| 3 | CLOSENESS |
Every Sunday I go to the cemetery—the Cimitero Monumentale, near here—where the tombstones of Gianpiero and Sergio are, one above the other, and an empty slot waiting for me. I feel at peace. I continue to feel a great closeness to them, something that doesn’t happen to me with anyone else, not even with my mother or sister.
When I saw my sister dead, in that absurd bed at the Maria Vittoria Hospital, I really thought: look, she’s in another world now, in another time; she’s closer to Julius Caesar than to me.
With Gianpiero and Sergio I’ve never noticed such a dimension of otherness. And I tell myself: now nothing more can happen to them, nothing bad, nothing ugly.
And what’s the worst that can happen to me, ultimately? I hope for a death without dreadful suffering. I might get arrested, but in that case, put me in a cell with a beautiful young prisoner. Don’t put me in with Vittorio Emanuele—please, not that.
This absence of anxiety also brings me to see that it isn’t true that everything is worse today than before.
Today, not being overly fearful, I know that someone worse could arrive, or return. Someone even worse than D’Alema or Berlusconi or Bush.
I was born in Turin in January 1936. I saw the war. I lived through the war. And I remember it well. In 1939 I was three; in 1945 I was nine. If I were told that tomorrow the bombing and the sirens and the blackouts were coming back, well, that, I know, would be “worse.”