I would like to write about Silvia but I can't. Every time I stop at the thought.
Writing is the only way I have to try to put things in order, and be sure that the faces don't disappear where it's too late to see them again. I would like to keep all of those faces, I would like to keep them by writing. But when I try to do it, I understand that nothing has value if I don't let things change, that faces become different from what I remembered. The face of someone I loved takes on the scars of another, friends swap noses, or the way they move hands. The words we said to each other are not our words, but those of two strangers I heard the other day in a shop. I have to misrepresent things to make them more truthful, and this is what I can't do with Silvia. So I won't just talk about her.
Silvia's face is a softened triangle. She has freckles. She has straight purple hair and dark eyes. On her eyes, for example, I couldn't swear; if I try to remember them, they seem to me to be dark: here's one thing about Silvia, that if I were able to reinvent her now, she would become credible and alive, even if she gave her green eyes; instead, relying on her memory, I have no certainty of any truth.
I met Silvia at university, but rather than knowing her, I watched her.
When I worked, I wasn't around much in Bologna: I went for exams and little more. I was sitting on the steps of the student bar, it was always November and the rumble of footsteps saddened me.
I looked at her for a year without ever speaking to her. I knew her name by chance, having heard two guys on the stairs chatting and saying "Silvia", realizing that they were talking about her. That's how I learned her name.
Given the shy nature I had, to approach her I would have had to force myself and construct a robust excuse, which I would not have been able to sustain; talking to her quietly, directly, didn't even cross my mind.
Thus we have reached the end of the year. At the end of the year, the street was hot and nobody was around. Classes were over, and the department was closed. But in that classroom in via Zamboni there was a professor waiting for anyone who wanted to validate the exam taken with him months earlier, when the matriculation booklets had not yet been delivered, and the mark marked on a provisional slip. I went there for that reason. It was the twenty-eighth of June of ninety-six, the courtyard was empty and full of sun, in the corridors much darker by contrast, and a janitor with disinfectant.
I entered the classroom, and there were only two people: the professor and Silvia. He seated, she standing in front of the chair. The professor looked at her distractedly, up and down, while he signed her booklet. He was one of those professors who flirts with female students; but I remember that from the way he looked at her I thought maybe she didn't find her as beautiful as Silvia was for me instead.
When she left, Silvia forgot her booklet on the teacher's desk. The professor noticed it, and without getting up he said to me: "Call her".
I looked out: she was finishing crossing the courtyard. I still had a little time to call her out loud, by her name, and she would turn away, wondering how I knew her name was Silvia.
I may have read his name in the booklet, but I didn't think of that excuse. I called softly so as not to be heard.
The professor closed Silvia's booklet and said: "Never mind, she'll notice and go back". He opened my libretto and looked at it, with the same absent-minded air: he had recovered from the tedium for a moment, and then nothing.
I saw Silvia again on March XNUMXth XNUMX, at the Link, for the Swans concert.
Over the years I've met various people who were present at that concert, and they all continue to swear, people who don't know each other, that they experienced that time the awesome sensation of being transported by the music to the point of detaching from his body and pick him up.
When the concert was over and the lights came on again, we were all walking around the hall stupidly, and the first person I saw was Silvia. This time I felt so shaken and strong that I called her name. She was dressed in red, and she had a red necklace that she touched the beads as she spoke.
"Strange thing," she told me, "until recently, if I wore anything that wasn't black, I felt bad."
She didn't have the contemptuous darkettona tone that you would have imagined for a year. She was a gentle voice, with a central Italian inflection. We talked about exams.
“I'm giving Film History,” he said.
“I just gave it,” I replied. “Which monograph did you choose?”
“German Expressionism” he said, and of course that was what I had chosen too.
We stood facing each other until the hall emptied. Then Silvia joined her companions, and I went to my parents. I didn't ask for her address or telephone number. There was no reason to take a wrong step, now that everything could change, meeting her in the student bar or in the corridor: because now I knew her.
I thought about her for weeks, every day, but I never saw her in the corridors again.
Today, eleven years have passed, I am listening again Soundtracks for the Blind while I'd like to write about Silvia and I can't: it's the last album the Swans made before breaking up, the album from that tour, and on the third song I remember the exact length of her hair, and the type of curve they did around the ears and next to the chin.
Then on XNUMXth July XNUMX, by chance, I was with a friend of mine at the Festa dell'Unità in Carpi. A band was playing that I didn't really like, but it was free, so the four of us went there.
Carpi, for Bologna, is out of the way. Or rather, both places are foreign to me, so I can't say, but that someone from Bologna, where there seems to be everything you need, picks up and goes to Carpi is bizarre.
In any case, I had been looking for Silvia for months where she must have been, continuously, and she wasn't there; instead where she shouldn't have to, Silvia was there.
I left my friend to talk to others and went to her. I don't know who she came with: I didn't see anyone with her. We chatted and danced side by side for a while, and when I decided that I couldn't stand the concert anymore and just wanted to talk to her, the moment I was opening my mouth Silvia said that that group bored her, and if we went to drink something.
Unity party was a beautiful place to chat with someone you were in love with, because you were in a T-shirt and you were fine, because there were so many people and it was wonderful to cancel everything else and talk to each other when there was so much around lots of people, and then it's true that there were neon lights, and music and a bar counter, but leaned as best we could on the wooden planks, in the midst of the smell of crushed grass.
Silvia said she was far behind with her exams; she wanted to catch up by giving four in little more than a month. She needed a ride back to Bologna that evening. I cursed myself because I hated driving, because I was so clumsy in a car that I avoided using it as much as possible. If I had been there with my car, I could have taken Silvia home, spent all that time with her. Instead, when we parted at the end of the concert, I had to watch her as she turned around looking for someone who could accompany her.
But first we said goodbye: Silvia caressed my left shoulder, and then my arm, and then my hand, until her fingers were pressed into mine.
Ten days later I had an aneurysm. I was on stage, with my band at the time, and while I was playing I felt a very strong blow to the head; I motioned to the others to cut the last three pieces, but they didn't understand why, and we finished the concert. I threw up afterward, in the beer hall bathroom where we'd gone in to celebrate and I couldn't drink anything but hot tea, and I threw up that too. Then I threw up next to my car. I drove home alone, driving, with blood pouring into my head, while I didn't know it. I lay down on the bed, face up, but the pain was getting worse and worse. I went to the bathroom to vomit again, I went back to bed, but after a few minutes I got up and went to knock on the door of my parents' room saying I felt like I was dying.
Mine woke up; through the crack in the door, the light came on amidst noises of surprise and daze, my parents spoke as they dressed, something I didn't mean, then my mother opened the door, and began to ask me what was wrong, if I I was on drugs, and I swore I didn't.
My mother took me to the Montefiorino clinic. The doctor on duty made me lie down. She asked me if I had caught something strange, but I was struggling to answer now.
"He says no" my mother said in my place and I thought, how sad, that now my mother doesn't believe me, how bad, that if I had taken drugs I wouldn't have any problem telling you, you don't think I would say, mom, while I'm behind to die. They loaded me into the ambulance and took me down to the hospital in Sassuolo.
At the Sassuolo hospital they didn't understand what I had. They went on for a week saying meningitis or whatever, and meanwhile the blood was pouring into my head, without anyone knowing, and they let me go free to walk around with an IV. Every time I got up to drag myself to the bathroom I was faced with a terrible pain in my head, with violent and recurring stabs, stronger than any other pain I have ever felt or imagined, and which I am unable to describe; to say that it was as if my head had been smashed with a toothed hammer from the inside is an attempt that is of little use, because it is trying to explain a sensation, which you have never experienced before, by comparing it to another that you will never experience. You have to draw from what you already know, to describe that kind of pain, but what you already know, lucky for you, there is nothing like it.
In the end, after an inconclusive week in the Sassuolo hospital, my parents signed to take me away.
At the hospital in Modena, on the other hand, they did the appropriate tests and they immediately said it was a cerebral haemorrhage: a capillary had burst and the blood had spread throughout the brain.
Those days spent in the hospital are another thing I can't reinvent.
I stayed more than a month in bed motionless. The first week I lost consciousness. Then slowly I began to improve, and to think that I would not die. I remember the faces of my boss and co-workers, which whiten every time they visit me. My face is strange for my father, who struggles to shave me. He says there's a ditch under the chin that can't be reached with a razor. My father's face is insecure and unprepared. I had never bothered to find those things on my father's face. At lunch he feeds me, and later on, when it seems I'm a little better, we laugh together, when on Sundays the priest is around to give the wafer, and I say to him: "Thank you, I've already had breakfast".
The priest introduces himself, meddles with my medical records hanging at the end of the bed, and tells us: “Campani… Campani… There was a Campani years ago, a priest in the mountains, in Riolunato…”. And my father, who didn't know that Campani and never knew anything about him, says: "The black sheep of the family".
The priest plays brilliant and is joking.
There's my mother who arrives hot, with her breath smelling of coffee; she makes me crave coffee even more. I tell her I'm abstinent from coffee, and it's a way of telling her that we look alike.
There are the faces of some old friends who disappear, who get consumed, like bricks that have landed on a beach, until they become indistinct sand. They send word every day that they will come, just like that, for no reason. I didn't expect them, but that's how I end up waiting for them, then they don't come. It's meaningless and in his own way it hurts, and yet, instantly, it's clear to me that it's nothing on the sickness scale.
I thought trivially, much later, that I came out of there knowing what really mattered to me, and what instead no longer mattered to me.
But already in there I remember exactly that several nights, starting to turn around in bed, not yet knowing if they would have to open my head and operate on me, I thought: "It's the best year of my life".
Then, finally, after the last exam they told me that the bleeding had been reabsorbed, it had dissolved by itself. They made me sit in a chair. After so long, sitting in a chair felt new. I had lost my tactile memory.
Other months I spent convalescing at home. September, October, part of November. I was sitting outside on the swing reading, as I didn't want to be alone, and I liked hearing the voices of the vacationers about to leave, and of my uncle in the vineyard, and of my grandmother. I was on the swing reading as the horse chestnut lost its leaves, and the curls began to fall on my legs, and I talked a little with whoever came to see me. I didn't mind closing the book and interrupting myself.
I resumed on the swing to study for exams. History of Modern Art, and a Supplementary of Cinema. I started imagining Silvia again. On November XNUMX, I returned to Bologna: there was fog, another world. From that day and throughout the winter, I've always looked for Silvia, but I've never found her. Sometimes I went to the Cinema headquarters and looked to see if by chance there were exam sessions that day and among the first names there was some Silvia, better if the surname was a bit from Central Italy.
In recent years there have always been times when I have thought about it. Then I wanted to write about her, but I never managed to.
I imagine her married, with two children. Her husband is a beekeeper.
I imagine butchery shops, broom escarpments, hang gliders that launch themselves from Mount Vettore towards the plain of Castelluccio, and land on the dry grass standing up.
I imagine her fat and resentful.
I imagine that Silvia is my guardian angel, and that that summer she dies in my place.
I imagine her leaving the university and returning home because of the earthquake in Umbria, to help her family, who can no longer support her. Or she simply can't make up for the exams she told me about and she gives up.
In any case, I never saw her again, and I will never see her again until I can reinvent her eyes.
. . .
Sandro Campani was born in 1974 in Vitriola (Modena). He grew up reading Steinbeck and Pavese, then Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor and Fenoglio. A story about him Spit on it, was published in 2001 in an anthology by Marcos Y Marcos. The debut novel is È sweet not to belong to you anymore (Playground, 2005). In 2011 you won the Loria Prize with the collection of short stories In the country of Magnano (Italic Pequod). His second novel The black earth, was released by Rizzoli (2013). This story represents a sort of prequel to the last published novel: Honey Tour (Einaudi, 2017).
