After Vibo Valentia, the view of the vast golden arch of the Calabrian coast line is interspersed with noisy darkness: one tunnel after another. It looks like a film projected so slowly that you can see the black strips between the frames. Then the sea disappears, we’re inland, and between one tunnel and another round hills and monumental olive groves appear. We’re now passing under the Aspromonte: a tunnel that never seems to end, as dark as despair.
Ulli’s coffin was about to be lowered into its hole when an old man with hands deformed by decades of pulling the bell rope came forward. “I’d like to say something,” he said.
It was Lukas, the sacristan. In church he hadn’t gone up to the lectern next to the altar, like Sigi and the others, to carefully and vocally ignore the reason for Ulli’s death. I hadn’t done it either, or gotten up to take communion. I hadn’t taken it since the day when, after Vito had gone, the parish priest had welcomed my mother back into the flock, but more as a broken lamb then a lost one. Lukas had been the sacristan of the little church facing the glaciers for almost forty years but nobody was accustomed to hearing his voice. At first it trembled, then he gathered his courage.
“I would like to tell everybody what Ulli gave me.”
Surprisingly, there was a sudden, perfect silence, as though the most authoritative orator had taken the stand.
“But if my Anna were still alive I wouldn’t do it.”
The shock had turned into anxious curiosity, which, in Leni’s case, had become panic. Terrible revelations she hadn’t asked for had already first taken away a husband, then a son; she was now staring at the sacristan as though imploring to be spared.
But Lukas continued. Over sixty years ago, he said, when he was a child, there was a forbidden word, more than forbidden, in fact—unknown: Homosexualität. A clinical, almost academic word: it was astounding, hearing it spoken by this modest man who for decades had been arranging breviaries on lecterns, spreading incense on bigots reciting the rosary, rewarding with non-consecrated wafers children who’d been well-behaved during catechism. Truly strange.
“There was Fascism, but that was a word we didn’t even know in Italian.”
Lukas continued his story. When he was young he’d start sweating when he approached certain young men; but that never happened to him with women. At night, Lukas had strange dreams and confessed them to the priest who would tell him, “Say three Hail Marys and four Our Fathers and you’ll have normal dreams again.”
In forty years of marriage, Lukas had only ever been able to get close to his wife if he shut his eyes and imagined her to be a man. Anna didn’t blame him for anything, but she could sense something. She didn’t know that word either, however. Lukas was sure he was the only person in the world with that twist in him.
Lukas was the loneliest man who ever lived.
Only when Ulli had openly declared his own homosexuality had Lukas understood. Ein Homosexueller. So that’s what he was. And he was no longer alone since there were at least two of them in the world. Lukas was an old man, his earthly existence was almost over, his good, blameless wife Anna had gone. And so he had decided: nobody else should have to spend an entire life in loneliness, ignorance, and confusion, as he had done. He had to speak out. And now Lukas wanted to say it: without Ulli he would never have known who he was. And even though Ulli had lost heart and gone the way he had, he, Lukas, was certain that now the good Lord—with whom he felt he had an excellent rapport since he’d always kept His house clean—would welcome him kindly.
Around the open grave, nobody spoke. Lukas, too, fell silent. He’d finished. He threw a handful of light-colored soil on the wooden coffin about to be lowered into the grave. On top of it was placed the target with Ulli’s name, the one his father had riddled with bullets at his birth, like a gloomy prophecy. The sacristan walked away, his gray hair ruffled by the wind, with small, hesitant steps, perhaps not just because of arthritis. The undertaker looked around as though to ask if we’d finished. There was no answer, so he started his job. Little by little everybody left except Leni and Sigi, and I.
Beyond the graveyard wall, the glaciers had never seemed so near.
Sigi hadn’t said to Lukas, the sacristan, the filthy words that had killed Ulli. He stood with his head down, his wide hunter shoulders unable to bear this kind of load. I’d never have thought it possible, and yet I felt sorry for him
However, Vito wasn’t there to support me as I leaned against him, and say: you see, Ulli’s life wasn’t in vain. Vito hadn’t been there for many years, and wouldn’t be there for many more: but that was the day when, more than any other time before or afterwards, his absence was unbearable to me.
And finally, suddenly, it’s the end of the tunnels and the last knotty mountain at the tip of the boot, and we’re once again by the sea. We’ve really arrived: the train is running just a few yards from the water. Even though the ballast of the rails is protected by a stone breakwater, I’m sure splashes of saltwater must reach the windows at high tide.
The tiny station of Favazzina is squeezed against houses, neglected, dirty, covered in graffiti among which, in huge lettering: WELCOME TO FAVAZZINA HILL. Immediately afterwards, we go past another station just as small and helpless, but with a more evocative name: Scilla. And finally, there’s the red and white lighthouse of Villa San Giovanni, which states: the continent ends here.