SENZA IL MIO NOME (Without my name)

Marcello Sbigoli, actor and voice artist, introduces "Senza il mio nome"

INCIPIT

This is an imagined story. A work of fiction belonging to the rich tradition of the coming-of-age novel, following in the footsteps of Demian, Kim, David Copperfield and The Catcher in the Rye. The author draws deeply on his own experience to construct meticulously detailed, three-dimensional settings in which his characters live, meet and interact. The result is a world that remains consistently coherent and believable, holding the reader suspended between situations and emotions. The irony that sustains the opening sections, allowing the reader to venture into the story with a certain cautious detachment, gradually fades until it disappears altogether. By the time we reach the final pages, the distance that initially protected us from becoming too deeply involved has vanished, and we are free to surrender completely to the protagonist's inner experience. The narrative moves with a musical rhythm: irregular, shifting, syncopated. Jazz, then, could hardly be absent from the ideal soundtrack to this book. But it is by no means the only music that resonates through its pages. Some chapters seem to call for the Blues; others evoke distinctly Country atmospheres. A book to be savoured slowly, losing yourself among notes and words.

Now, 590 kilometres and twenty-four hours later, he had no doubts left.

Before him stood a coffin, simple and unadorned, lined with gathered white satin.

Inside lay a man in a dark pinstriped suit, his feet in a fine pair of elegant shoes resting on a cushion, white like the satin lining, positioned so as not to leave too large an empty space between his feet and the end of the coffin.

It wasn't only that he wasn't breathing, or that his body felt far too cold to be alive.

The stranger also looked several years younger than he had when they had last said goodbye, only a few days before.

And he was his father. There could be no doubt about that either.

The stranger was his father.

A sparse wave of hair, encompassing every shade of grey, swept back from his broad forehead towards the nape of his neck, spreading out at the sides and emphasising his distinctive, deeply receding hairline.

His slightly aquiline nose, with a pronounced hollow at the bridge, leaned a little to the right and ended above an extraordinarily thick moustache, the same colour as his hair, almost concealing thin lips that, in recent years, had rarely been inclined to smile.

Equally thick eyebrows framed two tired eyes that, not so long ago, had been striking for their prominent, almost bulging appearance.

His face formed a long triangle, point down and base above, enclosed—like a pair of curly brackets—by large ears.

In that atmosphere, heavy with smells and unspoken feelings, he could think of nothing else.

Who was the man in front of him?

How had it been possible to spend almost eighteen years side by side, followed by another thirty years of intermittent contact, without having the faintest idea who his father really was?

A dog howled somewhere nearby.

A long, sustained, desolate sound that—perhaps because of the time of day, the blazing sun or the Felliniesque atmosphere surrounding them—did not sound sinister at all. It seemed, instead, filled with anguish.

The stranger, apparently comforted by the dog's sympathetic howl and wrapped in a soundtrack of Hail Marys and prayers for eternal rest, remained utterly indifferent to finding himself at the centre of that small world's attention.

No.

There was no doubt about it.

That really was his father.

[...continued]

He had been staring at him in silence for several minutes. Without crying.

Who was the man lying there, motionless, his face relaxed and his lips slightly parted, inside that pale wooden coffin?

He wasn't sure he knew him. He wasn't sure he had ever known him.

The powerful, penetrating scent of the white lilies generously scattered throughout the room made it difficult to breathe, but did an excellent job of masking the first odours beginning to rise from the stranger's body.

It had been an exceptionally hot August, and there was no cooling system in the makeshift funeral room, hastily arranged in one of the bedrooms of the old house by the sea.

Heat. Exhaustion. Heavy air.

For a moment, he thought the stranger had started breathing again. He shook himself.

It was not an event a rational mind could contemplate.

His father was most certainly dead.

He remembered receiving the call on his mobile phone the previous morning while mowing the lawn—an exceptional event in itself. Not receiving a phone call, obviously, but mowing the lawn, an activity he detested and found anything but relaxing.

The voice on the phone told him that his father had died suddenly just a few minutes earlier.

It had been a confused, frantic call, conducted through sobs and broken sentences, while someone was still trying to resuscitate a body that was already lifeless.

He had simply stood there, phone in hand, his T-shirt soaked with sweat, staring at his wife as he tried to grasp the meaning of the words he had just heard.