travelogue
by rudolph

In his first letter, from Belgium, I read about how the minute he stepped off the bus he could feel the rain coming. And in the picture he enclosed that's exactly how I thought of the air, heavy with rain. He regretted two things: not visiting the Netherlands, only minutes away, and not sampling any of the various kinds of chocolate so characteristic of Brugge . Instead, he said that his one and only meal there was mussels, and he used the German word for it, Müsseln. Maria, a woman from Spain whom he met en route, told him not to leave Brugge without at least trying them. And try them he did although he could not bear to look at them but instead focused on a Magritte painting on the wall directly in front of him. At the very bottom of the painting, barely visible, he said, was the sea, the North Sea, splashing waves along the shore. Above with a skyful of clouds as a background, floated a colossal egg-shaped rock with a castle formation protruding from the top. He said he wondered where the castle had been plucked from as it did not seem that the egg rock had just emerged from the sea, but rather looked as if it was about to plunge right in. From the letter I recognized the painting: "The Castle of the Pyrenees."

He said he had a vision, a revelation that explained the origin of his "disgusting" meal, as he called it: the gigantic Magritte rock drops into the ocean and a tidal wave charges through rainy Brugge, its narrow streets transformed into inland waterways; its canals overflowing and sending barges into shopping windows; desperate people struggling to resurface and trying to hold on to traffic signs and balcony railings to keep the torrent, replete with pieces of chocolate and lace, from swallowing them. In a matter of minutes, Brugge, and a quarter of Belgium, is half-covered in cold water. Antwerp, Brussels, and Lille are now coastal towns. All that remains of Ghent, Wetteren, Brugge, and Roeselare are sparse triangular rooftops, peeking above the water. In the distance, the castle emerges from the ocean. Inside, where everything is soaking in seawater, he sits at tables with a plate of mussels in front of him. Their shells crack open in unison to reveal steaming, ugly, fetus-like dead creatures. A waiter comes by and covers the mussels in white sauce. With his fork he detaches a mussel from its shell, pretends it's chicken, and eats it. He concentrates on a washed-out watercolor painting on the wall directly in front of him: it contains nothing but a clear sky. He finishes his meal.

He then wrote about his walk following the peculiar meal and how the sidewalks there were very narrow, the narrowest he'd ever seen, especially around the basilica that houses a spec of the blood of Christ. He didn't tell me the name, perhaps assuming that I knew which one he was talking about and that he was merely confirming its existence for me. In the letter he said that what he found most interesting was a small one-room store that sold nothing but dolls of all sizes dressed as witches. Some were as small as one of his fingernails and others as tall as a person, and they filled the shelves against the mirror-covered walls. When he looked up, the ceiling, also covered with mirrors, made the small place appear like a monstrous kaleidoscope of colorful witches.

I looked forward to reading page after page about Paris. This was Paris after all, the city of light. I wanted to know what Paris looked like from the Eiffel Tower, if one could see countless white rooftops, just like they appeared in postcards. I wanted to read about the Louvre and the Musée d'Orsay. Did crowds of people really gather around the Mona Lisa and was it true that the painting itself was very small? I had read that for some people seeing the Mona Lisa for the first time had been anticlimactic given that it was so small and almost impossible to see up close. Was it like a revelation, like something you've been waiting for all of your life and finally it is there in front of you? And what about the Venus de Milo? Can one touch it? And how big was Nike anyway? I wanted to read about the long walks along the Champs-Élysées. I wanted to know if it was true that at the Ile de la Cité many painters gather outside of Notre Dame cathedral and paint it from every possible angle. And was it true that in Montmartre you can barely walk because the streets are so packed with tourists and artists?

Instead, all he sent was a picture with its description on the back: he wrote of a small square on rue de Rivoli where people played chess with pieces the size of a person. He said that passersby gathered around to watch while eating pastries and snapping photographs, and that the two men playing wore blue-and-white stripped shirts and black berets. Every day at noon he came to this same square and watched the two men play. Like the rest of the spectators, he are pastries and drank coffee from a wax-paper cup over the course of the game.

The picture he enclosed showed the two men, but they were not wearing the outfits he described. One had a black sweater and the other a navy blue sweatshirt, and both looked as if they were staring at something on the floor among the gigantic black-and-white pieces. None of the bystanders appeared to be eating any pastries or drinking anything for that matter, except for a woman standing next to a black bishop and holding a water bottle.

This was Paris. Days of anticipation and wondering amounted to a photo with a brief description that took me all but two minutes to read. Here was my Mona Lisa. Yes, it was quite disappointing but I was glad I had received the picture nonetheless. I imagine that even those who find themselves disappointed at DaVinci's painting upon finally seeing it are glad they saw it -- at least they can tell their friends about it. It occurred to me that perhaps there were more letters coming from Paris, and that this was only the first in a series, a prelude to an adventure. After a full week of waiting, the next letter arrived and it did not come from Paris.

He wrote about the grocery store in Nuremberg and how people must have their own shopping bags with them before going into the store. He said they did not provide plastic or paper bags, but instead offered to sell him a larger canvas bag to carry the ten chocolate bars and three bags of cookies he bought. He said that the store next door was selling something he'd never seen anywhere else at the time: a deck of cards with pictures from Hitchcock's Vertigo on the back. Each card, he said, depicted a different scene. I remembered seeing something similar at the Northridge Galleria. It must've been at the same time he was in Nuremberg. It was an Altoids tin can engraved with a black-and-white picture of Kim Novak about to jump off the church tower as James Stewart tries to hold her. Because he was a fan of everything Hitchcock, and Vertigo was his favorite film, I bought this for him so I could send it to him once he returned home to London after his trip.

His next letter arrived surprisingly fast, two days later. In it he said that the best goulash was made in Vienna -- that he could have eaten it day and night, even though eating in restaurants there is exceptionally expensive. He described this place where he'd eaten twice a day, a cafeteria in the basement of a flower and gift shop where people take their trays into a large section where the dishes and drinks are arranged amidst antique furniture and musical instruments. He said that people paid at a cash register, just like at a supermarket, and then carried their trays to a very elegant dining area where waiters and waitresses brought trays with chocolate and wine while a pianist and two violinists play Beethoven from a corner of the room. He described this place as the most outrageous yet fascinating sight in Vienna, where sophistication meets McDonald's as people drink from tall wax-paper cups that bear the Coke and Pepsi logos while they eat their fine meals and listen to classical music.

He wrote about a party he attended late at night at an inn located ten kilometers outside of the city, where a large group of Brazilian tourists were staying. What was so unusual about this party was that the ambience was entirely South American. Except for the food, the drinks, and the weather, he said, one could almost feel as if in Rio. He said that the unofficial language in the room that night was by default Portuguese. Two older gentlemen, both Austrian, played the guitar and sang for tips the entire night. He said their repertoire consisted exclusively of "The Girl from Ipanema," "Tico Tico," "Aquarela Do Brasil," and the song from Black Orpheus repeated over and over to the delight of the guests, who forgot about their food and decided to drink and dance instead. The party went on until three in the morning, and he said he felt no need to visit Brazil after this.

There was one thing that made me jealous; he even included a picture of it: The Vienna Conservatory of Music. He wrote nothing about it but I recognized the picture immediately: it showed the vestibule of the conservatory's main hall, where the end of the film La Pianiste takes place. He must have taken the picture after a performance, for it showed the backs of men dressed in suits and women wearing elegant dresses. In the far right side was a brown-haired woman wearing a bright green dress, half turning to the camera -- the only person whose face was showing. Was it someone he knew? I wasn't sure how to feel about his neglect to write at length about this place after we had spoken about enthusiastically face to face. Instead, I think he let the picture do all the talking even if I wasn't sure what he was trying to say.

He told me the excitement evaporated out of his body the minute he set foot in the Gothic Cathedral in Kutna Hora, about an hour drive from Prague . The bones and skulls of more than 40,000 victims of the plague decorated the inside of the cathedral. Everywhere he looked, he said, the skeletal remains of people formed the most elaborate shapes. He described a great chandelier, about forty times the size of a person, that hung from the ceiling and branched out in crisscrossed chains of bones and skulls. He said he thought of how the skulls once had life and eyes looking through their sockets and if they could only see where their remains had ended up they'd never be able to rest in peace. This church, he wrote, was a celebration of death. Certainly none of the tourists come here to pray. This is art, he said, that reminds us how insignificant our bodies are.

In the letter he said the drive from Vienna to Venice was the most visually satisfying and most physically uncomfortable ride in his whole life. He described the Austrian and Italian Alps as something one needs to see to believe, with small villages of no more than one hundred inhabitants scattered in the middle of the mountains just as one sees them in calendars and postcards. In a space of a one-day drive, he said, he witnessed the change from winter to spring to summer outside his bus window -- from white to green to greener. Because the road cuts through the Alps, the bus drove through more than one hundred tunnels which made it impossible for him to write or to read. Instead, he was forced to devour the beauty outside.

Venice is a tourist trap was all he said in his next letter and wrote nothing more on the subject. He stayed in Treviso , twenty minutes from the vaporetti that take people to the Piazza di San Marco in Venice. The weather, although hot and humid, was beautiful. He spent three days in Treviso and did not even consider paying a second visit to Venice. He said that it was here that everything began to feel strangely familiar, perhaps, he said, because he's part Italian. He only ate one meal per day in Treviso and it was usually lunch since he would wake up late to walk the streets, where people would wave and greet him with smiles. The place where he had lunch, Tavolarossa, served a lunch so hearty that he would end up taking part of it to go and finish it at night. He said that on occasion people would stop and talk to him about nothing of importance such as the weather and the overwhelming number of tourists who continuously drive through town to get to Venice but never stay in Treviso.

In the letter he described watching kids in their early teens play soccer for almost an entire afternoon. He was invited to join them. He did and adults gathered around on the street to see this foreigner play. The kids argued about whose team he should join, oblivious to his ignorance of the rules of the sport. It must have been exciting for them to have the foreigner on their team even though he hadn't the dimmest clue of what he was doing. Unlike the adults, the kids spoke much faster than he could understand. He simply nodded and smiled and the kids smiled back. At the end of the long game, the kids walked him home to Villa Vicini, where he was staying. They patted him on the back and shook his hand, and as they said goodbye the first drops of rain began to fall. Tired, he sat on a chaise longue out on the porch, closed his eyes, and dozed off to a raindrop lullaby, he wrote.

He said he dreamt he was young again, in his early teens, and that he lived in Treviso. He dreamt the exact same events of that afternoon, but with him as a young man who had lived there all his life. He dreamt in Italian, he said, the only time ever in his life. That afternoon, after reading his letter, I watched a soccer game on television for the first time. I fell asleep halfway through and woke up only to catch the last four minutes of the game; the final score was 1-0. I couldn't remember what I dreamt, but I know that it didn't involve me playing soccer as I had hoped it would.

He said in a letter that came almost a week later, that in some buildings in Florence near Palazzo della Signoria one can see the water level marks from the flood in 1966. It was outside Palazzo della Signoria, he wrote, that a Chinese girl, who spoke very little Italian and even less English, approached him about drawing a henna tattoo on him for five Euros. He had a tattoo he picked out of a small three-ring binder she was carrying drawn on the back of his left hand. He said she paused three times during the course of the drawing, putting her henna ink away and holding his hand as if they were boyfriend and girlfriend whenever a policeman approached. The Arabic boys sitting on the steps of the palazzo would warn with a special whistle. To conduct business on the streets of Florence people need a special permit, one that the many immigrants that inundate the streets cannot legally get.

He said that the best ice cream he'd ever had he found at a gelateria in il mercato between Piazza Doumo and Piazza San Lorenzo. The flavor, he said, was cappuccino with almonds, served in a single hefty scoop in a large waffle cone. He sat down by the window, looking at the shoppers outside buy name-brand fashions that would cost ten times as much outside of Italy. An interesting item that shops were selling was an apron with the body of Michelangelo's David imprinted from neck to knee so as to give the wearer the body of the famous statue. Colorful soccer jerseys swamped every clothing stand visible from the gelateria. The jerseys, he noted, did not bear the names of Baggio, Maldini, Baresi, or Vieri, but instead spelled out BECKHAM in white bold letters atop a big number seven against Manchester United's bright red background. He told me he visited this place once a day, every day, until the tattoo faded, four days later.

Rome , he wrote, was a waste of his time. I refuse to believe it. Although he stayed there over a week he only wrote about one incident one afternoon after visiting la Piazza di Spagna, where a scene from The Talented Mr. Ripley was shot. At a nearby shop that displayed a large black-and-white picture of Gwyneth Paltrow he bought the Italian equivalent of the "How Do You Feel Today?" t-shirts. "Come Ti Senti Oggi?" it asked at the very top, followed underneath by rows of yellow faces illustrating the various moods:

Felice!
Triste!
And so forth.

He said in the letter that he took the metro to Valle Aurelia and looked for Via Aurelia, the street of his hotel. He said the street was nowhere to be found and only after walking two kilometers and asking at a newspaper stand did he find out that Via Aurelia is not in Valle Aurelia but in Cornelia. When he tried to get back on the metro he realized he was out of change, so he walked for another two kilometers until he finally reached his hotel. He said he took a long shower and wore to sleep the t-shirt he'd bought that same afternoon. "Come Ti Senti oggi?"
Frustrato," he answered.

Pisa , he said, has no other attraction except the leaning tower. He described the multitude of tourists snapping picture after picture of the campanile at Campo dei Miracoli. Many would stand at a strategic distance so that if they extended their right arms the picture would show them preventing the structure from falling. He said he ate rabbit at an outdoor place near the tower and wondered what the rest of the city looked like. The picture he enclosed was not of the tower itself but of people taking pictures of the tower. It showcased a pair of Japanese kids, standing in crazy positions, one with his arms extended out to the side (as if holding the leaning tower behind them) and another one kicking in mid air (as if kicking the leaning tower so that it would crush the other one). Shoppers and passersby turned their heads to look at the kids' stunt: some had smiles on their faces, other seemed about to burst out laughing, others appeared plain puzzled. A third kid in the picture, perhaps the younger of the Japanese kids, looked directly at me instead of at the scene he was a part of.

What I received next was a postcard of the Promenade des Anglais in Nice in broad daylight. The trip had worn him out already, he wrote on the back. He said that it was night when he arrived, that he was exhausted and didn't feel like writing much, that he was sure I would understand. But I didn't. I wanted to know whether the French Riviera looked the same in real life as it did in To Catch a Thief . I wanted to know if it was true that one could visit the Monte Carlo Casino only for 30 minutes or so despite paying the entrance fee. I wanted to know if Monaco really stood on a rock and if there was a castle at the very top of it. Instead, he finished the brief card by telling me was that from his hotel room window at that precise moment he could see the Promenade des Anglais with its lights that seemed to go on forever, perfectly outlining the edge of the bayside walk in the darkness. It was as if with the postcard he was asking me to picture the same image but without the sun and with the city lights on. I tried but I couldn't, so the next day when I went to the library I checked out a photography book: Photographies de la Côte d'Azur . Inside I found exactly the picture I wanted, in full color and spread over two facing pages: "Promenade des Anglais de Nuit" read its caption. For one second, I almost believed I was there.

From Barcelona he sent me the most beautiful picture I've ever seen. He attached a short note saying that he had taken it on the afternoon of July 21st somewhere along the way between Montpellier and the Spanish border, but couldn't remember exactly where. Taken from the inside of a moving vehicle, the picture displayed vast nothingness of terracotta land with hills and a grey sky in the far background. As with any picture taken from a speeding automobile the bottom part, the one that is closer the to vehicle, appears blurry since it's being left behind faster than it's being perceived. The blurriness disappears gradually, from bottom to top. It reminded me of a bus ride from Arizona to California one day. I was looking out the window the whole time and the nearby objects, the ones within reach like traffic signs, darted by so fast that I could barely see them at all; the very distant ones, the ones that were far and unattainable, like mountains or a cactus in the far distance, lingered in my sight and memory until the bus got close to them and they flitted by, or until they become so exceedingly distant that I shifted my focus to something else. On the back of the picture, in blue ink, he wrote:

southwestern france, northeastern spain
the world is the same
everywhere

I looked at the picture again and noticed how similar it looked to the many pictures I had taken from moving vehicles. In fact, if the picture had been black and white it could have been the cover to New Adventures in Hi-Fi . I'd seen this picture dozens of times and for a moment I believed that the world was in fact the same everywhere.

He mailed the picture and the note from Barcelona but wrote nothing of the city itself. Was the architecture as impressive as travel magazines make it out to be? Was it true that the city blocks there are in the shape of hexagons and not rectangles or squares as we know them? I guess I would have to wait to ask him over the telephone once he returned to London. Although I waited and waited for a letter from Madrid, this was the last I heard from him. I wrote him to his home address in London, but the letter came back as he no longer lived there. I called the last number at which I'd been able to reach him, right before he left for the trip, but got no answer. Emails that at first went answered began to bounce back once his account expired. I wrote a friend of a friend but it turned out that I had been in contact with him more recently that anyone else. I searched on the internet for his name, but none of the matching results seemed to point in the right direction. What troubled me was that it wasn't in his character to just disappear. I no longer cared why he had stopped writing, what had made him change his mind about our correspondence. All I wanted to know was that he was alive. I waited -- for a blank postcard from Barcelona that couldn't possibly come too late no matter what, for a blank email that would indicate nothing more than he had sent it and therefore was alive somewhere. But nothing ever came. I convinced myself that it didn't really matter why he had disappeared. I was procrastinating on a study about the phonological processes of regular past-tense verbs in English when I came across a website for the Tourist Information Center in Vienna. I found the exact same picture he'd sent of the Vienna Conservatory of Music, with the backs of the elegant people and the profile of the woman in the green dress. The caption to the copyrighted archive photo revealed that it had been taken in June of 1999, three years before his travel, by someone whose last name was Reisener. Then again, I remembered that no description accompanied the actual photo he sent and that he never claimed to have taken it. Maybe what he had sent was a souvenir photo he picked up while in Vienna, but I couldn't help but feel somewhat disappointed since I had up to now believed that he had taken that picture himself.

About a month later while I rode the bus back home in the afternoon, a phrase in a book I was reading about hikers in the Appalachian Trail caught my attention: one of the characters one night, after a strenuous afternoon hike, got into his sleeping bag and "dozed off to a raindrop lullaby." I looked at the publication date and learned that the hardback edition of the book had been issued in 2001, the year before he sent the letters. When I got home I ran an online search for the phrase "dozed off to a raindrop lullaby" and the search engine returned more than twenty entries from booksellers who excerpted portions of the book in their websites. I pictured a timeline like the ones you can find in a history book. The first dot marked the time when he read the book, sometime in the second half of 2001. The second dot marked the time when he used the phrase from the book in a letter that he sent to me in the summer of 2002. And the third dot marked me in the present, reading the book and making the connection between the three dots at last. It seemed to have come full circle. I ran an image search for Magritte and as the page loaded the reproduction of "The Castle of the Pyrenees," with the gigantic rock about to dive into the sea, jumped at me.

The next day I queried "witch store Brugge" on the same search engine but the results proved inconclusive: the store he described apparently didn't exist. A search on "chess Rivoli Paris" produced an overwhelming number of results but none pointed to the scene in his picture. I called my friend Carmen, an exchange student from Germany, and asked her if people there had to bring their own bags into a grocery store or if the store would bag groceries in paper or plastic the way they do in the U.S. She said that very large stores would bag groceries but that it is very common for smaller markets to not provide bags at all. I asked her if she'd been to Venice and she said yes. I asked if she'd even driven through Treviso and she said she had stayed there as a matter of fact, that it was very common for tourists to choose to stay in nearby Treviso and avoid the very high prices of Venice. She wanted to know why I was asking all these questions and I told her I was planning a trip for next summer. She offered not only a place to stay in Regensburg but also to show me around. When I asked her if she'd ever eaten goulash she laughed and said yes.

I later found out that Kutna Hora had been closed the summer he claimed to have been there. What's more, I found an online travelogue by a Katherine McGregor from Albion College in Michigan that described the cathedral at Kutna Hora as having "a huge chandelier the size of forty people dangling from the ceiling with crisscrossed chains of bones and skeletons branching out throughout the church. I wonder if the souls of these people can see what's become of their remains. How could they ever rest in peace?"

The letters were evidence that he had been in all of these places; the postmarks matched every city he visited and the dates proved accurate to the length of his travel. I had no doubt that he'd visited all of these cities but I suspected that he had made everything up. All I was left with was someone else's fictitious memories. There was no such thing as the "truth." I decided that I would take my own trip and write my own letters, take my own pictures, visit the exact same places, and construct memories and experiences that belonged to me. I would go to Brugge and eat the mussels while I stared at the Magritte. I would go inside the basilica and see the blood of Christ and at the small store I would buy witches for my friends back home. In Paris, I would stay a week and visit Truffaut's grave at the Montmartre cemetery. I would go to the Eiffel tower and take pictures of Paris and try to recreate a 360-degree view from the tower. I would go to Versailles, to the Louvre, to Notre Dame, and I would get an easel, a canvas, and watercolors and I would paint every day of my stay simply because I wanted to, because something inside me told me that I would die if I didn't. On the last day in Paris I would go look for the life-sized chess game in rue de Rivoli and stay until it was over. I would get to Germany through Luxembourg and take pictures from a moving boat along the Rhine. I would bring a canvas bag and bag my own groceries in Wiesbaden, in Frankfurt, and in finally in Nuremberg, where I would look for those rings and take a picture of me touching them. I would eat as much goulash as I could in Vienna and I would visit Schönbrün and let pictures do the talking. I would wait in Kutna Hora until the souls of the skulls talked to me and I would vow never to return again. I would sit back and enjoy the ride from Vienna to Venice, listening to music perhaps, but not bother to read or write. I would stay in Treviso but go to Venice frequently. I would eat stromboli sitting at the Piazza San Marco and take pictures from a moving gondola. I would buy a silly apron and a Beckham jersey in Florence and I would take multiple pictures of the Ponte Vecchio. Instead of disposing of my luggage, I would buy an extra bag so I could fit all the new clothes that I planned on buying throughout Italy. I would get a tattoo, a real one, one that wouldn't fade away. And instead of watching tourists shop while having the best ice cream in the world, I would take it to go and go take pictures of Il Duomo. I would visit the Vatican in Rome, the Coliseum, Piazza Venezia, la Fontana di Trevi, and finally take the metro home from Piazza di Spagna. I would go to Naples, Pompeii, and Capri, and bathe in the Mediterranean. I would take a picture of the rocky Naples coast from a moving ferry. In Pisa, I would ask a Japanese tourist to stand at a distance and take my picture while I prevented the leaning tower from falling. I would take a taxi ride, no matter how expensive, from Nice to Monaco along the same road as Cary Grant did in the Hitchcock film. And I would go in the casino and lose and I wouldn't care because I would have done something that most people never get to do in the first place. From Nice to Spain I would take a bus and I would be very careful not to miss the same spot where the world is the same everywhere between Montpellier and Barcelona. I would take not one but many pictures of that spot and I would continue snapping one every minute until the world became unique again.

And I would take a journal with me and I would write every day about everything I saw, about the exceptionality of every place and its people. I would record every smell, every sound, every texture, so that nothing would be left to speculation, so that there would be no doubt that everything I experienced really happened, so that whoever would read it would feel exactly what I felt, so that there would be no gaps. I would attach the pictures and write prolonged descriptions of every place, every landmark, and my sentences would be long in such a way that they resembled narration so that when read out loud it would be almost like the omniscient voice-over narrator of a documentary. I would attach receipts from every item I bought, every meal I paid for, every train or bus ticket I purchased, every night spent at a hotel or a hostel. I would attach candy wrappers, left-over postcards, brochures from museums and tourist attractions, samples of currency, napkins from restaurants, canned-food labels, stickers, business cards, and anything else I found that I felt said something about my experience. This would be my travelogue because everything would be related exactly as it happened. I would show it to my friends back home and they would ask questions and I would be there to answer them.

But I never made that journey. One morning one of my colleagues came into my office and saw the picture taken from the moving bus tacked onto my corkboard and asked where it was from. I told her that the previous summer, on a bus ride from Nice to Barcelona, I had snapped the photo right before crossing into the Spanish border. She asked why take a picture of such an odd place and I replied that it was the last possible snapshot of France I could take knowing that I probably would never go back, that the picture captured the very last thing I had seen of France but otherwise wouldn't remember. She said it was such a beautiful thing to do and asked if I could make her a copy. I looked at the picture and agreed with her: it was a beautiful thing. The idea of it was so beautiful that I could never recreate it even if I had gone there. No truth was necessary; there was no such thing.

Although I never heard from him again there were times when I thought about running into him, by complete coincidence, in an airport somewhere. For a while I thought that I would ask him to tell me what exactly had been a lie. Then I thought I would ask him instead why he stopped writing. Now I think that if that ever were to happen I would not approach him nor talk to him at all. I would watch him from a distance until he disappeared again. The only thing I've wanted to know, I don't know why, is whether or not he is alive -- and just seeing him once more would be enough, and then I would never wonder again.

But I know that this won't ever happen, that I will never see him again, so I don't worry about these things anymore. There are times late at night, right before I go to bed, when I can't sleep. I lie on my bed in total darkness and I imagine myself alone in Treviso, out on the wet street at night, waiting for the boys to come out and play.