In the beginning was the void. Then the void contracted, becoming 
smaller than the head of a pin. Was it by its own will or did something force 
it? No one can know. What is too compressed, in the end, explodes with 
furious rage. An intolerable glare came forth from the void, dispersing into 
space, so there was no longer darkness above but light. From the light 
the universe gushed forth in crazed splinters of energy projected into space 
and time. Racing on and on, they formed the stars and the planets. Fire and 
matter. This could have been enough but it wasn't. The molecules of amino 
acids continued on, millennium after millennium, transforming themselves 
until life was born: microscopic unicellular beings that, in order to breath, 
needed bacteria. From there, from those primordial pools, with a 
progressive ordering, each living form had its origin: the large cetaceans
of the depths and the butterflies, the butterflies and the flowers 
that host their larvae. And man, who stands upright instead of walking on 
all fours. From four to two things change. The sky is closer, the hands 
unencumbered; four movable fingers and an opposable thumb can take 
hold of anything. And then freedom, dominion over space, action, 
movement, the possibility of creating order and disorder. Meanwhile, the 
universe opens and the stars grow ever more distant, racing to the edge like 
balls on a billiard table. Was all this the work of someone or did it go forth 
by itself, with the inertia of an avalanche? It's said that matter has its laws-
-at that temperature, under those conditions, it could not have made
anything other than this, the universe. The universe and the miniscule 
galaxy containing, suspended, the flowering garden of the earth. Some 
hundred species of plants and animals would have been more than 
sufficient to transform our planet into something different from the others. 
Instead, there are tens and tens of thousands of different forms of life. No 
one person in a single life could learn to recognize them all. Waste or 
wealth? If matter has its laws, who then made the laws of matter? Who 
made order? Anyone? A god of light? A god of shadow? What spirit 
nourishes that which, programming the life of a thing, also programs its 
death? And then what importance can it have? We're in the middle, 
constantly pressed between the two principles. A fleeting form of order, 
cells aggregate into our body, our face. Our face has a name. Our name 
a destiny. The end of the journey is the same for everyone. Order becomes 
sporadic, turning to disorder. Enzymes depart with their messages and find
no one to welcome them. Messengers of an army that no longer exists. All
around is only the deaf silence of death. 
     Order, disorder, life, death, light, shadow. From the moment in 
which I became aware of my existence, I did nothing but ask myself 
questions, questions no one could answer. Perhaps wisdom means simply 
not asking yourself anything. I'm not wise and never have been. My 
element is not quartz but mercury. Unstable, mobile, feverish matter. The 
quick silver forever destined to move. And always in disorder.
     Such were my thoughts as I leaned against the gate of the cemetery, 
waiting for my father's corpse. It was cold, windy. The only birds able to 
brave it were the crows.
     The city services van arrived late, shrouded in a black cloud of 
diesel fumes. "Where's the priest?" they asked as they unloaded it. "The
priest isn't coming," I answered. 
     Everything happened fast. The loculus was already open. The 
men hoisted up the coffin and slid it inside, then ceiled it with a white 
marble slab. They used a drill to fasten it shut. That and the cawing of the 
crows were the only sounds.
     Instead of making a speech, his three friends -- the only ones still
living -- started singing something that sounded like the Communist 
International. They sang faintly, as old people do. The wind blew in 
short bursts, ripping away the notes as soon as they sounded. I watched 
them, they didn't watch me. They carried three red carnations in their 
hands, holding them with awkward shyness like children who don't know 
to whom to give them. There was a small vase outside the loculus, but it 
was too high to reach. They looked around, hesitating, then opened their
fingers and let them the flowers fall to the ground. It had rained during
the night. The mud on the ground soaked the petals. They were no longer
flowers but garbage.
     We left, one by one, our eyes on the ground. In front of the
cemetery gate, I gave a tip to the sextons and without saying a word shook 
hands with his friends. To the south, the leaden color of the sky was 
breaking into a lighter streak. Everything was over, closed. Forever.

     My father was over six feet tall and weighed some two hundred 
pounds. He wore enormous shoes. As a child I would put my feet inside.
For me they were Polynesian pirogues, not shoes, and with the carpet 
beater as an oar I would make circles around the room.
     He was born a few years after the Great War. He'd lived with his  
massive body through the majority of the century. Along with him went his 
gastric juices, his cerebral neurons with their branching dendrites, his heart 
with its ventricles and auricles, the come-and-go of his arterial and venous 
blood, his bones and tendons, the spongy walls of his lungs, and the 
smooth, slick sides of his intestines. For eighty years that ensemble of 
functions that responded to the name Renzo had moved in time and space. 
It had fought for some things, against others, it had screamed and shouted, 
and it had consumed an unspecified number of gallons of alcohol. It had 
made my mother live in terror and entertained friends at the local bar. It 
had put a son into the world. And that son, that morning, had 
buried it, with a tip for the sextons. The son was not sad but bewildered. 
Maybe it's always like that when the last parent passes on. All of a sudden 
you're alone, and in that solitude a lot changes. You're no longer a child. 
There's no one to rebel against anymore. The end that, in the order of 
things, looms on the horizon is yours.

     My mother used to say that the world was made by God. My father 
maintained that God had been invented by the priests in order to keep 
people in line. Up to a point, I preferred thinking of something simpler, a 
conjurer for instance. One day I had seen a show in which a man had
pulled a rabbit out of a hat with the wave of a wand. After that, with the 
same wand, he had reassembled the fragments of a broken glass. With a 
wand you could do a lot. Band directors used a wand. Waving it in 
the air, they transformed the confused black scribbles on paper into music 
     I believed in the conjurer for quite a while. Then, from one day to 
the next, I stopped believing in anything. It happened when a classmate of 
mine died. He was riding his bike to get cigarettes for his mother. It 
was twilight and hard to see. A car struck him and he was caught 
underneath. We weren't especially good friends. It's just that the day before, 
he had let me use his eraser. All of a sudden his desk was empty and the 
eraser was at the bottom of my satchel. There was no one to give it back to 
anymore. That was it. First there was Damiano. Then, in his place, the void.
     We had gone to the funeral in our school smocks and ties, the 
oldest two boys carrying a large wreath. We passed in front of his house on 
the way to the cemetery. His mother had forgotten to bring in the laundry. 
His pants and shirts were still there on the line, whipped by the wind like 
the flag of a vanished country. When the priest said, "We are thinking of 
your little smile up there, in the pastures of the sky," I broke into tears. I 
wasn't crying because I was moved. I was angry. Why were they 
kidding us? I asked myself. He's no longer anywhere. The eraser's cold in 
my pocket.
     That day I realized that I was like one of those fakirs in India, who
live for years perched upon the top of a pole. I was alone, sitting on top
of a pole, surrounded by the void. In my head, thoughts. Others were 
probably like that too. They just didn't seem to be aware of it.
     Once our teacher had explained to us that saprophytes were one of 
the foundations on which our existence rested. They could be vegetable or 
animal. Their function was to decompose all that had once had a life of its 
own. They broke down complex molecules into simple molecules. The 
ammonia, nitrates, and carbon monoxide of our bodies helped plants grow. 
Animals at the plants, and we ate both the animals and the plants. The 
squaring of the circle. Before the absolute void were these tiny creatures, 
humble transformers.
     While my father's friends mumbled the International, it was of 
those creatures I was thinking. I watched the three old men and wondered
if they felt that anxious seething beneath their feet. They too in the end
were nothing but fodder for the saprophytes, and deep down they knew it.
It wasn't appropriate or nice of me to think this, but I couldn't get it out of
my head. More than twenty years had past, but here again were all my
childhood fantasies about death.
     When my grandmother had passed on, my mother had explained to 
me that death was a kind of sham because you never die forever. "One 
day," she'd said, "the trumpet of judgment of will sound, and there will be a 
kind of great revelry. Then everyone will come out of their tombs." I was 
troubled. I already knew about the existence of paradise, purgatory, and 
hell. So I wondered how such a thing was possible. When you died, you 
went up or down, or you stopped for a while half way in between. It 
depended on whether you'd been good or not. What did opened 
sarcophaguses have to do with it? There couldn't be anything inside 
anymore. I couldn't see any reason why at some point you would need to 
rush back into your tomb as if forming up for review. Thinking about such 
a thing made me recall the mornings in which, though awake, I pretended 
to be asleep. I liked being awakened by my mother, so as soon as I would 
hear her steps, I'd close my eyes again. It was a kind of game. Maybe one 
day, to please God, all the dead people were just going to pretend to be 
dead. At a pre-arranged sign, from hell, paradise, and purgatory, in a great 
stampede they would all rush to the places they had been buried.
     But even if that were the case, there were still practically insurmountable
problems. I had seen how they sealed up Grandma, and 
I knew how small she was. How would she ever be able to get that cover 
off? For her even a toothpick would have been too heavy. And what about 
all those poor men who'd been blown to pieces on battle fields? The bodies 
of Pyrrus and Hannibal mingled with the enormous bodies of their 
elephants? How was it possible that, at the blast of a trumpet, everyone 
would be able to find his own parts? What if, in the rush, someone grabbed 
the leg of an enemy or an elephant rotula by mistake? Then what? Would
he present himself to God like that? And what about the inhabitants of 
India, whom no one had warned about this, and who continued to cremate 
themselves? Could the ashes be resurrected too?

     I got home after the funeral with thoughts like this in my head and
immediately looked for something to drink. There was only a half-bottle of 
sweet liqueur, which my mother had used for cakes. It no longer had 
any aroma, but there was still alcohol in it. I drank it from the bottle. I 
would have liked to lie down, but it wasn't possible. There was just a 
narrow vinyl couch.
     It was sitting in the very same place, my feet dangling above the 
floor, that I had asked my mother, "Does the devil exist?" She'd been 
washing the dishes, and I could see her back with the apron tied at the 
waist. "What's got into you?" had been her vaguely surprised answer, my
question neutralized by another question. "Nothing," I'd said with a shrug.
     A few days later, I'd repeated the question to my father. He broke out
laughing. "Of course he does," he'd said. "The fascists are the devil." It
was clear to me then that none of them was able to give me an answer.
     I often thought about that skeleton holding a scythe that was
painted on the walls of the church. It was mowing hay, and hay was our 
life. If God was good, as they said, who had invented that skeleton? Maybe
God wasn't so good. Or maybe he was good but distracted. Or maybe 
he'd had a bad day and on that day created the devil. The devil and 
death.
     When my mother saw me pensive, she would say, "Why don't you 
go outside and play with the others?"
     Now no one said anything to me anymore. I had come back home. 
The house was empty, and I was grown up. The questions I was asking
myself were the same as those I had asked when my feet didn't reach
the floor from the couch.
     Once, at the Sunday movies, I'd seen Moby Dick. A fraction of a 
second before the white whale had burst forth from the water, the 
projector had caught fire. There'd been a flare up and, immediately after, in 
the darkness of the hall, the white sheet had become visible again.
     The scene came back to me as I thought about my past. What had 
happened in all those years?
     I had escaped, run far away. In that flight I'd deluded myself into 
thinking I could make a new life. Then I'd come back. Like a good son, I
had buried my father and tipped the sextons. And with that tip I'd realized 
that behind me there were only burned film frames. The leviathan had 
neither died nor disappeared. It was still there, just beneath the water's 
surface. Walking through the empty rooms, I could glimpse its silhouette--
ominous, gray, silent, ready at any moment to leap out and destroy all.