THE 1100 BELVEDERE

by Mario Corte

It was not easy to place my little girl on the child’s chair. I started the usual fight with the buckles, which in my wife’s hands were always disciplined and obedient, and with me, on the contrary, became nettled, jamming and resisting me in the most irritating ways. But it did not end there, because, testing the steadiness of the child’s chair, I realized that it was not fastened to the seat well. I looked about me bewildered, in the absurd hope of finding someone that could help me. Indeed, fixing it was for me an inexplicably painful task: my hands got stuck underneath, striving hard and ever going forward into the wrong space, in search of a snap-hook which most of the times I found again dangling from the seat, exactly where I believed I had already looked. This time Providence helped me: my blind hands found the right way, I heard a click and finally Chicca and I succeeded in setting off. I looked at her from the rear-view mirror. She was placid. Her mouth was entranced in a half-smile and her eyes already began to assume that languishing expression which, in children, precedes of some seconds the dive into a car sleep.

We turned into the provincial road. I had no intention to deliver the cordiality of that lukewarm early October sun to the roaring overtaking of the superhighway. We went through peripheral areas in which a strange silence reigned. We passed under extraordinary bridges and went over viaducts under which little streams of stones were flowing. We paraded among green hillocks covered with incongruous spring little flowers and ramshackle sheds next to which melancholy dogs were barking at the deceit that had excluded them from freedom.
We were alone on the road. Slight slopes, slight descents, sweet curves. My little girl’s small water bottle, which I had nervously stuck into the compartment of the right door at the beginning of the trip, sent intermittent flashes.
It was hot. The little girl perhaps was sweating too much. I looked at her again from the rear-view mirror. The sun was beating on her legs, not on her face. Yet I thought that it was better to open the window on my side, to circulate the air a little. It was really a hot day. Splendid.
The road seemed practically abandoned. In half an hour we had met only three or four cars, all coming from the opposite direction.
After a slope, the road changed into an unbroken straight stretch, which seemed to fade away in the mountains standing out on the horizon. Much further ahead, several hundreds of meters, maybe a kilometer or more, there was a car. I realized it because, as soon as we emerged from a slope, one of its windowpanes sent a dash that blinded me. For a while I was afraid of losing control of the car, and if in front of me there had not been that infinitely straight stretch we would probably have run some risk. When I collected myself, wherever I looked I saw the phantasmagoric image of the dash received. It had a droll shape. If I closed my eyes for a while, I saw it well. It was all phosphorescent green. It looked like an effigy of the Madonna. It reminded me of some phosphorescent small effigies of the Madonna moving round at home when I was small. Terrifying. In the dark they looked like ghost eyes. I slowed down a bit and ran the risk of closing my eyes for two entire seconds, to see it better. It reminded me of an effigy of the Madonna only because its head was rounded as if under a veil. But, seeing it better, it looked more like a man than a woman. A man with a veil? What absurdity is the human mind able to organize with its illusions, its associations, its fleeting impressions.
The car was approaching rapidly. No. We were approaching it rapidly. By now it was clear, as a matter of fact, that it proceeded on the same lane of ours. But evidently it was going very slow, because, even though the initial distance was considerable, we had almost reached it. It was a car of other times, rather big, five-door, with very high and thin wheels, the rear window a little bigger than a big porthole and the whole structure that, from behind, appeared disproportionately high and narrow. A "1100 Giardiniera", I think it was called when cars like that were still in circulation. "Giardinetta", not "Giardiniera", it came to my mind. But there was something wrong. A dissonance between that name and that car. It was all green. The word "Giardinetta", in my imagination, corresponded to the mental model of a car similar to that but with some wooden panels stuck into the doors among metal frames. The "1100 Giardinetta", I continued to repeat between my teeth. But it did not ring a bell to me.
Now we were at few meters from the car. I slowed down considerably. It went so slow that I could not help overtaking it. But I was charmed, so I switched to third gear and decided to keep behind it to examine it better. Even though the model indicated clearly at least about forty years of age, the conditions of the bodywork were shop-window-like. It seemed brand new, not more than some month old. The license plate confirmed the oldness of the model, but it was bright, perfect, practically brand new as well as the rest of the car. Evidently the man at the wheel of the car ought to be a collector. Probably he was going to some veteran car’s show. The short seat left a part of his back uncovered, enough to show the camel coat, probably very heavy, he was wearing. With that heat… He also wore a light brown walking hat, absolutely out of fashion. His head was moving lightly up and down, as if he looked in the small rear-view mirror at intervals to spy on him who was spying on him. Then he moved to the left and to the right, as if the driver was trying to get his bearings in an unknown landscape. Actually he gave the very impression of a person prey to some anxiety. Next to him, the seat’s passenger seemed empty. But from time to time, especially if the car jolted a little, a round small head appeared. A dog? It could also be a little boy. Now captured by childish curiosity, I ignored any safety distance regulation, behaving exactly like those motorists I have always hated, who place themselves to a meter far from your back bumper to make you accomplice – and jointly responsible - to their miserable abusing anxiety. I saw him. It was exactly a baby. Probably older than my Chicca. He wore one of those old-fashioned little hats, with the little peak and earflaps, sliced-colored as those of Donald Duck nephews. I thought: he keeps such a small child there with the risk that at the first actual braking he beats his head against the windshield. The child’s chair was out of question. I bet he has not even fastened the seat belt. Supposing that he has it himself. What misdeed. If you want to endanger your life, you may do it. But to risk the children’s life! Scoundrel.
Eventually I decided to overtake him, to avenge the child, casting at least a black look at the stupid collector father. When I was by his side, I noticed that he had the window completely up. Those two must be dying with hot, in there, I thought. Also the child had the coat on. He probably was five or six years old. I looked at them attentively, and I realized at once that the man had an upset expression, as if a prey to panic. Also the child had a contracted and reddened face, as if he were crying. When the man realized I was looking at him, he opened his eyes wide, as if he wanted to attract my attention. Then he made me a vague wave with his hand, a gesture that could indicate dismay or bewilderment. My attitude changed all of a sudden and I began to search frenetically for a way to help that man. He had a vaguely familiar look. Beside the natural solidarity for someone in difficulty, a kind of mysterious, instantaneous affective implication began to emerge rapidly in that absurd situation. Luckily the road in front of us was visible and free for kilometers, so I continued to flank the green car. With gestures I asked the man to put the window down, but he did not understand. I continued to make gestures of turning, put down, airing, but he did not understand me. It seemed one of those scenes in which two people of two completely different cultures, and with absolutely different ways of gesticulating, are uselessly trying to communicate. But those scenes are almost always followed by smiles and winking, which help the comprehension. This was instead a quite dramatic scene, and the agitation seemed to produce a dimension of total incommunicability. In the end it came up to my mind to knock on my right window, and finally he seemed to understand. With a disconsolate face, always with gestures, he made me understand in some way that the window was blocked. "Pull up the side of the street," I yelled, but the man continued not to understand me. He touched his ear as if to ask me to speak louder. I waved at him to indicate him to stop, but he understood he had to slow down. For nervousness my left hand, which was holding the steering wheel, began to quiver, and my car veered slightly. That fellow had slowed down his pace so that I was obliged to overtake him definitively. When I was in front of him, I put the right direction indicator to signal that I wanted to stop. I looked in the rear-view mirror to make sure he had understood what to do, but the car was no longer there. He could not have overtaken me, but for scruple I looked ahead: the road was desert for kilometers. There were neither rises nor exits, neither in front nor behind. The car had simply disappeared into nothing.

I remained there spellbound for some minute, with the ticktack of the indicator filling the emptiness of impressions I had plunged into. For the first time in my life I seriously doubted of my perceptive abilities. I was sure I had seen that car. Bewilderment was bordering on a vague fear.
Chicca meanwhile had awakened. I availed myself of the stop to give her to drink. In her way, she asked to come in front with me. I convinced her to remain in the back with fairy-tale topics and promises of future ice creams. The fanciful conversation had the power of detaching my thoughts from the green car. I left again.
A very big cloud obscured the sky for some minute. Then Chicca spoke. It seemed to me she had asked to drink. Actually she had said something like ‘beverage’. It sounded strange to me, because she had just quenched her thirst; besides, in her language of an almost three-year-old child a word like ‘beverage’ was almost inconceivable.
"Do you want water, love?" I asked her.
"No, me no wan’ wadre, wan’ bevedere," she answered me resolute. To my further questions she reacted with annoyance. She was annoyed that I did not understand. Therefore, at a certain point, she put an end to the conversation with a definitive "Phew, daddy!" and she set to sleep again. Here is another mystery. Whatever will she have said?

The road had started to climb through the hairpin bends of that unlikely mountain which sealed the access to the sea. There was no other way of reaching the coast road, if you went along the provincial road. Thanks goodness Chicca was sleeping, otherwise she would certainly have retched. At the top of a more difficult slope than the others, leading the way to flow in a kind of a slightly undulating brief upland, I saw it in front of me again: the old five-door. It was striving, evidently worn out by the slopes, but all in all it did not go much slower than before. Was it her, the 1100… Belvedere? Suddenly that model’s name comes to my mind. Not "Giardinetta": "Belvedere!" Or that was what Dad called it… Dad…
My blood suddenly transformed into a mass of icy needles. That fellow in the 1100 Belvedere was him. My father. But what am I saying… That one, even though adorned in an incredibly demodé way, may be more or less my age. And then, the little boy… While the hair on the nape of my neck was standing on end like hedgehogs’ quills, and the icy needles of my blood shattered into my veins, the meeting with the absolute impossible had the power to defeat the barriers of the natural perception, and the following phenomenon assumed the aspect of a quiet and almost usual dimension. I realized that the range of my visual field was enriched by a new resource, previously unknown, that of seeing – not imagining, but literally seeing – another scene perfectly compatible with the one I had in front, as when a same human look is able to catch the reality of the television set – with its shape in plastic, its technical gadgets, the small plant leaning on it, the trolley supporting it and the volumes of the encyclopedia lying on the bookcase above – and contemporaneously to move behind the nomads’ caravan which, inside the screen, rides for the Gobi’s desert. And here the clairvoyant look of the memory is fixed on a box crammed with black and white photographs piled up in bulk. They are the cast-off photos: the most beautiful ones have obtained the honor of the album. Among them there is one in which my father and I are posing, smiling, leaning to the 1100 Belvedere. It is a bright winter day of thirty-five years ago, or perhaps even more. He has a walking camel coat. I am wearing a dark little coat (but, with magic certainty, memory wrings the information from the black and white photo that it is red) and a little hat with earflaps.

The 1100 Belvedere was always in front of us. By now the mountain had exhausted itself behind us and the coast road was skirting a wild beach, with a sea of a color never seen before. Light azure. So light that it looked like light gray. Also the sky was assuming that extraordinary shade. Light gray. There was not even one cloud in front of the sun, but the world was starting rapidly to shine with all the white and black enchanting shades.
The 1100 Belvedere pulled up at the side of the street. The wheels creaked a bit against the asphalt, then skidded for a couple of meters on the little sandy gravel under which the right side of the road faded towards the beach. While I overtook the car by now still, I heard the cackling sound of the hand break which the driver had applied after turning off the engine. For an eternal instant I stood undecided: I only had to accelerate again; I would have seen the old five-door departing from the rear-view mirror till it disappeared. I even imagined to see – rather, I saw again, with that mysterious second sight that I had been given a while before – that man in the hat open the door, get out of the car and look sadly at my car getting smaller and smaller. The sense of definitive detachment I felt during that vision was something yearning and dreadful at the same time, a commingling of nostalgia and terror. The last image of my vision, before turning into a road beyond which the 1100 Belvedere disappeared from the visual, it was that of the man’s thick eyebrows raising while his look was searching for me. But when I set back to concentrate myself on my normal sight, I realized that nothing of all this had happened: I was simply slowing down to stop about ten meters ahead the green car. I braked, I turned off the engine and looked in the rear-view mirror.
The man had not gone out of the car at all, as instead I believed I had seen a while before. I was a prey to an uncontrollable emotion. Chicca had awakened, and whined. The thing bothered me, because I would have liked to take her into my arms and cuddle her, but I was too upset to do it. I was in a cold sweat and quivering. I kept an eye on the 1100 Belvedere. No movement. The man who resembled my father and I seemed two duelers waiting for the right moment to make the first move. Then an idea came to my mind. I turned towards Chicca, I freed her from the child’s chair and put her next to me. Of course she was very happy. She began to make me odd faces and teasing me to play. I opened my door, took her in my arms and went out without hesitations. I felt that I and that small yet formidable source of life would protect each other from the mystery that was to be expected. I set out determined, with Chicca bouncing in my arms and looking at me inquiring.
While we were approaching the 1100 Belvedere, the man’s face became sharper and sharper. He stared at me with the same distressed face of when I had overtaken him the first time. It was he, no doubt about it. I did not dare to look at the child. I knew that he was staring at me, too, but a kind of sacred terror prevented me to look at him into the eyes. It made me feel guilty. I pondered once more on the possibility of turning back and leaving. An invincible uneasiness invaded me as I approached. I felt as if I was exposed to some poisonous radiation. I could not take it all and decided to go back. I made a gesture to the car driver asking him to wait and pointing at the little girl as if to make him believe that she was causing me some problem. I accompanied my pantomime with a ridiculous reply addressing Chicca: "Don’t cry, love, Dad will now put you in the car." She, who was looking at me with a face all satisfied and even more inquiring, concluded that it was a new kind of game and as soon as I was about to turn back, instead of crying, she started laughing, at first with affectation, then bursting her sides laughing. The excuse did not stand any longer. Beaten and embarrassed, I hesitatingly headed for the 1100 Belvedere.
When I was next to the driver’s door, always closed and with the window up, the man at the wheel became stiff looking at me into my eyes, with such frowned eyebrows for curiosity that he seemed given of an expression of extreme severity. He seemed to suspect something. At a certain point his look became softer, as if the warm breath of a remote liking was on the verge of his heart. He smiled faintly and opened his mouth a bit as if he was about to utter a name that was familiar to him but that for some inexplicable mental block continued to slip his mind. He shifted his eyes on the little girl I was holding in my arms and the expression seemed to fade even towards emotion. I tried to always keep the little boy out of the focus of my visual field, to be able to keep unknown what expression he had. I wanted to say something but it was an effort for me even to breathe. Also Chicca had become strangely stiff and kept still in her position in my arms, looking at the car. At a certain point the man spoke. His voice seemed to stem from the depths of the sea. "We got lost," he said in such a low and liquid tone of voice that made my hair stand on end. That thing in there is not my father, I thought. Then, however, when I spoke in my turn to ask him: "Where were you going?" he gave a start, too, as if my voice was horrible. He seemed to have some doubt on the fact that Chicca and I were two human beings, and slightly withdrew. The communication seemed sustained by unknown forces. It was as if our words were collected and transcoded by a prodigious device mediating between two dimensions. The impossible conversation went on that way.
"We got lost," he repeated. "Nothing is like before. It seems another world. The villages’ and resorts’ names are the same, but the streets, the cars, the license plates, the road markings aren’t. There are absurd buildings, and even the landscape has changed. And then, it’s terribly cold in here. You out there, instead, seem to be warm. It’s a nightmare."
"Where are you taking the little boy?" I asked him without even doubting for a moment that that trip of theirs had anything to do with the little boy.
"To a visit. To a doctor friend of mine that has a house in the surroundings, I believe. He had accepted to visit him on Sunday. But I think I have completely taken the wrong way, because the house is not on the sea, but in the country, maybe at the slopes of that mountain."
"What does the little boy have?" I asked with a strange concern, as if a secret always hidden was revealing to my eyes.
"Nothing serious. But could you help me?" answered the man a bit annoyed by the fact that, instead of giving him information on the road he would have had to take, I was interested only in the little boy.
"Where do you have to go?"
"To doctor Maggi’s house."
Maggi. I saw him again. A lean man, with a thin face and a metallic voice. My father worshipped him. A worship that however did not seem reciprocated at all. Maggi was cordial with him, but felt superior, and my father gave the impression to agree with that superiority of his. This made me suffer. His wife and he had no children. We would go and visit them in summer in a large house in the country, with so many fig and peach trees. A very thick undergrowth around the house. Dogs. A dry fountain. An enormous toad, which he called Volfango. His wife would set up a wooden table under the pergola and there they ate and drank. I ate almost nothing because I felt sick. Maggi treated me as if I was a little idiot. I had a vague and terrifying memory of him, because he made me feel nonexistent. His wife was better. She seemed to accept everybody’s existence. Also mine, with such pity as to drive her to prepare me the only thing I could tolerate in that place: bruschetta. Once, however, she made it with garlic; I hated garlic, but I ate it anyway, because I did not want to appear so silly as to make her do it again. I remember I ate it all, and the temptation to vomit began to assail me before even finishing it. I restrained myself and I got a headache. I wandered the whole afternoon about the garden with the temples tight in a steel vice. Then, when they were inside to prepare dinner and the first odor began to arrive, I started running and succeeded in arriving at the dry fountain before unloading the mush of the never digested bruschetta. I even succeeded in diluting the proof of my shame filling several times a rusted watering can I had found in the environs and emptying it on my refuses till making them almost unrecognizable. The odor, acrid, was smelt anyhow. All was discovered and the lady prepared me a light thin soup of small pasta, which I did not refuse, blocking my stomach again and risking another poor figure. When Maggi greeted me, he would say to me: "Bye, young man" with his never smiling eyes, and I knew that calling me "young man" was his way to remind me that, according to him, I would never become so, but I would always remain the ameba that I was. Then, one day, in that same house in the country there was a tremendous row between the Maggis and my family, owing to a strange scene that had occurred between my uncle Marzio (a handsome young guy, nice and jovial, who was fond of me and often came with us on Sunday trips) and an adolescent niece of theirs called Simonetta. I had noticed they kept hand in hand, in the garden. Then I had lost sight of them and when the row had broken out they spoke of trousers, slips, skirts, thighs and other things I did not understand, but that certainly were mortally offensive for everybody. Months, perhaps years went by. I remember that a kind of peace between the two families was recovered, after that my family had quarreled with Marzio’s parents and after that Simonetta had got married to a foreigner and had gone to live abroad. But it was not the same thing, you could feel it. There was a wound, as if that regrettable episode had evoked something deeper, never revealed. Something not concerning Marzio and Simonetta at all. The families lost sight of each other again. Maggi died when I was already grown-up, perhaps when I was at high school. We knew it from the newspaper, because he was a famous doctor. His wife died soon afterwards. We knew it because my mother had promised her to go and visit her and when she called her they told her she had died suddenly. Simonetta, now, could also have become a grandmother.
"Have you ever heard of doctor Maggi? Everybody knows him in the resort where he spends his holidays and the weekends," the man asked me.
"Yes, I think, but I don’t know well…" said trying to evade from that corner he had driven me in. Then I realized that if I had given the impression to know something on Maggi, I would perhaps have found a good excuse to talk of the little boy.
"Well, yes, I think I remember. Maggi, yes. Look: maybe, the best thing is that you follow me with your car, while I orient myself with mine to find the way."
"Thank you, you are really kind."
"By the way, you told me about the little boy… that it isn’t a serious thing."
"No: probably it’s nothing. He is only strange. So strange. First he was an ever-cheerful little boy, jovial, full of fancy. He sang and recited poems for everybody. He invented stories. Clever. Smart. And now, instead, look at him."
This time I was in a trap. I had so much interested in the little boy that I couldn’t look anywhere else. I let my eyes lay slowly on him beginning from the small feet dangling from the seat. Blue small shoes and white socks. A little big ankles, and above the lightly lowered sock, a little strip of fair rosy smooth skin, immediately interrupted by the brim of the long pants. Gray. I seemed to feel the warmth of the wool on the small leg, the light gatherings the cloth shaped under the thighs, the narrowness of the little waistband around his waist, his rough contact with the living skin exactly where the white blouse had slightly folded. The beautiful little hands. Already slender and no longer as plump as those of the smaller children. His right hand’s fingers abandoned open on his lap, lying down with care on the creased small hat he had on his head before, and those of his left hand lying softly on his father’s right shoulder, as if to try to establish a contact. Under the red half-open little coat, the blue little jumper with the three parallel white-green-and-violet-colored embroideries which redrew the V-shape of the neck opening. The false red white-spotted small tie, supported by a band hidden under the shirt collar. The neck in which life throbs. Straight. Not folded like that of the dead. Like that of a dead swan which he and I had seen at the park one day, leaning languidly on the edge of the fountain. The small head was still supported by life, fastened to the moorings of the existing with the wonderful mechanism of that slender neck. The pale and tenderly rounded chin. The mouth which had perhaps too much spoken; too much expressed, and which now was blocked in the bloodless fixedness of an everlasting half-closed crack. The nose undecided, in its growth, between a ball-shaped outcome, which would have freed him to the eternal childish and finally to the ridiculous, and a prolonged one, which would have marked before time his countenance with the allusion at his being already too adult. The lengthened face. His head, which ought to have been rounded and well proportioned till a few months before, now was stretching out a little too sharpened towards the sky in search of an answer, of an angel voice which could help him to understand a very difficult reason for his childish soul. The ears quite a bit shifted from the head, as if to want to eavesdrop at the door of a life that had made him promises of extraordinary melodies and that now had excluded him from the delight of its beautiful song. And at last the eyes, misted over like two stars twinkling far away right in the background of a mass of chimneys insensitive to the sky, and only able to smoke him with their heavy dross.
"Here he is. Always sulky. He has become bad-tempered and off-putting, he who was sunny, open and unconventional also with strangers. Just think that when I took him to work with me, till some time ago, he was the attraction of the whole office. They all adored him. Now they treat him as if he had some illness. He keeps silent there, aloof, hardly answers to the greeting of the colleagues, not even smiles out of kindness. And then, at home, he has become spiteful. And treacherous. He seems to be always brooding over something. He never speaks, but then, as soon as you reproach him, he is at once ready to be argumentative. Then he speaks surely. He stops only with blows. He makes clear and is pedantic on everything. I assure you that at this point to try to bend him is an effort. We have even thought of granting him to some… institute of religious people who can speak to him, guide him. But I really don’t feel like it. I’d prefer that doctor Maggi gave him a cure, advised me of some therapy, some meeting with a psychologist, I don’t know, I don’t know…"
"You seem to have great trust in doctor Maggi."
"He is a worldly-wise person. A trustworthy friend. One who knows the problems of our family well. And then my wife, poor woman, can’t really take it anymore."
"You’ve said so many things all together. Worldly-wise person. Trustworthy friend. Problems in the family. Your wife that can’t take it anymore. Why do you feel the need to put all these things together?"
The man became stiff. He seemed inclined to recover the right distances from a stranger who, with the excuse of helping him in a difficult situation, meddled a bit too much in a business which was not his. He had just started to answer, with a harsher tone: "But had you not offered to…" when the little boy suddenly opened his door and stole away. The man seemed to outcry something addressing the little boy, but nothing could be heard. It was as if the door, which had stayed open, had hampered that strange mechanism of communication between the dimensions. And the little boy was now here, on this side.
His father continued his silent monologue, this time turning towards me, but I thought only of the little boy. He had passed in front of the car and run to place himself right between me and the door from which the father was launching his mute desperate appeals. He had set to stare at Chicca, smiling softly. She, who was always sociable like a pet, smiled back at him. I put her down. They looked at each other curiously. The little boy touched one of her hands. She lifted that hand and touched the little boy’s face, giving him more a small tweak than a caress; then she turned towards me with a beaming as well as overawed smile, as she always did when she had performed a gesture she deemed daring. The little boy caressed her hair with the delicacy of him who caresses a flower. She looked at me again smiling of happiness, then she hugged him, always with the same delicacy. They stayed thus long. And I stayed looking at them, with inwardly the remote memory of a hug of a little girl less tall than me that I loved more than my life itself. The interior of the 1100 Belvedere had suddenly dimmed, and of the figure of his father nothing had remained let alone an indistinct and flat outline standing out in the darkness of the compartment.
Chicca took the little boy by the hand and proposed him, in her childish tongue, to show him our car from close up. The little boy let himself be guided, and slowly, at a measured and solemn pace, as if they were playing to get married, they headed for the car. I stayed there looking at them. It was the most beautiful show I had ever gone to. Chicca led him cautiously towards the right side of the car, shunning the street, but when she touched the handle she could not open it. She sweetly turned to the little boy telling him something about that mishap. Then she called me with her shrill voice and asked me to open. I approached slowly, while they both gazed charmed at the handle, like two doggies gazing at the small pan where the pap is heating. I opened the door. Chicca got in quickly, showing the way to the little boy, who followed her. She settled by herself on the child’s chair, he took the seat next to her. They looked at me as if everything was ready. The temptation to take the steering wheel and run away with the little boy was even overwhelming. Then the recollections of philosophy grotesquely mingled with those of science fiction stories, and I was a prey to strange doubts on the temporal sequences, on the concatenation of events, on the causes and effects, on the dimensional perturbations and the universes crumbling if you try to change their past. I thought of my father, who was closed in the dark of his 1100 Belvedere, and it wrung my heart. He was a good man, who like all of us knows but doesn’t know, and asks himself unanswerable questions only because they assure him the possibility to cling to the doubt; and he knows well that if he stopped for a while asking himself those blind questions he ought to meet with the answers that had always been there, simply there. But I also thought of the "family problems", of the mum that could not take it any longer, of Maggi, of how "worldly-wise" and "trustworthy" he was, and of the cures and therapies that were going to be organized to immerse into the font of oblivion that little boy, who one day had been happy, but now knew too much to be able to aspire to be still as such.
I entered headlong and slammed the door, like an American cop disposing to chase a criminal. I fastened Chicca to the child’s chair, closed decisively my seat belt and blocked the doors. Then I looked at him in the rear-view mirror: his big eyes were sparkling and had the same excited and enraptured face of when dad had not met Maggi yet, and made him dream because he was a great hero.
I shifted to first gear and took off. From zero to one hundred in ten seconds.

The little boy’s eyes remained engraved in the mirror even after he had vanished. Also today, that Chicca is grown-up like he was that time, they are still there. And when we are together in the car alone, and suddenly, as if resurfacing from a dream, she asks news of That Little Boy, as she says, I answer her: "Look in the rear-view mirror, love, and you’ll see his eyes." She sees them, as I do.