By My Hand by Maurizio de Giovanni, Antony Shugaar Read Free Book Online

closeness, a friendship. And then there had been the accident, the hospital: and not a single visit, not a single letter in all those days. Then when he returned home, the shutters were locked tight.
    As the tango outside his door gave way to a melancholy waltz, Ricciardi’s thoughts returned to the blood of the Garofalos, strewn all over their seaside apartment; and to how brief life could be, how wrong it was to cast off one’s feelings. He thought about himself, how he was treading the boundary between life and death without ever truly taking part in either, and about the life he led, caught between profound silences and deafening noises.
    He looked up, toward the darkened windows of the fourth floor of Enrica’s apartment building. Through one of those windows he saw clearly, translucent and dangling as always, the hanged bride.
    A very particular case, in the context of his visions. She appeared and vanished, from one period to another, haunting the apartment where she had put an end to her life; as if her final emotion had come in on a wind, and had then been swept away again into the darkness, to await its return. He could see her clearly, on that chilly December night, the neck elongated by the dislocation of the vertebrae, the eyes bulging out of their sockets, the black tongue lolling out of her mouth, open wide as it gasped for air. And her voice, hoarse and grating:
“You damned whore, you took my love and my life.”
A betrayal, an abandonment, an inability to survive in her solitude.
    Ricciardi turned his back on the closed window and on the open one above it: the living woman who refused to let herself be seen, and the woman who was no longer alive but who presented herself to the eyes of his soul in all her grief and suffering. He went over to his desk, he sat down, and he pulled out a sheet of paper. He would write to her, this time without the assistance of the book entitled
Moderno segretario galante
, without a model letter, without an outline. He would write to her, and he would tell his story to someone who knew nothing about it.
    Â 
    Dear Enrica,
    Ever since I returned home from the hospital you’ve denied me the sight of you. I know that you heard about the accident; Rosa told me that you were there with her in the first, terrifying moments, when no one knew whether I’d survive. I’m all right now, in case you were interested to know: nothing much, just a scratch on the head, the occasional dizziness. But I’m all right.
    I don’t blame you for the closed window, for the silence. You’re right: a young woman has hopes, aspirations, desires. A young woman wants to be courted, taken to the movies, taken out dancing. A young woman would like a man she could introduce to her parents, invite over for Sunday dinner. A young woman wants to be loved.
    I love you, Enrica. Please don’t doubt that. If love is a heartbeat, if love is waiting, if love is a faint suffering, then I love you. And my mind and my heart never abandon you, for a moment.
    But love isn’t a luxury that I can afford. I wasn’t born to experience emotions, to try to be happy. I’m a condemned man.
    I see the dead. On every street corner, at every window, I see the dead. I see them as they were when they died their violent deaths, their bodies ravaged, blood pouring, bones jutting out from their torn flesh. I see suicides, murder victims, those who were run over by carriages, those who drowned in the sea. I see them, and I hear them obsessively repeating the last obtuse thought of their broken lives. I see them, until they dissolve into thin air, to find a peace that may or may not exist, I don’t know where. And I feel their immense pain at abandoning love, for all time.
    I’m a condemned man. I’ve carried this mark upon me since I was a child, and I have reason to believe that my mother suffered from the same terrible malady, and she died a raving lunatic.
    I love