Young and beautiful
"But I have her picture in my imagination,
heroes are all young and beautiful, heroes are all young and beautiful."
("La locomotiva", Francesco Guccini)
One, two, three, five, seven. Inspector Renato Pascucci still could not believe it. He kept thinking about those bodies lying on the ground, the faces of kids in shock, desperate parents, shocked teachers, stunned by feelings of guilt and anxiety and repeated that never in his professional life, he had had a case like that. He had known murderers and rapists, aristocratic thieves and petty criminals, refined drug dealers and defrauded care workers, he had seen accusations go and bounce back to where they had started from, child prostitutes and raped teens, but he had never found himself in front of a school devastated by a slaughter, made by and of minors moreover. Never before he had seen such horror. Sort of a nightmare come true. Days and days hearing the same words over and over, complaining with the world around, going up and down between the school and the office, running, targeted by reporters. Even the Minister of Internal Affairs, the most excellent honourable Dr. Mario Montanari, had called him on the phone, in person, not through his secretary, asking for an explanation and an immediate resolution of the story. His voice was grave and composed. The voice you'd expect from a statesman. A few dry, firm sentences.
"Parents must send their children to school safely, you understand? The idea that now you can shoot comfortably in a classroom, or even that I should send military at the entrance of each institution, cannot pass. Put order in this case, as soon as possible. At least find out how those two deranged girls found guns. Someone must have given them to them, don’t you think? It’s not so easy to get weapons in Italy. We are not in the United States. There they are accustomed to slaughters in colleges. Find the criminal who gave them guns. As soon as possible. We should make a point... I repeat, as soon as possible."
The inspector had mumbled a "I will", turning off the phone with a vague sense of discomfort. The most excellent Dr. Montanari certainly had not officially said that his job was hanging by a thread, he had not threatened to transfer him to some distant place, but the tone allowed no argument. It was all implied. It was implied that public opinion must be appeased, it was implied that he was to find a way to do that. Immediately. Pascucci shrugged, resigned, leaving the phone on the table. He had never liked the power, neither he liked orders. And now, in front of the mirror, while struggling with his tie, Renato thought, with both rage and tenderness, about the day awaiting him, the words he had to say, the questionings he had to make, and especially about Silvia and Deborah. About the secret those girls were taking away with them, without appeal. About the death they had sown. About their children faces with too much make up. Their children faces, despite everything. As hard as he tried to understand, to find a reason, any explanation, the way the tragedy had grown was still an enigma. He could not understand. More than thirty years of age difference, the social role, and especially the choice of the side, dug a deep chasm between them. Silvia and Deborah were two drugged girls shooting on their classmates, he was the inspector who, if necessary, brought children to the juvenile court. They only had in common the love for Italian music and the fact that they had entered, overwhelmingly, as protagonists, a page of the town history that it would be impossible to forget. Silvia and Deborah and the other friends – innocent teenagers that should only have opened their curious eyes on life, and that instead had closed them for good – somehow had become legends.
"Heroes are all young and beautiful", the inspector repeated to himself. But he felt like a man rather dramatically plain, and it was a bit sadder when he looked in the mirror, dressed as a bank clerk. He wore important suits only for exceptional events. To go to work, among people, he preferred long-sleeved polo shirts, or shirts left sportingly undone, the only things allowing him to keep his pretended dynamism that made him feel in step with the times, closer to the world he had to face. Yet that day, for the funeral, he had forced himself to wear a sober black suit. It was a debt he had with the children. So dressed up, he was even ready to face the risk of being recognized: at best it would cost him an embarrassing conversation with family members, teachers and nosy people. They would ask him, with words suited to the occasion, how investigations were going after one week from the slaughter, how could that have happened, and why. Inspector Renato Pascucci – a life spent chasing thieves and criminals, solving puzzles and murders in one of the most affluent and tourist-friendly areas of the capital – would not know how to answer, which indications to provide, how to change the subject of the conversation. At worst, however, he would be surrounded by reporters, armed with cameras and microphones, they too increasingly younger, more and more relentless, in search of a scoop to break through. "Give us a comment at least", they would tell him, pleadingly surrounding him. He would avoid them, running, extending his hand like shields to protect himself from the lenses of the cameras, without saying a single word. There would come a time for statements and press conferences, explanations and comments. They just had to wait. Just wait and investigate.
"Heroes are all young and beautiful", he repeated, and inevitably he caressed his son, Stefano, with his mind. The memory was still there. "But I have her picture in my imagination", Guccini had written. He too had just to close his eyes to see a tall boy, holding a guitar, come through the door, ash-blond hair ruffled on his forehead, as if he had just got out of bed. He too fond of music like all teenagers, ready to strum up mixed chords until late at night.
"So, Dad? Will you take me to the match Sunday?"
And he chuckled, he who had to patrol matches, making sure that other young men of his child’s age did not hurt themselves, did not come to blows or, even worse, used iron bars.
"Again? Why don’t you go with your friends, Stefano? You know that I must work."
"But I'd like to go with you once."
"I work, definitely I can’t take a day off to come with you at the match. Do you realize that you're grown up?"
"You're right Dad."
Ah so he went, disappointed, with the slow gait of a bored bum. At sixteen, what can you do beside going to school, dreaming of the holidays and of a sunny afternoon enjoying goals? Renato only had to re-open his eyes, and then the whole scenario changed, the memory began to twitch without hope, then became outlined. He arrived at that afternoon, a different sun, different words. They had brought him in an emergency car to the Aurelia Hospital, in a hushed silence that already said everything. Sixteen years, far too few to go. The inspector had never resigned to that goodbye, sudden, unexpected, unfair. He had stood, frozen, staring at a bloodstained sheet. Even then, who knows why, he thought about "The locomotive". He had brooded about that song of Guccini for years, it always rose from his guts at important moments. The anger of a man against the locomotive, against the progress which changes myths and steals jobs, the anger of those who cannot find a place in society. You have to be young to feel it and keep it going. He had felt it when he was studying law at the Sapienza university, and there was the movement of '77. It wouldn’t have taken much to slip by the terrorists’ side, the side of those fighting against the power. But inspector Renato Pascucci hadn’t. He had chosen the right door, decided to fight in the name of the institutions, of the law, to change the rules. In the book of dreams of a twenty-year-old, he saw himself as a kind of Robin Hood, ready to fight injustice and punish the rich. His revolutionary idea, he knew, had then been overwhelmed by events, sank back behind the reality, the lost causes, the times he had failed to take the guilty to justice, or even worse, he had seen them acquitted on the benches of the tribunal. But you cannot die at sixteen. It is then that you strongly feel the unfairness of life.
That morning, seven days after the "girls slaughter" – so reporters had called it in their nine-columns titles – the anger of the locomotive was again his own. He would have gladly thrown himself under that train, as a p
rotest against the age of Youtube and kids toting guns, sort of a modern Don Quixote, who must fight against a reality he doesn’t understand and cannot stop. And now, he even had to attend the funeral. Suffer once again the smell of incense and the bells tolling, see again tears and black dresses, pity parents on the verge of fainting, take upon himself screams and unspoken words. He knew well the alienating agony of that day, as long as a lifetime. No, there wasn’t Stefano to cry for this time, but the hushed "it’s impossible", whispered in a low voice, the amazement in the eyes, the stunned surprise death brings when it comes unexpectedly – a moment that can stop tomorrow forever – would be the same. He would find other children in the church, other anxious eyes to comfort, other parents bent by fate or by a cruel God. Five coffins together, and he had never seen so many. Boys and girls of fifteen and sixteen, along with their teacher, a woman of his own age, just fifty-two. And for him the tragedy would not end there. There was another teenager at the morgue, still to be buried, that Deborah already condemned by the events. Certainly they would not reserve for her a funeral with so much fanfare. Soon, her accomplice, Silvia, the mind behind the slaughter, would follow her. The diagnosis of the primary of the Santo Spirito hospital was clear: irreversible coma. Dr. Spezziani had looked Pascucci in the eyes and told him, spreading his arms: "Don’t expect any truth from her. She will never talk again. It's a miracle she even breathes."
The inspector increasingly felt like screaming. He knew pain very well, the pain of a tortured parent, of a mother ready to commit suicide rather than face the loss, of tears filling the hours, memories like a dead weight that will not leave you anymore. Empathy, that was what he felt. But he didn’t know how to contain five devastating pains joined together. Not to mention the desperation of classmates who would come en masse to fill the church of Santa Maria in Traspontina, a stone's throw from the Vatican on Via della Conciliazione. Even the Pope, in his general audience, Wednesday, had had words of sympathy and outrage for that massacre. "Watch your young, love them, protect them", he had said, raising his arms to heaven. Such a tragedy, Pascucci had never even thought it could happen, in Rome, at a good school, attended by the children of the middle-class families of Prati-Borgo. He felt the eyes of the world upon him. He owed answers to all.
"Then you really decided to go?"
His wife Paola had come quietly into the room, a cup of coffee in her hand. She was turning the spoon with a carefully absent-minded air.
"Of course."
"It will be tough."
"I must go."
"Poor children, I can’t even think about their parents. Why do you think they did it? I mean, what drives two girls to kill their classmates?"
"I don’t know... a dare... anger, sorrow, envy, stupidity, recklessness. And then for me this is really the least of the problems. Who gave them the guns? How did they plan this? I have to find out, if I can... oh, well, I hope to find some answers, to put an end to this. I'm tired. You know that yesterday a crew of El Arabia, the Arab television, wanted to interview me? Can you believe it? Ah, I always say it... heroes are all young and beautiful."
Paola had handed him the cup and sat on the edge of the bed, her hair still dishevelled from the trauma of waking up, her eyes half closed, her blue dressing gown innocently open on the pyjamas of the same colour. She raised her eyebrows in surprise. Fifty years had passed on her in anger, like a cyclone. The death of Stefano had done the rest. It had stripped her of all charm. Thus cleansed, with wrinkles prematurely marking her face, she looked like one of those old ladies found in small towns, sitting outside the door, watching the world go by and making comments.
"They're not heroes."
Renato had turned to look at her wearily. They did not understand each other. Maybe he should just give in to reality. They had nothing more to say to each other. Stefano had taken away the reason of their being together as well.
"Actually, I was talking of their classmates."
"They too are gone."
Her wife never used the word "death".
"The killers? One is still alive. She’s in a coma in hospital."
"And their parents?"
"Like us."
"Don’t you dare. Stefano was a good kid."
"Yeah."
She had stood up resolutely, she wanted to move away quickly from her husband and his looming presence. Paola just needed another day of nothing to taste to the last bit. That slaughter of teenagers made her feel bad, even more than usual. It reopened her wounds, leaving other unanswered questions. She just had to find ways to pass the time. The house to clean, clothes to be washed, shopping at the supermarket. Like an automaton, go, come, give a faint smile, pretend. Pretend to live when she was now only borderline, in perpetual oscillation between the present and the past. No future. The future had been taken away by a car accident, one Sunday in July, at the sea. She had not even a reason left to feel guilty. Even that privilege had been denied to her. What could have been her fault? Her complicity in what happened? Sure, she might have refused to buy her son a scooter, but it would have been like wrapping him up in cotton wool, preventing him from living like any other sixteen-year-old boy. And Stefano had insisted so much.
"I will use the scooters of my friends, I swear. I'll be sitting behind on the saddle and it’s more dangerous. I'm not a child. I always wear a helmet, respect the law, don’t drink and don’t do drugs. Why can’t I have a scooter like everyone else? All of my friends have one. Why not me?"
He was a good guy, Paola said to comfort herself. A really good guy. He hadn’t been stopped by drugs, a gun or a human error. Only by fate. That Sunday, for some reason, perhaps blinded by the sun, he had skidded on two wheels and ended up crashing against a tree on the Aurelia. Paola was at home, watching television, her husband at work. They had gathered them at a run with a squad car, wrapped them in white lies for the whole trip, taken them to the hospital, accompanied them into a private room, close to the small local emergency room. The news, the chill, the horror of that moment. She could not remember anymore what she had said or how she had fallen to the ground. She only heard her scream, that "no" she had cried against the sky. For the whole trip she had been hoping to find Stefano alive, perhaps injured, but alive. Her child to comfort and hug, to hold and take care of. All those useless words whispered by Renato’s colleagues. There was nothing left to hope for. If I hadn’t said yes to the scooter, if I had prevented him from joining his friends at the sea, if... All of the ifs in the world were useless. Paola knew that, they would not give her child back to her. That was when she had stopped believing in God. She had replaced him with drugs and sleeping pills. She used them to sleep at night, sometimes, secretly, even during the day. They gave her the strength to go forward. Dazed perhaps, but present.
Six years later, for her, it was as if time had stopped. Stefano was still around, hovered in the house. Paola would never admit that to anyone, but she knew, she felt that he was still alive. Present. Sometimes she distinctly heard his voice in the hall, deep and nasal.
"Mom, have you ironed my blue sweatshirt? I'm late. Where did you put my socks?"
She no longer ran to look for him, as in the early days, when she roamed the rooms, breathless, wandering as if possessed, chasing that whisper. She opened doors and looked around. She even looked under armchairs, behind curtains, inside closets. Stefano was there, she felt it, hidden somewhere, ready to come out if only she had found a way to locate him. Then and only then, she would be able to look in his eyes again, hug him, cry for joy, come out of the nightmare. Instead, each time she ended her desperate race in her son’s bedroom. There she stopped, astonished. There she awoke from the dream. There lived the memory. Everything was like it had been that Sunday, the bed linen immaculate, the books resting disorderly on the desk, the guitar in a corner, the signatures book of the day of the funeral. Then, and only then, Paola understood again that he was gone forever, and she threw herself on the floor in tears. When she got up, w
hen the storm of grief and madness left her free and returned her to the world of the living, she felt powerless and she put back the mask on her face, to become again the good wife, silent and discreet. She had nothing more to say to Renato. It just took ironing enough of his shirts with more zeal than usual to make him happy.
Six years after, Paola had learned to mastered both her husband and her son. When she heard the voice of Stefano chase her around the house, she brought her hands to her ears and repeated that it was just a fantasy. She suspended any activity, she remained with the iron in hand, or the broom suspended motionless in the air, and breathed hard, containing the urge to reach out to that whisper, look once again for her child, hug him, hold him, look into his eyes, smile for nothing like when he was so little and she changed his diaper, and he kicked the air making the verses that newborns make. She had convinced herself that the mysterious sounds she heard from time to time in the house were only one final act of love. Stefano, from the mysterious galaxy that had swallowed him, just wanted to let her know that he had not abandoned her, that he was there, always and no matter what, that he had not cut the umbilical cord. So Paola whispered softly "Ste", and she sat in the armchair, motionless but with all senses alert, hoping to glimpse a shadow, a light, a nod. She let hours pass, dreaming that he could show up again. In silence. The tears, her tears, stopped just inside her eyes, they did not even have the strength to roll down and wet her cheeks. She did not say her son's name in full, she no longer whispered to her husband, as she had done the first few times that Stefano had visited her. She was afraid of being considered mad, she was afraid she really was. She remained motionless, reaching for nothing. Only her son could take that posthumous caress.
"Yeah", she echoed her husband, at the door, slipping quickly away without another word.
"I will not come for lunch. Maybe even for dinner, I have to work like crazy these days", Renato called after her.
He neither turned to look at her. He was distracted. He had stopped long since to worry about the mental health of the woman, had long since ceased to care for her. At first yes, the first few days after Stefano’s death, he had tried to hug her, to share emotions and words. But Paola was too far away and he was, in turn, on the brink of madness. For days he had not shaved, he had not washed, he had not gone to work. He had dug a furrow in the bed in the time spent looking at the ceiling, looking for the image of his child. He saw him on the soccer field, running, with happiness and physical exertion showing on his face. He found him again with the guitar in hand, asking him for an explanation about some chord, or in the car, singing along to songs of De Andrè after an old cassette player. Renato cried, silent. Paola stirred in the room, silent. She never approached him. She cried and ironed shirts. Sometimes she confided with a wink to Renato that Stefano had returned and talked to her. He looked at her and raised his eyebrows. They never touched, intimacy belonged to a bygone era. He was afraid to touch her, to take her suffering on his shoulder too. He was afraid they could infect one another with the disease death brings. Then, by tacit agreement, she had stopped telling him about her hallucinations and Renato was back at work, dressed as an inspector, washed and perfumed. As if it all had been just a bad dream. Only his hair had turned white at once, had lost consistency and vigour. And Paola’s face had gathered the signs of aging, wrinkles suddenly scattered around her eyes and lips. The loss of a son is something devastating, a wound that splits you in two. It doesn’t heal, you don’t accept it. You just learn to live with the pain like you do after an amputation. In the evening at home, after dinner, Renato watched television in the living room while his wife was busy in the kitchen, with another TV on, showing some family drama. At night the bed was a parade ground in which it was impossible to meet, one facing left, the other right. In silence they had also chosen never to go to the sea. Not to go anymore, not even by accident, along the Aurelia.
"Heroes are all young and beautiful." Renato had sung that song a thousand times, thinking about Stefano, and with that quote in mind he had begun to write his first poem, an evening in late October.
"To you, my son, who were young and beautiful..."
An inspector who sings songs and writes poetry is not quite normal, he told himself, blaming himself, but then he acquitted himself. There are inspectors who write novels and even become famous, and there are those who go fishing. He had the soul of an artist in a body devoted by choice to law and order. A modern-day Cyrano, with his uniform hiding the inner passion. And the poet who lived in him would not stop fantasizing.
"I'll never know how you would have been as an adult", he thought, stopping in front of a picture of Stefano, a giant poster showing him while strumming the guitar. Paola had wanted to place it right in the bedroom, near the mirror.
The whole house spoke of the dead boy. His wife had scattered pictures and memories in every room, even in the bathroom, on the medicine cabinet, she had built an altar. Every day the woman lit a candle, each week she replaced the bouquet of fresh flowers in the bedroom of the boy. There was always a special occasion. It became impossible for Renato not to continually think about that child of whom they could not talk. He left home, mentally picturing his face. They resembled each other physically. How would he have been, now, at twenty-two? What faculty would he have chosen? Would they discuss about politics, the destination for holiday trips, and for his friendships? He speculated about the subtle pleasure he would have felt when accompanying him in the morning to the exams, or in asking him with complicity, and only apparent distraction, "Are you coming back for dinner tonight?"
What had he done wrong? Why had Stefano gone? This thought sent him back to the collective pain that he was about to face at the church, in front of other parents suffering with the same pain. He owed them to do a great job, give them at least one certainty. Who had given the guns to Silvia and Deborah? How had all that ruckus been born, and why blood had been shed in the halls of a high school in Rome? Why? Finding answers would not change the course of history, but perhaps it would prevent more slaughters in other schools. And also, there must be a hidden guilty. Maybe more than one. He could already think about at least two accomplices of that execution: the owner of the weapons used by the two killers and the pusher who gave them drugs. He got in the patrol car, deep in thought, and went to the church, his heart pulsing in his throat. He had decided to arrive early, before the funeral cars, to avoid having to be escorted inside. He still had to do an effort to move within the crowd before the arrival of the coffins. White coffins, dragged with effort by the children who had survived the massacre, touched as they passed by, touched gently as you do with the effigies of saints, drenched with tears, in poignant, intense applauses. In the background, a slow dirge played on a guitar. It took a few minutes before the devastating procession could walk the length of the aisle. One, two, three, four, five. It took a few minutes before the church found again a semblance of order, studied by the direction of priests and teachers. With the parents of the victims slumped in the front row, holding hands, until they merged into a pain that had neither beginning nor end.
Hundreds of people thronged the entrance, the strong smell of flowers and lit candles invaded the air, a soft whispering filled the large interior of the church. On the left, halfway down the aisle, the statue of Our Lady of Mount Carmelo, with the child in her arms, was illuminated by a multitude of candles, lit relentlessly by desperate mothers and students, but what left truly breathless were the pictures of the children which dominated the place. On each coffin was resting a giant photo. The photographer who took care of group snapshots at school had made some small jewels, a work commissioned in record time by the principal of the school. The inspector lost himself watching those portraits, recognizing in each of them "his victims". Eleonora, the first from the right, had a beautiful face, with delicate features. She had curly red hair and intense green eyes. Almost all students had repeated to Pascucci that she was the real target of the slaughter, that Silvia a
nd Deborah had been targeting her since the first day of school. They had threatened and humiliated her. The girl who was smiling for the camera, instead, seemed quiet and happy, a young adult aware of her charm, confident in dealing with life. The coffin, at the foot of the altar, was completely covered in yellow roses and white daisies. Right there, in front of it, someone had placed a pink backpack, next to the sign written by her classmates: "We will not forget you."
The parade of coffins was impressive, Pascucci looked at it like at a nightmare. Next to Eleonora's coffin there was that of Luca, it too covered in red and yellow daisies. On it, the uniform of the Roma football club that probably the boy used to play soccer. There was also the captain's shirt, autographed. Luca was a boy of Moroccan origin, slightly dark skin, black, curly, and thick hair, dark, intense, cunning eyes, bold and lively. "A lively boy", the inspector told himself, looking at the giant picture. Then there was Alessandro, who instead looked like a bully, one of those you meet at the exit of the Olympic stadium, with a beer in hand and some joints hidden in the pocket of the shirt. He had a piercing on his right eyebrow and a gelled-up hairdo, following the fashion of the time. A challenging smile, eyes wide open to look at the photographer. At the foot of his coffin there were some roller skates, and a sign made by his friends: "We will always wait for you, your rollers and your jokes. The guys of Mole Adriana." The little face of Alessia made her look like a small child rather than a high school girl. Long black hair framed her face. She had a shy smile, and she looked scared. For her, too, many people had brought flowers, but this time sunflowers, and there was a musical score to soften the farewell.
There was no photo of professor Rossigni instead. Maybe none was found, maybe her death was shrouded in a sort of reserve, Pascucci found himself thinking. It was certainly on the background in newspapers and in the several TV specials. All articles and services concerned the teenagers. The collective trauma was still in the air seven days after the "girls slaughter". On the coffin of the teacher, the only mahogany one, wild flowers and several yellow post-it notes, handwritten by the students.
The inspector, sitting quietly on the benches of the left aisle, almost halfway in the church, to merge with the mass, listened in silence to the whispers and the insistent sermon of Don Mario, the priest, asking forgiveness and prayers for the two killers.
"They too are victims and they have already paid. One is dead, the other is dying. We are left with the bitter task of admitting we are to blame and ponder on the level of barbarism that we have reached."
Renato nodded quietly, turning slightly to look around. The boys of the fifth E were sitting right behind parents and relatives, most of them could not contain their tears. The teaching staff had found a place on the opposite side of the church. Dazed expressions, carved faces. He wondered whether it was right to ill-treat people already so tried by the events. They had a burden too heavy to carry. But the priest went on, inflexible. He was a tall and powerful man, with white hair, thick glasses and a confident speech. From the pulpit he was reading with professional vigour pages and pages, probably handwritten, integrating them with improvised parts. It was an important homily, Don Mario knew that. It was going to be in the newspapers. It would make an impression to the students.
"Where were the parents of these girls when Silvia and Deborah took the guns and left their houses? Where were their teachers when they planned to kill? Is it possible that no one noticed anything? I ask you to be alert and attentive in school, not to close your eyes to alarming episodes. I would like never to hear the word bullying anymore, I would like never to hear again threats and petty theft described as if they were pranks, goliardic jokes. That's where they lead, dear teachers and parents. Is it possible that young guys can keep taking drugs without anybody doing anything? That guys hit each other for some small change? That they hate each other because one has high heels and makeup and another chooses to wear sneakers? What kind of world is this? Is it possible that we still hear about boys offended by a different colour of the skin? Is it possible that gangs of teenagers keep teasing the weakest, steal their pocket money, burn paper sheets in the classroom just to shoot everything with their phones and send the video to Youtube? Then shut this modern deviltry, or check the videos, filter them. Do your role as educators. Is it possible that we have to read about teenagers selling themselves to charge their phones? There are girls who let themselves be photographed nude at fifteen, do you understand? At fifteen, naked, for twenty dollars? I pray you to be careful. When we close our eyes to all this we are already guilty. I ask you to make one step back, parents and teachers. Stop, stop them. We are the first to be responsible for their behaviour, even when we choose not to see, not to comment, to be silent. We are all guilty."
Renato restrained a nervous movement of his body. He wanted to stand up and shout. Answer his own way. It wasn’t so simple. There are guilty in flesh and bones, he thought, ruthless people selling drugs outside schools, buying the dreams of little girls for a few euro, giving out weapons and cocaine, broadcasting videos in which people can learn how to make a Molotov or shoot, spreading the theory that the more you mistreat a poor wretch the more you become a hero. The guilty in flesh and blood must be exposed and condemned, Renato repeated to himself. They must be distinguished from the silent accomplices who simply record the dominant culture, and from the careless parents who are not aware of having a drugged child at home. What fault could Youtube have, aside from annotating inflexibly the progressive disruption of a generation adrift? You can’t sow the tares with the wheat, he told himself, breathing an anger that would soon lead him to leave the church and search, by every possible means, for who had given the guns to the two killers. He went back to hearing the priest carefully, hardly breathing the smell of flowers and incense. The homily had almost come to an end, he thought with relief.
"If you can understand this", Don Mario was saying, "you'll understand why I am asking you, on this day of endless pain, not only to pray for these innocent victims who are going today before God, but also for Silvia and Deborah, who are themselves victims and who are already paying for this unspeakable guilt. Forgiveness, this is what I ask. Forgive Silvia and Deborah."
His words fell into silence. Here and there, suppressed sobs could be heard. Nobody dared to say it was too early, no voice was raised to say, "No, not yet." Parents, students, teachers, onlookers stood still. It could be a sign of agreement or just respect for the priest, it could also be a clear sign of contempt. Renato Pascucci fidgeted on the bench, he feared an answer full of anger, a scream, a scene for which all of the hardcore journalists would have no pity, raising new controversies. He waited a minute, then calmed. The officers in plain clothes, discreetly scattered among the people in the church, drew in turn a sigh of relief. Nothing happened.
One by one, instead, the friends of the victims began to speak, called upon the altar to commemorate the dead. Greetings, fragments of memories, accompanied by silences and even some timid applause. Boys and girls with troubled faces, with notes nervously wrinkled in their hands. The attention of the inspector was drawn only by two of them. The first introduced herself as the sister of Alessia, the baby-looking victim. Claudia, that was her name, stood still on the pulpit, staring into space. She seemed to be looking far away, at a point lost in infinity, while tears fell without shame from her eyes. She took a few minutes before finding the strength to whisper her gaunt speech. She could be two or three years older than the other students. Long blond hair caressed her face, which look like a blade for how emaciated it was. Beautiful, of that kind of beauty that youth gives, a little Madonna of Sorrows, with a dark miniskirt worn with aplomb under a long black coat.
"Claudia is in pieces. She hasn’t been eating anything for a week... since the death of Alessia", someone whispered in the bench behind him.
"It must be terrible to lose a sister like that", another voice replied in a grave tone.
This, more than anything else, led Pascucci to l
ook at her carefully. Not the weight of the investigations – the desire to learn more about the children and their past – but the pain, the empathy.
"I never understood you, Alessia. We were so different. You played that damned piano with a love that I could not explain. You only troubled me, you made so much noise, you were always there, thinking about music... now, if you came back, I would leave you alone. I would let you play all the time. Forgive me, everyone forgive me... if you have someone you love, tell them, don’t waste time. How can I tell now to Alessia that I will even miss her terrible music? I love you, little sister."
The girl got off the little pulpit with a shrug. She hadn’t stopped crying for a moment while she had been reading her last farewell, in the general silence. Death carries along a cloud of unspoken words, a sense of guilt that no one can heal, a pain that you do not sew up. This was what the inspector was thinking, as he remembered how much he wanted to have said more to his son Stefano how he loved him, desperately, the way you can love only a piece of yourself.
Finally, it was the turn of a girl who looked like a pole, so tall and thin she was. She was dressed all in black, pants, sweater, even her coat and clothes made her look even more skeletal, another kind of embodiment of the pain, compared to the one Claudia had talked about. Her black hair was pulled back in a high ponytail. She was clenching her hands in punches that she let slip along her body. Rigid yet fragile at the same time. Something in her appearance made her look like a suicide bomber ready to explode, with dynamite hidden under clothes, on her stomach. There was in her the sense of death and yet the anger, the despair and the desire to end it, hate and love. She alternated words to tears. But it was in her intense eyes that you could glimpse a secret she would never reveal, maybe not even to herself. Inspector Pascucci remembered having heard her a few times in his office, even though he could not remember her name. She was a classmate of Silvia and Deborah.
"Sara, I am Sara", he heard her say in the end, with a faint low voice, amplified by the microphone. "Goodbye boys. Stay close and keep each other company... we of the fifth year love you so much and you will always be in our hearts, always. Eleonora, Luca, Alessia, Alessandro, professor Rossigni, we will miss you. Nothing at school will ever be the same without you, without Silvia and Deborah. I never, ever thought I would say goodbye to you like this. Nobody would have imagined. Perhaps we really are all guilty, as the reverend said... I would like to pray for my friends and their parents. I hope that one day, somewhere, we will meet again... let me say how sorry I am to be here, still alive... that if I had known, if only I had understood..."
She said no more. She walked away, crying, and jumped into the arms of a woman who had to be her mother, who was sobbing in turn like a raging river. The aisle was now illuminated by a mysterious beam of light coming from above. It came from an opening on the dome, kissing the flowers and the altar. A hidden choir of parishioners began singing softly "God is dead", and inspector Pascucci almost jumped on the bench. There was still Guccini to accompany his life. He turned and noticed that the kids knew the song and its words by heart. This too seemed strange to him. He decided he had seen what there was to be seen, and that he could not take it anymore. It was time to leave. The smell of incense made him dizzy, reopened hidden wounds that had never healed. He walked towards the precinct with crazy thoughts and he was happy that no one recognized him. Days of backbreaking work awaited, and he knew that he would bring only one dominant thought with him: what is the perception of death for a teenager? What do they feel or think when they decide to kill a peer? Do they really understand the harm they are doing, or do they think they are the stars of a TV show? Do they really understand what it means to die? Evil is a chain, it has a domino effect, starting from a point and going on endlessly, jotting down everything it meets. Silvia and Deborah, he was sure, had not even imagined this. And neither had that Sara, the little suicide bomber who must have sensed something instead. He decided he had to call her and listen to her again, enter her secret. Whatever it was.