Blue Grade: Midnight
On the Constraints of Imperfect Information
He assesses the tiny cavities that populate the rock. A slight miscalculation and all would wind up in a happy, neat, freak accident. That’s how things are supposed to be. Simple, lucid, no-frills. When they are not, misery will only nest and breed.
The Playground
If only she remained hidden for many hours, loads of hours, an entire day, until after the last gasp of daylight is long gone, until well after darkness had settled in, even up to that point when the poppy field turns unnerving and creepy.
Paradiso Lost
He sits to watch her basking in the lethargy of the impending twilight, her oversized straw hat drooping over the pale face, a few straggly locks that had come free to flutter on the mellow breeze and filter the amber light that cuts across them.
This Sea Will Only Bring You Good Things
He moored in her life one ill-fated morning in the late winter, early spring of seventy-eight, more than out of the blue – out of an ersatz honeymoon cruise, swaying and wobbling under a perpetual liquor-and-daftness stupor, all the way through from within the depths of a godforsaken Irish hamlet to Cagliari, and from there upwards along the coast, hopping through the booze dudgeons strewn along it. He missed the ship and the bride.
Il Tabarro
Then the rehabs, the stints of depression and in the middle of one of those she gets to kill herself, as they do, you know, the thousand-times replayed tale of heartbrokenness, highly talented at school, promising at everything and subito fortissimo, out of the deep blue, all starts to go awry.
The Only Smile She Knew
A child made of thick glasses, of a dishevelled short-cropped lifeless heap of brownish hair and a pair of atrophied legs discarded on a disproportionate wheelchair that looked bent on sucking up the shrunken body and making it vanish from the scene at any instant.
A Pleasant Aroma of Citrus
No respite passes through the imploring windows, though no shortage of other stuff does. The ubiquitous humming of the torrid midday insects, the cadence of car engines in and out of Nuoro, a pervasive tractor that ploughs an unending field nearby, a medley of dissonant voices that surfaces from time to time.
Caprera.xlsx
So much for the only true and authentic story. As a matter of course you don’t even have to draft that many pages before you quickly come to realise how truth and facts can turn into such a bore. Fourteen years of obsessive writing afterwards and you’re left with the scraps of this sort of make-believe human being who wrecked everyone around her, burnt down every single element she ever touched. And, in the end, if I survived it, it was only because I turned out to be way too incompetent to cut even my own life short.