“By the time you come back I will be gone.” These are S.’s last words to Matthew, spoken over the phone on an autumn day in 1998. It sounds like a service communication, but instead it is a farewell. S. is finishing moving her things out of Matteo’s apartment after the end of their romance. That day Matteo returns home, the house where they lived together for seven years, and discovers that S. has taken his own life. As he uselessly calls for help, he realizes that he is experiencing the most painful moments of his entire existence. Almost twenty-five years have passed since those instants, during which Matteo B. Bianchi has never stopped shaping these pages of excruciating beauty in his head. In the months following S.’s death, Matteo discovers that those like him, relatives or fellow suicide victims, are called survivors. And this is how he feels: a protagonist of a rare event, of a perversely special grief. Anger, regret, guilt, bewilderment: his pain is a labyrinth, an ongoing search for answers-why did he do it? -, for order, or even just an hour’s respite. To appease herself she tries everything: she meets with psychiatrists, pranotherapists, even a psychic. And meanwhile, as he has since he was a child, he seeks solace in books and music. But there is nothing that speaks to him, no one who can understand him. Slowly, he begins to retrace his story with S. — a love born almost out of defiance, between two men different in everything –, to stop memories and feelings on the page, without shame. That is why she is publishing this book today, because then she would have needed to read such a book, about the lives of those left behind. But there is also another reason: “Two souls coexist in me,” he writes, “the person and the writer.” The person wants to save himself, the writer wants to look into the abyss. For twenty years the writer in Matthew has been looking for the right distance to tell that abyss. And when he found himself at the point of balance, from there, from that miraculous position, he wrote these words, which, though very lucid, gush forth with the force and naturalness of urgency. What we are delivering into the hands of the reader is a gift, yes, but a gift of extraordinary gravity. Yet each of these pages contains a germ of the future, a testimony to how, even in the folds of unspeakable pain, writing can still save. (Source: Ibs.co.uk)
Matteo B. Bianchi, born Matteo Bianchi, is an Italian writer and television author.
