1 Breath

Umbrarum hic locus est

Virgilio, Eneide

***

I woke up in the middle of the night, drenched in sweat. My heart, gripped in a fierce vise, desperately cried out its conviction: that he was alive.

My hand still held the object that rocked my cry before I fell exhausted, its spare inhaler, which I used to keep with me when we were apart. From the day he was pronounced dead, I had held it tight like a lifeline, drowning, drunk with sorrow, in those indistinct and indistinguishable days that had been the funeral and all the seemingly inexplicable events connected with the death of a young person. Because my husband was too young to die.

I put it in my pocket and got out of bed. I couldn't ignore that blind certainty inside of me, that alarming feeling. Whether it was love that dictated the terms, or rather the devotion that is reserved to a saint or a pagan god, something pushed my steps with frenzy as the most faithful of the handmaids so that I left home and went to the cemetery.

***

Noah Napnei

13th January 1990-7th March 2019

"Sunset.

Nothing is lost.

In the nowhere I leap."

I fixed the headstone for a few seconds, in an attempt to reconcile that deafening silence with the deaf beat of my heart.

I tried to imagine myself from the outside.

A hooded figure, completely in black.

Elbow-deep gloves and boots up to the calf. The backpack full of possible or improbable tools, picked up at random, that would have served me to dig and break the welding of the cover of the coffin, if I had ever managed to reach it. Although at that moment there was nothing that seemed more distant.

I inhaled.

I knelt down and brought one ear to the ground. The void and then a blow. Gasping. I waited, my eyes wide open. Another blow. Out of my mind, with my bare hands, I began to dig. After what seemed like a few thousand hours, I arrived at the coffin.

He was there, white as a sheet, thin and in the throes of a terrible asthma crisis. With all my strength, I tried to get him out of the box and to bring his face beyond the cloud of dust in which we were immersed and which I had created with the hustle and bustle of blows and kicks and shakes, out of the hole, where the fresh air was.

But the task was far from easy. He was a tall, heavy, muscular man, and completely powerless. The hole was at least three meters deep and every time I thought I could pull it up, the earth fell under my feet and we fell back into the coffin.

The man's breath was getting shorter and shorter. His heartbeats more and more throbbing.

***

Noah closed his eyes, trying to protect himself, in vain, from all that dust, completely inert, feeling he didn't even have the strength to lift an arm. When was the last time he had eaten? He didn't know. He didn't know where he was. He didn't remember anything.

The only grip with reality was that thick, strong urgency of air. When Zelda could push him a little higher, almost with his hair he could feel a fresh and pure breeze fluttering, but it was too far away for his mouth to welcome salvation, just a little bit of that fresh clean air.

He could feel the stars on his head. He couldn't wait. He couldn't breathe anymore.

Suddenly he heard her gasp, mutter something and rummage in her pocket.

She brought something to his mouth.

He recognized its shape.

The inhaler.

A big, deep breath, accompanied by a gasp.

Then the dark.