Davì by B. Garlaschelli - sample chapters in English

GLI ARCOBALENI 4

Barbara Garlaschelli

DAVI’

It is only loving, only knowing that matters, not having loved, not having known P.P. Pasolini, The Weeping of the Excavator

My name is David. But my mother used to call me Davì. Now that she has gone away, nobody calls like that.

I am nineteen, but sometimes it is as if I felt much younger. Some other times, I feel all the world’s ages on my shoulders.

I think this may happen to everyone, sooner or later. Time is a strange thing.

It dilates, shrinks, dries up and stuffs itself. It stuffs itself with all our life and the others’. It contains them. An enormous shopping bag where desires, dreams, reveries are tucked away. Cool.

Mum went away in a Summer morning.

I was ten. She just told me: “Bye, Davì” and she left. I have never seen her

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again. Dad called her whore and told me that she went away with another man. I would have done it too, if I had been her.

Living with my father is really impossible.

Simply, you cannot. There are people who come to life and they need none.

They only feel like being alone. There you are, my father is just like that. He has never beaten us up, neither me nor my mother, but he did not like having us in the way. Well, it was as if we were not there.

I have often seen Mum crying, and sometimes she yelled, she yelled at him.

She cried that he was her downfall, that she cursed the day when they had met.

She yelled at him even when he was not at home. If he was at home, it made no difference. He did not listen to her. He never listened to anybody.

I think that he did not even realise that I went away too.

It was a lot of time ago. I left behind that small flat, stuck between tens of other flats, and went out. Into the world.

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It was as if I was born again.

I did the right thing.

Dad never came to search for me, so maybe he thinks the same too.

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She was pedalling like she was mad, with her hands tight on the handlebars, her hair in the wind, the little girl clung to her like a koala.

Late, as usual! The young woman braked abruptly and the girl’s head bounced off against her back.

- Mum, have you killed that sir?

The young woman was scared out of her wits. She had not even brushed by the pedestrian who was now on the zebra crossing.

- Sir? What sir?

- That one.

The little girl pointed her finger at a body that was lying few metres far from them.

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It took some seconds – and all her cool head – not to faint, but to realise, instead, that it was not a body, only some garbage bags on the sidewalk.

- Honey, it’s not a dead man. It’s garbage.

- Ah…- said the girl.

The woman shook her head. How could she have engendered so strange daughters? The Fat One – the one she was now bringing to the kindergarten – and The Tall One – who already was at school – were one of her life’s mysteries. Something like the Third Secret of Fatima.

They were her joy and her frenzy.

- Then are you going to school, Mum? - Yes, darling, said the woman. “If my heart won’t burst before” she thought.

- And are you going to read your own books to your pupils?

- No, I’m reading the others’.

- Why? “Oh my God, how far is the kindergarten?” she wondered while plodding along the road.

- Because… because…

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- Because the others’ are better? - the little girl tried to help her.

- No! – she slipped out, instinctively, then she burst into laughter.

- No, because it’s not nice if your Mum reads her own things… It would be as if you… if you...

She was desperately searching for an example that could be simple but honest. She was rescued by two things: the red light and a character who seemed to have just escaped from one of her books.

- What’s that, Mum? An alien? – screamed The Fat One. - Darling….

The boy was walking in front of them, with his studs sparkling in the sun and a yellow daisy lolloping in his hand. He turned his head and smiled to her, a very small smile, but as coloured as his flower.

- No, he can’t be an alien – said the girl.

- Why not?

- No, there aren’t flowers in space – she answered without a doubt.

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The woman laughed and resumed to pedal.

Flowers in space, it would be nice. And in the wake of that thought, she moved into the city bustle.

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DavĂŹ by Barbara Garlaschelli All rights available www.camelozampa.com foreign rights: sara@camelozampa.com