Free Lost Words by Nicola Gardini Page A

the darkness. I lowered my gaze to the tassels of the satin bedcover, which were illuminated by the yellow light coming in from the hall, and I prayed to God to get me out of there as quickly as possible.
    â€œMan did I ever take a beating,” he muttered.
    I could hear him fumbling with the light switch hanging next to the crucifix. Before turning it on he warned me, “Try not to get upset.” He flicked the switch and in the cone of light you could see two half-closed eyes, all black-and-blue, a mouth covered with cuts, a broken nose . . . He was unrecognizable. I couldn’t even reconstruct his ruined features into a human face . . . His lips were swollen into a weird smile. One of his front teeth was missing. His split upper lip was stained with fresh blood.
    â€œThey hit me everywhere, Chino. My head, my back . . . it went on and on. At one point they even used a crowbar . . .”
    â€œWho did this to you?” I found the strength to ask. He started coughing and couldn’t stop. “The fascists!” he said, in a strangled voice. “They nabbed me in Piazza Medaglie d’Oro, in broad daylight. They jumped in my car when I was stopped at a traffic light and pointed a gun at me. Where the fuck are the police when you need them? . . . I felt like I was having a nightmare. We drove out of Milan. I don’t know which road we took . . . I was shitting my pants . . . The only thing I remember is at one point, after I’d been driving for a while, we got off the highway and were in the open countryside . . . We turned down a dirt road . . .”
    He stopped speaking. His eyes filled with tears and his upper lip shook, puffy and red. Slowly and with great difficulty, he pulled the covers off all the way down to his legs. His naked body was covered with marks from the beating. His right side was as black as coal, his upper body a patchwork of purple bruises. My eyes came to rest on his hairy crotch and I immediately looked away. But Riccardo wanted me to see.
    â€œTake a good look,” he insisted.
    He lifted his scrotum. Some punches had even been landed down there. He pulled the sheet back up very slowly and started coughing again. His mother ran in with a glass of water. “Drink, drink . . .” she said, lifting his head from the pillow. She sat next to him on the bed.
    â€œAre you ready for your medicine?” she asked him quietly. She patted his forehead and left us alone again. I stared at his face the way you might look at a lifeless object, an expressionless mask. Riccardo understood my repulsion. “You’re shocked, huh? Don’t worry. It’ll go away . . .”
    Signora Lojacono came back holding a small brown bottle. “People are crazy, Chino,” she explained. “Don’t listen to anyone! Not a soul! Look at what they did to my son . . . Now be a good boy and get along home to your mother.”
    *.
    â€œI spent my youth convinced that if I knew the exact meaning of words, it would unlock my understanding of things. I loved difficult words, obscure words, foreign words. Not neologisms, which aren’t real. I had my own cult for dictionaries. Maybe all young people, whether they realize it or not, love dictionaries—I’d go so far as to say that children are the ideal lexicographers. They don’t know the language of the community very well because they still think that meanings exist independently of people. You could write a fairy tale about it: Once upon a time there was a meaning . . .
and then?
What happens to this meaning? . . . Let’s say it meets a little girl. And the little girl misunderstands it, that is to say, she believes it. A while later she discovers that the meaning doesn’t only signify what it claims. One night she sees it in the company of a few adults and realizes that it behaves
in a questionable