Italian
Love stories are always unhappy and they move us for this reason. As in poetry, what matters is the initial strike. It’s the firework that starts with a single, isolated, and strong bang. Then, after a moment, the fireworks ignite: crackling and colorful lights that paint the sky. Finally, the loud and definitive bang that closes the show.
Some stop at the first story, while others continue until the last. It’s always like this.
One of the most beautiful stories from Dubliners by James Joyce is titled The Dead. It is Christmas Eve: guests and relatives gather around a table laden with all kinds of delicacies. The children play, the elderly talk and have fun. A couple, husband and wife, well-off bourgeois, arrives by carriage. It is a cold night, full of stars, with snow.
In the well-decorated home, there is warmth, joy, and peace. After dinner, the couple, with their healthy and beautiful children, retires to their house. The young wife is happy, embracing the man she loves, her husband. They kiss tenderly and prepare to go to bed: a night of love, like the many experienced in a successful marriage.
However, the young woman is reminded of a memory. A distant memory, from when she was just a teenager, on vacation with her family. A boy, young and handsome, catches her eye and a love story begins: for both, it is the first love. At the end of the summer vacation, everything comes to a halt, but the promise of a future meeting lingers, who knows when. But it will not happen.
The young man falls ill and dies. This is the thought that interrupts the night of Christmas Eve and the joy that accompanies it: the thought of the dead.
In a famous poem by Neruda, the poet wonders: if death is truly death, where will poets and the things that no one forgets ever end up? But of course, when love ends, it is not always because someone dies, even though death activates the illness of grief. We know that healing from grief means starting to live again, despite everything.
The separation is more painful when there is no mourning to work for you, but you have to do everything on your own. When love ends, there is nothing left to do but turn the page and never reopen that book you hadn’t finished reading.
But sometimes, in your hands, you come across something that reminds you of when you were eighteen and still beautiful, and the imperfections of your body, the flaws of your character, had not yet made you recognizable.
We are disappointed when we seek out people from the past and, if we are lucky enough to meet them again, we realize how much time has passed and how we have changed. But when we remember them, these people appear in our memory just as they were back then. And that’s when we miss them. We miss them so much.
The inability to live in the present is a purely human characteristic, which we envy in animals and plants. Now we have overcome the awkwardness and clumsiness of the past. We have become clever, attentive, and cautious. We think about the future, the time we have left, and how to make the best use of it, without getting lost in what today are trivialities, but which back then made us happy.
