The post in which the writer Maurizio De Giovanni recounts his experience as a temporary heart patient went viral in less than an hour.
And from the heart he speaks in his post which only needs to be accompanied by a thank you for his prose:
“It beats. It’s still beating.
Not that he ever stopped, of course. Let's just say that at a certain point he made up a story, and while he was telling it to me he got so involved that he became a little too realistic.
He said: Let's imagine that I decide to stop. That this cold sweat, this feeling of oppression you feel in your chest, this stupid little pain between your shoulder blades is the beginning of an irreversible process.
May it happen right here, in the place that is dearest to you, exactly where you would like to be, inside the air that the one you love most has just breathed. May it happen as you have always wanted, without long battles, without loss of dignity and autonomy, with suffering limited in time and all in all discreet, without agonies. May it happen now, when you have lived enough to laugh and cry, when the one you love will not have to fight with adversity and will be able to live peacefully. Let's imagine this, he told me. May it happen like a bolt of lightning, dazzling and immediate, on the threshold of decline and loss of strength.
As he told me his story, which became more and more realistic, and the car sped toward the hospital and the brilliant nurse said code red after only looking at me from twenty meters away, as the journey to a place of absolute excellence and professionalism was completed, while everyone around me knew exactly what they had to do, in a perfect choreography that was a hymn to competence, I wondered why there was no fear.
I felt rather a strange melancholy, a sort of absurd nostalgia for the future. A sense of lost things, a vague scruple, like when you fall asleep overcome by tiredness while still having something important to do.
And behind the perfect row of green coats and masks and caps, under the big screen on which the Professor studied the flows and barriers to be broken down, I glimpsed a group of interested spectators whose faces bore the same sad nostalgia as mine. One had slanted eyes and oriental features. One had gray hair and an attentive gaze. Another had tight lips and proud eyes, and a body that shouldn't be in a cardiology department.
And others, a corpulent sergeant, a showgirl with a veil of beard, a boy with blue glasses and a Hawaiian shirt; even a big guy with a huge dog on a leash. Until one man broke away from the group, wearing an old-fashioned overcoat, who came up to me and whispered: no. Out of the question. Not yet. I looked into his green eyes and shrugged. This story isn't mine, I told him. Talk to him.
At that very moment the Professor said: Here it is. Everything is fine.
And he, the heart, smiled and said: but it was a beautiful story. To keep in mind. No?
Yes, maybe it was a good story. Maybe it's the right one, that sooner or later we'll tell each other. But thanks to that excellent choreography for now the ending is different.
And it is so different that I have been able to read the thousands of messages, to which you will forgive me if I do not respond individually, postponing the hug and the laughter and the tears to the meetings we will have in person, because life will resume as before, because that is how it must be.
What I had to tell you today is that it beats. It still beats.
And it beats for the same things as before, a blue and wretched city, and a cheerful and melancholic people who tell me stories.
Stories that maybe, and I say maybe, saved my life."
Article published on 29 July 2022 - 10:32
