Summer is our reason for living, but this one has been different. It wasn’t a time of screaming, but of silence. I didn’t see or hear from anybody during the whole summer. I spent almost three months up in the mountains, in the hotel where we always go. This was the first year I really wanted to go. I needed the silence. I needed to walk alone. I needed not to make new friends. I had absolutely no need to meet girls, in order to have something to talk to Niko about after the holidays. I needed my parents. I needed Beatrice’s diary, because in it I found a sliver of happiness. I needed the essentials in life, and in the mountains it was easier to find.
In the mountains, at night, we can see the stars like they can’t be seen anywhere else. Dad often tells me stories about the stars. Mom listens, looking at us more than the stars. One evening Dad tells me the story of the star I gave to Silvia as a gift, and that light, still warm, brightens a small corner of my heart I had closed with a thousand angry locks.
I wasn’t able to bring myself to open Silvia’s letter, I didn’t even bring it with me. I continue to write her text messages, but I am unable to send them. However, I save all of them: category MWD.
Just like I save all the messages she has sent to me in the past. I am unable to delete them. I must have more than a hundred on my cell, and every so often, when I don’t know what to do, when I need to, when I get bored, I reread them at random. I glance them over, and I choose the number of the message that inspires me the most. Thirty-three: “You are the most stupid guy I know, but at least you’re not boring … ” Twelve: “Remember to bring the History book, stupid!” Fifty-six: “Stop being a dumbbell. Let’s go out and talk things over.” Twenty-one: “What’s your shoe size? What is your favorite color?” One hundred: “Me too.”
The most beautiful message: I would fill it with whatever I wanted and she would always say, “Me too.” I was never alone. It was number one hundred and brought good luck. I could write a novel of only text messages. At the moment, there are only a few characters: Silvia, Niko, Beatrice and her mother, The Dreamer, and me. Yes, The Dreamer: I have his cell number, and this summer I sent him a message, just a greeting and to ask him if his friend, the one who had had a problem with his father, was better. He answered that thanks to Beatrice’s words that I read at the funeral, his friend has begun to recover from his wound. I then asked him how his friend knew about Beatrice. Maybe he had invited him to the funeral?
“In a way … Thank you, Leo, I am happy to have met you.”
I answer, “But, what for?”
Is it possible to have such conversations by texting? Yes, I am convinced of it.
“Because you had the courage to read those words. We will meet again with those we have loved, and there is a whole lifetime to ask for forgiveness.”
I reread that answer at least one hundred and twenty-seven times; it was too philosophical, but at the one hundred and twenty-seventh time, I understood three things:
I call all “things” philosophical that are truly important, and maybe this is what philosophy is for …
I must answer The Dreamer’s text: “Thanks to Beatrice, I’ll see you soon!”
I can’t wait to go home and read Silvia’s letter.
I spend the evening looking at Silvia’s star, then Mom sits next to me in the middle of the night, with the aroma of fir trees and the gleaming moon illuminating her relaxed face.
“Mom, how is it possible to love when you can’t love anymore?”
Mom continues to fix her gaze toward the heavens; now she is lying next to me while I stare at the Dwarf Red Giant called Silvia.
“Leo, to love is a verb, not a noun. It’s not something established once and for all for everybody. It evolves, grows, climbs, descends, sinks into the abyss, like the rivers hidden in the heart of the earth that never interrupt their course toward the sea. At times, they leave the Earth’s surface dry, but underneath, within dark cavities, they flow; then at times they climb back up and spring forth, nurturing everything.”
The sky seems like the sounding board of those sweet words, words that only on a night like this don’t sound rhetorical.
“Then what should I do?”
Mom is quiet for at least two minutes, then her words come out from the silence like a river, which after much effort reaches the sea, “Love all the same. You can always do it: to love is an action.”
“Even when you’re talking about someone who’s hurt you?”
“But this is normal. … There are two kinds of people that hurt us, Leo: those who hate us and those who love us. … ”
“I don’t understand. Why should those who love us also hurt us?”
“Because when we are dealing with love, people sometimes behave stupidly. Maybe they go about it the wrong way, but, somehow, they are trying. … You must worry when the person that loves you doesn’t hurt you anymore, because it means that the person has stopped trying, or that you have stopped caring. … ”
“And if you still aren’t able to love?”
“You didn’t try hard enough. We often deceive ourselves, Leo. We think that love is in danger, instead it is actually love asking us to grow … like the moon: you only see a sliver, but the whole moon is always there, with its oceans and its peaks. All you have to do is wait for it to grow, and little by little, the light will illuminate the whole hidden surface … and to get to this point takes time.”
“Mom, why did you marry Dad?”
“Why do you think?”
“Because he gave you a star?”
Mom smiles and the moon illuminates her perfect row of teeth framed by the face capable of calming my every storm.
“Because I wanted to love him.”
Mom ruffles up my hair to free the gloomy thoughts that are still stuck inside my head, like she did when I was a small child filled with fear and hidden in her arms.
Now there is only the complete silence of us looking at the moon and heaven and speaking with whomever we want, there beyond the stars.