This article is published in number 51 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until December 22, 2020
Once upon a time there was a yellow building. The building had been such – brick, plaster, windows – for many many years and no one paid much attention to it. Its laughable architectural value flattened it to its basic function, that of containing lives; his, perhaps, a little more worn and bruised than the average. Then one day his large glass front door was double locked, it was then that the palace uprooted its foundations and revealed to the world its nature as a spaceship, a metal sphere with bolted portholes behind which those consumed lives had to go on pretending to be alien, when they were desperately human.
Among those lives, the youngest belonged to a much loved woman. Her husband, out of there, far from her, did not rest. It had been six years, since she had entered the palace, that she had done her best to keep a thread that united them. When they closed them, she inside him outside, he was afraid of losing her forever. What can a wire against the reactors, turned on, of a spaceship? Yet every day he woke up and found the skein of their lives intact and tense. Then came the snow and the air of the holidays that brought him the pain of bad memories and he thought that, since this Christmas he could not hug his wife, he had to find yet another way to prevent the spaceship from leaving, and he decorated the thread that joined them with the Christmas balls.
Teresio has lived all his life inside a newsstand: he doesn’t even feel the cold. He remembers all the price fluctuations and the covers of the story of this weekly, on which he never imagined he would end up. Newspapers were his life until February 17, when he sold the last of the five newsstands he owned. Some money and an extraordinary resistance to bad weather are the legacy they left him all those years in the middle of paper and now both are good: money because it gives him time, temper because it allows him to stay outside – at least there yes – from Saronno retirement home where his wife Daniela has been hospitalized for 6 years. She entered when she was only 56 years old, following the devastating results of a stroke that hit her on the night of Christmas Eve 2013. Daniela and Teresio had decided a few months before separating, she was at her mother’s house for the holidays and that evening, wishing her goodnight, she had told her that she had a big headache. The next day she was very ill: at the hospital, where her almost ex-husband had rushed her, they had given her up for so much that the priest had also been called for extreme unction.
And instead Daniela had made it: with no memory of words, with enormous motor difficulties, her asymmetrical face, her right hand unable to do it, she had managed to recover pieces of existence and joy, compatibly with everything else. “She had become a profoundly different woman, not only in her appearance, also inside. Surprisingly a better woman, capable of giving as she had never done before. In the first rehabilitation center where she spent the months after being discharged from the hospital, the manager told me: leave her to me a little longer, her presence is so good for others ”, says Teresio. The return to life after a trauma like the one that Daniela’s body suffered is an ascent in which the summit never reaches: trying to climb is already a goal, finding a base camp to call home a success. Daniela had found it in the yellow building in Saronno: it’s called Focris, it is run by a non-profit organization with the same name. 41 years of difference pass between her and «la Maria», but it is the two of them, the youngest and the oldest guest, who animate the days of the hundreds of people who live there.
Daniela is all called Titti, because “Titti” is the word she says most often, sometimes adding “both”. Teresio took her everywhere to try to understand why, among millions of others, her brain had chosen to remember those words, “but they told me that there is no sense to find. And also to give up with speech therapy: Daniela will not improve. If I prompt her and imbecile her, she knows how to get little else out of her memory. If I tell her I love you she says the same, if I say head of, she responds, fucking laughing. Maybe this is a silly thing about bad words, but it reminds her and me that she is not a child who cannot tell her. ‘ Until the end of February Teresio and Daniela spent almost every afternoon together, then the pandemic arrived and the rest home, like all the others in Italy, banned visits. The spacecraft, the aliens, their looks at the window. “What happened next was difficult for everyone. Guests and operators », says Laura Biella, head nurse of the structure. “There were so many feelings together: their loneliness, our fears, the strange feeling of having to become children, wives and husbands every day and even in the last days, when we were the only ones who could hold the hand of those who fell ill , and died ».
As soon as Teresio no longer had his afternoons with Daniela he invented a thousand ways to get around her if not close, at least around. «I offered to transport the dirty linen of all the guests to the laundry, I delivered and went to collect the swabs that were made inside the structure to the analysis laboratory. I called a nurseryman friend and I had hundreds of tulips sent to me, to cheer everyone up a bit ». Teresio’s enthusiasm is a stone in the pond, from which concentric circles of solidarity are born. So much so that at a certain point the nursing home gets so much stuff that they no longer know where to put it. Meanwhile him. to repay those who had helped him, he invents “the potato of health”, a banquet that sells potatoes, the proceeds of which are used to buy food for a canteen for people in need. “We thanked those who had given, giving in our turn.” Why did he do all this? I ask him. So that they, inside, would know that we had not forgotten them.
When Teresio’s visits reopened in July, however, he didn’t go to Daniela’s. “She wouldn’t have understood why I couldn’t hug her, on this side of the Plexiglas. I don’t want to see her to do me good, I want to do it to make her feel better “. Alice, who works as an oss in the facility, confirms that certain physical barriers are a problem for people with impaired cognition. «Even the hug rooms, a wonderful initiative, are not for everyone. There are those who don’t take all that plastic on them well ». Then, however, in October they closed everything again and there was not even more time to wonder if it was the best decision or not. “We make a lot of video calls and I always make her have her markers.” Daniela, who had never taken a color in her hand in her life, after the stroke creates immense drawings, as large as mandalas. “His damaged part of the brain is the left one. They explained to me that the right hemisphere presides over creativity and she, to compensate, must have developed it a lot ». Her husband, at first, had brought her the pre-printed children, to see if she could fit inside the edges with the only good hand she had left, her left. And she, without any effort, filled the spaces with colors not only spread to perfection, but also matched with perfect taste. So the subjects to be colored became more and more complex, the tones more precise. Now Daniela always has 500 markers of different colors, which she discards at the first hint of minimal défaillance. And that her husband then gives to the nearby nursery school, “because they usually still work very well.”
The day I meet Teresio, I find him in front of the nursing home, intent on checking that the last of his initiatives works, literally. He remembered the padlocks of Ponte Milvio, in Rome, and thought that a little the same thing could be done with the Christmas balls: invite everyone to hang one, with their name written on it, on the gate of the nursing home to give a sense of celebration even to those who, this year, will not be able to go out or see anyone. When I arrive he is there, checking that the fishing line with which the first balls were tied – he made it available, along with scissors and a felt-tip pen – holds. There are still one here and one there, but he is happy: “As always, I broke my balls to everyone, there will be quite a few”. I realize that it is very unlikely that guests will be able to see the decorations from the windows, but then I realize that that is not the point. The meaning is to make us make the gesture of carrying them and hanging them, and that they are then visible to us, and that they remind us that that place, even if inaccessible, is full of dignity, lives and life. Maybe this way the spaceship won’t fly away.
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Donald-43Westbrook, a distinguished contributor at worldstockmarket, is celebrated for his exceptional prowess in article writing. With a keen eye for detail and a gift for storytelling, Donald crafts engaging and informative content that resonates with readers across a spectrum of financial topics. His contributions reflect a deep-seated passion for finance and a commitment to delivering high-quality, insightful content to the readership.
