What Hell Is Not

by Alessandro D'Avenia

  The Hunter is now at his side and shoots him from a distance of eight inches like he was the last of the traitors, like he doesn’t have the courage to look him in the eyes. But even from the side, he can see his smile.

  The last words of a man are the ones that count the most.

  They are the seal of his life.

  He says: ‘I was expecting this.’

  He says he was ready, at 8:40 p.m. on September 15, 1993.

  And he smiles.

  These are his last words.

  He was waiting for death.

  He was waiting for it like someone who goes to an appointment or receives a visit after a long wait.

  He dies with a smile.

  He doesn’t see his two assassins. He sees two sons. He was expecting them, with a smile, like a father who rushes to embrace a child who’s been away for a long time.

  He sees through them. He sees beyond them. And in his gaze, they see themselves as they were when they were children.

  The Hunter had a different nickname them: Ricciolino, ‘curly,’ because of his hair. It was the nickname his mother gave him. That smile takes him back to that time. That smile says to him: You don’t know what you are doing; you are not this. That smile is the worst punishment that can be inflicted on an assassin. And the Hunter will no longer be able to sleep at night. There are certain crimes that seek out their punishment. And they end up finding only forgiveness.

  Don Pino now sees who was waiting for him.

  He sees who he’s always seen in all things.

  He feels the weight that crushed him be lifted, as if on the immense wings of a king from on high.

  He sees God. Face to face. And he smiles at him.

  The semi-automatic Beretta M1935 with silencer fires from a distance of eight inches from the back of his neck. It’s a pistol for common criminals and amateurs. But from this distance, it’s plenty and then some.

  The bullet explodes on the back of his neck and shows his soul the way out.

  Don Pino falls and kisses the street with his lips. The bitter taste of blood is blended with that of the dust.

  They take his bag. It’s supposed to seem like the result of a robbery by a desperate man.

  The body is still on the ground. It’s almost 9 p.m.

  The pack heads back to its den. It’s a warehouse for a shipping and transport company, the ideal place for those who ship souls to the afterlife.

  The Hunter’s hand is shaking. He puts the pistol away and opens the priest’s bag.

  ‘This time we were the ones to say the blessing.’

  He finds the envelope. It has 50,000 lire in it and a greetings card.

  ‘To Don Pino, who treated us like a father when others only judged us. Happy birthday.’

  ‘We sure gave him a good birthday present. Look at this!’

  There’s another envelope with a lot of money in it. It’s says ‘For Maria’ on it.

  The Hunter slips it into his pocket without letting anyone else see. The money from Federico’s English visit.

  They don’t find anything else in the bag. No secret messages. No trace of working with the cops or contact with the police. Nothing. Just a few banknotes, a driver’s license, and the greetings card.

  The other guy rips the stamps off the license.

  ‘These are always useful.’

  They divvy them up, one for each of them.

  They laugh, clearly proud of themselves. They drink an ice-cold beer. It relaxes their foreheads, which have been made shiny by sweat from the tension.

  ‘Now it’s time to hit the tobacco store,’ says the Hunter with a feverish tremble.

  ‘A great night! What are we doing?’

  ‘Burning it down.’

  The pack is still hungry. The prey they just finished sacrificing was too weak. And they always want more. That pack of wolves is preparing an attack that has never been attempted in the history of the Mafia: A car filled with TNT in front of the Stadio Olimpico in Rome, to be detonated when the game is over and people are leaving. It’s a huge leap forward. A checkmate for that papier-mâché idol otherwise known as the government. Like the Italian word for has-been, the stato – the state – is the past. They are the present and the future.

  Chapter 32

  In the silence of Piazza Anita Garibaldi, the air is still. Minutes pass slowly as the blood exits the wound in the back of his neck. It has exactly the same rhythm and possesses the same dripping awareness that his life does.

  These seconds are filled with absolute and tremendous lucidity.

  There are five things that a person regrets when they are about to die. And they are never the things they consider important during their life. We won’t regret the trips that never went further than the window display at the travel agency. We won’t regret the new car, a better salary, or a woman or man that we dreamed of. No, at the moment of death, everything finally becomes real. And there are five things that we will regret, the only real things in a life.

  The first is not having followed our inclinations in life instead of being prisoners to others’ expectations. The mask of skin that made us lovable, or made us believe we were lovable, will fall by the wayside. And it was the mask created by fashion, by our false anticipation, to heal the resentment of wounds we never faced. It’s the mask worn by those who are content merely by being lovable. But not loved.

  The second regret is having worked too hard, having allowed ourselves to be overwrought by competition, by results, by running after something that never arrived because it existed only in our minds. We regret having neglected people and relationships. We wish we could apologize to everyone. But there’s no time left for that.

  Our third regret is that of never having found the courage to speak the truth. We will regret not having said ‘I love you’ enough to those close to us, not having said ‘I’m proud of you’ to our children, not having said ‘I’m sorry’ when we were wrong or even when we were right. We preferred festering resentment and long silences over the truth.

  Then we will regret not having spent time with those whom we love. We didn’t bother to worry about those we always had around, for the very reason that they were always around. And yet the pain reminded us every so often that nothing lasts forever. But we underestimated this as if we were immortal. We continued to put it off, giving the right of way to what was urgent and not to what was important. How did we manage to endure so much loneliness in life?

  We tolerated this because it was ingested in small doses, as you do with a poison so as to become immune. And we suffocated the pain with tiny, sweet little surrogates. We couldn’t even manage to make a call and ask how things were going.

  Lastly, we will regret not having been happier. And yet, all we would have needed to do was to let bloom that which we had inside and around us. But we allowed ourselves to be crushed by habit, by apathy, by egotism. Instead, we should have loved like poets and we should have sought knowledge like scientists. We should have searched the world for what the child saw in his maps: Treasures. We should have searched for what the adolescent discovers as his body thickens: Promises. We should have searched for what young people hope for in the affirmation of their lives: Love.

  Don Pino doesn’t regret any of these things. He knew all of them through love. To him, everything was already real. That’s why he smiles as he crosses over the threshold. He has only one regret: Leaving his city, his neighborhood, his friends, and his kids. He misses their faces and thinks about the pain that his leaving so abruptly will cause. Maria, Lucia, Francesco, Totò, Federico, Dario, Serena, all of his old students and the ones that he would have had that year and others. Their names start to become jumbled because his brain is burning like a fire and the bitterness is grabbing at his heart. But he senses a light that slowly guides his way in the grip of death.

  The love that he has given will remain intact and it will continue forever, indestructible, because that love didn’t originate with him. It passed t
hrough him like an open channel. He remembers the phrase written at the top of the first page in his notebook of maxims from his years at school: ‘The Priest: Ring that connects God and man.’ A connection that has twisted his limbs, which are now growing slack as he tries, in vain, to call them back to his body.

  The last thing that he hears is the voice of the sea and the last thing he smells is the aroma that permeates the city he loves. He now needs to leave those streets like – when he was six years old – bombs fell over Palermo. Never-ending port and longing. He has arrived at his destination and he is leaving again. It’s the same thing. His heart slows and his longing fades.

  He now enters into a place where every paradox melts away.

  He enters into God and his embrace, where every desire is a possession and every possession a desire. Devoid of pain. Every departure is an arrival and every arrival a departure. Devoid of pain.

  The grains of sand are finished. Fear is finished.

  He cannot regret anything: He has given and received everything.

  He sought to bring water to life in the path of burning thirst. He sought to plant trees in the cement of the city. He sought to open the sky to the streets. He sought to bring heaven to hell.

  He sees his mother and father’s faces again. They smile at him and take him by the hand and they swing him just as they did when he was a child.

  Every time, they swing him higher and higher.

  The world’s show comes to an end and so does hell’s laughing.

  The cycle of dreams and blood subsides.

  History and every one of its moments are fulfilled.

  Dying abruptly is the only way to get on with goodbyes. He will trust that those who remain will go with God.

  The last thing he sees is the sky riddled with stars. The galaxies flow swiftly through the hands of the Creator, so rapidly that their light is late in reaching our eyes. He opens his arms, utterly exhausted. Now all that he has longed for is finally his.

  Chapter 33

  A little girl moves toward Don Pino’s lifeless body. She arrives before the others who were finishing up at the rehearsal. She wanted to be the first. She and her doll. She dressed up for the occasion and she is afraid of the moonless evening sky because everything has to be just right: It’s Donpino’s birthday.

  She smells nice. And in her eyes, you can see a little girl dancing in the sunshine. She knows the way by heart. When she arrives, she finds him there, on the ground, covered in blood. And she understands that he is not sleeping, just like her father. He will not wake up again. He has gone beyond the sea. He has gone to where all the train tracks end. She sits beside him. She puts her hand on his head and caresses it, without saying a word. Her little hand gets covered in blood. He is smiling. And she smiles back with her eyes as black as night and tears like the sea. They have taken another father from her.

  Nothing seems capable of breaking that silence.

  But then suddenly, a scream slices it cleanly in half.

  The undertow grinds in the background like a pack of strays and the clouds look like scratches against the metallic sky.

  Mimmo, the policeman from the second floor, comes out with his cigarette in his mouth. He leans over the motionless body with its inert arms and the keys in one of its hands. Those keys were for opening a door other than the door to death.

  A doll is lying next to him and it stares at him with its glassy eyes. It has no answers and no questions. There is a little girl standing not too far away.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  She disappears into the night.

  When the other kids arrive with Lucia and the boy, Don Pino is no longer there.

  ‘He wasn’t feeling well and they took him to the hospital.’

  ‘What’s all this blood on the ground?’ asks Francesco.

  ‘He hit his head when he fell down.’

  ‘You should always keep your head held high.’

  ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘You should always keep your head held high.’

  ‘What does that have to do with anything?’

  ‘That’s what the wizard Pipino whispers into Little Orlando’s ear,’ says Francesco. Then he starts running. He doesn’t even know exactly where the hospital is. But it’s nearby.

  The others follow him. Everyone looks out at the swarm of children as they cross the street heading to God knows where.

  Chapter 34

  They put him on the gurney for a post-mortem examination.

  The night is just halfway over and the demons are all still on the street.

  Some say that to know a city, you have to see how its people work and love. But especially how they die. And nobody knows that better than she does. She knows every detail about death. The doctor who carries out the examination looks over that body and she sees the entire city.

  It’s still not rigid and the skin temperature is gradually going down. Blood oozes out of his right ear. There is a wound on the left occipital lobe with ecchymosis around it.

  The bullet is lodged in his head and it has transfigured his face. The parietal-temporal-occipital area is swollen. The cranioencephalic trauma stopped the bullet, which was deformed by the silencer. A face made unrecognizable by iron.

  And yet, you can still discern the last thing he did, a testament to the man: Smile.

  The doctor has never seen anything like this in someone turned into a cadaver through violence. She can certify that violence has been defeated. Violence unmasked by the victim himself. Weak violence against the weakest.

  That smile leaves her serene.

  In the meantime, the fire carries out its conquest. A ferocious, fast fire. It turns a tobacco shop into dust together with all the dreams of someone who didn’t bend to the bitter demands of the gods of the neighborhood.

  And the sabbath continues, more furious than ever, and the flurry rises again. It stinks up the streets that have been lost to the night, twisted by other fires and other murders. The light has been trampled upon in a macabre dance. But between the sobbing, it doesn’t stop revealing the faces of all the victims in history.

  The Hunter laughs bitterly. He has killed a man who smiles.

  Chapter 35

  The visitors’ room is crammed with children.

  I lean over Don Pino’s body. He’s still smiling even though life has left it. I have so many questions yet to ask. I almost hate him for having left us so early.

  You, who opened the space between my heart and my mind.

  You, you showed me that courage belongs to those who know they are weak.

  You, who helped me shed the scales of boredom from my eyes. You, who were my teacher and my friend.

  I put my head over his heart so I can calculate how big it is, and it’s as wide as the whole city. I cry like a baby who has lost his father. I look up at the other children, the real children. No father can have this many in just one life. And they are all there, as only they could be in the face of death. In silence and in anticipation that the deceased will get up and walk once again.

  Only the older kids allow themselves to cry. The younger ones ask where he has gone but they are skeptical when told he’s gone to heaven. They want to know where he is so that they can go visit him or at least call him. Riccardo stares at him without shedding a tear because now Don Pino has shown him the way to get to heaven. He leaves without saying a word.

  Francesco holds Father Pino’s hand and won’t let go.

  ‘You promised me that you would show me a miracle. You are supposed to keep your promises. You are supposed to keep them!’ he repeats to himself.

  Totò has his arms crossed and his head bowed. He cries into his glasses.

  Then he comes over to me and asks: ‘Why doesn’t God keep the people he has instead of letting them die and making new ones?’

  I try, in vain, to offer an answer as I watch those kids. They are pieces of a broken vase. There is more love in putting back together the fragments than in t
aking for granted that the vase is in one piece. Once it’s repaired, the vase takes on an inexplicable new beauty, more similar to life. It takes someone who can see the beauty in the broken pieces. I watch each of them one by one. We are all orphans of a man whose fatherhood was stronger than blood but it took blood to show that. The memories I dig out of my pain grab on to my heart like octopuses in stormy seas. Every movement rips through my flesh.

  When Don Pino used to come into the classroom, we were always hungry for surprises. Other teachers just went with the program. But to him, we were the program, with our lives and our questions. And there was never a question that he ignored. He began every lesson by reading a passage from the Bible. Then he would ask us if we had experienced what he had just read about.

  I remember when he talked about the Penitent Thief who died on the cross next to Christ and who asked Him to remember him when he entered into his kingdom. He received a guarantee that he would go to heaven.

  ‘He is the only man that we know for certain is in heaven.’

  ‘A thief and a murderer?’ I asked rebelliously.

  ‘Yes, but the difference is that he recognizes Christ’s innocence and his own guilt. And he asks at least for the privilege of a remembrance on behalf of the man that dies next to him. He suffers the same pain but he is serene.’

  ‘This God of yours is too good. He’s giving the place of honor to a thief,’ I joked at the time.

  ‘He must have been a pretty good thief: He managed to steal heaven . . .’ answered Don Pino without skipping a beat.

  Many of us laughed when he said this. But he wasn’t simply making a joke: ‘The thief was a murderer who ended up there because of his crimes. Someone who found himself next to God as a consequence of his actions. It was his being lost in evil that brought him to the right place, where he found peace and forgiveness.’

  He didn’t give us the answers, but he allowed those words to dig deep into our hearts and stay there. He knew they would come in handy at some point in the future.