"Postcards from the next world"
Here the end of winter and the end of spring are about the same. The signal is the first roses. I saw one rose when I was taken to the ambulance. I closed my eyes, thinking about this rose. Front driver and nurse talked about the new restaurant. There, and you fill yourselves, and the prices are miserable.
At some point, I decided that I could become an important person. I felt death give me a reprieve. Then I plunged into life, like a child running a hand in a stocking with baptismal gifts. Then came my day. Wake up, my wife told me. Wake up, she repeated everything.
It was a fine sunny day. I did not want to die on such a day. I always thought that I would die at night, under the barking of dogs. But I died at noon, when the cooking show started on TV.
They say they most often die at dawn. For years, I woke up at four in the morning, got up and waited for the fateful hour to pass. I opened the book or turned on the TV. Sometimes went out. I died at seven in the evening. Nothing much happened. The world has always caused me a vague anxiety. And this alarm suddenly passed.
I was ninety-nine. My children came to the nursing home only to talk with me about the celebration of my century. All this did not touch me at all. I did not hear them, I felt only my fatigue. And he wanted to die so as not to feel her. It happened in front of my eldest daughter. She gave me a piece of apple and talked about a cake with the number one hundred. The unit should be long as a stick, and zeros like bicycle wheels, she said.
The wife is still complaining about the doctors who did not complete my treatment. Although I have always considered myself incurable. Even when Italy won the World Cup, even when I got married.
By the age of fifty, I had the face of a man who could die from minute to minute. I died at ninety-six, after a long agony.
What I have always been happy about is the nativity scene. Every year it turned out all the more elegant. I exhibited it in front of our door. The door was constantly open. I divided the only room with a red and white ribbon, as in the repair of roads. Those who stopped to admire the den, I was treated to beer. I talked in detail about papier-mâché, musk, lambs, magicians, rivers, castles, shepherds and shepherds, caves, baby, guiding star, electrical wiring. Wiring was my pride. I died alone on Christmas night, looking at the nativity scene, sparkling with all the lights.