thought, but she could no longer deceive herself, or deny that her feelings could change just because she tried so hard to avoid it. She realized it was time to face reality. She turned to Guido with a careless
expression. "Ah… I forgot” she said. She hadn't really forgotten anything.
She had imagined an infinity of times.
ʺOk. I'll have to pretend it's nothing. It has to give me an idea that it's not that important to me. It's nothing… Be brave and keep calm… ʺ.
Daisy told him at the drop of a hat.
Guido faded from surprise. He thought he didn't quite understand.
"S… Sorry, can you repeat that?" he asked.
She huffed and puffed. "But if you don't want to, I can't make you."
"Of course I want to. Saturday's perfect” he said, his ears lit up with a red steal.
Guido couldn't focus on the magnitude of it.
Daisy had invited him to go out with her.
"So I'll see you Saturday” said the girl with a pout, as if she had a hard time with fate, guilty of setting her on the path she had tried so hard to avoid.
He saw her get into her mother's Cherokee. She did not turn around to greet him.
Guido walked down the road without really knowing where he was going.
ʺI have an appointmentʺ repeatedʺ. The grey patina of his life was as if it had been blown away suddenly, and now everything around him shone with colour. A rainbow of emotions that he could grasp without feeling it slipping through his fingers. He felt so happy and so in tune with the world that he wanted to embrace everyone he met on the way home: a mother pushing a stroller, a child enchanted by a balloon vendor, an old man sitting on a bench, a gentleman in a suit looking for a taxi, a tramp lying on the sidewalk resting between the folds of a cardboard box…
Yes, he would have wanted to embrace the whole world.
He and Daisy would have seen each other on the weekend.
He began counting the hours that separated him from her, the clock hands that suddenly became unbearably large, heavy, and slow.
The low pressure weighed down the sky with grey, threatening clouds. Leponex's tablet was on the medicine drawer, put there to remind Daisy's mother how tragic and complicated her life still was.
Adriano, with his face emaciated and tired, his black hair crushed on his forehead, his gaze wandering about without ever deciding where to settle, had not attended school since the age of twelve. The disease was cruel, the support teachers non-existent, beheaded by linear government cuts.
Adriano was followed by a teacher who constantly visited him once a week. Forty-five thousand euros spent in four years. The doctors said that his father's suicide had awakened an evil already written in his genes.
The first symptoms appeared when he was twelve, a surprisingly early age for the disease. Sandra began to suspect that something was wrong when Adriano, who was round and rosy, suddenly began to lose weight. She washed lightly, refused to study, slept on the carpet, and when she went to the bathroom she got dirty everywhere.
One day he started lowering the shutters on all the windows in the house.
He said he was being spied on by someone. Evidence of a dark evil that had begun to seriously worry his mother. The psychologist deduced that Adriano had failed to process the trauma of the suicide. The tragedy occupied all his thoughts and left no room for anything else. As for feeling spied on, it could be interpreted as an indication of a persecution mania.
Then the hallucinations began: Adriano watched the inhabitants of Castelmuso die one by one. He gave names and surnames, even writing down the date of their death.
One day he took a can of gasoline from the garage and dragged it to the entrance of the cathedral. He was stopped firmly by the chaplain.
Adriano insisted that he had seen a face all black beyond the iron grille of the confessional. He thought it was a demon, which is why he wanted to purify the cathedral with fire. That same afternoon, Sandra accompanied him to the Umberto II hygiene and mental health centre, where the boy was kept under observation for seventeen days. That was the first of four hospitalizations.
It had been three years since he was diagnosed with severe paranoid schizophrenia. Since then, Sandra Magnoli had visited the office of Professor Roberto Salieri, the psychiatrist who followed Adriano, every week.
Sandra parked on the white lines reserved for a modest restaurant, a few steps from the study.
Adriano got out of the car with the slowness of an old man. The active ingredient of clozapine prevented hallucinations, but the side effects caused him drowsiness, obesity, muscle spasms, speech and walking problems. Medication was a necessary evil. Without them, a dog could become a monster covered in scales. With medication, a dog remained a dog.
Sandra took her son under her arm. They turned the corner and were greeted by the waiter at the restaurant, who was hastening to put up the chairs and take the tables off the sidewalk because the sky was threatening to rain.
The study was on the second floor of an austere mansion, with the entrance door surmounted by an important travertine arch. The windows overlooked the boulevard that cut through the old town, just a stone's throw from the old water tower that still supplied the country today.
Sandra and Adriano slipped into the elevator, an elegant wrought-iron cage with wooden doors, purple-red interior and Art Nouveau mirror. Adriano, who suffered from
claustrophobia, gasped until the elevator opened onto the second-floor corridor.
The name of the psychiatrist Roberto Salieri was clearly engraved on the front door. Greta, the doctor's assistant, had them sit in the waiting room, a room with high, frescoed ceilings, furnished with two large damask velvet sofas with smooth, worn-out pillows, as if they had succumbed over the years under the weight of patients' neurosis.
Although they scheduled the appointment for 10:00 a.m., one patient took longer than she should have, and Sandra took the opportunity to read a two-month-old supplement. The sky reflected a dark colour over the country. The rain began ticking on the windows. Adriano observed the drops set one by one on the window. First they appeared sparse, then they started pounding insistently, becoming a rough downpour of water. The roar of thunder made Sandra jerk.
The professor's assistant entered the waiting room, his hand pressed his chest, and the air was a little frightened by the roar.
"Come, Adriano. Dr. Salieri is waiting for you."
The doctor's office was furnished in an unusual and refined manner.
Some people thought it was a whim that underscored a certain megalomaniac in Salieri. In reality the psychiatrist simply wanted to respect the dignity of the patients by surrounding them with objects of good taste.
The desk was the last purchase of a certain value: a mahogany table with a magnificent mother-of-pearl inlay in the centre. Adriano noticed that the sofa filled with fluffy Chinese silk cushions had been moved to the wall, the silver service and the majolica vases removed from the old desk and resting on the Victorian-style septet. The ruby Persian rug was laid proudly in the centre of the room. The office, as always, was pervaded by the scent of orchids in tall, thin crystal vases.
The psychiatrist placed the mobile phone on the table, to use it as a tape recorder. The professor, with the consent of Adriano's mother, always recorded the sessions, and then attached the audio files to the boy's medical records.
"So, Adriano, how are you?" the doctor asked, looking at the notebook to review the notes taken during the last session.
Adriano did not answer. He reached the window. He wanted to see the rain, which now fell less insistent. The doctor, his forehead furrowed with thick horizontal wrinkles, lifted his deep, black eyes toward the window. The mist was turning the sloping roofs of the buildings grey.
"It's not raining anymore. But there is fog…" he said with a thickly voice.
Adriano moved the heavy velvet