split his bones he pushed the engine—come on, come on now!—to force a burst of warm air out of the dashboard vents. Even his glasses would fog up, he could see and not see. He tried to guess the road from the few corners of glass spared by the heat. But, he thought, suffering this filthy cold is worse than dying smashed to pieces.

100. 120. 150. Fifth–fourth–third, engine braking. Sooner or later I’ll take two sick days and smash these fucking speed cameras, goddamit!

He floors it again. Then, in the pitch-dark of the state road, a familiar shape lit by a streetlamp… the unmistakable curves of Destiny.

He had met her by chance while grocery shopping a few months earlier, in spring. He always bought the same things, in the same supermarket. He would simply walk in and hit checkpoints—first this, then this, then this, then that. As if someone were timing him. Ten minutes and the week’s groceries were done. Head down, he spoke to no one. But that day he felt something like an irritation, a hitch in that perfectly calibrated mechanism. He froze in the middle of the aisle. Muffled, strangled little cries reached him.

His eyes pushed their way through the cereal boxes.

What he saw was enough to snap him completely back to reality. A giant was squeezing his hands around the neck of what seemed to be his partner. Terror on her face, eyes bloodshot, about to burst. Mucus ran from her nose, the effort to free herself from that gorilla’s grip was terrifying. He met her gaze between one box and another—her eyes were pleading with him like those of an animal about to be torn apart.

Why did he shove the boxes off the shelf, sending them crashing down onto the two of them? Why, when that animal let go and shoved his head between the shelves, did he apologize politely, muttering disconnected phrases?

“I fell… yeah… I’m so sorry…”

He, the worst of lone wolves. Who saw kindness as defeat, the beginning of softness and the end. Who had consciously chosen to become something repulsive and disgusting, to harden himself—stomach and the rest can go to hell. Why, when that chimpanzee had given up—taken the cart again, pulled the girl close like a little dog, slipping away silently toward the checkout—had he felt relief? He watched those questions, pushed them back where they had come from.

How long had it been since he heard his own thoughts? His head was inhabited by an indistinct murmur, broken reflections. An engine constantly choking, sputtering forward. Children trying to form words, stumbling, a jumble of guttural sounds and letters. His, he thought in rare moments of clarity, was a brain becoming like that of animals. Good. Good. Hit bottom, down and further down.

That girl, though. He had looked at her, her face still shaken. Her eyes carried both anguish and resignation, like someone expecting only fatal blows—from any side, at any moment. That face had haunted him in the days that followed; in the end, time erased it.

Many weeks later, summer almost over, he saw her again by chance. At the corner between the state road and the street leading to the sea. The mistral hits there—and so did she. Wearing only a tight dress, struggling to contain those black African curves. She stamped her feet to shake off that abnormal late-season cold, the breath of the sea. Laden with salt and second thoughts, it tasted of autumn.

She hadn’t seen him. The traffic light had just turned from orange to red. He accelerated. He was about to run it when, from the side street, a motorcycle started early. He slammed the brakes. They were side by side, impossible to ignore each other. She leaned toward the window, about to knock with her knuckles and begin the usual humiliating negotiation. From her eyes he understood she had recognized him. She gave a slight embarrassed grimace, asked him to roll the window down.

“…”

 “…” 

“…hi… my name’s Destiny…”

 “Ok, no I’m good, thank you.”

He drove off.

And now he saw her again, months later. Always in the same, squalid spot. He thought—like a flash—that if one day he decided to end it, the last thing he would do would be to go look for that pimp. That bastard, beat his teeth in until his skull exploded. He felt ashamed for even having thought, that day in the supermarket, that he could ignore such a painful cry for help. It wasn’t the fact itself, but what it said about his condition. Having fallen so low as to see the most basic human instinct as weakness, something to flee from. A gag reflex tightened his stomach. He thought about how his life was steeped in slime, how at times he had made himself inhuman, immoral. He felt the same as that day in the supermarket—nothing had changed.

“…enough…” A sharp turn left, the car sliding on the hot asphalt. He smiled under his breath, savoring the spectacle. Flashing lights, horns, tires screeching. Countersteer. The oncoming car narrowly missed. The driver’s crazed eyes, distorted grimace. Thinking was unbearable. He emptied the small bottle of sambuca he kept on the dashboard, swallowing the liquid as if it could go straight into his veins.

The thought of that girl in the cold, forced to sell herself at the roadside, the image of her violated purity among supermarket shelves shook him more than he wanted to admit. In comparison he felt filthy, compromised to the core. Almost instinctively, he picked up the phone and dialed a number he knew very well.

“…hi… what are you doing??? …I’m ten minutes away…”

 “…yeah ok… I’m free… I’ll wait for you…”

 “I’m coming.”

The prostitutes. That too had started by chance. Like all things that end up defining a life.

For years he had believed his life was destined for a precise, luminous love story. Then a couple of unrequited loves. Some short relationships to heal himself, to raise the volume of emotions so as not to feel older pains. The emotional cost of that intensity wasn’t immediate, but someone would have to pay later, when things could go wrong. And it was never him who paid. The guilt that tore him apart when he realized he was using those girls as anesthesia. The promise, to himself, never to be a selfish monster again. He kept his promises. Maybe because he always made them when he had reached the limit, when there was nothing left but to change course—or die there.

From that moment it became a continuous slipping from one bed to another, a race against time. Lightness elevated to a defensive technique. Superficiality as a shield for the conscience. Enough involvement to desire a body, never enough to stay and risk getting entangled. For everyone’s sake, yes. Love on short-term lease, forever. It was exciting too, a balm for the ego and for insecurities sedimented like debris from past pain.

“Sex is just sex.” Yet on certain nights, lying beside a random body, eyes fixed on the ceiling, a suffocated thought resurfaced. There had been years when that act had seemed to him the deepest way to touch another’s soul, to blend it with his own until they could no longer be distinguished. The crack reopened for an instant—he shut it immediately.

Until he sealed it completely. Until one day, almost by accident, he realized he could no longer feel anything.

He understood then that that had been the point of no return: the moment when he began to hate himself lucidly, to silently cultivate a self-destructive impulse. As if going down to the bottom of the well had become more natural than trying to climb back up. He convinced himself that going back was impossible. The inclined plane had taken him and dragged him down, further and further, with no holds and no Light.

Going to prostitutes became the only possible choice. The alternatives unbearable. From that kind of encounter he demanded very precise things.

First: not having to see himself reflected in the women he met. He had understood, at the cost of enormous suffering, that none of them crossed his path as a mere accident. That what a man has not yet faced in life and within himself often comes toward him with the face of a woman. All the ones he met along the way were mirrors. They did nothing extraordinary, maybe they didn’t even stay long. Yet each one returned something he had never dared to look at.

The woman became for him the revealer, the mirror that unveiled him to himself. She does not invent a man’s wounds, at most she allows him to touch them. A phrase, a gesture. And the heart decides. To look into the crack or to flee it, deny it.

The intense relationships he had had were never free from the past. They carried the weight of times when he felt insecure, unseen, not enough.

The challenge—he knew it perfectly well, despite his mental confusion—was to go beyond words and gestures, to understand which ancient emotional mechanisms they awakened in him.

From paid love he also demanded not to be looked in the eyes, to escape the shame of always pretending. He required an aseptic boundary: no promises, no illusion of reciprocity. A defined time, a defined rate, a defined script, a body known anatomically.

No need to tell himself, to construct an acceptable narrative of himself.

In that hour he could calmly be his worst version. The one he continued to hate, dragging further and further down: here, though, he could do it freely. The relief of being able to do harm without being judged.

No scruple would ask him to be anything other than what he was in that moment. One who went to prostitutes. Simple.

No lies about love, no future evoked, no past concealed for fear of hurting and driving the other away. It was the opposite of those short relationships in which he had acted a part, promising without believing, withdrawing without explaining. There the pain was deferred and one-sided, borne by only one of the two. For the one who suffered it, it was unbearable: a possible future was glimpsed, all the more radiant the more it was stimulated by imagination. Unsustainable because not born of love, but of dependence: the illusion of the mind that idealizes those who have not chosen us, the reopening of unprocessed childhood wounds, attachment disguised as destiny.

With prostitutes instead everything was declared.

Human contact tolerated because reduced to its contractual form. Contracts—what an invention! No cracks to seal, no illusions to bury. No risk of discovering you feel nothing. No risk of hurting someone with your emotional dryness and immaturity. The most irreproachable conduct with respect to the idea he had formed of himself: incapable of loving.

It was not a choice but a consequence. As always happens when our automatisms get the better of our inner life. If he couldn’t climb back up the inclined plane, at least he could go down methodically. And that was the simplest, most linear way to keep moving without asking himself who he was becoming. I am, and that’s it.

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I resurfaced. I came back to myself, hands still on the steering wheel, the engine off. January rain had gathered on the windshield with a few leaves; I couldn’t see anything. My muscles stiff, a dull numbness ran through my legs and my backside, nailed to the seat for hours.

I realized I was completely unprepared to live a place out of season. It’s no small thing—quite the opposite. Stuff for strong stomachs. I was amazed, as always, at the cold blood required just to survive the first impact. You arrive and think: it’s a place like any other. But it isn’t.

Human beings dream, suffer, love—live, in short—in any place in the world, and that place becomes charged with humanity. We soften its morphology, worn smooth by our passage. It fills with life. It’s like winding up a music box: the more you turn it, the more it spins. It moves, it plays. The vital energy that, invisibly, we release accumulates in the places we pass through. They are spores that settle and germinate, reproduce other life.

But when all this ceases, when this living withdraws to move elsewhere, when for a moment the spotlights shift toward other stages, that’s where another story begins. The sets remain, the streets, the walls—but without a voice. And then the trick shows. The artifice falls. What we called “atmosphere” reveals itself for what it was: a transfer of energy, a temporary loan of soul. Without us, the place returns to itself. And its self is bare, almost feral.

It takes a stomach, a lot of it. Just to look at them, those places. Let alone spend time there. The Sunday trip, the weekend with company, the quick stop for a coffee and a view. Sure. But that’s not what we’re talking about.

To make those places the stage of one’s daily life even in the months when their wild eyes resurface. When we have abandoned them to their solitude.

A place once inhabited that suddenly finds itself deprived of our presence is dangerous. It has a ruthless, feral sadness. It smells of death at every corner because life has in fact moved on. We have seen it breathe through those streets and now we don’t find it.

These places are dangerous because they remind us that life can sometimes wear itself out in stillness, when once its heart was beating. It shouldn’t be like this, and precisely for that it hurts. We perceive it and we feel that lump in the throat.

For many years I didn’t realize any of this. I wandered unaware through the streets of that small town, summer or winter alike. I mistook my not feeling anything anymore for a conquered detachment, an achieved goal. I thought: finally nothing touches me anymore, finally I am steady. I didn’t know that feeling at ease was, at bottom, synonymous with proximity to death, intimacy with the desire to disappear. I didn’t see death, because it was walking on me. As you don’t see something that comes so close it loses its own contours, with which we become one. I had it on me like a tailored suit. It wasn’t just peace, no. It was turning down the volume, lowering the light, reducing intensity until nothing could be felt anymore.

For hours I had been entangled in memories, sitting in the driver’s seat. My stomach in knots, a painful nausea took me. For a moment it had seemed to me that I saw them pass before me as if that life had never ended. I was shaken and terrified—and that was a good sign. The disgust, the lump in the throat, even the nostalgia. They were proofs of life, raw flesh.

I looked at the parking lot. A couple of cars. One of the two parked to one side of the lot, discreet and subdued. I had no memory of owners ever moving it from that spot. In summer—when light rain arrived like a blessing, kicking away the unbearable heat—under that car there always remained a patch of dry asphalt, protected by the chassis. It was part of the landscape like the concrete, the fences, the gardener’s shed: immobile and necessary.

My forehead burned, I tried to give order to the tide of words, colors, faces, noises, sensations resurfacing.

For an instant I was tempted to return to that torpor: to the absence of shocks, to the anesthesia that makes everything bearable.

But it didn’t work anymore.

It was like watching a film already seen: I saw the twisted paths I walked in the dark, the senseless questions, the obsessively repeated thoughts. A single aim: to justify my suffering, to give myself the pretext to be miserable.

No, there wasn’t only the pitch black I ventured into armed.

In the seabed of time there were also moments of Light, blinding. Even in the middle of the dark—especially in the middle of the dark. To an eye accustomed to the Sun they would have seemed ordinary moments, but in that abyssal black they became Light. The hope that never dies, as long as there is time to pick up the thread and begin to weave again, leaving everything else aside. Perhaps even when that time is no longer there: the thread as testimony to a possibility that did not materialize, yet in a certain sense did—potentially, by the mere awareness of its possible future existence.

Evening was now giving way to night, yet inside something had started moving again. If Light exists, it always overcomes darkness. It has on its side the overwhelming force of life that wants to continue. This is the Law that reigns sovereign over all others, over everything. Light calls life, and life calls other life.

It wasn’t happiness. It wasn’t fulfilled hope. It was only a fracture in the smooth surface of stillness.

I started the engine.

And drove off.