In a May morning my father left ... This paper is 2003. What was the motivation that prompted me to write these memories? I do not know, frankly. Shortly before he died one of my dogs, I remember for sure. And at the same time, followed by a Master trainers degi health workers. This included master, too, in his joint issues, including a module on narratives (even autobiographical) and use them in training. The teacher responsible for this module was very good and engaging, so that, when I returned home I felt the irresistible impulse to challenge myself, abandoning the narrative flow, without too many rationalizations.
One morning in early May my father is gone.
went by plane to Rome and would come home late at night.
Dad knocks on the bathroom door to tell me that is going on.
Hello! Hello! I have done from behind the door.
And he is gone.
could not wait any longer.
was already late, with the driver ready, waiting, under the house.
For my father to travel by air, including lightning trip was a matter of routine, like taking the bus to go to work and make it back.
A random farewell ... but who could know.
In the evening, after a normal day, the phone rings.
My father was not home yet ... but no worries, sometimes - you know - the aircraft unexpectedly lead late.
I, locked in a room of the house, I made love, unaware, with my "girlfriend" English, my "first" girlfriend, just come from England ...
gasatissimo and I was happy about this visit for which, after our knowledge in England, I had waited almost a year, taking in the interim contact with her a passionate correspondence ...
My father was certainly pleased with this visit, which marks a turning point with respect to my teenage insecurities: the sign that I had finally "weaned" from a kind of cloudiness and uncertainty in starting stories with women .
phone rings repeatedly.
My mother answers it.
Who, I hear them ask.
Silence.
Who is this?
A long pause.
Then, my mother's voice rises more acute.
She wants to know why I have to say right now if my husband is on the plane arriving from Rome.
Tell me, tell me ... the voice, louder and louder, is close to break into a moan.
Pause.
Again the same iteration.
broken cries.
And then, silence.
Perhaps the relentless voice on the other end is finally saying something.
end of the call.
I leave the room, reassembling at best, anxious.
What happened?, I wonder.
I ask my mother.
Who was he?
A journalist from the Giornale di Sicilia.
What did he want?
wanted to know if Dad was on the plane that came from Rome.
wanted to know why?
Before I did not meant
Then finally told you?
Yes
The plane crashed, crashed.
No. What you say!?
Yes, well.
After that, yes, so clear and undeniable, there are no words that can mean.
What we do now?
We do not know what to do ... We are not like those who come and go from the airport to accompany and take their families. We do not know what to do ...
Telephony.
Yes, but to whom?
tried calling the airport.
Yes, let's try.
are unable to communicate, the phone lines are jammed to the airport.
Come on, then.
Yes, let's go.
I say a few words Jane, who is there dumbstruck, includes and excludes. Suddenly finds himself thrown into a tragedy.
We dress, we're ready.
We embark on the five hundred of small mom and head in anguish, I driving.
The highway to the airport is dark and quiet ... a few machines, deserted road and then, suddenly, the transit of a lump of ambulances with the siren.
height of Carini, in the pitch dark of night, I see beams of photoelectric cells that sweep the flank of Mount Longa.
are taken from the dross.
For the first time by the ringing phone I feel the knot in my chest and throat dissolves into tears and cried.
Mom, what we go there.
E 'go home pointless.
We're going to wait at home.
It 'been like that arrived at the airport without even stopping we are on the way back.
This is what I remember.
But in truth - here I remember the story of my mother, thirty-one years and ten days later - we arrived early in the airport, got out and entered the arrivals hall.
bleakly empty space opened in front of us.
It was all gone.
An official came to meet us ... We wanted to know ...
But we stop before we can say more.
is useless you're here, go home!
Why, why, does my mother.
Meanwhile approached by a young journalist that we know.
He repeats the same thing with kindness.
He rolled up a newspaper sticking out of his pocket.
My mother grabs him and it unfolds.
reads the news "is the plane crashed on Mount Longa from Rome, the dead passengers and crew. "I do not remember the exact number.
My mother looked scroll the list of victims. And there is written very clearly also the name of My father, Francesco Crispi.
A cynic service apart from the personalities of citizenship to board the plane.
understand the reason for the call before.
had been the chronicler, author of the article, to call because he wanted to be sure to include the first name in the list, he wanted to be sure it was that of Francesco Crispi, known in Palermo environments journalism and culture, and not others.
Come back, we pass by the road where there is the house of my uncles.
We climb for a while '. We're going to track them down and talk to them.
No. No. What we can do, what to say.
Let's go home.
At home all together, waiting for news.
We are all standing in an unnatural situation, suspended time, there is nothing we can do, just wait.
Stunned.
astonished.
Meanwhile gather other relatives, the brothers of my father, Aldo's brother Mom, Uncle John's wife and children, perhaps they went to the airport and they too are waiting for news on the plane was his daughter Elizabeth.
A terrible pain.
with bitterness that I think in the morning, my father I did not even say goodbye properly.
I know that I see him more, even in death.
is dead, a word that you can not even pronounce.
Right now there's more I feel so terrible lack of it, now that I had begun to differentiate and grow with my own identity, from its rich and varied personalities, and its culture. I think all those things I could have and that I, for pride and desire - can not - of autonomous growth had tried to reject (the visceral rejection of the usual phrase said by many "and 'the son of Ciccio Crispi" phrase that each time I was proud but at the same time made me feel humiliated and canceled - I thought, then, for me, my qualities I'm not worth anything!), those things that, despite everything, despite my contortions, I came in and that even now I carry inside.
I shall not see my father. It is a hard and unavoidable reality. I also feel deeply guilty, as if with my need for rebellion, I had been to kill him, send him away forever.
After two days of waiting has taken home a coffin already sealed.
A polished wooden sarcophagus that hurts your eyes just watching it.
The empire style wooden stools, lounge, on which the support and Sconocchia groan under its weight.
Wreaths of flowers fills the room, he begins an endless procession of faces pricked I do not remember anything.
My father is in there ... but we will then really? What then will there?
Me are then asked me and I am repeatedly asked, in all subsequent years already.
In the days following news reports to no end, pitiless images.
Someone shows me a photo, published in the newspaper in the evening.
A fence of barbed wire and ground a faint dark spot, perhaps a body hunched over.
This same someone says to me, some say that this was the body of your father, at the point where he was discovered.
I did not go as my uncle John at the Institute of Forensic Medicine to try to identify the mortal remains of my father, if there was anything to be recognized.
They told me not to go.
I, coward, I accept the imposition.
Over the years, I am sorry.
regret it forever.
I had to drink from this cup all the way to understand the harshness of life.
And instead, I chose not to.
Even if nobody have never officially acknowledged, before the arrival of first aid, looters ransacked luggage scattered on the mountains, looking for valuables among the things that had not been pulverized in the explosion.
of the things Dad has not found anything, but travel light, the bag of documents, things for a day trip.
Just a day we have called the police station. Empty hallways, with high ceilings, places steeped in melancholy, in an office furnished with cheap, they gave us a portfolio. The portfolio's dad, and within his journalist card, cards of notes, no money, driver's license we had taken her Uncle John by the Institute of Forensic Medicine, where the bodies had been arranged. Maybe he was pinned up what was left of his body. They also gave us some keys, including that of a hard case luggage, a key deeply engraved on one of its surfaces.
I thought it was the shock to produce this scratch.
In these moments, you always think of stupid things and irrelevant.
This key, for years, I held in my personal keychain and often walked it with the finger and tried to imagine the scratch hardness of impact that he had been able to provoke.
After two months, accompanied by my cousin Patrick and his uncle Aldo, in a very hot afternoon in July, we face the climb up the cliffs of Mount Longa, from the side of Cinisi.
A way forward from the car, only to a certain point, then we have to walk up the steep side of the mountain.
My uncle is forced to give up because you feel bad.
We continue and eventually reach the top flat, long and narrow, thick calcareous rocks from the ground, dehydrated in full foliage, not a tree on this ridge often used by strong winds, the ground, in places where it is free of vegetation spontaneous, is littered with small fragments of metal plastic, fabric, all the large debris were removed for the expertise (in truth, they were hastily removed and never kept for a careful study of the dynamics of the tragedy: nothing similar to what was since then the plane crashed over the skies of Ustica, but that's another story).
remain long, bending down to pick up, from time to time, and examining the fragments, as if examining a single piece, I can take items to help me understand the enormity of the tragedy that involved, in an instant, so many people. Qau and there I discovered a few fragments of torn suitcase, a little 'bigger.
The wind blows constantly, swinging the expanse of grass.
You breathe a deep loneliness, but loneliness is one that inspires feelings of peace and quiet.
There are no conspicuous signs of what has happened, signs of destruction and struggle, traces of fire.
When I was younger my father I had said, commenting on the sudden death of a fellow journalist for heart attack (which, in the morning, was found dead at his desk by his family), this is how I would die. All of a sudden. A rapid transition from life to death.
I wonder, as I stand among the tufts of dehydration swaying in the wind, if this desire has been fulfilled or have had time to realize that it was time and if he was afraid.
The wind blows forever and no answers.
When I got home, ol'avevo've done it before, now I remember, I went to read a book dear to my father, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, by Thornton Wilder, looking for answers about why the lives of some men are to be joined by a common destiny.
still do not know if I can find these answers, or if ever find.
Because you live, why we die.
Why do some live because others die.
's all.
