Oxygen E-Book

Christiano Cerasola

• Herausgeber: Elmi's World
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

A smoking cigarette, cities to discover, a bar of chocolate and accidental lodgings: this is the life of Sandro, a lonely creature in a ripped world. He has the will to live and the courage to try and this is why he travels, experiencing the warmth of short friendships and the pain of the continuous partings. Grown up without the love of his family he looks for beauty and love in the people he meets but he also finds the theft of the body and a grievous past. For those who live on the streets, for someone who is just a passer-by, the encounters are never arranged: fate is the only catalyst of intense and spontaneous bonds, like the ones that oxygen intertwines with the substances it touches. So new compounds are born, with new values and influences. Darkness can leave room for comicality, eradication will turn into balance for, as it happens in chemistry, it is because of the bonds that we can breath.

Leseprobe

Collana

Traduzioni - English

Christiano Cerasola

O2

Oxygen

O2

Oxygen

di Christiano Cerasola

Traduzione di Valentina Colombi

Collana Traduzioni - English

ISBN: 978-88-97192-25-1

© Casa Editrice Elmi's World

Tutti i diritti di copyright sono riservati

Casa Editrice Elmi's World

Via Guillet, 6 - 11027 Saint Vincent (Ao)

Tel. [phone]

mail: [email protected]

sito: www.elmisworld.it

Plot

A smoking cigarette, cities to discover, a bar of chocolate and accidental lodgings: this is the life of Sandro, a lonely creature in a ripped world.

He has the will to live and the courage to try and this is why he travels, experiencing the warmth of short friendships and the pain of the continuous partings.

Grown up without the love of his family he looks for beauty and love in the people he meets but he also finds the theft of the body and a grievous past.

For those who live on the streets, for someone who is just a passer-by, the encounters are never arranged: fate is the only catalyst of intense and spontaneous bonds, like the ones that oxygen intertwines with the substances it touches. So new compounds are born, with new values and influences.

Darkness can leave room for comicality, eradication will turn into balance for, as it happens in chemistry, it is because of the bonds that we can breath.

Treviso July 12, 2008

I watch the clouds of pale blue cigarette smoke, mesmerized, scrutinizing the designs forming in the air as they clash against the profile of my face. I try to find something, without knowing exactly what…

The smoke carried my mind to the memory of when, two years earlier, I had taken refuge in a former army barracks that had been converted into a dormitory in the countryside of Treviso. I made my living by gathering bunches of grapes that would later become a mediocre and unpretentious wine. Depending on the season, I lent my hand to harvesting tomatoes and vegetables. For my toils, I was rewarded with a measly salary.

In that desperate shelter, I annexed through a somewhat Machiavellian endeavor a bed and locker for storage of my few belongings. Each morning, after coffee, I slowly smoked two Marlboro lights. So began my days, which were spent between endless rows of vineyards and farmland.

It was now quite some time from when the company had ousted all the society rejects to make room for even more grossly underpaid immigrants. The entire community of hippies, punks and outcasts, suddenly found itself out of work. All that arrived from the gang in ties and suits was a letter that stated, without too many scruples; the inhabitants of the former barracks were to leave within a week.

After an initial period of confusion, I started dating a married woman. She was frustrated, I was unhappy. It lasted a few months and eventually without any remorse, I left with a clean cut. It seemed that she had been hurt, but I later learnt that another man immediately replaced me.

That was a fitting end to a squalid affair.

From that point, I resided for some time in a dormitory for the poor run by friars. There we could but sleep, leaving at eight in the morning and returning at seven in the evening, all the time still there was never the certainty of finding an available bed.

I would spend days wandering around Treviso, up and down the main street. I eventually gave into the temptation to light the cigarette butts that I would find on the ground. One day, hunched beneath the arcades, I decided to quit smoking.

After almost two years spent around Treviso trying to find the money to eat, I got used to, despite my nature, eating very little.

I had a series of occasional jobs always rewarded with makeshift accommodation and or cash in hand. I shoveled snow during winters, deliver the overnight bread to bakers, I was in charge of cleaning a kennel, washing the windows of downtown Treviso... It became time for me to return to my place of birth.

It happened by way of one of a number of trains I had taken without knowing where they were bound, the same process that had led me in Treviso. It had been just by chance I’d found myself in that city.

In my past I had survived a premature birth, peritonitis, hepatitis C, an automobile accident, and the absence of my parents, the ensuing poverty and unawareness. Now it was time to start a new chapter…

The train was late.

My ticket to Milan was a gift from a woman with whom I had had a fling over a weekend who had developed a soft spot for me.

The next day would be my 34th birthday. It would be the anniversary of someone who had nothing to his name.

During the short trip, I scanned my face reflected in the mirror down to the smallest detail, illuminated by a ruthless neon light. Wrinkles, more pronounced than normal for a man of my age, though not pronounced too dramatically. My eyes seemed to have changed colour, the bright green, once so full with illusions of the past had been replaced by a pale, opalescent colour. Surely, in the sadness of my eyes there was a reflection of the misery that I had witnessed. Advantageously I am rather tall and lean even if working in the fields had helped to fortify me a little. Brown hair, long on the neck and slightly brittle, was tied with a string at the nape.

For years I did not watched myself closely in the mirror. To look into my own eyes irritated me ever since I could remember and I disliked the image staring back at me. Alessandro, Sandro to anyone else. Not even my name was I happy with, I had never liked it, and I always found it disagreeable.

Ever since I was young I've understood that I was handsome, maybe this was the reason I used to neglect my appearance, the beauty that is in me would certainly have to be elsewhere, not in the reflected appearance in that dirty pane of glass covered with fingerprints.

I sat alone in the compartment, that train was half-deserted. I watched the countryside that flowed fast outside the window, images that overlapped too quickly to be able to focus on one thought alone. It was hot, the air conditioning wasn't working and to pass the time I imagined the people who had alternated through those empty seats, I wanted to know the stories that lurked behind every face, their thoughts, the reasons that had pushed them to take that train and if anyone would be expecting their arrival. I have always been curious and frequently encouraged this aspect of my consciousness.

Milan station had not changed since the last time I stood there. The speaker's voice was the same, the dominant colour was still grey, the pigeons were still disoriented, still the rows of bored taxi drivers and the rush of travelers dragging their luggage out of there.

One of the few memories I had of my father was when he took me to the station and left me alone to watch the trains depart... I spent whole days there. He confessed that the first word I had learned to pronounce was neither mum nor dad, but train.

What had changed in that place were the people. On the other hand, maybe it was just me that had changed.

I decided to celebrate the return in my hometown by begging for enough coins for two coffees, and drank one after the other.

Milan July 15, 2008

I had to dispute the bench on which I chose to sleep with a group of heroin addicts.

The girl, who was their leader, had been taken aback by the way I had spoken to her in a low voice without ever lifting my eyes and she then convinced her companions, with a steely glare, to leave.

It was six in the evening and hunger began to take hold.

I had never succeeded too well in begging. I had far less going for me than those who routinely asks for alms, the way in which I held myself and clothes that were still in good condition made it questionable for passers-by to show me too much compassion. I resolved the problem by stealing some Mars bars from a kiosk in Piazza Duca D'Aosta.

Towards the evening, I started walking in the direction of the street of the house where my parents lived, Father Sergio and Mother Silvia. Surprisingly I found it hard to locate their home and I was surprised even further when I found it full of Chinese immigrants who explained that they had purchased the modest apartment from an Arab family three years earlier. Nobody there knew anything about my parents.