I

In the beginning was the void. Then the void contracted, becoming smaller than the head of a pin. Was it by its own will or did something force it? No one can know. What is too compressed, in the end, explodes with furious rage. An intolerable glare came forth from the void, dispersing into space, so that there was no longer darkness above but light. From the light the universe gushed forth in crazed splinters of energy projected into space and time. Racing on and on, they formed the stars and the planets. Fire and matter. This could have been enough but it wasn’t. The molecules of amino acids continued on, millennium after millennium, transforming themselves until life was born: microscopic unicellular beings that, in order to breath, needed bacteria. From there, from those primordial pools, with a progressively ordering movement, each living form had its origin: the large cetaceans of the depths and the butterflies, the butterflies and the flowers that host their larvae. And man, who stands upright instead of walking on all fours. From four to two things change. The sky is closer; the hands are unencumbered; four movable fingers and an opposable thumb can take hold of anything. And then freedom, dominion over space, action, movement, the possibility of creating order and disorder. Meanwhile, the universe opens and the stars grow ever more distant, racing to the edge like balls on a billiard table. Was all this the work of someone or did it go forth by itself, with the inertia of an avalanche? It is said that matter has its laws­––at that temperature, under those conditions, it could not have made anything other than this, the universe. The universe and the miniscule galaxy containing, suspended, the flowering garden of the earth. Some hundred species of plants and animals would have been more than sufficient to transform our planet into something different from the others. Instead, there are tens and tens of thousands of different forms of life. No one person in a single life could learn to recognize them all. Waste or wealth? If matter has its laws, who then made the laws of matter? Who made order? Anyone? A god of light? A god of shadow? What spirit nourishes that which, programming the life of a thing, also programs its death? And then what importance can it have? We are in the middle, constantly pressed between the two principles. A fleeting form of order, cells aggregate into our body, into our face. Our face has a name. Our name a destiny. The end of the journey is the same for everyone. Order becomes sporadic, turning to disorder. Enzymes depart with their messages and find no one to welcome them. Messengers of an army that no longer exists. All around is only the deaf silence of death.

Order, disorder, life, death, light, shadow. From the moment in which I became aware of my existence, I did nothing but ask myself questions, questions no one could answer. Perhaps wisdom means simply not asking yourself anything. I am not wise and never have been. My element is not quartz but mercury. Unstable, mobile, feverish matter. The quick silver that is forever destined to move. And always in disorder.

Such were my thoughts as I leaned against the gate of the cemetery, waiting for my father’s corpse. It was cold, windy. The only birds able to brave it were the crows.

The city services van arrived late, shrouded in a black cloud of diesel fumes. “Where’s the priest?” they asked as they unloaded it. “The priest isn’t coming,” I answered.

Everything happened quickly. The loculus was already open. The men hoisted up the coffin and slid it inside, then ceiled it with a white marble slab. They used a drill to fasten it shut. That and the cawing of the crows were the only sounds.

Instead of making a speech, his three friends –– the only ones still living –– started singing something that sounded like the Communist International. They sang faintly, as very old people do. The wind blew in short bursts, ripping away the notes as soon as they sounded. I watched them and they did not watch me. They carried three red carnations in their hands, holding them with awkward shyness like children who don’t know to whom to give them. There was a small vase outside the loculus, but it was too high to reach. They looked around, hesitating, then opened their fingers and let them fall to the ground. It had rained during the night. The mud on the ground soaked the petals. They were no longer flowers but garbage.

We left, one by one, our eyes on the ground. In front of the cemetery gate, I gave a tip to the sextons and without saying a word shook hands with his friends. To the south, the leaden color of the sky was breaking into a lighter streak. Everything was over, closed. Forever.

My father was over six feet tall and weighed some two hundred pounds. He wore enormous shoes. As a child I would put my feet inside them. For me they were Polynesian pirogues, not shoes, and with the carpet beater as an oar I would make circles around the room.

He was born a few years after the Great War. He had lived with his massive body through the majority of the century. Along with him went his gastric juices, his cerebral neurons with their branching dendrites, his heart with its ventricles and auricles, the come-and-go of his arterial and venous blood, his bones and tendons, the spongy walls of his lungs, and the smooth, slick sides of his intestines. For eighty years that ensemble of functions that responded to the name Renzo had moved in time and space. It had fought for some things, against others, it had screamed and shouted, and it had consumed an unspecified number of gallons of alcohol. It had made my mother live in terror and entertained friends at the local bar; it had put a son into the world. And that very son, that very morning, had buried it, with a tip for the sextons. The son was not sad but bewildered. Maybe it’s always like that when the last parent passes on. All of a sudden you’re alone, and in that solitude a lot changes. You’re no longer a child. There’s no longer anyone to rebel against. The end that, in the order of things, looms on the horizon is yours.

My mother used to say that the world was made by God. My father maintained that God had been invented by the priests in order to keep people in line. Up to a point, I preferred thinking of something simpler, a conjurer for instance. One day I had seen a show in which a man had pulled a rabbit out of hat with the wave of a wand. After that, with the same wand, he had reassembled the fragments of a broken glass. With a wand, then, you could do a lot. Band directors used a wand. Waving it in the air, they transformed the confused black scribbles on paper into music that could make you weep.

I believed in the conjurer for quite a while. Then, from one day to the next, I stopped believing in anything. It happened when a classmate of mine died. He was riding his bike to go and get cigarettes for his mother. It was twilight and hard to see. A car struck him and he was caught underneath. We weren’t especially good friends. It’s just that the day before, he had let me use his eraser. All of a sudden his desk was empty and the eraser was at the bottom of my satchel. There was no one to give it back to anymore. That’s it. First there was Damiano. Then, in his place, the void.

We had gone to the funeral in our school smocks and ties, the oldest two boys carrying a large wreath. We passed in front of his house on the way to the cemetery. His mother had forgotten to bring in the laundry. His pants and shirts were still there on the line, whipped by the wind like the flag of a vanished country. When the priest said, “We are thinking of your little smile up there, in the pastures of the sky,” I broke into tears. I wasn’t crying because I was moved but because I was angry. Why were they kidding us? I asked myself. He’s no longer anywhere. The eraser is cold in my pocket.

That day I realized that I was like one of those fakirs in India, who live for years perched upon the top of a pole. I was alone, sitting on the top of a pole, surrounded by the void. In my head, thoughts. Others were probably like this too. They just didn’t seem to be aware of it.

Once out teacher had explained to us that saprophytes were one of the foundations on which our existence rested. They could be vegetable or animal. Their function was to decompose all that had once had a life of its own. They broke down complex molecules into simple molecules. The ammonia, nitrates, and carbon monoxide of our bodies helped plants grow. Animals the plants, and we ate both the animals and the plants. The squaring of the circle. Before the absolute void were these tiny creatures, humble transformers.

While my father’s friends mumbled the International, it was of them I was thinking. I watched the three old men and wondered if they felt that anxious seething beneath their feet. They too in the end were nothing but fodder for the saprophytes, and deep down they knew it. It wasn’t appropriate or nice of me to think this, but I couldn’t get it out of my head. More than twenty years had past, but here again were all my childhood fantasies about death.

When my grandmother had passed on, my mother had explained to me that death was a kind of sham because you never die forever. “One day,” she had said, “the trump of judgment of will sound, and they will be a kind of great revelry. Then everyone will come out of their tombs.” I was troubled. I already knew about the existence of paradise, purgatory, and hell. So I wondered how such a thing was possible. When you died, you went up or down or you stopped for a while half way in between. It depended on whether you’d been good or not. What did opened sarcophaguses have to do with it? There couldn’t be anything inside anymore. I couldn’t see any reason why at some point you would need to rush back into your tomb as if forming up for review. Thinking about such a thing made me recall the mornings in which, though awake, I pretended to be asleep. I liked being awakened by my mother, so as soon as I would hear her steps, I’d close my eyes again. It was a kind of game. Maybe one day, to please God, all the dead people were just going to pretend to be dead. At a pre-arranged sign, from hell, paradise, and purgatory, in a great stampede they would all rush to the place they had been buried.

But even if that were the case, there were still practically insurmountable problems. I had seen how they had sealed up Grandma and I knew how small she was. How would she ever be able to get that cover off? For her even a toothpick would have been too heavy. And what about all those poor men who’d been blown to pieces on battle fields? The bodies of Pyrrus and Hannibal mingled with the enormous bodies of their elephants? How was it possible that, at the blast of a trumpet, everyone would be able to find his own parts? What if, in the rush, someone grabbed the leg of an enemy or an elephant rotula by mistake? Then what? Would he present himself to God like that? And what about the inhabitants of India, whom no one had warned about this, and who continued to cremate themselves? Could the ashes be resurrected too?

I got home after the funeral with these thoughts in my head and immediately looked for something to drink. There was only a half-bottle of sweet liqueur, which my mother had used to use for cakes. It no longer had any aroma, but there was still alcohol in it. I drank it from the bottle. I would have liked to lie down, but it wasn’t possible. There was just a skimpy vinyl couch.

I was sitting in the very same place, my feet dangling above the floor, when I had asked my mother, “Does the devil exist?” She’d been washing the dishes, and I could see her back with the apron tied at the waist. “What’s got into you?” had come her vaguely surprised answer. My question had been neutralized by another question. “Nothing,” I’d said, shrugging.

A few days later, I had repeated the same question to my father. He broke into laughter. “Of course he does,” had been his response. “The fascists are the devil.” It became clear to me then that none of them was able to give me an answer.

I often thought about that skeleton holding a scythe which was painted on the walls of the church. It was mowing hay, and hay was our life. If God was good, as they said, who had invented that skeleton? Maybe God was not so good. Or maybe he was good but distracted. Or maybe he’d had a bad day and on that day had created the devil. The devil and death.

When my mother saw me pensive, she would say, “Why don’t you go outside and play with the others?”

Now no one said anything to me anymore. I had come back home. The house was empty, and I was grown up. The questions I asked myself were the same as those I had asked when my feet didn’t reach the floor from the couch.

Once, at the Sunday movies, I’d seen Moby Dick. A fraction of a second before the white whale had burst forth from the water, the projector had caught fire. There’d been a flash and, immediately after, in the darkness of the hall, the white sheet had become visible again.

The scene came back to me as I thought about my past. What had happened in all those years?

I had escaped, run far away. In that flight I had deluded myself into thinking I could make a new life. Then I’d come back. Like a good son, I had buried my father and tipped the sextons. And with that tip I’d realized that behind me there were only burned film frames. The leviathan had neither died nor disappeared. It was still there, just beneath the water’s surface. Walking through the empty rooms, I could glimpse its silhouette––ominous, grayish, silent, ready at any moment to leap out and destroy all.