A Walk in the Dark

35

When I told Margherita that I’d like to take up parachuting, she looked at me for a long time without saying anything. “Was I trying to show her I could still surprise her?” she asked when she got the power of speech back. If so, I’d succeeded.

A few days later I started the course.

During those weeks I felt a very strange sensation I’d never known before, a mixture of definite fear and unsettling serenity. A sense of the inevitable and a mysterious dignity.

The night before the jump, I didn’t sleep a wink. Obviously.

But I stayed in bed all night, wide awake, thinking about many things, remembering many things. The most vivid of all was that terrible children’s game on the ledge, so many years ago.

Every now and again a wave of absolutely pure fear swept over me. I let it flow through my body, like a current of energy, until it had passed. Sometimes these waves were stronger, and lasted for a longer time. Sometimes I thought I was going to die the next day. Sometimes I thought I’d pull out at the last moment. But that too passed.

If Margherita noticed I hadn’t slept, she didn’t say anything in the morning.

Strangely, I didn’t feel tired. On the contrary, my arms and legs felt loose and my mind clear and clean. I wasn’t thinking about anything.

The deafening noise of the plane dropped until it became a kind of background rumble. Powerful but contained, in the half-light of the cockpit. The pilot had reduced speed to the minimum and it almost seemed as if the plane was suspended between the earth and the sky.

There were six of us due to jump. I and three others would go first. Then the instructor and Margherita, who had asked to be there and had told me about it only that morning.

When the hatch was thrown wide open the wind rushed in, and the light was unsettling.

I was very close to the mystery of life and death.

The instructor told me to place myself across the opening, as I had been taught. I did as I was told. A few seconds passed and he signalled to me to jump. I looked down and didn’t move. It was like an endless scene in slow motion, developed frame by frame. I stood there motionless. He repeated that I should jump, but I didn’t move. Everything was absurdly still.

Then Margherita came up to me, squeezed my arm and said something in my ear. I couldn’t make out the words over the noise of the plane, but there was no need.

So I closed my eyes and let go.

A few seconds, or a few centuries, later I heard the phutt of the parachute opening. And the incredible silence of the empty sky, with the plane already a long way away.

My eyes were still closed when I became aware of a strange yet familiar noise. It took me a while to realize it was my own breath, emerging from deep inside the silence, the fall, the fear.

I still had my eyes closed when I heard my name being called. It was only then that I opened them, and saw where I was. I saw the world below me, and realized I was flying without fear. And I saw Margherita, a hundred, a hundred and thirty feet above me, waving to me.

I felt an emotion that can’t be explained, and I raised my hand too.

I raised both hands, waving like I used to when I was a little child and I was very happy.