Marco Di Caprio

With a grim and solitary air,
I wandered through an abandoned quarter of the town.
Nerves on edge, thoughts striking in my skull like distant gunfire,
bursts, volleys, echoes that would not die.

Baroque composers had become warlords in my mind,
unleashing dissonance, carving through silence,
until even music turned against me.

I had dreamed of glory once.
I had been quick, too quick, at school,
quick to remember, quick to judge.
But what I loved was the guitar.
Songs had come, but nothing followed them.
And so that music, unheard, folded inward,
grew sharper, thinner,
until it became a noise I could no longer bear.

I moved through the city without rest,
from bar to bar, from cigarette to cigarette,
from one bitter cup of coffee to the next,
watching the world continue without me.

Crowds passed, but did not meet.
Each face lit from below, each voice sealed behind glass,
each life reduced to a small, glowing surface.
And I thought: even emptiness has become crowded.

So I left the streets
and reached the edge of the old city.

There it still stood.
The tower, unmoved,
rising above the ruins of everything that had once lived.
Around it, an overgrown field, a crumbling church,
as if even a stone had grown ashamed of itself.

And there
memory returned.

We were boys then.
We played among the steps and shadows,
shouting, laughing, inventing worlds that did not end.
The town was alive: voices from balconies,
vendors in the streets,
a small radio always playing The Beatles.
Guitars in our hands,
songs in the air,
and that certainty,
that youth would never pass.

And every evening
he passed.

The old man with the lantern.
The one the others mocked.
The one I feared.

That eye,
faded blue, already beyond life,
was enough to silence me.

They said he used to mutter:

Woe unto you…
for you say: we shall live forever.
Yet I shall come for you
in ten days, in ten years, in fifty.
And in the end
I shall take you all.

Then nothing.
Only the present again.
Only the sound of drums, dull, mechanical, without melody.

Beyond the walls, a circle of young people:
They were glued to their mobiles.

No words.

Then I saw him.
From a narrow alley
he emerged again.

The same cloak.
The same worn face.
But no lantern now,
only the pale light of a phone
held in his hand.

I knew him at once.
And as he came closer,
I stepped back,
and as I stepped back,
he drew nearer,
until the wall stood behind me
and there was nowhere left to go.

He touched my shoulder.
And in a voice no longer terrible,
but tired,
infinitely tired,
he said:

For fifty years
I have taken vengeance
on those who believed themselves eternal.

Yet these,
these people do not see me.
They avenge me themselves,
with their indifference.

I would give them death
but how shall I slay
those who have never lived?