“THEn Ecuador, six-year-old boy falls from the tenth floor and gets up from the ground without a scratch». The story, so sparse and devoid of further details, was reported on the first page of the diary that her mother had started writing for Anna after giving birth to her. The date of the accident coincided with the day of his birth, April 15, 1996. An almost legendary event, this last one. Christmases comparable to those of a princess or, in any case, a predestined one. At least from the solemn tone of the narration.
But who knows why the mother had also noted that fact happened thousands of kilometers from Italy and also so far from the extraordinary thing that was happening in his existence, the coming into the world of his first and only daughter. What struck you about that story? The fortunate and certainly unrepeatable combination of small events that had slowed the child’s fall until he landed unharmed on the asphalt? Had he interpreted it as a miracle or perhaps read it as an omen?
And why compare the fact precisely to his birth? The chronicle of Anna’s young life in that diary proceeded in an epic tone. Even the smallest or most insignificant events became memorable. And all were strangely accompanied by news anecdotes of the same tone as the story of the Ecuadorian child. Singular facts, often improbable and sometimes far-fetched, learned on the radio, from magazines or newspaper articles, which the mother reported with precision.
«6 October. Anna had her first tooth, well ahead of her peers: further proof of his precocious aptitude for being in the world. Dog saves owner who fainted during a fire, dragging her out of the house… March 27. Anna said her first word “lunar”, a literary and poetic adjective that describes something with an arched shape, similar to a waxing or waning moon, the choice of an atypical term is a sign of a profound sensitivity. Cornicione collapses while a girl passes under the building, one step further and she would have been crushed… 18 September. Anna’s first day at school, the teachers welcome her with great expectations, her classmates compete for her attention and friendship. Man accidentally discovers after a CT scan that he has had a bullet lodged in his head for years and cannot explain how it could have happened…”.
The diary was spread over several notebooks, because just one would not have been enough. The mother wrote down something every day, with scrupulous consistency, without sparing emphatic accents. In reality, as a child Anna never asked herself why she did it, what the purpose of the meticulous recording work was. It was a habit she too had gotten used to. It didn’t even seem strange to her.
We often tell things in a way that makes them appear better than they really are. Illustration by Fred Benaglia
In fact, she thought other mothers did the same thing. Whether it was some kind of social obligation, like sending children to school or paying taxes. And that this practice would happen to her one day if she had a son or daughter. She had never wondered why such a task was necessary. On the other hand, every bureaucracy has a component of indecipherability that sometimes borders on the absurd.
In fact, until she was able to read, Anna had never known what was written in that disorganized diary. She was aware of the existence of the same, as she saw her mother update it every evening, sitting at the kitchen table, before going to bed. And she was also aware that it was a diary, since her mother had never made a secret of the matter. However, she didn’t know its contents and she wasn’t even that interested, since she didn’t imagine that something different from what she experienced firsthand on a daily basis could be hidden within those pages.
So, the first time he came across that account, it happened almost by chance, when he was eight years old. She opened the last of the notebooks that her mother had left on the sideboard and it immediately seemed to her that there was a mistake. In reporting the events of the previous day, his mother talked about a hot chocolate with pastries, consumed together in a regal hotel room, when instead the highlight of their afternoon after shopping at the hypermarket had been a snack at the bar with fruit juice and a cream croissant split in two, left unsold since breakfast.
“The lie of the orchid” by Donato Carrisi (Longanesi).
For this reason, she had gone backwards with her reading discovering not only the author’s tendency to hyperbole, but also her tendency to totally transfigure the modest events of their lives. Since then Anna had begun to carefully examine the diaries, looking for correspondences with her own memories and, often, also answers to questions that remained unsolved. For example, what intrigued her most about her life was not mentioned in her mother’s diary. It was information about herself that she had learned casually from a very young age, sifting through the conversations of adults, even their silences in her presence. They were topics he would have liked to explore further.
For example, the reason why his dad didn’t live with them. He came to visit her one Sunday a month and the three of them had lunch together. He usually brought her a gift and they always ate lasagna because her mother said it was her father’s favorite dish. For this reason the woman always kept a spare tray in the fridge in case he came on a different day than the usual Sunday. But it never happened. The frozen lasagna piled up and sometimes his mother served it on the table even on weekdays so as not to have to throw it away.
Anna had heard from someone that her dad was a sales representative and had another family, somewhere in that same city. And she also had other children, older than her, who were basically her older brothers or sisters, but she had never seen or met them.
In her adolescence, she happened to randomly meet a boy a few years older than her in a nightclub. He had observed it carefully and, for a few moments, it had been like looking at himself in a mirror. The boy had noticed her too. After giving her a very long look, he went back to chatting with his friends as if nothing had happened, erasing her forever from his field of vision and his mind.
Sometimes, at night, the phone rang at home and woke them up with a start. His mother always answered and didn’t even say a word, not even “Hello”, as if she already knew who was on the other end. Instead, from the receiver that she held to her ear, the screams of a female voice could be heard. Screams and insults. His mother remained impassive until the angry interlocutor, satisfied by the outburst, hung up.
Both she and her mother knew perfectly well who the woman was, even if they had never told each other. And the mother tolerated the situation perhaps because she thought that the real wife of her daughter’s father sometimes needed to express her pain in that way, that by always keeping it all inside and pretending nothing had happened, one seriously risks exploding like a pressure cooker.
«November 11th. Anna brought home her first boyfrienda young architecture graduate with great prospects and an excellent family. He loves her and wants to marry her. In Indonesia, a child is sucked into a manhole during a tropical storm and resurfaces safely in the sea after several kilometers.”
Bruno was a laborer. He wanted to start a family, but the money wasn’t enough. He was sweet, thoughtful. He hadn’t gone to school much, so he often kept quiet, so as not to make a bad impression. «April 19th. Anna is expecting a child, perhaps a girl. Her father has already decided to organize a wedding for her in a castle. Elderly man is struck by lightning and remains unharmed thanks to shoes with insulating soles.” The wedding was celebrated in church, in a hurry, very early one morning. Few present. But Anna’s father had offered everyone breakfast at the bar.
By the time she turned thirty, Anna’s life was not unlike that of her mother. Aside from a husband staying at home, it was the usual struggle to make things appear better than they really were. Especially for the daughter. But, in the case of the new baby, there would be no diary scattered across makeshift notebooks. Anna reported everything on social media. Like many other mothers in her situation, she tended to emphasize with retouched photos, emojis and enthusiastic statuses the normal and somewhat banal existence that she had passed down to her daughter.
For years she had wondered why her mother also wrote down the absurd and incredible news from around the world. The stories of her survivors served to balance the lies she told in those pages. If fate had decided to spare those unknown people from certain death, then anything was possible. Even that an invented existence magically transformed into a real life. After all, isn’t that what we all try to do, every single day? We pass off as reality the improved version of ourselves and what surrounds us. And in the end, we simply survive our fate.
The author
*Donato Carrisi was born in Martina Franca, Puglia. Graduated in Law, he specializes in criminology and behavioral science. Author and screenwriter, his success exploded with The prompter translated into 40 languages, loved by “colleagues” of the caliber of Stephen King and Michael Connelly. Master of suspense weaves disturbing and suspended stories, which open like overlapping mirrors and have sold twenty million copies worldwide. He is also the director of films based on his novels. The last one, The orchid lieopens with a question: what happened inside the red farmhouse on a hot August night? There is only one survivor, the person responsible. But the story is only just beginning…
