Our discomposed, fragmentary present is but a bridge between past and future.
On the floor of my living-room among broken glass is the giant-size photograph of a relative, a young man - just out of his teenage years - in a bersagliere uniform, dated 1917, a couple of months before the untimely death in WW1. The picture is intact, the only memory left of this life, his tomb somewhere, unnamed and unvisited among the hundred thousands at Redipuglia amid the battlefields of the Great Wars, the dreams of his life flying, forever, in the winds over the snows of the Alpine summits hidden in the clouds.
Something in the expression, in the face of the young soldier is strangely reflected in my son today, the resemblance somehow pulls the strings of our heritage together, as if an unknown Dike was at work in the backstage and the little we can see were just the tip of the iceberg in a larger plan. Back in 1804, the ancestor of a friend of mine was killed by mountain highwaymen, he was just 40 and left wife and young children; I told this friend, you are being fortunate in your life because this ancestor whose existence you did not even know until late, ransomed with his cruel death your privileged existence in exchange.
And so my family was spared in this generation, while the brother of our great-grandfather was taken at 19. And I think of another young life, untimely taken by a careless fate, my father's brother, who while playing soccer with other kids at Piazza Navona, Rome, hit his head on one of the two fountains, and my grandmother with her hands around his hair mixed with blood had to accompany his last breath, and cried for two years on his tomb before her life was mercifully taken. Another two years and the husband too, my grandfather, followed both of them, his heart crushed by too much grief, unable to live for the one son left. So in 1941 my father, alone in the world and in wartime at 11 years of age, was picked up by his mother's half-brother, who already had 11 children of his own, and brought to live in Aquila.
As if the hunger of a Greek Dike was satisfied with the lives and grief of previous generations, my family and all the descendants were spared this time, thank God we have our lives, and our children. How can a mother, a father, live after burying a child, I know I could not cope with such a destiny, I feel ashamed of the gifts I was given and humbled in the presence of those parents who have to open their eyes to new days, and the first thought is the knowledge that the smiling eyes of their children, forever asleep in the brown earth, will never open again and look at them, in this life.
So many splendid angels hidden by the clouds are trying to reach out to them, this uninterrupted rain like their tears for the abandoned souls left alive among the ruins, trying to wash away the anguish, and bring some - just a very little - consolation, if it is at all possible - but they are so far away from this world, consolation might, maybe will come, but to other generations than ours.