I killed Bambi
"Murder murder murder. Someone should be angry. The crime of the century. Who shot little Bambi? Never trust a hippie. ‘Cause I love punky Bambi."
("Who Killed Bambi?", Sex Pistols)
The music comes on strong. "Who Killed Bambi?" A ballad. Only they sing it like that. The Sex Pistols. I discovered them because of their name. I bought all the CDs I could find. Dad paid. Dad always pays for my culture. Whatever makes him happy... Ah ah ah ah. Sex Pistols, what an idea. The name goes right to my blood. It’s mine. I want it, I claim it. Pistols, sex, sex, pistols. Ah ah ah. Bambi! But Eleonora was not Bambi. She was just a bitch. A snob. I didn’t give a damn about her. Deborah, yes. Deborah was Bambi: defenceless, friend, sister. I killed Bambi, and God killed me. There is a difference. A fucking pain in the back. Something that could kill you. Ah ah ah. A hole as precise as a drill turning inside you. A devastating shout. Shit. It happened, it happened to me. I see only dark. Death. Dark and guns. Who shoots with me? Who shoots behind me? A man, a car, an army? Thanks God there is Cocaine. He looks at me quietly and purrs. He loves me. He’s is the only one in the world to see through me. The cat of the naughty little girl who now became the witch of fairy tales. Meow. That's me. Come on, what a blast.
Here, it’s another day. I don’t take it. I don’t cry. I'm sitting at the computer and playing. I het high. Go. One shot, then another and another. I keep the gun in my hand, take aim with the mouse. I practice. I must learn. It takes discipline to learn. The moving targets are moving. There is the red cross which is worth ten points, and then the bouncing circle. Here and there. Up, down, up, down. Every so often the coloured hands appear to distract you. You need to hit the mark. You have to be careful. You have a supply of ten bullets, when you finish them you press the R button. You reload. You can shoot again. But if you wait a moment longer, you lose your turn. Only the score appears, and it is low. I write my name, "Silvia", the game recognizes me, it knows everything. It analyzes my score, compares it with others. I'm good, I admit it. I'm among the top scorers. Silvia shooting, Silvia dancing with the gun. Silvia, Silvia, Silvia, here, this is my name and I had forgotten it, but the computer does not forget anything, everything comes to light. It's smart. You search inside it and discover the life of a person, who he was, what he thought, what he subscribed too, which marks he had in elementary school. The computer is better than Sherlock Holmes, if you know how to use it. Now that I think about it, I never searched for Eleonora. But it was not worth the effort. She was all the evil in the world. You don’t study bitches. You bring them down. First with thoughts. Then with guns. The true ones, those which go boom, boom, boom. "I shot the sheriff...", Bob Marley sang. I shot the sheriff, but I swear it was in self-defence. That’s what he said, I am sure. Give me my music at least. I have a right to it. I want it back.
I really don’t know how it started. If it was for the guns, the smoke or because we really wanted to. There was that little bitch in our class and we had to get rid of her. I thought that from day one. She came in looking like the princess on the pea, with red hair falling over her shoulders, a white Lacoste and trendy jeans. I even liked her shoes, the perfect white Converse with pink laces and embroidered flowers. A terrific physique. A living provocation.
"That one eats men", Deborah said in a whisper. I hadn’t even noticed her.
"Who eats whom?"
"That one."
Take the gun, take the gun right away and shoot the bitch, little Silvia. Get rid of the shitty girl who wants to bring order to the fifth E, the class of anarchy, peace and continuous pissing about. Everything dances in front of her, shapes and words, contacts and friends. I think about it. Friends. Fuck. And who are they? I had one, called Deborah, and now she’s gone. I shot her. I, myself. It happened a few days – maybe a few hours – ago and it was not at the computer. Here, I can see myself. I am in the middle of a room and the people around me is afraid. Silvia shooting, shooting and dancing with the gun. Silvia, Silvia, Silvia. I try to shed light and see better, I cannot. Everything around me is dark. A silence full of fear. But I'm not afraid. I am elsewhere. I pray. God of the universe, make all of the evil ones disappear. One shot and they go down, all fall down. And this is a ring-a-ring-o’roses.
This morning, inspector Pascucci came again, the eternal stoned. I felt his angry eyes on my face, my body, piercing me. I'm sure that his eyes light up when he sees me. I am his prey, his moving target. The game reversed. He does not have a gun, he has words. He slips them one after the other. He seems to be complaining, but it's an indictment. He says that I have to tell him about the weapon. Who gave it to me, who taught me to shoot. What did I have in my head and blah blah blah. He looks like a mad priest, such scary tirades. To me, really to me? Come on, go away, you are ridiculous. He says a flood of things, I am not hearing. I'm lying on the bed in this fucking hospital. Every now and then they remove the IV needle. Every now and then I have fun at the computer. Every now and then I dream. My world now is populated by nurses. Entering and leaving. They look at me with sorrow and disapproval. They come in and leave again. They check my temperature, take my blood. They are only shadows. I could delete them with the gun if I only knew where it ended. I keep thinking. Lord who created everything, give back to me my legs and voice. Let me get out of bed and pull me out of this nightmare. But nobody listens to me. I am always in the middle of the ring-a-ring-o’roses. I lead it. I dance and I'm good. Light, I hover in the air. Hip hop, the body loosens up, following the music, it wiggles. Electricity, I’m electricity, like Billy Eliott. I know, I can fly. Forward, backward, I bend my back, touch the floor. Fall on the floor. I am in the labyrinth, I run, run, so many rooms and I don’t know where the door to leave is, assuming that there is any. I feel like I am my cat when we sterilized him. He stood lying on the floor, motionless. For two days he refused food, moved aside if I tried to pet him. No purring, no cuddling. Nothing at all. Stop. Cocaine, the cat without sex, in love with his own pain. Oh Cocaine, I wish I could pick you up and make you purr, caress you with my hands, smoke a joint while you’re napping. Shit, I can’t do that anymore. I will stay here forever, lying on the bed. I'm already dead.
You die in many ways. Without realizing it. You die, period. I resume the game, now there are frogs, they pass by in groups, hopping, and you have to shoot. You shoots them in the head, and if you hit them they jump in the air, it’s very funny. Frogs running headless. They are green, the grass is yellow, so you don’t get confused. Crocodiles you shoot between the eyes, otherwise they don’t die. Their heads blow off too. They have no imagination, the ones who create these pastimes. And in the cemetery (this is nicer) you must hit the bandits, running, gun in hand, among the tombstones. The game name and atmosphere come from a film, titled "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly", and also has a music, the soundtrack by Ennio Morricone. Every time you hit it’s silenced. Then it starts again. Your opponents come right in front of you, you have to be quick. At the end, a guy with a hat appears and tells you that you have been good. You have won another game. I play it in English, it is in English only. When you're using your computer you need to know English, because all the information are in that language. I wonder why I understand them correctly. I even understand the Sex Pistols, but that's another story.
I look at myself, I don’t see me, I don’t exist. I'm seventeen and I'm trapped in a bed. Spinning around in my head. And it’s all off around me. Only dark. Nobody knows if I will heal, if I’ll be able to talk and walk again. If I will stand again and tell the story they want to hear, and say that I am sorry, that I didn’t know. This is what everyone is expecting from me; reassurance. They wait for me to say that I had gone crazy. That for a moment I had lost my head. So they could be at peace, they will not have to condemn themselves, take decisions, or think, feel guilty and forgive themselves, look beyond the wall that divides us. They will forget in a hurry, move forward. But I really don’t know on which side I am and on which side they ar
e. Too many years divide us. And even language. They have one, I have another. They don’t meet, don’t even collide. They move on two parallel tracks. Mine and theirs. My age and theirs.
Look at my father, who comes here and holds my hand, caresses my hair, and cries. I didn’t think he knew tears. Pain and defeat, yes, I always knew he had them in himself since when he lost Mom. But tears, tears stream down the cheeks of children when they got hurt. I thought he had lost them, but they slipped from his face to mine, like a flooding river. I felt them. I wanted to say "Con, so you love me", but I have no way of communicating with him. Poor thing, he makes me feel tenderness for him. But he says a lot of lies. He whispers nice words, and at the same time he thinks I am a monster, no, maybe he thinks he didn’t understand anything, that I am a stranger. Someone that one day pulled out a gun from the hat and started shooting.
"Silvia, Silvia, don’t die, come back to your dad. I love you."
He says that with conviction, I will end up believing him. But understanding one another, no, Dad. You are on another planet, each one of us is on a different planet. Even Deborah was on a different planet. And now I miss her. My little sister. Shit.
I'm back in the classroom, with the wild-eyed bitch looking at us. That Eleonora with ten and honours in Latin and Greek. She must be shoot in the heart. If you shoot at her heart you hit her and she falls down. Our classmates don’t understand, they wave in jubilation when I spurt jokes, and always know on which side to be. I'm the general, they follow me. They don’t think, they obey. They don’t know the Sex Pistols, but they know Vasco, yes, and Liga. They belong to these days, I am beyond. Eleonora is the outcast, the other, the rich, the swot who wants to divide and convert. They all realized. Immediately. The declaration of war was delivered instantly. I felt like a kind of Indira Gandhi. The true revolutionary. And her, miss Northern League, understood from day one where she had ended up and what was going to happen. We knew which was the toy of the new school year.
We always picks up a target on the first day of school. It helps to keep in practice. Last year, Debby and I had selected in the pile two twins of the first year, the sisters Chiara and Giada Whothehellknows. They were two absolute nonentities, and occasionally, just to keep in practice, we would have them give us their snacks. Sometimes we also stole the change they had in their pockets.
"If you say it to anyone", we threatened them, "we'll let everyone know that you ratted out and no one will talk to you anymore."
It was too easy, they didn’t even object. Not once they complained to their parents or the teachers, not a hint with the principal or the priest, who is the only one who can really make us the sermon. It wasn’t even fun to torture them, they seemed stoned. After a while we stopped looking for them. It really wasn’t fun.
The secretary, on the contrary, she was so hilarious, at least initially. Adrenaline? I don’t know. Mrs. heavy-ass, so called because she was constantly sitting, came to our school from the central branch with a letter of transfer in January. After the Christmas holidays, to be precise. In my opinion, she must have had a strange disease, because I remember her perpetually hazed. Perhaps she took tranquilizers or psychotropic drugs, I don’t know. Anyway, you could pass in front of her and she didn’t realize it. You could go into her office and make photocopies or take books and she didn’t even look up to see what was happening. One like that is a moving target. At least for someone like me. During the break, Deborah and I took documents from her desk, or moved her things around until she became hysterical.
"Who took the red folder with the receipts of payments?" she screamed going down the hall.
And everyone, without exception, came out of classrooms and laughed at her. Miss heavy-ass was getting on in years and her legs were too big to run. I still distinctly see her elephant-like calves covered by horrible black stockings that outlined them perfectly. Under the stockings she must have had hair like a boy, thick and straight, but we could not verify. She was short, say around five feet one, give or take one inch, and she dared sporting some disturbing hairdo, usually wave upon wave. To make matters worse, she dressed always in the same, depressing style; skirt, blouse and golf. Blue or beige, there was no way out. Come mid-April, we no longer saw her. She sent in a medical certificate and the principal explained to us that she would not return to school. She had chosen to go straight from sick leave to retirement, without striking a blow. In the end it wasn’t fun. With Eleonora it was.
She was different. Not only for how she dressed.
She was a swot, a terrible swot.
And toady.
She always knew what the teacher asked during examinations.
She had become, in a few days, the darling of professor Boschi.
Come on. She had to pay.
We waited for her outside the school. I remember it very well. She was walking straight, with the iPod in her ears. Obviously the latest model, very small, pink. Be quiet, Northern Leaguer. We explained her who was in command. And what was her place. But she didn’t understand anything. And that's why we decided to kill her. We had to delete her. We did.
Here, now they come to turn the light off.
I recognize the steps of the bad nurse. She has a heavy thread. She slaps the switch with violence and chases my father out of the room as if he were an illegal alien. I have the feeling that she’s getting convinced that the hospital belongs to her, that it relies on her, for better or for worse. One day I heard her arguing with the policeman stationed at the door of my room.
"It is useless to stay here, how do I have to say that? She cannot escape, we are here. And then, she is in a coma, you know? We don’t know whether she will ever recover."
She screamed as a woman possessed. And he even answered her.
"It doesn’t depend on me. Order of the inspector."
"We were just missing the sentinel", she replied in a huff.
That’s how I understood that I was hovering between life and death. And I saw myself: I'm turning around the Earth, hung from an IV drip. If nothing happens and they don’t remove the needle from my arm, I can stay here. But why should I? Of course my brain still works. I can tell day from night by the slow flow of nurses and noises. Now, for example, is time to go to bed in homes. And here, too. The voices that were strong and able to come thundering in my ears, now became a whisper, and the frenzy became quiet. Silence. Panic. It is time to curl up in bed and think, how did the poet say? Ah, here: "some people know the names of the stars by heart, I recites absences". That should be Nazim Hikmet. I studied him at school, he was a myth.
I have absences, I just have to organize them, arrange them, put them in place, waiting to open my eyes again and talk, stand up again. If I move my legs I do not feel them, better to say I cannot move them. My body goes on its own, detached from me. I should be afraid, I know, afraid of being on a wheelchair or worse, of dying, of never coming out of this coma. I should have some strong, devastating feeling, roll around in the bed, draw attention, scream that I hear them all. But I can’t. I am here, suspended, even with emotions. I just like to get high with my thought. To imagine being at my computer. That’s the real world, I talk, I can chat, I play, I study, I think. Me and it. The rest will come later. Now I feel my physiological needs. I pee automatically, without shame. Sometimes I even poo.
When the good nurse cleans me she pats me. She gently removes the bed-pan and whispers: "Poor creature. You're so skinny."
Her colleague gasps something instead: "When you wake up, brat, they will make you clean the shit."
What a bigoted bitch! She's so cowardly! She says these horrible things only when she thinks no one can hear her. I am sure that then she goes to the church and prays, maybe hoping I will find redemption. She’d better mind her own business. However, all things said, I prefer her over the good one. When they are together in my room, they talk about me. Free-wheeling speeches.
"Doesn’t this little girl have a mother?" the compassionate one said once as sh
e was removing the IV needle to put it in the other arm.
"It is clear that she doesn’t. She must be dead. If she had one, she would be here", the other one replied, muttering.
I started rooting for her.
"So that’s why she is like that."
"Like what?" I would have asked if I had still had a voice, and if there is a gift that I have never lacked is the ability to use words properly. I have the gift of gab.
"I think you are born like that, and that's it", the commander sentenced in a dry tone. She thinks she has innate knowledge. She is arrogant, hateful and angry with me.
"Do you think she will ever come out of her coma?"
"What do I know? I have no crystal ball."
The hag is tough. Convinced and of the utmost integrity. Come on, say it, say another little word, ugly old witch. She turns around, I hear her moving in the room, she removes the needle, puts it in again.
"With what she did, she’d rather die soon. As soon as possible."
The other one opens the window, a river of air comes in, caressing me. What nostalgia. God, how I would like to go for a walk. But what did I do that is so terrible?
"Death must not be wished to anyone", the good one says, and she closes the window.
The end of a moment. I'm immersed again in this soporific mud. Sleep, get high. I'm in the circle, they take me, raise me, throw me down. I am a doll for them. Two nurses all for me, still I'm alone, motionless, forced to listen and never reply. I must go forward. I don’t know where yet. Instead, they are gone, their aggressive steps on the floor, four hooves leaving. Clop clop clop. No one comes to keep me company. Not even Sarah. Only my father and the inspector. So nice! Two men all to myself. What else can you ask for? Redeem myself? Ouch, ouch. My head hurts, I feel it wants to break away from the body. It wants to go get cleaned up. A discharge. Like the frogs, like crocodiles. If you shoot, even my head jumps. Shit, Deborah, you had to do it, and instead you got lost. You left me to them. You betrayed the pact. We had an agreement. I trusted you. I got high with you. If you leave you're shit. You wanted it. All fall down, Deborah. Do you remember? Do you remember? I do remember you.
And the first thing that comes to mind is your voice, bullying, always a tone higher than the others. The way you talked attracted attention. Sometimes you talked like a clown, in falsetto, you sounded like a character in a cartoon. On other occasions you played acting like a teacher, then you became serious and melodramatic. You used your voice as if it were a camouflage, to hide the real you. You put the sunglasses on your nose, a bit sloping, and did your best impression of a psychoanalyst face. You had copied it from a movie.
"So you are suffering? And tell me, how much are you suffering?"
We laughed so much. We invented the levelmeter of suffering. From zero up. The maximum score was for the evenings alone at home as punishment. But only you got them, and they took away your computer, mobile phone and TV. Enough to be sent to an asylum. I've always said that you were born into a family of crazies.
"So you are suffering? And how much are you suffering?"
That voice now rings in my ears. I would do anything to turn it off. Not to listen. Stop Deborah, stop talking. I can’t take it, I have a headache. You drill into my head. I drilled yours. I can’t take it, please. I start playing again, one, two, three. I hit, I hit, I hit again. Silvia is my name, but I have not fallen yet. But I killed Bambi. Someone please forgive me...