Serenella
Angeli di pietra

a few years earlier …

Yesterday,

all my troubles seemed so far away,

now it looks as though they’re here to stay,

oh, I believe in yesterday.

...

Yesterday
(Lennon/McCartney)

The high school occupies the entire ancient palace of the noble Giustinian family, the science room is on the top floor, where the servants used to be. The ceilings of the rooms are low with wooden floors and doors that open awkwardly onto long, dark corridors.

In our class, there's a guy who has some problems, he doesn't talk much but one morning he surprises us all: he straddles the windowsill on the top floor, while we are all downstairs having our break.

I don't know who sees him first, but at a certain point we are all with our heads up and eyes wide open, he's up there and doesn't say a word. It's this that chills us, that silence broken only by the rustling of his pants on the stone ledge: he is trying to find a position to jump. They grab him by the sweater while he's already with his legs out, from below we hear the moans and screams of someone struggling inside the room.

When it's all over, no one wants to talk anymore.

On Calle Fabio, he pulls me towards the wall and, grabbing me by the lapel of my jacket, speaks excitedly about the perfect suicide, he tried it too but not in such a spectacular and theatrical way. He got the timing wrong, he says, and speaks like someone who has thought deeply about it. We walk like drunkards, we have seen the edge between life and death brushed close and can't stay away from it anymore.

The event we witnessed wasn't written on the pages of a book or painted in a painting, it was reality; and yet, it happened so quickly that it seemed impossible to fix the contours of the episode and assert with certainty: I was there, this or that happened, the sun was shining or not, I was smoking or had just put out a cigarette...

Nothing, in the end, a guy jumps from the top floor of your school and you were distracted by a thousand silly things, and you miss the essence, the truth of things. Indeed, it remains to ask what is truth if not what appears before everyone's eyes? And what is verisimilitude if not the attempt to build something that is visible and therefore - apparently - comprehensible? From an event, in the end, only fragments of gestures, words, sensations, trivialities remain that envelop the fact, stripping it of importance; so that you can say a boy died but you were turned the other way scratching your ear and so you didn't see or understand what happened. On the other hand, the cleaning lady in the classroom grabbed him by the rags, blocking him, and so she allowed you to postpone any regret to the next attempt.

By this, I don't mean to say that Fabio and I, or my classmates, are cynical and heartless, I'm just trying to explain what we were like: our interest was all directed towards attentively observing reality to see it better, in order to grasp the meaning of things, and often, imagination slowed down and distorted our reactions even in front of an insignificant or trivial event like the flapping of a butterfly's wings. In the end, it was fortunate for our schoolmate that there was a cleaning lady as a witness to his attempted suicide, with a common sense of reality, if it had been one of us, perhaps it would have gone differently.