Ring-a-ring-o’roses for two
"We'll meet again, older and more sincere in a tear, and we’ll talk again of immense skies and we will have new truths. Tell me if I disappointed you and how much you cried without me. I never stopped thinking about you, not even for a moment, and how long eternity lasts."
("Eternità, Giorgia)
I always hated tears. Tears of women, to be clear, those they pull out when they are excited, when their boyfriend dumped them or when they quarrelled at home and their parents forced them to go to their room and study, without TV. I too brought those tears with me. When needed I pulled them out, when I still wasn’t and still didn’t understand, when I felt big and nasty, without any friend. Then I became Silvia the tough and I met the black. From that day, my life changed. Piazza del Popolo, on Saturday afternoon: we all dressed in dark style, with jackets tied at the waist and long, weird skirts. Adults, other people in general, even kids, called us neo punk. But it doesn’t mean anything, I don’t think there is an ideology behind a colour. A colour is your state of mind at a moment. Mine was black, and it doesn’t mean death. Black reflects other colours and takes a life on its own. Black does not mean sad or funeral. Black is life slamming like the paintings of Mark Rotko. A genius. I went to see his exhibition at Palazzo delle Esposizioni. The idea that someone made entirely black canvases had made me horny. Nice, I said to myself, I could become his student. Too bad I can’t draw, but maybe I don’t need to, maybe only ideas are needed. And then he died, but there must be a place where all those who are gone and love the black meet and become friends. In Piazza del Popolo and Via del Corso it happens already. Except they are alive. On Saturday afternoon. The youngest, aged twelve and up, start arriving at two o’clock, swarming out from the MacDonald. Then the others, the older ones, join them. At night you can even find twenty-year-old guys. Deborah and I went there, when we had the whim, just to look around. We wore heavy makeup and tights with holes artfully made with scissors. Sometimes we rolled a joint, sitting on the stairs of the church of artists. It makes adrenaline rise. You always start thinking that the police is gonna come by. You think, they will find me and bring me to the precinct, call my parents, it will be a mess. I was never caught though.
There, I hear it again, that sucks. Another shot. God, it came out of the barrel. I thought by now my Beretta was empty. How many bullets can a gun shoot? Ten, twelve? They never end. It's not like the computer, it’s not a game, in the classroom I really hit the target and delete people. If only I could remember right. For days I have been trying to overcome boredom and find out why I killed Alessia too, given I really did, but I think I did because inspector Maigret repeated it to me and slammed in my face several times. He always repeats all the names, angrily. One after another, to make me feel guilty. Eleonora, Alessandro, Alessia, Deborah... he lists them and then stops, short of breath, like a truffle dog in my room full of IVs and nothing. What a personage, this detective. Renato. Renato Pascucci. One day I heard the nurse call him, but I have never been able to see his face. I wonder if he has stars on his sleeves, if he wears a uniform or dressed like everyone else. And most of all, who knows if he moves around the hospital like the guys in CSI, and at home he studies everything on the computer, collecting his notes in orderly cards with the pictures of my victims, their data, height, weight, memories and statements of the witnesses. He must, he can’t have the memory of Pico della Mirandola. He would be a genius. I can imagine him, there. Come on, I can even see him. He is tall and big, his nose is like that of Depardieu when he played Cyrano, and his walk is a bit dragged, typical of someone who carries a lot of extra pounds. For sure his hair is white and he walks with the determined expression of those who move the world. He could not have such a determined attitude if he was not in the police. That is his strength. Once he told me about his son. He mumbled something that made me think he was dead, who knows. He said that we young people don’t understand the meaning of life and death, we take unnecessary risks, we fiddle as if we were invincible, made of rubber. Funny, isn’t it? I think he used exactly those words. He repeated that we think we are made of rubber. I don’t understand him, I don’t know what it means to die, but for sure it is better than staying still here, wasting time. The inspector is a pain in the ass, he comes here every day and I'm sure that after that he wanders around the hospital asking doctors about me and my health.
He just wants me to live and go to prison, like Erica and Omar, but it’s not like I killed my mother. Only a few schoolmates, the punishment must be different, no? I did not shed the blood of my blood. Beautiful expression, almost literary. Ah well, about letters, those two received a lot of them in prison. They are regarded as heroes. And Erica is beautiful. I too am a hero. A mythical, very cool heroin, but I’m not as pretty as her.
Among the other characters in this sitcom that I am living in my mind, imprisoned in a body in poor shape, there is also Doctor House, who in real life is the mythical professor Spezziani instead, the one who takes care of me. Good one. He came only once in my room and he was in a dreadful hurry. I think he doesn’t wear the white coats, but for sure he wears latex gloves. Cream coloured. It seemed to me to feel them as he was touching me, assessing my wounds, lungs, heart. He said "Double dose of IV" and rocketed out of my room. As if suffering from tarantism. But what am I thinking? I can’t have felt the latex gloves, I must have imagined them. I feel nothing, I have been completely deleted. My body, I think, is already gone, only my mind is still here; it works, but in its own fucking way. And it chases the Silvia who is me and who is also someone else, because we are two, but nobody knows. There is a good Silvia who wants to live, and a bad Silvia who hates everyone. The little plump girl who has a mother who holds her hand and brings her to the cinema, and the very skinny girl who lives with Neli and a useless father, and doesn’t see anything but her computer. You can never tell which of us is winning, because we are always fighting. But the very skinny one is also very strong, and she always wants to be the centre of attention. And she has a gun, and a Silvia with a gun knows exactly how to get what she wants.
With that gun I killed Eleonora, then Alessandro, who offended me, and I had no pity. Then Deborah took care of Luca and Mrs. Rossigni. We only killed two each. Too few to go down in history. I didn’t like it that way. Because I wanted to line them up and shoot on everyone, classmates, friends and teachers, as if we were a firing squad. Tatatatataaata. I've seen that in a lot of movies. It's a military thing. And I would have avenged all that I suffered in recent years, when they treated me like a retarded because I didn’t have a mother and I failed at school. Rubbish, that's what I was for them, rubbish without a present or a future. And I wanted to delete them and become famous. The scene went too fast, this is our fault, and Debby and I had no time to kill twenty-three. When the other students, the secretarial staff and even the caretaker understood what was happening, they barricaded themselves inside, in the classrooms, and there was no way to get them out. They must have taken the phones and called 113, 112 and the army, I bet. We tried to open the doors, but there was nothing more we could do. Everything was locked, everything blocked. We should have understood that it was over and run away. I'm not so sure.
Did I want to leave or not? I don’t really know. I just wanted to be the one to tell the rules, to lay down the law, me and no one else. For once I wanted to be the one. Deborah, instead, interfered. Usually she is a perfect partner. That day, the day of my birthday and of the slaughter, she did everything wrong.
"Stand still, stand still or I'll kill you all!"
I see myself, I am there, I shout and shoot. Tatatata... but I don’t really kill them. Because now I can’t get my record and I am pissed off too. I just break the glass and I don’t know why. I no longer remember the list, oh God, I don’t remember it. I knew it by heart and now I no longer know what to do. What might the right choice be? Leave or go back and kill them all. Run away from the corpses, to St. Peter'
s, pretending to be a tourist on a school trip, or stay in the school and wait until the end, the one we had decided early on that Sunday afternoon in my house, with Liga singing "What time is the end of the world"?
There we were, me and Deborah, looking with worry at one another, guns in hand and no desire to continue that game. Eleonora, Luca and Alessandro, even Mrs. Rossigni on the floor, lifeless. I had my heart in my throat and I was foaming with anger. We went out in the corridor, that shitty all-white corridor with the doors of all classrooms, those too as white as snow. Ahead of us the stairs, the escape route, the only possible one. A second would have been enough to slip away. The school, sometimes I didn’t even think of calling it that. It was a small hotel before we came. And on its walls an air of briskly recovered space still hung, it’s not like it seemed a place to study and be good guys, in spite of all changes and work done quickly. Mrs. Maresco, the headmistress of my boots, always dressed as if she had to go to a meeting with the Minister, over the years had the walls plastered by social posters, like "I don’t do drugs", "I don’t drink when I drive", "I don’t do this", "I don’t do that". They would give a rash to a sane person. There’s nothing else than prohibitions and punishments in the life of a high-school student. Every time we went to some theatre, some event, the distinguished principal with half-black half-white hair came back with at least two or three new posters and hung them in the corridor. Deborah and I once started scribbling on them and she sent me home with a report. Dad, however, never saw it, I signed it myself.
Come on, I am in the corridor of the prohibitions, with all doors closed in front of me. I see and I see again myself. Shit, I wanted to make a slaughter but I could not. Deborah followed me like a puppy. She only said in a low tone, almost in a whisper, "Silvia, we must go. We must run away, I don’t want to die."
And I didn’t want to run away, not before I was finished, before I had closed my account with history. That's when I thought, Debby wait here, I go back to the classroom and see what happens, if they are afraid of me or they are laughing because I am gone, if they have at least a little fear or they keep seeing me as an absolute nonentity. Because closed doors make me even more angry. When I was little, my parents fussed a bit with me and then went to sleep, barricading themselves inside their bedroom. I was never allowed to lie on the big bed with them. What a memory, dammit. It must have been twelve or thirteen years ago. One night I approached their bunker because I could not sleep. I wanted the stories that only my mother was able to tell me. But the door was locked and I cried. I knew they were in there, I could hear them whispering. No one deigned to come and see how I was and what was happening. I crouched on the floor and stayed there, with the pillow under my head. In the morning I felt my father taking me in his arms and taking me to bed gently. He said "We shouldn’t do this anymore", but he was not speaking to me, he was looking at Mom, who had finally repented. That day they were nicer than usual with me. Come on, fuck it! They could fuck when they brought me to the kindergarten.
If I had followed Deborah, the day of the slaughter, when it was still possible and she was pleading with her eyes and words; if I had listened, if I had listened to the best part that hides in me, maybe I could have saved Alessia. But instead I followed the angry Silvia, the one who can’t forgive and forget. I went back to the classroom, it was the only open door left. I saw Alessia near Eleonora and I lost my mind. I made another mistake, because it was useless to shoot her. Completely useless. Alessia was a quiet girl. She never treated me badly. She lived for music and she even liked Ligabue. We talked about it. I remember that she made me listen to "The day of pain that one has" with the earphones of her iPod. It’s a song that says something like: "when did you realize that you will never go back... when this shit around will always be shit... that life is much more than easy". He's right. No turning Back. I just wanted to leave this place one day. Deborah, where have you gone? I know, I know that we’ll meet again, maybe inside a tear "... and we’ll ask the world what harm have we done to stay here..."
Giorgia docet.