A Molise odyssey with the Ripabottoni walkers

At night, however, it was I who found myself at war. It was impossible to drive out the ghosts of fear. So, in the fiery circle of the night, I would start to tremble. As soon as I switched off the pale light in the hospital room, someone upstairs would start walking. It was a slow, rhythmic thudding.

The struggle was between dark fantasies and drifting off to sleep. Sinking into that rhythm of fear or managing to shake it off. The fear of death whilst awake, and the fear of death whilst asleep. Those footsteps, above me, did not merely stir within me a fear of death: rather, the certainty that, walking up there, just a few metres from me, was Death himself.

*

Whenever my fear got too intense, I’d switch on the light and start reading the only document I had, apart from a few issues of Topolino. It was a map of Molise. My father had brought it to me; I don’t know where he’d got it from. On those nights, it was my salvation.

When the light was on, the sound of the footsteps seemed to fade. At times I suspected that the noise was only inside my head: was it the wild elephant in my mind that was making it? At other times, I would simply start memorising the strangest place names on the map of Molise: Pietracupa, Castelbottaccio, Roccapipirozzi, Lupara, Ripabottoni. And so, little by little, I would slip into a whirlwind of phonic fragments, and closing my eyes, without even realising it, I would fall asleep, only to wake at dawn: at last, the fiery circle of the night was behind me.

*

One night, however, it seemed to me that the footsteps were too loud. Too dark. Too furious. Not even Roccapipirozzi could save me. I remember a sensation I’ve never felt since: an underground, invisible energy stirs within me, takes control of my body, sweeps it away and leads it into the corridor. It wasn’t me driving, nor was it anyone else: it was a part of my deepest self, one I didn’t know. It was that part that led me there. That made me sit down on a chair in the dark corridor, where only the emergency lights flickered dimly.

And it was whilst I was standing there for a few minutes that Mr Mario appeared in my life. A man in pyjamas, with white hair and an unkempt beard, walking down the hospital corridor, wide awake. “Can’t you sleep either?” he asked me.

*

It was just the beginning of a long inner mythology.

‘Mr Mario’ – I shall continue to call him that for the rest of my life – was a most peculiar man. He spoke in a wild dialect, which he alternated with formal phrases, such as the one he said to me that evening: ‘Vespers are not to my liking’. He could discuss the spread of the tomato across Europe, Leopardi and how to cook a perfect omelette with the same level of intensity. I don’t know how it happened, but after just a few minutes together I managed to ask him what had seemed impossible: “Can you come with me into that room? Can you tell me if you can hear those footsteps from upstairs too?”

*

Yes, he could hear them too. But there was nothing to worry about. As far as he was concerned, he was simply a sleepless soul, just like us. “He’s just a wanderer,” he told me.

From then on, for a few nights, we’d bump into each other in the corridor, as part of a sort of unspoken routine. Every evening he’d ask me, ‘How’s it going with the walker?’

I was smiling because the truth is that, ever since he’d been there, those steps hadn’t scared me quite so much.

*

Then one evening, Mr Mario told me that this would be his last night in hospital. He could finally go home. He gave me his telephone number and his address. “Come and visit me with your mum or dad. I’m from Ripabottoni.”

*

He drifted out of my life, as people do. I never went to see him, and I never saw him again, but he always remained part of my emotional landscape.

Until, one day, many years later, I began to study writers from Molise and discovered one who was from Ripabottoni: his name was Arturo Giovannitti. When he was in his early twenties, Arturo had moved to America and, along with others, had ended up in prison, wrongly accused of murder. Amidst a huge media furore, his case had been a Sacco and Vanzetti-style affair – with a different outcome – long before the Sacco and Vanzetti case.

So, one evening many years later, I started reading Giovannitti and discovered his poem ‘The Walker’. He who walks. The walker.

In prison, Arturo had gone through the same thing as me: that slow thud coming from the ceiling.

‘Above my head, I hear the sound of footsteps, all night long,’ I was reading. ‘An eternity in the four steps that go; an eternity in the four steps that return.’ And as I read, I thought of Mr Mario and sank into my inner map, which is also his: of footsteps in the night, and of friendships written in the stars.