Visti i buoni riscontri da parte dei lettori, pubblico anche la versione in inglese del racconto “Il colore del sole”. Questa versione è stata scritta subito dopo quella in italiano, e beneficia della lettura da parte della stessa persona che mi ha raccontato la storia di Kathy e ha ispirato il racconto. Le nuance, e i  colori, sono suoi. IM

Since the readers have appreciated the  short story “Il colore del sole”, I also publish it in English. This version was written immediately after the one in Italian, thanks to the reading from the same person who told me about Kathy’s life and inspired the story. The shades and colors are hers. IM

 

The color of sunshine

(This is not Thelma and Louise)

 

Sunshine Skyway Bridge.

Tampa, Florida.

The sea is a blue postcard. As if millions of dwarf slaves of the goddess of beauty painted every drop to make it more beautiful than that of Osaka or Adelaide, much sleeker, more American. It is only a bridge. Nay, it is the way to heaven. The road leading somewhere else, where the blue does not need to be painted and polished every day by the sweat of brow and arms.

Nearby lives Liza, my American beauty.

She loves Italy, and I love her love.

She says that she has Sicilian roots. But she’s like the Statue of Liberty – she comes from Europe but no one remembers that. She laughs, with those teeth eternally young and her brilliant mind far away from self-centered billionaires with hair resembling the fur of unkempt cats. She laughs and runs each day among her true cats, black and healthy, and her smooth lawns, no fences.

Today she has run to the airport, to take me, the sloth Italian drawn by her, by the thought of her flesh and mind, in this huge playground where every step brings you toward astonishment and fear. Where even the morning is bigger, thirstier, and the evening is a smooth lawn to walk and dream on.

She keeps talking and laughing, with that voice that sways like a song on the skin and sinks into the veins. She laughs, and before I can embrace her, she has already told me about her life, her brother, her cousins, relatives, work, the glasses of more and more colorful and alcoholic drinks, friends, gyms, massages, the steps of a lifetime between heat and wind, laughing and crying, perseverance and dreams.

I step into her giant car. She tells me that there, by them, that is a small car, similar to our Panda, the old model, square, still not completely extinguished. She has been in Italy, with her love, far away now. She saw St. Peter and St. Siro, the sun and the frost. She brought with her huge suitcases and heavy memories, regrets of cast iron and lead evenings. She has not stopped loving this crazy and strange country that is ours. But she is here now, in her own world. Playing at home, she is favored. She is the captain of the soccer team, as they say, of my overseas dreams.

She drives without hardly an eye to the road ahead, along wide and straight roads. I look at the road with one eye and at her with the other, and squinting has never been more full of fear and excitement. She brings me, first, to see their most beautiful monument: the Ocean. A huge installation on which no man has put a hand.

We cross the Skyway Bridge. And it’s like flying. Rapid and unstable, away from the ground. Close to the words of the story which, with a more intense laughter, she gives me as a gift.

She tells me of Kathy Freeman. The name is similar to that of the former Australian athlete specialized in speed. But our Kathy is another. She was used to walking slowly. Only in the final moment she accelerated.

Our Kathy Freeman one morning, that morning, prepared some homemade cookies, in her bathroom gently washed the child of a friend, chatted amiably with the neighbors in the early afternoon, then, a few hours later, shot a dozen bullets into her former husband, a successful lawyer.

Soon after she attempted to strangle the companion of her ex spouse, then, at the dawn of the next day, she got into her ’99 Cadillac and headed to the Sunshine Skyway Bridge. Yes, the Bridge of the Sun. The same endless, inescapable thing we are crossing now. She then threw herself into the air from the center span.

She survived. Against all logic, against all odds. Kathy wanted to do a complete job: she also violated the laws of physics.

According to police experts the strong winds of the bay slowed the velocity of her 138 pounds into the void. She was still conscious when, after being at the mercy of the ocean for forty minutes, she was fished out as a relic by the St. Petersburg fire brigade. A first check of her physical condition revealed a fracture of the legs and pelvis. She was taken to the Bayfront Medical Center and underwent surgery. Her condition was critical for internal injuries.

The following afternoon, less than twenty-four hours later, the Hillsborough sheriff accused the housewife and former stockbroker of first degree murder, armed robbery and aggravated assault.

The events have shocked her friends and neighbors. According to the testimony of her dear friend, Michelle, Katherine Freeman was a jovial person who cared lovingly for her daughter and had maintained a friendly relationship with her ex-husband despite their divorce in 1996 after ten years of marriage. She and her husband were two best friends who had gotten married. Michelle remembers that sometimes Kathy said that she missed her husband. And she added, referring to him, “Now I realize how much I liked him as a person.”

Katherine, Liza says again, had come to her husband’s house at eleven thirty in the evening, and had fired several shots at him. Then, after struggling with his current wife, she had fled. She had not returned home to her daughter whom she loved and protected with all her heart. Someone declared that an argument between her daughter and the wife of her ex-husband triggered Kathy’s fury.

The incident surprised those who knew that Kathy and her former husband were an example to point out to all of friendly separation.

The divorce decreed that, after they separated, to her husband had been awarded the marital house, valued at $ 650,000, several apartments, sports cars, and numerous bank accounts and stocks. Kathy had obtained 110.00 dollars in cash and $ 96,000 of alimony, plus half of the furniture and photographs. Grover Freeman, the famous lawyer, had married six months later with Constance (Constant) Elaine King. It happened on October 12. The same day America was discovered. We Italians always meddle. We cannot do without.

However, what matters is that the friends of the former couple claimed in unison that if Kathy had somehow suffered the separation and division, she didn’t show it. Basically it was just one of the many challenges she had faced, and overcome, in her life. In 1983 Kathy’s boyfriend had been shot to death. A year later she was taken hostage and beaten during a robbery in her jewelry shop on E. Busch Boulevard in Tampa. In 1986 Kathy had been assaulted by a stranger who had entered her home while her husband was out of town. Despite all this, her friends state, Kathy was not aggressive or resentful.
“Life goes on”, was her philosophy.

Recently, continued her friend Michelle, she was very full of optimism and had planned to take her daughter to Hawaii. When she spoke of her former husband, says Janine Rosen, she did it with respect. Indeed, with admiration for the successes he had managed through his work. But perhaps, says Janine, Kathy hid behind her jokes, spread via e-mail to friends and behind the parties that she organized for the neighborhood kids, her pain.

The Bridge is almost finished.

For sure the story of Kathy is over. The story that my beloved American baby (beautiful alliteration) told me in detail.

Liza adds some images. She always does. She does it as only she can do, with sweet malice, just like the ocean below us, that lulls us and would like to swallow our bodies.

Liza makes me reflect on the summary process. Here they do them quickly seriously, the trials. Sometimes better than a direct train would be an “accelerated”, or a regional, a train which stops at all the small stations. She tells me to try to imagine Kathy completely immobilized in plaster, present as a tragic and ridiculous statue to the trial where they tear to pieces and badly reassemble her life. Liza informs me that the Skyway Bridge is the suicide bridge. Every day there is a row of aspiring birds without wings.
She adds that some days, especially on Christmas Eve, there are volunteers who patrol the bridge to try to dissuade depressed men and women from taking the extreme action.

She tells me that she often thought about the Skyway Bridge. With love. I cannot stand her now, I cannot even watch her. I have a cramp in my stomach.
I would like to kill her. Without even preparing, the morning before, biscuits and baby baths.

I would like to return to Italy.

But through water routes.

I would like to throw myself into that sea larger than the world.

Then my lovely friend opens her mouth again.

She invites me to think how beautiful Kathy would be with her red hair blowing in the wind during her flight.

Before the impact.

When she was still air and freedom.

I, now, want to kiss her.

I look forward to the moment when the bridge is finally behind us. I cannot wait to get to Liza’s house, her patio, her swimming pool, her red bed always full of cats, books and phones. Always warm, always to be made.
I, now, I want to embrace her.

Skyway Bridge will forgive me.

Maybe on my way back I will think about it a little, about the jump.
Not now.

I have to think about what to say to convince Liza to wear that really small yellow bikini for me. The color of sunshine, yes! Like the bridge.

 Ivano Mugnaini