E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle

The room was unfamiliar. I didn’t know how I got there. I ignored many other things, like the fact that my life was about to change.

The day that changed my life wasn’t a day; it was a night. 

Not Halloween night, as you might expect from Stephen King’s words.

For me it was Valentine’s night, 2018. Cold enough to call a cab, mild enough to forget my jacket at home.

Martin was at the Estates Theater, cursing at everything because I was late. I wasn’t there but I imagine him whispering (but not too much) that Valentine’s celebration was not for him. No restaurants, we had an agreement on that. No chocolate boxes, agreed on that too. No flowers, no nothing, agreed and agreed because I was as anti-romantic as him. But the theater was booked, by himself, three months earlier, when the fact that the random booking fell on Valentine’s night was not a fact yet. But when the fact proved itself in its factuality, it ceased to be a fact and began to be a disgrace.

Not only for me, not only for Martin, but for the taxi driver too, perhaps for all the universe that that night was staring at us expecting true love, the one with the big ‘l.’ In some divine design the taxi driver was meant to be a postman delivering me to my beloved, but things went in another way.

“In such a magic evening,” the taxi driver said in a soft voice, “the evening of love,” he went on. His eyes on me, peering from the rearview mirror; his voice raising. “How can a woman be nervous?” and he took both hands off the wheel and I took mine off my phone. I wasn’t sure he was talking to me despite we were only the two of us in that damned cab. I was slow enough to not reject the call I had started, and Martin’s voice filled the cab.

“Where are you?” he shouted. “They are about to start.”-

“I am in a cab. I am coming.” I leaned forward and asked the driver for the expected arrival time. He said nothing because I heard nothing. But I swear I felt his mute words saying something like: ‘you are about to miss the first act, you bad girl. Those who miss the first act of The Barber of Seville on Valentine’s night do not deserve to see the second act neither.’

Martin’s voice was still in the cab. I heard him saying that if I did not get to the theater in 10 minutes he would go back home. I wanted to answer, to tell him that I was on the way, that I was… about to be kidnapped by a mad taxi driver. But I said nothing, because nothing came up to my mind.

The call dropped, the battery of my phone died and I thought that I was about to die too. It wasn’t only a suspicion, neither a doubt. It was the taxi driver, when he decided to exit the main road and enter a dark path. He spoke his mute words again. In the silent cab I felt him saying: ‘you are an Italian lady, you now tell me what is love, the one with the big ‘l.’ You do this, and you do it well, or you die.’

I wondered how he knew that I was Italian and I thought I had bumped into a crazy psycho maniac. Only now I know that it was because of the jacket I had forgotten, the one that if I had worn it would have hidden the Italian flag I tattooed on my neck last summer, when I was once drunk.

He stopped the cab, under a tree. I saw him digging in his pocket, his hand emerging but it was too dark for me to say if it held a knife or a gun. He handed the thing over to me, in my trembling hand.

The thing felt cold and round and small.

He put the small lamp on. “Read it for me,” he said in his mute voice. “And read it well. Otherwise…” I didn’t let him finish, I know the ending of the sentence by heart.

I opened the fist of my hand. I saw the thing that lied inside, cold and round and small. It wasn’t a knife. It wasn’t a gun. It was a chocolate candy, wrapped in the silver foil that I knew very well, the one printed with little blue stars, the one hiding the kiss that lovers should exchange every day, not only on Valentine’s day. The one with the tiny paper note with famous love quotes printed on it.

I cleared my voice and started to read: ‘Amor, ch'a nullo amato amar perdona.’

The taxi driver said that he felt the beauty of those verses, something moving his heart, his soul. He only knew those words were beautiful, he knew they meant something big that he could not explain, and always in his mute voice he asked me to explain it for him. I told him what I thought, that such words cannot be explained, they must not be explained. Only now I know that I said so because I wasn’t able myself to explain those words, me that I studied and re-studied them at school, when Love is something you only want to do, when Love is something you don’t want to tell to your teacher.

The taxi driver gave me another paper note. I was ready for a new verse, a new poetry, but I saw only numbers printed on it. Then he spoke with his real voice; he asked: “cash or card, madam?” When I finally decided that that was not a riddle I took my debit card off my wallet, and opened the car door hoping that the embarrassment on my cheeks went unnoticed.

“Have a nice evening, madam. Enjoy the opera,” he said, and returned the Visa to me.

Martin was standing on the stairs of the theater. “Just on time,” he said. “Forgotten your jacket? Let’s go, they are about to start.”

We went, they were about to start. We were in the room that ceased to be an unfamiliar room and started to be a theater hall. In the queue I asked him a question, I asked him what he thought about love, but he was too busy to unwrap the chocolate candy that the theater staff was giving out for Valentine’s night. He ate the chocolate and gave the tiny note he found inside to me. I refrained from reading it, maybe because I was too busy to eat my chocolate, maybe because I already knew what was printed on it. I buried the note in my wallet, instead.

The opera was about to start, and in fact it started. We watched it. We found it boring, we found it too long; never again to The Barber of Seville, nothing personal against Rossini. We went home and we agreed that love is not something you can talk about, and that there are things to be talked and things to be done.

Days ago I decided to write something about love, and I didn’t know from where to start. Nevertheless everything started. It started when I found my old wallet, scattered in a drawer I had even forgotten we had. The old wallet wasn’t really old and it was still elegant, and filled with two things only: a taxi bill, and a tiny note reading a few words that explain the universe. In fact the universe was in my wallet, in the sentence that discloses the true face of Love, the meaning of Life, both with the big ‘l.’

Beautiful words; they seem to keep their original, classic beauty, despite any brutal act of translation.

You may read: ‘Love is what moves the sun and all other stars. (By Dante Alighieri),’ but what you really think, despite your native language, is and will be: ‘L’Amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle.’ 

E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle.

And thence we came forth to see the stars again.