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  Claudia Del Prete

  The man of the Cathedral

  The man of the Cathedral

  Copyright © 2012

  Zerounoundici Edizioni

  Cover: image Shutterstock.com

  I. La Cathedral

  Fear that place had always done me: it was said that you/he/she was infested by the spirits of a group of remained young people killed during the collapse of the building more than fifty years happened before the facts that I am about me to narrate.

  The whole structure had come down, almost pits implosa because of a vice practiced by the outside to work of a strength sovrannaturale: the dome, the rest of the ceiling and even the carrying boundaries had surrendered to the will of something or someone that anybody, among those that were trapped there inside, it seemed intenzionato to welcome.

  From child I had never dared enter there: my boyfriends and I sometimes reached the front door of entry, we peered at inside and then, I pervaded by a shiver of terror, we returned in the before plaza, racing down to rout of neck for the staircases; from there taken back breath, we looked at there to the shoulders and we felt there subjugated as by the presence of the stately one appalling cathedral.

  You/he/she had immediately been reconstructed after the collapse, brick on brick, not before having extracted from the rubbles the lifeless and unrecognizable bodies of the four boys.

  The principal façade faithfully reproduced that that was crumbled in precedence: a great dark front door marked the border between the inside and the outside and the part made even more dark remainder, that was of a grey that very little seemed to have to that to do with the sense of rejoining with God that a place as that would have had to arouse in who had visited him/it. Some sketches in relief embellished the tall part, that centrally brought a rose window from the blue glasses. The other three have you/they had been very more quickly taut on, without too stylistic elaborations.

  Who to that epoch it dealt him with to direct the jobs he/she wanted to conclude them as soon as possible, predisposing some rapid operations and times to the concreteness: this time the cathedral would have been less decorated, but notably more stable. Of as soon as you/he/she was thrown however, on, stone on stone, seemed that anybody liked to be to look at her/it there and so, exhausted him the assignment of the reconstruction, they were few and rapid the jobs of embellishment.

  The new building didn't come riconsacrato, it became one among the so many monuments of the suggestive paesino of Poles, swarming of tourists to every time of the day; something however it made the different cathedral from every other place of the country: it had that charm that only the pregnant places of mystery know how to infuse in the visitors.

  That place daily welcomed hundreds of people, but you/he/she could not be found only you an inhabitant of the place; my fellow townspersons and I were well you make an attempt to hold us of it to the wide one: too times our mothers had told us to be distant of it, as many times we had told us him our children and so you/they would also have done them with those that would have given birth to.

  Personally I didn't know if you/they were trapped indeed there some spirits, there inside, but I have never had doubts on the fact that a doesn't know what of anxious you/he/she was emanated by that structure: I realized of it when I walked for the plaza, illuminated by the sun in the morning and dominated by the shade of the cathedral in the afternoon.

  II. The mendicant

  What there pits the sun or the shade, that it threw wind or that he died of heat, that rained or that it raged any other atmospheric agent, on top of the staircases of the building, on the left, observing her from the plaza, an elderly man he/she sat with a big glass drink monouso in hand: it lengthened him toward the visitors in entrance or in gone out of the principal front door and there was no tourist that, in to pass him of side, he/she didn't let you fall at least a coin.

  When the glass was filled, the old one poured the content of it in a purse of cloth, that brought shoulder and that for end day was always flood: bent because of the transported weight, it went away, walking on the foundation of the tinkling coins. Nobody knew what it did with that money.

  That man was aged there, really on those staircases. To memory of the elderly ones, you/he/she will have been about twenty years old when for the first time you/he/she was seen crouched close to the entrance of the cathedral.

  Those of the social services had tried for years to recover him/it: you/they had gone to talk to him, sometimes also succeeding in making to estrange him/it from the monument, but only in the schedules of closing and only for the necessary time to drag him/it in their studies, to make to examine him/it from competent people in subject of mental troubles. From the effected tests, its intellectual quotient results in the average; nobody explained him, therefore, why not a youth from the compromised mental potentialities wasted its life on a staircase, asking the alms.

  Despite the commune it put to his/her disposition the meals and a bed in the house-family, he limited him to consume the breakfast and the supper, without never returning for the lunch; sometimes it didn't even reenter for sleeping, preferring to let him protect from the starry sky rather than from the four boundaries of a shared room with other people.

  A crazy poor man, defined him/it us inhabitants of Poles; some insinuated even that there pits something demoniac in him, because frightened by the fact that you/he/she spent his/her time on the steps of that desecrated place and accursed. Even those that lodged in the house-family, when they didn't see him/it reenter, they were felt calmer.

  III. An instant of distraction

  The first time when I found me confrontation with the man of the cathedral, I could finally look at him/it in the eyes and what last he/she didn't speak to me of wickedness, if not perhaps of an evil immediately who knows how much time back, that had left him inside of the indelible images: in his/her look it flashed the reflex of everything that that brought him inside, yet I would not have known how to say of thing him it treated.

  It happened when, crossing the plaza, I accidentally left the hand of my child and him raced toward the stairway: it was then that I scrutinized for the first time over the body of that man. In my life I had never spoken to him; apart those of the social services, nobody had ever done him.

  Going up again the staircase, I howled to my child not to enter for any reason the building; it was at that time that the man spoke to me:

  «Leave him/it alone» it told me «it won't happen him nothing».

  I turned me and my eyes were captured by his for some instant. The distraction cost me dear: when I brought the look on my child, I had only the time to s
ee its green shirt disappear over the door and to lose himself/herself/themselves in the dark of the inside of the cathedral.

  I was tied-up. Some tourists entered, others went out, other anchor is sat on the steps. They seemed not to warn the dangerousness of the place, they behaved as if it dealt with a monument as so many others, I didn't succeed there instead: I had in mind the recommendations of my mother, that you/he/she had always told me to be far of it. I was afraid of that place, but my child was inside and I could not allow how same alone among those boundaries; nobody would ever have forgiven me to have allowed to enter him/it, but to that point I had at least to recover him/it. A couple of Asian tourists, armed with photographic car with so much of teleobiettivo, it was about to cross the threshold: I hesitated an instant, then I reached them and me accodai to them to enter.

  The inside was dark, damp, and the voices dispersed him among the carrying columns. I saw astride my child on a bench, I raced verse of him, I threw him/it on and I tightened him/it among the braccias: holding him/it to me, as if at that time it dealt with my same life, I escaped down out and then, making the twos twos steps toward the plaza. Infinitely a family feeling invaded while the adrenaline that flowed me inside made my more agile body.

  Finally to the sure one, on the before spiazzo, I turned me and I realized me that the man of the cathedral was observing me, while the tourists kept on pitting monetine in his/her glass.

  I stooped me, until the feet of my child they didn't touch earth and, holding shakes him a hand, I drove homeward it without saying a word. I would have had to reproach to have estranged him to it from me without asking the permission and not to have obeyed to my command not to enter, yet I didn't have the mind to do him/it. I succeeded only in mentally reliving what had happened in the two preceding minutes; one, two, three times. That eyes, the tone of the voice, the peaceful admonishment of that man: all of this worried me. Yet the mendicant of the cathedral had said the truth: nothing was not happened to my child, you/he/she was true; even to me. To anybody nothing disagreeable ever happened there inside; he had even had never ugly experiences in the fifty years that you/he/she had spent asking the alms.

  On the street of the return I reflected on the fact that in any occasion, before that day, I had watched out indeed for the face of that man; for me you/he/she had always been a heap of dirty cloths on top of the staircases and even when from child I crossed the staircase with my companions of games I was well careful to climb and to go down holding me on the right side, so that to avoid to pass nearby him.

  The adults of the country told us that it was a crazy person and me I was afraid of it: I was terrorized to the idea that, passing nearby him, he would have been able to capture me and to bring me street with itself. I knew that there was, but I never looked at him/it, hoping that so even not doing him would have looked at me.

  For trentacinque years I had ignored him, but that day the barrier that I had raised between me and its thin figure had been dejected: we were looked there not only in the eyes, but he had spoken even to me. Subsequently I stopped looking at earth when I passed in front of the cathedral; the fleeting glances that I had always launched to the building and that that his/her usher seemed to be became curious looks, attracted, but at the same time intimidated.

  IV. Heavy looks

  Every day I crossed the plaza and there was no day in which the young one by now old, sat on top of the staircase, it didn't follow me with the eyes; I didn't understand if it did only it because you/he/she had been stricken from the episode verified him with my child or if in that way it tried to attract my attention.

  A morning, accompanying my child to school, his/her child he/she asked me to be able to give a monetina to the mendicant. His/her application me spiazzò. I lifted the eyes toward that man, whose look was fixed on us, and, rather annoyed, I said of no to my child, throwing him/it for the hand and bringing him/it street with me.

  In the following days his/her child kept on asking me the permission to make the alms to the old one, but I kept on denying him/it to him, not understanding the motive for such application and finding inopportune that that man observed us, regardless of the uneasiness that its look transmitted me. When I noticed that my child and the bum of the cathedral started to exchange smiled, I opted for a deviation of the run: was inadmissible that there that tried to do him I befriend him/it with the look! You/he/she could be a pedofilo or who knows who, and I could not leave that it put the eyes on a seven year-old child.

  One afternoon my wife, that had gone to pick up our child to school, got back home and you/he/she told me to have had to give some coins to the mendicant of the cathedral because his/her child had insisted so much, sustaining that that man was his/her friend; churches to me explanations around this friendship of which she didn't know anything, but I didn't even try to answer: I slipped me the coat and I went out.

  I poured again my anger on the paved road of porfido, stamping on her/it with the sole of the shoes. The fists in the pockets of the coat were narrow so strongly to hurt me, but my pain was not anything in comparison to what that bastard would have tried not as soon as I/you had had him to draught.

  V. Una strange conversation

  When I made capolino among the buildings that leaned out on the plaza, the old one it noticed me.

  They were you are her of the afternoon and the doors of the cathedral they were about to be closed.

  A swarm of tourists went out of the front door and poured again down him for the staircases, while the monetines in the glass of that man increased; me, countercurrent, did me space among that bodies, holding him/it fixed look in the direction in which, just gone beyond the rabble, I would have found him. In the moment in which our looks were finally crossed, I warned a strange feeling: it was as if the anger was of a line fallen through and I almost succeeded in trying a sort of tenderness towards that individual. Did I try to return in me and with a certain difficulty I finally succeeded in asking him: «Thing you want from my child?».

  «Nothing» he/she answered me, with the air of whom doesn't have her/it although least knowledge to be himself/herself/themselves in the blame.

  «My child says that you are his/her friend» I replied, not succeeding however to put in the voice the accusatory tone that I would have liked to cast him against.

  «I am only sits here of it» he responded. «If yours child finds me nice you/he/she is not my worth. I was you, I would wonder me rather for what motive all you have me to you to boredom.»

  «But what kind of talked it is this?»

  «You because you avoid me?» churches, with a disarming naivety.

  I was silent. I didn't know indeed thing to answer. I felt me stricken and sunk.

  «They are the eyes» it said him after some.

  «I don't follow you» I did me.

  «If to his/her/their children it was granted to look at the world with his/her own eyes, without being influenced by the vision of the reality that his/her parents impose them, truth would be clearer to everybody. From small you/they have told you of the histories and you you have thought that they were true. To, how much seem you have had the delicacy not to tell her to your child, giving him so way of looking the things with the pure eye of whom has not been conditioned.»

  The serenity that was unraveled by that man was incommensurable; I didn't succeed in opposing me to the feeling of peace that the provoked me to be there, together with him; to listen to its words was almost catartico, it was as to discover of a line that the chains in which you/he/she was seemed me to have always lived you/they could be broken.

  I wondered me as it did to know that to my child I had never told the history of the cathedral; I had him only motto that was a place for tourists and that us inhabitants of the place we were busy more interesting things what a church to visit in which the function eucaristica was not even celebrated. My wife and I had decided not to frighten him/it, to avoid to put I set him the fear that had been tran
smitted instead to us when we were small. But as it did that old to know this thing? It only imagined perhaps him; dopotutto whoever would have been able to realize that my child didn't know what in that place there was the Evil, seeing his/her child vivaciously race toward the entrance and to go beyond the threshold between the light and the dark.

  «You know him/it what happened here, many years ago?» he/she asked me interrupting the flow of my thoughts.

  I made sign of yes with the head, suddenly trying a sense of uneasiness.

  «I there was» it said him; and in me something jammed.

  «It was the evening of May three and my fiancée it was badly from some» it started, with the tone that the stories of the elderly ones make irresistible. «The physicians had pronounced her hysterical while the priest had assured that you/he/she was possessed. We had to get married us, but we would not have been able to do him/it without she was first is purified. Therefore that evening, after supper, we brought there in the church, together with two friends, that would have been not our witnesses of wedding as soon as we had had the possibility to get married us; and then there was the priest, that had come in big secret from the parish of Margi.

  You will surely have felt to speak of Father Livio: to the epoch it was whispered that you/he/she was run away with a parishioner, but they were only calumnies. As the priests of our parish didn't have the competences to be able to help the girl and they preferred to trust himself/herself/themselves the opinion of the physicians, I had implored him to come in help there; if him we had been open you/he/she would have suffered the excommunication but, since he/she believed a lot in the practice of the exorcism as I make up for to the evil, he/she wanted to help us however. When they recovered his/her body, attributing him my identity, I didn't object because I didn't want to be questioned by the police neither to feed the imaginations of the journalists; and then nobody would ever have believed in my history, therefore definite to hold her/it for me. I am orphan, my girl was all of this that I had and, dead her, nobody would have acknowledged my absence, so I accepted to remain in the shade, so that lasciar to believe in her family that in the collapse I was dead also me.