The Dawn Of Sin. Valentino Grassetti

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СКАЧАТЬ that Adriano had failed to process the trauma of the suicide. The tragedy occupied all his thoughts and left no room for anything else. As for feeling spied on, it could be interpreted as an indication of a persecution mania.

      Then the hallucinations began: Adriano watched the inhabitants of Castelmuso die one by one. He gave names and surnames, even writing down the date of their death.

      One day he took a can of gasoline from the garage and dragged it to the entrance of the cathedral. He was stopped firmly by the chaplain.

      Adriano insisted that he had seen a face all black beyond the iron grille of the confessional. He thought it was a demon, which is why he wanted to purify the cathedral with fire. That same afternoon, Sandra accompanied him to the Umberto II hygiene and mental health centre, where the boy was kept under observation for seventeen days. That was the first of four hospitalizations.

      It had been three years since he was diagnosed with severe paranoid schizophrenia. Since then, Sandra Magnoli had visited the office of Professor Roberto Salieri, the psychiatrist who followed Adriano, every week.

      Sandra parked on the white lines reserved for a modest restaurant, a few steps from the study.

      Adriano got out of the car with the slowness of an old man. The active ingredient of clozapine prevented hallucinations, but the side effects caused him drowsiness, obesity, muscle spasms, speech and walking problems. Medication was a necessary evil. Without them, a dog could become a monster covered in scales. With medication, a dog remained a dog.

      Sandra took her son under her arm. They turned the corner and were greeted by the waiter at the restaurant, who was hastening to put up the chairs and take the tables off the sidewalk because the sky was threatening to rain.

      The study was on the second floor of an austere mansion, with the entrance door surmounted by an important travertine arch. The windows overlooked the boulevard that cut through the old town, just a stone's throw from the old water tower that still supplied the country today.

      Sandra and Adriano slipped into the elevator, an elegant wrought-iron cage with wooden doors, purple-red interior and Art Nouveau mirror. Adriano, who suffered from

      claustrophobia, gasped until the elevator opened onto the second-floor corridor.

      The name of the psychiatrist Roberto Salieri was clearly engraved on the front door. Greta, the doctor's assistant, had them sit in the waiting room, a room with high, frescoed ceilings, furnished with two large damask velvet sofas with smooth, worn-out pillows, as if they had succumbed over the years under the weight of patients' neurosis.

      Although they scheduled the appointment for 10:00 a.m., one patient took longer than she should have, and Sandra took the opportunity to read a two-month-old supplement. The sky reflected a dark colour over the country. The rain began ticking on the windows. Adriano observed the drops set one by one on the window. First they appeared sparse, then they started pounding insistently, becoming a rough downpour of water. The roar of thunder made Sandra jerk.

      The professor's assistant entered the waiting room, his hand pressed his chest, and the air was a little frightened by the roar.

      "Come, Adriano. Dr. Salieri is waiting for you."

      The doctor's office was furnished in an unusual and refined manner.

      Some people thought it was a whim that underscored a certain megalomaniac in Salieri. In reality the psychiatrist simply wanted to respect the dignity of the patients by surrounding them with objects of good taste.

      The desk was the last purchase of a certain value: a mahogany table with a magnificent mother-of-pearl inlay in the centre. Adriano noticed that the sofa filled with fluffy Chinese silk cushions had been moved to the wall, the silver service and the majolica vases removed from the old desk and resting on the Victorian-style septet. The ruby Persian rug was laid proudly in the centre of the room. The office, as always, was pervaded by the scent of orchids in tall, thin crystal vases.

      The psychiatrist placed the mobile phone on the table, to use it as a tape recorder. The professor, with the consent of Adriano's mother, always recorded the sessions, and then attached the audio files to the boy's medical records.

      "So, Adriano, how are you?" the doctor asked, looking at the notebook to review the notes taken during the last session.

      Adriano did not answer. He reached the window. He wanted to see the rain, which now fell less insistent. The doctor, his forehead furrowed with thick horizontal wrinkles, lifted his deep, black eyes toward the window. The mist was turning the sloping roofs of the buildings grey.

      "It's not raining anymore. But there is fog…" he said with a thickly voice.

      Adriano moved the heavy velvet curtains away. The storm was moving north, thunder farther and thinner.

      "It is like the mist of I’m Rose."

      "How many times have you watched this video in the last month?"

      Adriano muttered something the doctor didn't quite understand.

      "Come on, Adriano, make an effort and be clear. Don't you have anything to tell me about the video?"

      "There's fog… on the video… but I didn't put it there…" Adriano muttered.

      "You're repeating yourself, boy."

      Adriano replied with an anxious moan. As always, he was impatient with the idea of taking the session.

      "Let's watch the film together, shall we?" proposed Salieri.

      "I… no… I…"

      "Are you always afraid of what's inside?"

      Adriano nervously smoothed his pale hands. After a long silence, he painstakingly said, "He knows. He knows that I have seen him. The fog has put him there…"

      "Go on” the psychiatrist encouraged him, focused on writing in his notebook.

      "I get it. I understand that he's putting down roots…" said the boy, while outside the mist covered the whole course in grey. The tower of the old aqueduct disappeared from the horizon. Adriano stared at the fog as if he were watching an unbearable threat.

      "He will rain down on the wicked burning coals. Fire and sulphur and fiery wind will be their portion" he said, reciting a passage from the Bible with anguished reluctance.

      Salieri deduced that Adriano had become accustomed to Marxotal, an antipsychotropic that he had been taking for two months, and delirium was the first sign that the drug was ceasing its effect.

      "So now read the Old Testament. You quoted Psalm number eleven, if I'm not mistaken. A psalm by David. I know it. I recited it during my bar mitzvah."

      As the doctor pondered the drug to be discontinued, Adriano babbled in monosyllables, "I only hear his voice… in here… and I must pray."

      Dr. Salieri continued to take notes regardless of Adriano's delirium. Schizophrenics often became obsessed with mysticism or religion in general. And Adriano's case could not even be considered among the most serious. In the past he had treated a hysterical nun who stabbed her palms with the irons she used to embroider.

      Fortunately, the hallucinations did not induce the boy to behave dangerously. The only exception was at the onset of the disease, when Adriano wanted to set fire to the cathedral's confessional.

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