"We only seek to change what we hate."
— From the Sermon on Hatred
1
THE DRAWER
I never thought I would experience something so extraordinary in my life.
And yet, it happened.
I still laugh when the people around me wonder how I got to where I am today.
They will never truly understand.
It all began on a Saturday, many years ago. I was twenty years old. I will never forget that day.
At the time, I needed money for the summer holidays and was picking up odd jobs here and there: mowing lawns, tutoring, clearing out cellars.
That last one was my favourite. I loved losing myself in the contemplation of old, forgotten objects and furniture, imagining their stories. It was the most tiring and worst-paid job, but that didn't matter — I did it anyway, and gladly.
I would rent a small van, drive out to empty garages or cellars, load everything up and haul it to the tip. The odd curious item, though, I kept for myself.
At first I had hoped to find something valuable to resell — a painting, a piece of antique furniture — but I soon realised that was nothing more than a dream.
Until the most important day of my life.
* * *
I had been called out by a pleasant elderly man who lived in a lovely detached house on the outskirts of town. He had a vast garage, crammed with objects and furniture he wanted to get rid of. He insisted on paying me twice what I was asking, saying it seemed too little. It took me six trips with the van to empty the place and cart everything to the tip.
Or rather, almost everything.
A small piece of furniture had caught my attention. It was a white wooden bedside lamp table with a single drawer. It struck me because it seemed at once very old and perfectly new. It was in immaculate condition: the wood was glossy, a clean white that was smooth to the touch, yet it exuded a sense of age.
I decided to keep it — I needed a lamp stand where I could rest my books beside the bed.
I barely had to clean it. I simply ran a cloth over it and set it beside the bed. The wood had a distinctive smell, almost sweet, like almonds. The table's style didn't jar with the rest of the room; it slotted into the arrangement without any awkwardness.
When I opened the drawer for the first time, the runners glided without the slightest friction, without a single creak.
A perfect movement, almost unnatural for a piece of furniture that appeared so old.
I rested the books I was reading on top of it and for several days paid it no further attention.
A few weeks later I caught a cold and put two packets of tissues in the drawer, in case I needed them during the night.
The following morning I woke up and opened the drawer to take a tissue. Something was odd, but I couldn't work out what, until I sat down to have breakfast. I froze, cup suspended in mid-air. I put it down and ran back to the bedroom to check whether I had been mistaken.
I opened the drawer.
There were four packets of tissues.
It was strange. I was certain I had put only two in. Or had there been four? No, I was sure: there had been two packets.
I stared at those four packets for a long while, trying to understand how it was possible. I lived alone, and it seemed unlikely that someone had broken in to leave two extra packets of tissues in my drawer.
I closed the drawer because I was running late — I had tutoring to give that morning.
When I got home, I couldn't get the mystery of the tissues out of my head. I had turned over various theories, but none of them made sense. It seemed as though those packets had appeared from nowhere.
While I was eating lunch, a mad idea flashed through my mind. I put down my fork and got up to investigate. As I walked to the bedroom, I started laughing at what I was about to do. It made no sense whatsoever, but inside me a strange excitement was building.
I went to the bathroom, picked up the tube of toothpaste, came back to the bedroom, opened the drawer, placed it inside and closed it.
I felt like an idiot.
I opened the drawer and stood motionless, staring at the contents.
There were four packets of tissues and two tubes of toothpaste.
I thought I had gone mad.
I took everything out. I picked up a biro from the desk, put it in the drawer, closed it and opened it again.
There were two biros.
I sat down on the bed, my hands trembling.
"What on earth is going on?"
Part of me was thrilled, part was frightened, and another part kept screaming at me that it simply wasn't possible.
I spent the whole of that day running tests. I cancelled every appointment and stayed up until late into the night experimenting with the drawer. Then I went to sleep on the sofa in the other room because it frightened me.
Every object I placed in the drawer was duplicated — identically and perfectly. It was duplicated only once: I had to remove the objects and put them back in for it to work again.
That night I had strange dreams. When I woke up I lay there for a long time wondering how it was possible. Was it magic? Did magic, then, actually exist? Was it a curse? Was it dangerous? Would those objects last forever, or would they vanish?
I had a whole swarm of questions buzzing around my head.
After lunch I decided to go and see the kindly old man whose cellar I had cleared. I had to know.
I got in the car and drove out to the house, but he was no longer there. There was only an "For Sale" sign and no one inside.
I felt panic rising.
I rang the number on the board. The estate agent told me they were unable to give me any information about the owner, at his express request. I insisted.
I said it was urgent, that I needed to speak with him on a personal matter. No luck.
I went back to the house the following day. I rang the neighbours' doorbells. Nobody knew anything, only that he had left suddenly, some weeks earlier. I tried searching online, on social media, in the telephone directory. Nothing. It was as though he had never existed.
I returned twice more over the following weeks, hoping to find someone — anyone — who could give me some information. Each time I found only that sign and silence.
Frustrated, I drove home. The situation was surreal, like something out of a film.
Weeks later, while flicking through the photos I had taken during the garage clearance, I noticed something. In the background of one shot, on the garage wall, there was a small brass plaque. I zoomed in on the image on my phone.
It read: "For those who have the courage to choose."
The old man had known. He had always known.
* * *
I seriously considered taking the bedside table to the tip. I went to the bedroom to fetch it, but stopped when I reached it. I took a two-euro coin from my pocket and put it in the drawer. When I opened it again, there were two coins.
This was getting interesting.
I set aside the idea of getting rid of it. Part of me kept insisting that it wasn't normal, that I would be better off without it, but I turned down the volume on that little voice and pushed it into a corner.
By now I was thinking about everything I could do with that strange, magical drawer.
Many ideas came to me, but I decided to be cautious. First, I took all the money from my wallet and doubled it. It worked with both coins and banknotes.
I spent hours duplicating banknotes, as if in a trance, until the bed was covered with fifty-euro notes. It was incredible.
A sudden doubt seized me, so I took a note and went to the nearest shop to see whether they would accept it. Everything went smoothly.
It was a wonderful feeling. I sensed a great weight — one I hadn't even been fully aware of — lift from my shoulders. I felt light as air.
That evening, as I stared at the pile of banknotes on the bed, a small voice in my head whispered that it wasn't right. That I was stealing from… Someone? The universe? But stealing what, exactly? I wasn't taking anything from anyone. I was simply… creating.
And besides, I thought, I would only use it to set myself up. Only to pay for university. Only to stop having to do demeaning work. Only to have a decent life. After that, I would stop. I promised myself that night. I really did.
All at once, money was no longer a problem.
Over the first two years I laid the foundations of my wealth. I was careful and cautious. I duplicated primarily cash, which I spent on small purchases spread across several cities, always in different places. I soon discovered that duplicated banknotes carried the same serial number as the original, so I had to be prudent.
The turning point came when I began duplicating gold. I bought a small gold coin from a bullion dealer, duplicated it, and sold it in another city. Then a small bar.
Then progressively larger pieces. Gold has no serial numbers. Gold is perfect.
My first flat was small but mine. I bought it with duplicated gold. While signing the contracts, the notary smiled at me: "Congratulations, so young and already a homeowner."
He didn't know. He couldn't know. On the way home in the car, I tried to feel guilty. But why should I have? I worked hard, paid my taxes, was a model citizen. The drawer was simply… an advantage. Like being born into a wealthy family. Like winning the lottery. I hadn't chosen to find it. It was fate. And who was I to refuse a gift from fate?
It was around that time that I met Laura. The flat needed furnishing, and she worked at an interior design studio. I remember the first day she came to see the space. She was wearing a mustard-yellow jumper and had her hair piled up in a messy chignon.
She walked through the empty rooms touching the walls, studying the light coming through the windows. "Lovely," she said. "You have very good taste." She didn't know I had chosen it only because it was on the market at the right moment.
We began seeing each other. It was easy to be with her. She talked a great deal; I listened. She told me about her projects, her impossible clients, her dreams of opening her own studio. I nodded, smiled, but part of me was always elsewhere. I would come home and open the drawer. Just once. Just one more gold bar.
Over the next three years I expanded the empire. I opened several companies, bought property, made investments. The authorities asked a few questions, but my earnings were by then all traceable, and a well-placed bribe or two made the more probing investigations disappear.
In the third year I was almost caught. The Guardia di Finanza knocked on the door of my office. A routine inspection, they said. They had noticed some "anomalies" in my initial investments. Too much capital from nowhere. While they leafed through the documents in front of me, I could feel the sweat running down my back.
I had prepared everything carefully, but what if they dug deeper? What if they asked to see the first batch of cash, the notes with the duplicated serial numbers? For two weeks I lived in terror. I obsessively checked my phone. Every time the entry buzzer sounded, I froze.
Then, at last, they closed the case. "Everything in order," they said. But that fear never left me.
From then on I began scrutinising every car parked too long outside the house. Every insistent glance in the street. Paranoia became my constant companion.
Laura noticed. "You're different," she said one evening. We were having dinner in my penthouse. She had cooked; I had drunk too much wine. "Since you started making all this money you're… distant. You're not really here any more." She was gazing out through the panoramic window, the city lights reflected in her eyes. "Sometimes I look at you and wonder whether I truly know you."
I didn't know what to say. Why should she have known me? I no longer knew myself.
She left that night. She took her things — a few clothes, her toothbrush, the books from the nightstand — and she left. The flat she had decorated with such care became suddenly empty. The dove-grey walls she had chosen seemed grey in a different way.
The designer sofa she had insisted on was just a cold object.
I stood in the sitting room, surrounded by expensive furniture that meant nothing, and for the first time in years I felt something I couldn't name. It wasn't sadness. It wasn't regret. It was simply… emptiness.
I went to the bedroom. The drawer was still there, faithful, in the corner where I had always kept it. I opened it. Closed it. Opened it again. A mechanical gesture I had repeated thousands of times. But that night, for the first time, I asked myself: what is all of this for? I had money, power, success. And I felt completely, utterly empty.
The thought terrified me more than the Guardia di Finanza ever had. I pushed it away. I went back to work the next day. I bought another company. I duplicated more gold.
I tried not to overdo it and to maintain a credible profile. But at the height of my success, looking down from my penthouse window at the city spread out below me, I felt like a god. A small one, but a god all the same. I had long since stopped asking myself whether it was right. The question itself seemed pathetic. Right for whom?
Morality is a luxury of the poor, I thought. A way of convincing themselves that their misery has meaning. I had simply done what anyone in my position would have done. I had won. And winning, in the end, erases every question.
In five years I had amassed an enormous fortune and an enormous amount of power. I could do whatever I wanted.
This long and beautiful dream cracked on a Tuesday evening a year ago. I was duplicating a pair of shoes because it was raining outside and I didn't want to ruin them, when, as I pulled them from the drawer, I scraped against the upper side and heard a strange sound. Different from the usual sound of wood. Hollower.
I put the shoes down and ran my fingers along the upper interior surface of the drawer. I pressed gently and felt something give. With a barely audible click, a small panel opened, revealing a hidden compartment no more than ten centimetres wide, concealed within the thickness of the wood.
Inside, protected by the mechanism itself, was a folded, yellowed scrap of paper. My hands were trembling as I took it out.
It was a piece of squared paper, worn with time. I unfolded it and saw that there was writing on it.
I read it several times, trying to make proper sense of it.
Instructions:
— Place anything inside to obtain an identical copy.
— Every time the drawer is opened and closed, one person in the world is killed.
That was what the note said.
For three days the note lay on the kitchen table. I couldn't bring myself to touch it. I couldn't look at it for too long. Every time I walked past it, I re-read it. "Every time the drawer is opened and closed, one person in the world is killed."
I thought of every time I had opened it. Hundreds. Thousands, perhaps.
I started counting, then stopped because the numbers made my head spin.
It was a joke.
It had to be.
Who could create an object like that? And why?
But if the drawer duplicated things — and it did, that was real — why should the note be false?
On the fourth day I began searching online. Sudden deaths. Inexplicable accidents. I looked for correlations with the dates on which I had used the drawer. I found nothing concrete, but I found no peace either. Every article about an accidental death seemed like a verdict against me.
Then, by chance, while scrolling through the news in search of something I couldn't even define, I came across an article about an American steel magnate from the nineteen-sixties. A retrospective piece on his meteoric rise. There was a grainy period photograph of his first office.
And there, in the corner of the room, beside a leather armchair, was a small piece of furniture. White, with a single drawer. Identical to mine. Every detail, every line. The same glossy wood, the same shape. It was impossible for them to be two different pieces of furniture.
The man had died twenty years earlier. A sudden heart attack, at sixty-two. The article spoke of his fortune, his business genius, how he had built an empire from nothing. I stared at the photograph for hours. The piece of furniture was there, in the corner, a silent witness to another life, another empire, other choices.
How many had come before me? How many more would come after?
On the fifth night I didn't sleep. I stared at the ceiling and thought: "What if it's true? What if I've killed thousands of people?" But then another voice answered: "And if it's true and you had never found out? You would have been happy. Blissfully ignorant."
On the sixth day I made a decision. Or rather, the decision made me. I couldn't live with that doubt. I couldn't keep the bedside table knowing what I knew. But I couldn't go back either and unknow it.
I went to the kitchen, took the note and burned it in the sink.
Then I picked up the bedside table, carried it to the car, and drove out to a field beyond the edge of town.
It was a moonless night. The air smelled of damp earth and freshly cut hay. In the distance, the lights of the city shimmered like fallen stars.
I set the piece of furniture down on the grass. My hands were trembling as I poured the petrol. The sharp smell burned my nostrils. I set it alight. The flames took hold immediately, hungry, and the heat struck my face. It took hours to burn. The smoke that rose from it was violet, unnatural.
It climbed into the night like a soul being liberated. Or condemned.
I wondered whether each curl of smoke represented a life. Whether all the people I had killed without knowing it were mingling in that smoke.
Then the wind scattered it, and nothing remained.
I stayed and watched until it had burned entirely, down to the last splinter of wood. The dawn was beginning to lighten the horizon when the last embers died.
When I got home, at daybreak, I expected to feel free. Instead I felt only a still greater weight settling on my shoulders.
I have never tried to count the number of times I used the bedside table. I don't want to, and it would be almost impossible. But above all, I don't want to.
I don't think I feel properly guilty. How does one feel guilty for something one never saw? I saw no faces. I saw no names. Only numbers on a scrap of paper that could very easily have been a lie.
But sometimes, when I walk down the street, I stop and watch the people around me. That child running to his father. That couple arguing in front of a bar. That old man reading the newspaper on a bench. And I think: how many of them are no longer here because of me? How many fathers, mothers, children?
Then I walk on.
The truth is that if tomorrow I were to find another magic drawer, with another note, I wouldn't know what to do.
I would like to think I would burn it at once.
I would like to believe that with everything I have.
But deep down, in that part of me I won't even admit to myself, I know that I would open it first.
Just once.
Just to see if it really works.
Just once.