WITHOUT PATRICIO

By Walter Veltroni and - - Reprint | | Print |

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ROME, Oct 1 2004 (IPS) - \’\’One day, an ordinary day, walking down a street in Buenos Aires, I came across some writing on a wall, scrawled in colour on this lifeless surface, just five words: \’\’Patricio I love you. Papa.\’\’ Never in almost fifty years had I seen graffiti dedicated to a son by his father. And I began imagining the story that might have given rise to this act.\’\’ Thus begins the brief presentation of \’\’Without Patricio\’\’, the latest book of Walter Veltroni, released in late September. The book is comprised of five stories and is the first work of fiction by Veltroni, the author until now of essays and books on political themes. Veltroni has been the editor of the newspaper l\’Unita di Roma, leader of the Democrats of the Left party, vice president of the Italian government. He is a Euro-parliamentarian since 1999 and the mayor of Rome since 2001. By agreement with the Rizzoli publishing company we are offering in this column an introduction to the book and excerpts from the second chapter.

”One day, just an ordinary day, walking down a street in Buenos Aires I came across some writing on a wall, scrawled in colour on this lifeless surface, just five words: ”Patricio I love you. Papa.” Never, in almost fifty years, had I seen graffiti dedicated to a son by his father. And I began imagining the story that might have given rise to this act. In this sad and melancholy land, its soul suspended in time, everything seems epic and grand. Even so simple an act. Sixteen letters written one day by someone on a wall.

***** Maybe Patricio disappeared. He disappeared and doesn’t know it. He disappeared to his father, but not to life. Maybe Patricio is alive, living in a building somewhere in this huge city, or another. Maybe he has a girlfriend and is thinking of having a child. He doesn’t know his father has looked for him every God-given day, for twenty years. His hair is white now, this man who brought him into the world.

And he remembers the moment, the exact moment, when Patricio exited his man’s body, a mere drop, and, transformed, entered the body of his mother. He remembers the sensation of absolute pleasure and astonishment on that humid night on the lawn of the park of Palermo, the most beautiful of the federal capital.

He remembers the sense of fear at being discovered. The stifled sighs, the face of Laura Estrela who a second before had been a lover and was now a mother. At least this is how his memory had set it down.

****** A few weeks later Laura Estrela was waiting for him in the library of the university. She waited until he sat, picked up the Apology of History by Marc Bloch, and began to read, turning the pages with one hand and twisting his curls with the other. She waited until he was lost in the words and then crept up beside him and let fall into the musings of Bloch the drawing of a baby.

There was a yellow star that was smiling, but also a tear. A green field with two figures intertwined. And suspended as if in flight a baby with short pants held in the air by a sky blue ball. And from the mouth of the baby these words, ”Papa, I love you.”

****** He arrived at the house of Laura Estrela but when he rang it was the door of a neighbour that opened and he was silently let in. They knew each other from university. The neighbour told him that Laura Estrela had been taken away in May. He watched her through the peephole one shriek-filled morning. He saw that she was very pregnant and was taking with her little sweaters and other clothes for a child not yet born. He didn’t know where they had taken her, only that she never came back.

The life of Laura Estrela ended that morning. No one ever saw her again. No one heard anything more about her. Only a cousin of her mother, who heard it said that she met the same fate as so many others, loaded in a plane, flown far out over the ocean, and pushed out. Now it was she, in Raul’s memory, that lingered as if suspended, immobile, between the sea and the sky.

****** He cried uncontrollably for an entire night. His heart felt wrung dry like a sponge. His brain fought to escape from his skull. He felt a pain, the pain of absence, that was unbearable.

He thought of Laura Estrela at the bottom of the sea, lost. And he imagined Patricio, at some university, deceived about his origins. He opened the cupboard where he stored the things he treasured most, looking for the drawing that he had kept. The next night he went out with a brush and a jar of paint and on the first empty spot that looked right he wrote in blue letters, the blue of the night sky and an invisible balloon, writing with all the force within him: ”Patricio, I love you. Papa.”

Then he closed his eyes and took a deep breath. He tried to find the only air that was left to him, that of memory. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)