45	OBITUARIES

Gianpiero was only forty-three when he died, shortly after Christmas 1992.

Sergio died at forty-seven, just before Easter 2003.

Julio died not long after Gianpiero.

I practically never knew my father; he died when I was sixteen months old.

My mother died twenty years ago now, in 1980, at age eighty.

My sister Liliana died three years after our mother, in 1983; she was only fifty-three. An absurd death, a case of the flu that turned into pulmonitis and that nobody could diagnose or cure. The tragic fire in the Statuto movie theater happened just then, and when I was with her at the hospital, at one point I started to see all these injured people arriving.

I’ve outlived those dearest to me, outlived my family.

For the first time, I’m alone.

And I’ve become an expert in a very special literary genre, the obituary.

For Gianpiero I chose these words from the breviary: “Salva nos, Domine, vigilantes, custodi nos dormientes” (Save us, O Lord, while awake, guard us while we sleep).

For Sergio, on the other hand, a line from psalm 125: “Magnificavit Dominus facere nobiscum” (What marvels he did for us).

And that was how my friends ended.

There’s a poem by a minor German poet of the nineteenth century, set to music by Mahler in Kindertotenlieder, that goes like this: “Be not sad, I have only gone out for a long walk.” I put those lines at the beginning of the book I dedicated to Gianpiero. They still make me shiver.

I only cry when I reread the obituaries. The feeling of loss, once formulated, moves one even more profoundly.