The Letter
Friday, the fifth of May, 1995
09:07
Silvio,
Today you turn eighteen.
The number itself means nothing, of course, but I take a quiet satisfaction in knowing that you are finally beyond the reach of this place. Distance is a rare mercy. There are towns that cling to a man like damp clothing, and ours has always been one of them.
I have sent you a small gift.
You will know it when you open the parcel.
Do not be alarmed by the smell. Fire has a way of lingering in things long after the flames have withdrawn. Resin. Charred wood. Something animal beneath it.
It is not, in case the thought crosses your mind, an image of Yeshua upon the cross.
It is Pedro.
He remained there three days before death made up its mind.
A stubborn creature. I almost admired the perseverance.
I set him alight only a short while ago, so what you are smelling is very recent history.
You may wonder why I chose such a method.
But you remember what they always said about him: that he had finally repented, that grace had at last entered the old bastard's bones.
Repentance deserves ceremony.
And what ceremony could be more fitting than the instrument upon which redemption itself once hung?
My dear Silvio,
Paul writes in Philippians:
Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.
Luke says:
Lift up your heads, for your redemption draweth nigh.
And David, wandering through his valley of shadows, assures us:
I will fear no evil.
I searched the New Testament for the old God — the one who understood deserts, blood, and justice — but he appears only in fragments now, like a ruined statue half-buried in sand.
Still, I did what I could.
For a brief time I imagined myself a shepherd, guiding a lost sheep toward the green pastures promised to it.
Pedro travelled that road by means of my hands.
It was not simple work.
A man is heavier than one remembers.
And crucifixion, contrary to popular belief, is an exercise in patience. One must be careful not to hurry the body toward death. The point, after all, is not destruction but revelation.
I wanted to see what remained of him when the body had exhausted its arguments.
Pedro proved unexpectedly talkative.
Pain loosens the tongue.
Genesis
At first he tried to hold himself upright on the nail through his feet. The effort produced a sort of luminous agony — the kind that turns sweat into blood.
Nehemiah
The iron eventually tore between the metatarsal bones. The legs began to tremble.
Zechariah
They surrendered soon after.
Ephesians
Then the arms took command of the burden. Tremors travelled through them in waves. Each spasm folding the muscles inward like paper being crushed.
I discovered something curious at that moment.
For the first time in my life I felt grateful for my own inability to feel pain.
A peculiar blessing.
Hebrews
When the arms could no longer lift him, the shoulders began their slow separation from the sockets. You would be surprised how long the human body can stretch before it finally accepts defeat.
Jude
His breathing became very small then. Little gulps of air. Almost polite.
The lungs filling.
But never emptying.
The body drowning quietly in its own breath.
Every so often he would try again to lift himself, just enough to steal another fragment of air.
And then—
Revelation
Silence.
May the memory of that silence follow him wherever souls go to pretend they have been forgiven.
Silvio,
If this offers you even the faintest comfort, know that you were not the only one Pedro touched when we were children.
My work here is finished.
All that remains of my life now are those scattered memories — the kitchen table, the evenings when we spoke without knowing exactly what it was we were trying to say to each other.
Life has an austere sense of humour, paisano.
It abandons us on battlefields we never agreed to enter, while the gods withdraw to safer distances.
Yet in spite of everything, there were those seven years.
Seven brief years in which the world contained at least one other person who understood its darkness.
I suspect that is the only real life I ever lived.
You will continue to carry me, I think, somewhere inside the quiet machinery of your heart, just as you have always lived inside mine.
There are words I never found the courage to speak aloud.
Across that kitchen table I wanted to say them many times.
Senza di te non sono niente.
Or simply:
Ti amo.
I say it now.
Quietly.
Ti amo.
Tomorrow I will be gone.
Not out of despair — that would suggest feeling — but out of a certain fatigue.
The machinery has stopped.
There is no passion left in me.
Not even pain.
Only the absence where those things used to live.
Yours,
Matteo Bandello