CURVE TO HELL

CURVE TO HELL

His hands stuck in the pockets of his jacket, the brim of his hat turned backwards, a little bent , but still with an agile, quick step, Gerald was enjoying his walk in the middle of the countryside. The road on which he was walking, very narrow, is indeed asphalted , but on both sides of the road, beyond them, even looming over it, since they were higher up than the road, meadows and fields stretched out, and also much uncultivated land , with an almost wild vegetation, and this wide expanse, mostly of green, although there was no lack of browns, and yellow, and even gray….matched perfectly with the great dome of the blue sky, furrowed by luxuriant clouds of a pure white. The sunset had already passed, but there was still light , and the air was warm.

Cars rarely passed on that asphalted road, but when a car passed, Gerald had to retire to the grassy edge of the road to avoid to be run over, so narrow the road was. Along the sides of the road there were ditches, and in the ditches, in their stagnant water, there were frogs, which at certain time could be heard croaking. On the road, which ran rather straight from Filla to Papilla,

there were nevertheless curves, where quite a few accidents had occurred, mostly due to the narrowness of the road, where for two cars traveling in the opposite direction it was very likely to collide. It was when Gerald arrived at the widest curve that he found before his eyes ….something that he hardly could believe it was real, that it was not a vision or an hallucination. But besides seeing, he could hear the heartbreaking screams of the girl who a very tall and massive man was hitting with a long silver sword. At first Gerald had seen the tall man hitting the girl as she tried to escape. The length of the sword allowed the man to hurt the girl even though she was at a certain distance from him. After some blows , pulled hard between her neck and her shoulders, the girl had fallen to the ground, and then the man had continued to hit her in the chest, in the belly, even in the face.

Gerald wanted to scream for help, even if there was no house nearby and there was no one on the road. He tried to scream at the same, although there was no one who would hear him, but he was not able to scream-

When the murderer with the sword , standing next to the body of the girl, who was lying on the ground, turned towards him and pointed his sword at him, doing all that with very calm gestures, very calm movements, like a person who feels safe, who is sure to have nothing to be worried, Gerald, terrified more by the Olympic calm of the man____who had just slaughtered the girl____than by the long sword pointed against him, walked away on the road, and he would have liked to do it as quickly as possible, he would have liked to run away, but, damnation, he couldn’t run, he was out of breath, he was trembling. Unfortunately he had not brought his mobile phone with him, so that he couldn’t even call the police. He knocked at the door of the first house he found on the street and breathlessly, confusedly, he tried to make it clear to the woman who had opened the door, that they had to call the police immediately, and the ambulance, too, since he had been just a witness to a crime committed not far away, beyond the big curve which, he remembered only then, with a shudder, was called the curse curve, and also the curve to hell, for the numerous accidents which had occurred there.

When the police arrived, two policemen and a policewoman, from the meadow beyond the curse curve, which Gerald had indicated as the place of the crime, not only he, the murderer, the very tall man with the sword, had disappeared, but also the girl he had massacred, who was probably dead, had disappeared. If the man with the sword could well have gone away, it was impossible to think that the girl, even if she wasn’t dead, could have walked away by herself, on her feet….so Gerald thought. They, the policeman and the policewoman, looked at him in a way that he couldn’t help feeling embarrassed, in difficulty. Well, they looked at him as if they didn’t believe at all what he had told. Not even when they found some blood on the grass of the meadow, had they believed him : oh, that blood was too little to think it was really the shed blood of a person (someone) who was hit repeatedly with a stabbing weapon, as Gerald said to have seen.

“ But sure, this blood must be the blood of some animal” The older policeman said, grinning.

“Then…you told us that the man you saw ….this tall man was hitting the girl with….with a sword….ah, ah…..Sorry, but are you sure not to have dreamed it….the sword and….and also all the rest?” he asked, sneering.

Gerald had continued to protest that no, he had not dreamed, he had seen what he had told, all had happened under his eyes.

The policewoman, with her face posed in an understanding, welcoming, almost maternal expression , had asked him if…if he had slept well the last night, if he usually slept well.

But of course he had slept well, as always, he didn’t suffer of insomnia, Gerald said, feeling more and more himself falling in despair, indeed beginning to feel himself in danger.

And how were the man and the girl he claimed to have seen? Could he describe them? Had he recognized in them someone he knew or, at least, he had seen before? The policemen had asked him. Ah, he, the very tall, massive, bald man, all dressed in black, no, Gerald was sure he had never seen him before. While the girl, oh he had seen her only for a few moments, and he was very upset, too…the girl was screaming as she trying to escape ( to run away), here, the girl instead, it had seemed to him that she looked like a girl he knew by sight, who lived in the village, yeah, she could have been….When Gerald said the girl’s name ___Mirna V.___the cops shook their heads : no, the girl he had seen couldn’t have been Mirna V., who had immigrated in Australia twenty days earlier. They knew this since she had gone several times to the police station for the passport and other documents she needed for the expatriation. Gerald remained very much stunned at this news. But what had someone like Mirna V.,who was not yet twenty and had a little job as a hairdresser’s assistant __that is, she was a shampooing___ gone to do to Australia? 

Indeed it would come to say to him: eh, even she went to Australia, she could have returned (come back)….but he said nothing, he did not dare, and then …. he was not really sure that the girl he had seen slaughtered was Mirna V.

They had taken him to the police station , where they had filed him( registered him), they had taken his mug shots and even they had fingerprinted him, and it all had happened without he could request the assistance of a lawyer…..Oh, but then , those guys branded as antisocial who he had heard to claim that by now they lived in a police state, since the most basic civil rights were trampled, and WOE to protest , that otherwise you ended up in a mental hospital or in jail…but then those guys were right….                                                                                                                                                 Then, how he remained when, a few days later, he was summoned again to the police station , where he had learned that in the meantime the policemen had talked with his mother who, she was over ninety, had told them that he was out of his mind, that he was used to tell lies, ah, that he told all things, facts, persons….all invented from scratch.

The first time he had made it, that he had dared to pass again from the cursed curve_______for days and days he had stopped before getting there, since he, step by step, felt himself more and more seized by the fear that the same scene was about to happen again in front of him , he would see again the big, tall man who hit the girl with his long sword, and the girl who fell on the ground, that man would turn again to him , and he would point his sword at him, just as if on that curve time had stopped and what once happened there continued to happen again, presenting again before his eyes______on the meadow beyond the curve there was a middle aged man, nicknamed the Hunchback, with a billhook in his hand. The Hunchback, holding one hand on his hip and waving, with the other hand, the billhook, as if it were a bell, had said, grinning : “ Ah, you see, I’m hunting rabbits…if you knew how many rabbits I have killed in this meadow! Ah, don’t you believe it? Come! Come and see : on the grass there is still the blood of the rabbits I have killed and skinned ...uh, how much blood there is on the grass of this meadow

Blood…Gerald didn’t feel like seeing the bloody grass…grass smeared with blood, so he hadn’t moved from the edge of the road. Stretching his arms towards the Hunchback, while he felt his heart plummet into his stomach, “ On the meadow…I saw….there…in this meadow…I…”. he

stammered, unable to say but a few disconnected words.

“ Oh, yes, I know whom you saw, eh…yes, you saw that one there, the man with the broadsword slaughtering a girl….Eh, eh, if you knew how many girls he slaughtered with his broadsword…..He killed as many girls as I killed rabbits! Eh, eh….things go like this….I kill  rabbits and he instead kills girls” the Hunchback said, grinning.

“ But how can you know what…whom I saw?” Gerald shouted.

“ Ah, my dear, how can I know what you saw? Oh, but everyone knows and even talks about it….”

The man, with the billhook in his hand, winkling his head, was looking at him with an expression that might have seemed pitying, which was instead mocking “ And, sure, everyone also knows that what you told , it really happened” the Hunchback also said. “ Then why doesn’t anyone believe me?” Gerald shouted, and his was a cry of despair.

The man with the billhook had a few steps towards him, but remaining in the meadow. “No, it is not that people don’t believe you….oh, it is that you shouldn’t have talked about what you saw here, in this meadow…You shouldn’t have told anyone what you saw here! But really don’t you know that it is forbidden to talk about it?”

“ But why? Why I’m forbidden to tell the crime I saw being committed?” Gerald asked, more and more confused and anguished.

“Oh, the crime….so many crime are committed” said the little man, in a light, distracted tone, raising his arm whose hand was holding the billhook”      “Yes, I know that there are many crimes, but I have seen that one….why don’t I have to tell it? Who, what forbids me?” Gerald insisted, since he wanted an answer, he needed to understand.

“ Ah, my dear, now….now I have to run after the rabbit. Can you see that rabbit over there?” the Hunchback said, pointing with his outstretched arm at the bottom of the lawn, perhaps beyond the lawn. “ Ah, dear, I’m sorry, but I don’t have time to answer your question now …..I’ll answer you the next time you will come back from here…oh, I every day come here to hunt rabbits…bye!” And the Hunchback ran off along the lawn, where he, Gerald, couldn’t see any rabbit.

One night Gerald dreamed Mirna V., who appeared him dazzling with youth on a sunny beach. “No, it is not true that I went to Australia “ she said him.”I just made it believe, that I have gone so far so that nobody could look for me” Mirna told him, smiling.

He, in the dream, wanted to ask her: “But the girl I saw being killed by the man with the broadsword , there in the meadow beyond the cursed curve, was that girl you?” But he was not able to say these words, the question died in his throat as he tried to ask it. But Mirna, as often it happens in dreams, seemed to understand the same what he wanted to ask her, even without his speaking. “No, I wasn’t the girl you saw being massacred” Mirna said, her face, her hair shining under the full day light on the beach. “But that girl looked so much like you” Gerald said.

“Of course she looked like me….she was my double” Mirna exclaimed, as she kept on running along the sunny beach. “I didn’t know you had a double” Gerald, amazed, murmured, as he was waking up.

It happened often to Gerald, when he, walking, came back home in the evening ____his job was in a doctor’s office near his house ____that he heard laughing behind himself, close his shoulder, just as if there was someone approaching behind him, laughing at him. But when he turned back there was no one.

His nights became more and more sleepless. He often woke up with a start, because he heard his name shouted: GERALD! GERALD! His name sounded as the cry of someone who wanted to warn him of an imminent danger.

Often walking on the street, crossing someone who(m) he knew only by sight, or who he did not know at all, he heard that someone whispering: “ the mad…the mad…here is the madman…”

And it happened that people he knew, who he also had considered friends, shouted at him from the window: “ Hey, Gerald, what did you see? Don’t you tell us what you saw?”, or: “ Here is the witness of the crime!” or also, frequently: “ Who did you see being killed Gerald? Ah, and who are you going to see while he will be killed?”

The first time that Gerald managed, in his usual walk on that asphalted road, in the middle of the green, to arrive at the curse curve____also called the curve to hell____after his meeting with the Hunchback, and for days and days he was not felt to get there. He had always interrupted his walk before he arrived to that curve , coming back. The first time he got there again, or he decided to get there, it was already almost dark, but he, oh how light he felt walking on that road. It seemed to him that he could start running, as if he were twenty again, it even seemed to him that if he had started running, at a certain point he would have been able to take flight.

Wind was blowing, not a strong wind, rather a cool, but pleasantly cool, a refreshing wind, and Gerald seemed to feel that wind under his feet. “I’m walking on the wind….and, who knows, perhaps this wind is …the presence of time, which wants I can know that it____TIME___is here, is present…present as something material….corporeal…” so he was saying to himself, while he is about to reach the curve.     “Hey, look what a big rabbit I got! A really big, very big one! Ah, what a formidable hunter I am! With me no rabbit can escape!” Before Gerald could see him, he heard the voice of the implacable rabbits hunter. He, the Hunchback , stood planted with his legs apart on the meadow, and he was waving a big white fur rabbit in front of him, holding it by its hind legs.” “ Do you see this rabbit? Eh, do you see? Ah, I got it! And now I skin it!”

Gerald was astonished….But how, now the Hunchback would have also started to skin the rabbit he had killed? Would he start ( have started) skinning it there, in the meadow?

“ I didn’t know rabbits could be hunted even when it is dark” The words came out of his mouth unconsciously , trembling….he , too ,was trembling. “ Ah, of course rabbits can be hunted when it is dark! Ah! Ah! Indeed they are more easily hunted when it is dark! Ah! Ah! Ah! But you don’t know…..Ah! Ah! You don’t know a lot of….of things, darling….Ah! Ah! Ah!” The great rabbits hunter seemed to be having a great time.  Suddenly in the dark a silver glint flashed: in the hand of the Hunchback, the hand he had hitherto hidden behind his back, now his billhook appeared. “What strange how this billhook looks like the broadsword of the man I saw massacring the girl….” Gerald couldn’t help but think.

“ Uh….you don’t know that in this…this very great and very green meadow____so to speak____there are hunters and there are rabbits….Ah! Ah! ” The Hunchback giggled, waving with one hand the body of the rabbit, with the other the billhook. “ And, above all, you don’t know, my darling, that , as it is true that in this wonderful very green meadow I’m a hunter….it is also true that you …..you are a rabbit, darling! “ The billhook in the hand of the rabbits hunter was glowing as silver, Gerald looked enchanted at its glittering.

The hunchback , giggling ,  was repeating : “But on, come on! Go on running on this splendid green meadow, which is waiting for you, and I am waiting for you, too”