Concerto for Chance and Destiny E-Book

Sebastiano Paolo Lampignano

• Herausgeber: Youcanprint
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

The life of humankind is governed by the ebb and flow of forces too vast to grasp—absolute yet fragile dualities such as Good and Evil, War and Peace, but above all, Chance and Destiny. At Porto del Molo, these forces take on the very essence of mystery, weaving through a place of magic that conceals a dark historical crime, binding the villagers to an unseen will, as though guided by the hand of uncontrollable events. Having survived a civil war, Dave's life is thrown into turmoil, swept away by circumstances that find their roots in an ancient past. In this coastal village, the elders whisper of a time when, on the seventh day, the Lord rested—not before crafting His strangest creations: Chance and Destiny, which He plays with masterful grace, like an unseen musician orchestrating the dance of all things.

Leseprobe

Contents

Title

Copyright

To the Reader

They Say

The Future Within the Past

0

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

They Say …

Notes

Main characters of the story

The Author: Sebastiano Paolo Lampignano

Summary

Guide

Copertina

Indice

Start

SEBASTIANO PAOLO LAMPIGNANO

Concerto forChance and Destiny

Title | Concerto for Chance and Destiny – 2025 all rights reserved.

Author | Sebastiano Paolo Lampignano

First Edition, Italian Language, Fermento Pub.: Le palme del Purgatorio, 2008 October

Principal Translator: Leonore Ivy Colbert

Translation Group Director: Stefania Costantini (TperTradurre s.r.l.)

Latin support and consultancy: Alessandro Pisani

Graphic Project: Sebastiano Paolo Lampignano and Giorgia Gangeri

ISBN | 9791222743400

© 2025 – All rights reserved to the Author

This work is published directly by the Author through the Youcanprint self-publishing platform and the Author holds all rights to it exclusively. No part of this book can therefore be reproduced without the prior consent of the Author.

Finished printing in the month of Jenuary 2025

Youcanprint

Via Marco Biagi 6 - 73100 Lecce

www.youcanprint.it

[email protected]

Made by human

To the Reader

Dear Reader,

the story you are about to read had a complex gestation.

The first version was published in 2008, with the Italian title Le Palme Del Purgatorio (The Palms of Purgatory), but, in some respects, it didn't satisfy me. For this, I apologize for the revisions, which finally do justice to the complexity of the characters in this story. The new version, however, claimed a new title, out of respect for the readers and for the work. So it was.

Someone tells me that I wanted to idealize my land beyond my explicit wishes.

Perhaps.

It may happen that the characters take the pen hostage and sweep away reasons and methods. When this occurs, there is no other way to react than to leave the future of history in their hands, whatever it may be.

Thanks again for your trust and enjoy your journey into the world of Porto del Molo.

Sebastiano

They Say

They say they saw him, motionless, in front of the Sea, on the evening of his last day. He seemed to be waiting for someone. Then, a sudden light from the earth, like a spark, and then, from the Sea, a child.

Just like that.

From nowhere.

He appeared out of nowhere.

He had come to get him; that is what they say: to get him.

They say that he had arrived there by chance, and that, perhaps, this is not how this story began, if it really began at all.

They swear this is how it ended, while someone took him gently by the hand, with the voice of a child, like an ancient call.

Perhaps.

Just like that.

The Future Within the Past(backstory)

The song of the wind is like the dirge of a soul in pain, it is born quietly and then, as if it were a memory, it gradually amplifies becoming an allegro andante, and from there a majestic finale is just a step away, a nothing away. Leaves and memory projected into the air like lightning bolts. Sometimes destruction, how destructive memories can be when they haunt. Burdens of distant times carried by those notes that slip in everywhere, leaving you with the taste or smell of what they have encountered, happiness, pain. Atmospheres. Dust, raised by the silence. Whirlpools of fine earth smashing tough walls, walls that had already resisted attacks from many other vandals. Strong obstacles that crumbled over time. Yet, looking at them, enchanted as you are in front of these wonders, you would never have said so. But then, suddenly, it comes.

Suddenly.

As when you are somewhere and suddenly ...

Or when you are waiting for someone and suddenly ...

Just like that.

Suddenly.

From afar.

It comes.

Later, it becomes music; vibrations in the hidden corners of some restless soul. An exile destined to play waves with skillful mastery, and, if you stop and listen, from the beginning, it would seem to be a music that is always the same. Then, in the folds of the pauses, feeling strangely filled with an infinite variety of sounds, yet empty of the slightest knowledge of time, now lost in memory, which, with deadly creativity, can transform a sequence of acoustic effects that somehow rain upon you into a poignant melody. When it happens, you know it's him: the sea wind, which the Soul welcomes in order to be traversed. Soul that asks, Soul that gives itself.

And so, finally, you feel that you have a Soul, you actually give it a human way of being alive and not merely be the most ancient and powerful concept-spitting machine that the best sensitivity of a very twisted biped has ever created. Good concepts for overcoming that death almost always hidden around the corner of a man, never sufficiently prepared for its unwelcome and demanding visit. Enchanted and blessed Soul which, by welcoming that wind, feels the deepest experience of reconnection, falling in love with that wind as with the purest among the chosen, as with its at long last found other half.

The Soul as lover.

What artistic genius could ever have inspired Creation when, with tiny particles of heat and cold, it composed the first immortal Breath. A Breath that fatefully split between the first breath of the dust that became life and the sigh held back by the atmosphere that became wind, between what was inside the being and what remained outside of it. And what luck could ever have kissed that one infinitesimal moment of time, born so that Anima, the most precious of essences, could rejoin its primordial half: Anemos, superb and ancient name of the wind.

Wind as delicate as a feather and yet fearsome; wind which begins its journey where the pressure is higher, blowing towards lower pressures, sweeping the earth; wind which cleanses history by blowing between different pressures of suffering, between those who have nothing and those who have everything; storm wind of history that destroys when it screams in the throats of the desperate who, transformed by pain into ruthless justice seekers, no longer grant justice.

Wind that rages and subsides in a circular motion, just as time is circular in its cadenced rhythm from sunrise to sunset, from life to death. Cyclically, tirelessly. Furthermore, there is, on some days, a light wind that takes on the flavor of the day it traverses, that smells of food cooked for a long time, expected, odors of simple tastes, like those of lonely villages. Odors that can take the measure of hunger at noon on a Sunday.

There are certain villages where Sunday is announced by a cool morning wind that makes you close your eyes in a sigh until you feel your defenses weaken and feel like letting yourself go to that, albeit momentary, feeling of eternal loneliness, among unkempt leaves in the atmosphere of Sundays in slow motion. Sundays in villages that seem born to mitigate the pain of existence.

And that Sunday, like an expected ritual, there was wind. After all, in Porto Del Molo, on Sundays, there was always wind, always.

One might actually think that the Good Lord, on the seventh day, had gone to rest there, with all the fuss that this, of course, one can imagine, had created in the nature of the place. Special wind, like a breath. Nonna Maria said that the presence of signs of the wind without there being wind was a magical event, an imperfection of physics impossible to define, to explain. A suspension of reality granted, almost as a reward, to the only place in the world that seemed not to exist, certainly not in official documents. Not anymore.

Porto Del Molo lived its mysterious isolation in the certainty of having miraculously escaped the destruction of the last war of the poor, as well as all the previous human tribulations of this ramshackle world. Nonna Maria maintained that He, referring to the Good Lord, would never have chosen a place that was too well-known to take His holy rest, too many people would certainly have tried to disturb Him. In Porto Del Molo, on the other hand, this never would have happened, no doubt about it.

For sure.

Not so sure.

In that town, the first thing to caress the senses was the vision of two giant palm trees at the center of the square, two Phoenix Dactylifera, which to define as trees would be like defining a goldfish as a whale. Perhaps thirty meters high, it seemed as if the palms were trying to touch the sky, with leaves gathered in giant feather tuffs of at least six meters, and with trunks that, starting from the base and ascending, inclined towards each other as if desiring to touch, to help each other in their growth towards the sky.

To touch the sky!

One can die trying, but one cannot touch a concept. You either have the sky inside you, or you will never touch it. Those palm trees were already the sky.

The origin of those palm trees was not history, it was pure feeling, words, tears, smiles, the dead and the living in an ancient tribal dance. Wonderfully fake. False. As if it were truly possible for history to say what is True. Not there, in any case. And perhaps nowhere else, because, as usual, history is told by those who remain alive. History. My goodness. Unbelievable.

During the holy days, history was told by the older women, who were more attentive to matters of the spirit, women accustomed to the courage of strong feelings. And one might have even smiled at those words. But, in the end, what mattered was that one arrived in this place in a certain state and one left there so upset that, some time later, one's mind would return there dragging one's body with it.

There, the brain recorded non-existent facts, remnants of the future invisible to most, it burned into itself moments of enchantment in order to then search for them again, again, and again ... And when one asked them to tell the history, it began like this:

“An Angel. The most beautiful of Angels: Lucifer.” Quite simply.

At that point in the story, suddenly, every atom of the body became contracted. Shuddered. At the same time, you became as if hypnotized by an attraction to the pain that was about to rain down upon you. You felt it coming, but no one was trying to avoid it. On the contrary. The attraction to pain. A huge thing. Huge. Pain that has never truly subsided, the pain of not being able to accept having once been immortal in Paradise and then cast out to live but a blink of an eye in the universe.

The elderly women recounted that pain, from generation to generation. Like a fairy tale. It is a huge thing, if you think about it. Truly.

An Angel. The most beautiful of Angels: Lucifer. That's how it began. Until, on the sixth day of creation – to be scrupulously precise, the morning of a Friday for some and of a Saturday for others – the Almighty bequeathed to the world the most beautiful of gifts, which only later revealed itself to be a clamorously awkward one, that creature among creatures: Man.

Lucifer, flying over the world, touched by the beauty of creation, was moved to the point that he shed two tears, one from each eye, and these, carried by the wind, came to bathe with scientific and meticulous precision what would later become the center of Porto Del Molo. Those tears, Lucifer's last sign of goodness before envy petrified his heart, became the most enchanted and beautiful of trees: the Palms. Lucifer, having deceived and corrupted the creatures of Eden, was cast out forever from all places possessed of a soul:

“... you were full of wisdom and flawless in beauty;

you were in Eden, the garden of God; every precious stone was your adornment ...

drums and flutes were at your service, prepared for you the day

you were created ... as a cherub with outstretched shielding wings ...

You were blameless in your ways, from the day you were created, until wrongdoing was found in you ...

You grew haughty because of your beauty;

you debased your wisdom for the sake of your splendor;

I have cast you to the ground, I have made you an object for kings to stare at ...

All who knew you among the peoples are appalled at your doom;

You have become a horror and will not exist ever again.

Ever again ... ever again ... ever again ... again ...”

(Ezekiel 28:12-19)

Hosts of angels led by the Archangel Mi-ka-el fought in what turned out to be the last time Good and Evil met face to face, in a terrible clash, but nonetheless, a transparent clash, because everything was clear then, what was on one side and what was on the other. Dark clouds in the skies mingling with the horror of marvelous wings that nevertheless cracked like dry wood under the blows of flaming diamond swords; superhuman screams, to the point that that day became an ancestral trauma, a memory that, hidden in the depths of humanity's unconscious, torments it and deprives it of sleep. From then on, the night was no longer just a time of rest but a place of ancient ghosts, a time of distress for the Soul, of insomnia and tears in the eyes of a newborn humanity needing to be consoled when, at sunset, the strange idea emerged that, thereafter, everywhere would be dark. Everywhere.

Indelible night when in broad daylight the Pale Blue of a loved and immortal creature becomes the rotten Brown of the curse, forever, as a divine condemnation. Because, they say, this was His Will, so ironbound and so infinite that its course could no longer be changed. Thus was born, in that precise moment, that path traced in and by the Divine Will. It would be called Destiny.

To alleviate the wound, the stars were commanded to shine. Infinite fireflies to warm the heart of those who would have learned to live something inscrutable, and which would also have determined events, whatever those events might be.

Everything, in that design, would have been different, but it all would have been written in a book that would never be readable until later.

Later.

Always later.

As all things that are incomprehensible.

Later.

But, there was a but. A silent and intriguing but ... stuck in that little pile of dust that was us: Free Will.

It doesn't even seem like much to say it like that, however within was the ingenious madness of Creation; within, there was also the most extraordinary and whimsical of inventions. From here, the result of millions of combinations of Free Will, impossible to control, would lead to splendid and ineffable Chance. From within the same incredible sacred fresco, two shocking creatures were born: Destiny and Chance.

Destiny that guides you and Chance that challenges you. Bizarre Creations that blend and confuse you. Where the first stops, the second comes to life. And what is a Destiny if not the straw that broke the Chance's back?

What immense and grandiose solitude could ever imagine something that imposes itself as an already decided path and, at the same time, as the freedom to choose the path? All this would have to be, were it not for the Divine Source, incompossible. Quite simply.

As if life weren't complicated enough, the Almighty slipped into creation the absolute duality of things, and if it weren't for the majesty of everything one could think, one could really say: how the hell could a being of dust ever extricate itself from such a divine tangle. How to always tell what is right from what is wrong, True from False, Life from Death, Good from Evil ... how?

A mud creature, one of his ribs with the word, an apple, a wretch in the shape of a snake and, lastly, Free Will. What human intellect could truly understand such a sophisticated architecture?

Later, Evil took more silent paths, insinuating itself into the folds of the soul in small doses, slowly corroding and tearing apart ancient ties, creating gray areas and no man's lands, becoming difficult to see, becoming an enemy very difficult to fight, a strange enemy, because it was very often an enemy-accomplice, sought out. Hidden in such a sophisticated manner that sometimes one might have mistaken it for a form of Good. And that's no wonder, because, once upon a time, everything descended from a single tree.

This is what those palms testify to: a last gesture of kindness; a gesture that made them outpost and border between Heaven and Hell; a time boundary between the moment before and the moment after, a moment that can sometimes represent a lifetime in the transition between happiness and despair. Those two tears left a tangible sign that, once upon a time, everything was Good and nothing was Evil. On the seventh day, in a delicate and harmonious breath, in the shelter of those palm trees, the first day of rest in the history of creation announced that the work was finished.

Then, came the fate of men.

Dust, swept up by the wind.

Noble sands.

At that point, the old women would stop telling the story.

They asked for silence.

There were no words that could have followed that stillness, they didn't even look for them.

Some of them shook their heads in sorrow, as if to say: “No. It is not possible that the lesson has not been understood.” Others shook their heads, as if to say, “Yes. This is what truly happened.”

Despite being immersed in an extreme faith, to the limits of the reason itself of a faith, the inhabitants of Porto Del Molo did not feel the need to demonstrate too strong a religious spirit. They thought that only the insecure manifest at all costs. Perfection was the stuff of Heaven and this was neither the time nor the place for perfection. Tolerance, leniency, meekness, this was what they were. This they wanted to be. History and religion represented the two souls of every being in that place, their ironic Soul and their tragic Soul, both true, both alive. It was a borderland in every sense, between irony and tragedy, between black and white, between what was and what will be, like a circular song. This duality was the essence of what had always characterized its existence. Almost all peoples had passed through: Greeks, Latins, Arabs, Germans, Normans, and the more modern Spanish and French. It was a coming and going of people who arrived there, with the aspiration of conquering the world. Sometimes, it seemed that the wickedness of the world was directed towards that land, but no one had ever managed to take away its Soul. So one day that Soul decided it had had enough. It decided to paint a fresco over time, destined to shake up the future, any future there. And, as often occurs, the signs of the Soul are indelible scars.

Two eyes focused on the horizon.

Two eyes closed in on the horizon as if to say: “No. Why?”

Ottoman ships were mirrored in those same pupils that now had to reopen in order to give aid in the rush that precedes an alarm and shout for succor for poor souls they couldn't help.

Soldiers from foreign lands and imported pain.

All in one chaotic moment.

Not content with the carnage they had committed in the land of Otranto, perhaps soldiers sent out to inspect the territory by Gedik Ahmed Pasha, or perhaps disbanded fighters in search of gold and women, they showed up punctually like a bill of fate one August afternoon.

It was the evening of Saturday the nineteenth of August, 1480.

The echo of the massacre they had carried out five days earlier, mercilessly beheading eight hundred and thirteen human beings, spread fast.

They say that one of them, perhaps the commander of those ships, after the landing, entertained a whim for a girl from the small village. He took a young woman, named Agnese for her purity, and led her to the beach, showing her off to his men like a trophy.

The hand of time moved towards the dawn of the morning of Sunday the twentieth of August, 1480.