A line of pale skin
I saw my very first dead person unexpectedly. Not that there is any predictable way for it, but at least you think the first dead person you see is an elder relative, a grandparent, an old uncle. For me, it was my best friend’s father. It was a September morning. I must have been eighteen or nineteen. I was walking the hills surrounding my village when, among a thick beech forest, I saw a white Renault 5. I didn’t immediately recognize it as the car I had ridden so many times with Andrew, my closest friend. Michael, his father, was like a second father to me. In that Renault 5, he used to take us to the sea, the mountains, the circus, the carnival, the theater. They lived in a decaying eighteenth-century building surrounded by a wall topped by stuck glass shards, as was once used to prevent thieves from climbing over it. In a hidden corner, overlooking a ditch, was a hole wide enough for a child to pass through. I used to enter Andrew’s house from there, more for fun than for necessity. When I was old enough to no longer use that secret passage, Michael always greeted me at the door. “Andrew’s over there,” he would tell me before going back to the desk, working at his typewriter. Tall, with blue eyes. His thick blond mustache gave him that mysterious look a writer can never lack. He wasn’t born in the village, and no one knew his past, but he had made himself popular, and everyone admired him. Especially Serena. Her esteem soon became something more, and after a few years, Andrew was born.
There was nothing of the man I knew in what I saw that September morning as I peered through the windows of the white Renault 5 parked in the woods. At first, I thought it was a bunch of dirty rags lying on the seat. Then, I recognized a human figure soaked in blood. An arm fell down his side towards the gear lever. The shirt, slightly raised at the wrist, left on display the Citizen watch Michael never took off, not even when he went to bed. Serena found it an irritating habit. To us kids, however, it made us laugh, especially in the summer when, under the band, you could see a pale mark on his tanned wrist. I stepped back to have a better look at the car. Now I recognized it! I rubbed my eyes, and I looked again in the window. Wedged between the two front seats was a revolver. I wanted to call the police, but as soon as I picked up the phone, his name was at the top of the recent calls list: Andrew.
“Hi!” the cheerful voice on the other end disoriented me.
“Hi, Andrew,” I said somberly. “I’m here with your father.”
He didn’t say anything.
“He’s dead.”
He remained silent a few more seconds, then asked, “Where are you?”
“In the beech forest.”
“Stay there,” and he hung up the phone.
We met again by chance in a beach bar: a light blue wooden hut, with white plastic tables, under straw umbrellas. Bruce Springsteen’s The Last Carnival was playing on the radio. It was Andrew who first noticed me and waved me over. Fifteen years had passed since the day we had last spoken. Since that “Stay there,” uttered over the phone in a beech forest. We spoke in clichés during the funeral, but his father’s death marked a dividing line in our friendship. I had found his reaction surprisingly unusual. That “Stay there,” uttered calmly, quietly. When the police discovered it was not suicide, I even considered it suspicious. Writer Michael Zonti knew his killer, the newspapers said. The gun found in the car was probably his last, desperate attempt at defense. Did Andrew know something? Was he involved? Why did that blond, thick-mustached writer feel so endangered to carry a gun? And who truly was the man who, throughout my childhood, had been a second father to me?
“Do you believe in dreams?” I heard Andrew’s question among the lapping of the waves and Springsteen’s voice singing “Where have you gone, my handsome Billy?”
“That depends,” I answered.
“I never believed in dreams, but mine was truer than true — “ “The morning you called me, I had woken up in a daze. I had just dreamed about my father. His car parked in a beech forest. He seemed to be asleep. I called him, called him, but he didn’t answer. Then suddenly, I was a kid again. I saw a figure in the trees, and it was you, child. Then again, my dad, who was sleeping and didn’t want to wake up. Next, the gun. That’s when I knew he was dead.” He cleared his throat. “For years, I thought you killed him. I know it’s irrational. But for me, this was all too much. On the same day, I had lost my father and started believing in dreams.”
I turned to Andrew and spotted the old Citizen watch, whose band hid a line of pale skin on his tanned wrist.
“You know what I’ve been wondering all these years?”, I asked him.
“Of course,” he replied. “The same thing I’ve wondered. Who truly was that writer with a thick blond mustache? Who truly was my father?”
