30 Fiction Just like destiny Roderick, Ursula and Paulo cannot remember how and when they became friends. They just are. They sense, though they do not know why, their past is evanescent. It is just like destiny, as Roderick has it, and so often does he repeat that formula that it has become hollow, too. Yet he repeats it every day, punctual and inevitable. They were one day on the threshold of adult life, as if they had gone through their early lives with their eyes shut, as if they were born just as they are. It is a pretty odd thought that makes them laugh and shiver because it comes with the strange feeling of being tugged at by some mysterious force. They have talked about it; they talk about it every day. However, it seems a dead-end street, and they cannot find their way about. The Aeneas Café is the centre of their world. As they quietly sit at the round metal tables on the sidewalk, their world gets together piece by piece every day at the same hour and under the same sun. Although everyone in the neighbourhood knows them, you will never find anyone who’s actually spoken to them. They appear to have jumped out of a magician’s hat, and when the time is ripe to resume their unknown and untold lives, they disappear, leaving the tables empty. That emptiness is somewhat ominous because, though you know that they will be there again tomorrow, speaking about life, the passing time and that restlessness that urges one to dream about distant and uncovered places, you nonetheless are left with an annoying doubt that buzzes in your head like an angry wasp. The doubt that someday you may walk down the promenade and realise with a start that the tables are empty, the three friends did not come, and a whole slice of your life has gone with them. Then you would be surprised THR | Issue 3 31 to hear yourself repeating Roderick’s words, that it had to be so for it was meant to be so, just like destiny. But today, they are there and everything is just fine. There is one hour of the day they love above any other, or I should say a moment, for that is what it is. It is a fleeting moment that you can guess in the light and in the look that things assume for a second, and the next one is gone and leaves behind a vague feeling of joy and dissatisfaction. That moment is the secret of their friendship. In front of the sea, which in that hour glimmers and seems to be one thing with the sky, the sun, and all the visible and invisible things on earth, the three friends sit in silence without being distracted by the people strolling by on the promenade, without paying any attention to the glances those people cast on them. This is their moment and theirs alone. This is the instant when everything starts over, every day, from scratch. And one moment later, it is already gone. “It’s so beautiful here,” Paulo says poignantly. “Can you imagine to live somewhere without this same light, the sea and such harmony?” “Does it really matter,” asks Roderick. He pauses, a vague look on his face. “Any place is always the same, wherever you go. An infinite series of variations, all of which are equally true and false.” “That’s what I meant to say,” Paulo nods. “Not as good as you can, of course. You been a professor, sometime in the past?” “I don’t know.” “Yeah, you must have been, you’re too serious, you think too much. And I’ll tell you more, you’re not happy.” “Really? Tell me about that...” “You know, irony is the secret of happiness. And a thoughtless mind too. Look at me, I never overthink and the sun always shines on me.” THR | Issue 3 32 “Oh, please,” snaps Ursula. “That’s not happiness, thickhead. Your irony is just another cheap drug. Living at full speed, that’s the secret of happiness. Living, living, and living, that’s it.” “Why are you talking about happiness,” Roderick scoffs. “What is more depressing than that? Have a walk around, stop people, and ask what happiness is. And then give me a unifying, consistent and durable definition of it, if you can.” “Have a walk around?” Ursula looks scandalised. “You must be kidding! Look, wait a minute and pretend you’re not here. Try to feel the world around and tell me, don’t you think something’s missing?” “It never rains?” Paulo guesses. “I don’t think you got her point,” Roderick stirs. “I think I know where that is going.” “I believe—,” Ursula starts, but she leans forward and clumsily bumps into the table, sending a glass crashing on the floor. For a moment, all remain silent as if confounded by the unexpected event, as if that banal incident was an omen, a tear in the fabric of the world revealing some terrifying disorder lurking right behind the veil. Ursula stares at the shattered glass in horror, then she looks at her hand, which returns to rest on the table, motionless like a dead thing. “Never mind,” Paulo says. “It could happen to anyone.” “No...,” Ursula gravely sighs. “Do you ever happen to feel out of yourselves, and almost see yourselves doing things that you don’t even imagine you can do? Or saying things you had never thought about and nonetheless are there, right in your heads? Don’t you ever happen to feel your own hands as if they were not yours at all, and they won’t obey you, as if they were just things hanging at the end of your arms?” “I guess I get it,” Roderick mutters. Ursula continues, “I remember I had to say something, when the glass fell. And now I don’t know how to go on. It’s like everything was clear in my mind, when I suddenly forgot my line.” THR | Issue 3 33 Ursula looks at the sea and the people walking down the promenade, but her mind runs idle. She wishes there was some foothold, a tiny crack through which she may return to where she was before. “It happened to me too, right here,” Paulo says sadly. “Yeah, I remember that,” Roderick nods. “It was the day that you stumbled and fell, toppling the table and the chairs.” “And then,” asks Ursula in a tense tone, but the others do not reply and look at the sea. “I beg you, answer me!” “I’m sorry, I just can’t,” Roderick says with a bleak gaze. “I can’t remember what happened next.” “Me neither.” “Why?” Ursula gets angry. “Why can’t we remember anything? Why does it seem to me that my life away from this place is just a black backcloth? Why don’t I have any memories? What lies beyond the corner of this place?” “Why do you keep worrying about what you can’t see,” Paulo asks. “Do like me, look at the sea, isn’t it beautiful? Look at those people, everyone lost in their thoughts. What’s the point in recalling what we were in another time and place?” “Paulo is right, you know,” Roderick says. “In his own way, of course. In fact, he cannot see anything but shadows because he’s so afraid that his eyes are shut. Hence his mistake. The point is another, though. Where does our knowledge come from? Somewhere, an intelligence must exist, of which we are part. Maybe in that blue sky, beyond the sun that we love so much? Maybe, if we looked at the glass closely, we might understand that intelligence and how much we depend on it. Every system seems too complex, when one looks through it from the inside. We ought to pick from the outside, through those people’s eyes. Only then, perhaps, we would understand why we sit here today as we did yesterday and will do tomorrow, at the same old tables before the sea on this very sidewalk. Do these thoughts belong to me? Is it me that THR | Issue 3 34 move these arms? Or there is someone who thinks for me, moves me and speaks through my mouth?” “You talk like a philosopher, or worse, a priest,” Ursula complains. “I’m thirsty with life, not truth. I wish I could stand up, hug you, two-step dance among the tables where nobody ever comes to sit but us. And I wish I could walk down the sidewalk and across the street, stop in front of a perfect stranger and shake his hand, maybe I’d kiss him. I wish I could reach the shore and bathe in the sea. Finally, I would turn over and look at the Café, its tables and you two sitting in the sun, just like those phantoms look at us without ever stopping by. You know what? I’m afraid I’d see myself sitting there next to you, still and fake. And I’d see that bloody glass fall over and over again, and that hand of mine rise and move just like a mechanic lever.” “Wow, that’s intense,” Paulo feebly whistles. “You expect too much from life, you know? You, Rod, seek after answers you’ll never find anywhere. Nothing will take away your doubt that your answers are not your own but someone else’s lines that you must repeat again and again. And you, my dear friend, wish to feel life as the bough fallen into the river can feel the stream. You can’t get out of yourself. You can’t even reach the sidewalk, and you don’t even know why! Accept what you are, who cares if you don’t understand. We hang from a thread, so what? Who doesn’t? Ok, we look for the way out, whatever, but why? To go where? We are what we are, here, now. Out there we wouldn’t be us anymore. We wouldn’t even recognise each other. There’s nothing out there, my friends, only phantoms.” The three friends are silent now. Roderick stares at the broken glass and says, “It’s just like destiny.” “It is, no kidding,” Paulo nods. “No,” Ursula cries. “There must be something we can find, that’s the key to all our questions, the end of our quest—” “And then what?” Roderick interrupts. “What remains after the quest?” “Life!” THR | Issue 3 35 “Our life is now,” Paulo shakes his head, raising his hands almost mechanically. “I just know that tomorrow we’ll be here again and everything is going to be just fine. I would like to take one more step further only to show you that everything ends where that road begins. And yet I can’t. An invisible thread pulls me back and tomorrow I will be here again, like in a dream. Paulo sees, Paulo sees, Paulo sees, Paulo...” “Someone once said a philosopher dwell in each of us,” smiles Roderick, pushing his legs beneath the table. “Yours woke up today, didn’t he? Actually, he seems more a poet than a philosopher to me, but doesn’t matter, who am I to judge? Anyway, your reasoning is flawed. You want but you can’t. You assume some truth is out there while you deny it. Your resignation is dishonest, isn’t it? Why don’t you do like her? Curse this place, these tables, this cage without bars. Otherwise, embrace the idea of living without a will, in the hand of something that existed much before us and shows itself through us.” “And what should that be?” “The Great Intelligence. We are the variable forms of its restlessness, the effect of its revelation. Through us, the Great Intelligence knows itself. Whenever the Great Intelligence enters a new stage of its evolution, it has to start new explorations through new forms. That’s why we are forever born again without memory, timeless orphans and castaways hanging from the threads of destiny like empty clothes.” “I don’t believe one single word you said,” Ursula says in anger. “Then explain to me why, right now, you wish you could get up and walk to the sidewalk, across the street and down to the sea, but you just can’t. Why?” Ursula, crestfallen, does not reply. “See? You can’t because we’re not allowed to. We are dogs on a leash, my friends. That’s what we are.” “Whatever. The sea is so beautiful today,” Paulo says in a dreamy tone. Ursula looks at her feet, shaking and sobbing: THR | Issue 3 36 “You are my best friends, the dearest things I have. But I don’t think this is love, and I wish I never saw you again. I wish that an earthquake destroyed the city and swallowed us in the earth. I wish that, if I cannot be free...” Something has interrupted her. Suddenly everything is swaying, the tables topple onto the chairs and the flowerpots, and even the lamp post and the sign of the Café fall with a crash. Roderick, Ursula and Paulo fall and roll over, crying in pain and fear. The earthquake is over and Paulo, from his very uncomfortable position, can see Roderick lying beside him. “What the hell has happened? Are you all right?,” he cries. “I think I have broken something, but I’m alive. It was a quake, no doubt. You all right?” “I think so, but I can’t move, something hit me. What are these threads? They’re everywhere, what a tangle! Are these electric cables?” “Ursula? Where is she? Ursula!” She doesn’t answer their calls. Paulo spots her a little beyond the sidewalk, lying unnaturally, facing the sky. She is entangled in the cables, too. “Ursula, can you hear me?” Nothing, she lies still. “She won’t hear you,” Paulo says sadly. “Can’t you see? She’s fallen beyond the sidewalk.” “So, you were right,” Roderick mumbles gravely. “There’s nothing out there for us. Beyond the line, everything changes.” “There’s hope, then.” “I suppose, yeah.” *** THR | Issue 3 37 Everybody is talking about the incident on the promenade. It must have been pretty scary. It was about five, and people were flocking by up and down the promenade as usual when a sudden and inexplicable gale began to blow, which swept away the tables of the Café on the sidewalk. It was a momentary lapse of terror that lasted just for a few seconds, enough yet to destroy Plato’s small business. In a second, his small wooden theatre was overwhelmed and crushed, and his puppets flew all around, entangled in their threads. Unfortunately, one of them wound up on the street while a car passed. I did not see that happen, and I am grateful for that. Sometimes, I pop by and watch Plato’s performances, I like the texts that earned him his nickname. Everybody in the neighbourhood knows and loves him, although some think he is a bit of a loony. I must say he has got a talent; his puppets do look alive. Their faces are so real that I am sure I would have cried if I had seen one of them crushed on the ground, just like a broken thing. Gianluca Cinelli studied in Rome and Cork and worked as a researcher and lecturer in several European universities and research institutions. He published books and scholarly articles on the topics of literature, memory and history, with particular attention to war narratives of the two World Wars. In 2018 he co-founded the Close Encounters in War Journal. Since 2012 he has published fiction in Italy, Ireland, and America. THR | Issue 3