Here is Andrea!

Publish date 14-10-2021

by Matteo Spicuglia

There are apparently incomprehensible lives, fragile and transparent like crystal. Lives loaded with absurd weights, yet capable of expressing light words. It is not easy to find them, as it is not easy to find everyone's secret. It happened to me with Andrea Soldi, a 45-year-old man suffering from schizophrenia, who died on August 2, 2015 during a violent compulsory health treatment.

Andrea had been living with terrible hallucinations since he was 20 years old. He had refused treatment for months. That day he was sitting on his bench in a public park in Turin when a psychiatrist and three traffic police arrived to convince him to follow them to the hospital.
When he refused, they blocked him, took him around the neck, handcuffed him, threw him on the ground on his stomach and loaded him into the ambulance. Nobody noticed his suffering: Andrea would die after a few minutes of respiratory failure. So far the chronicle of the last moments which, however, say little about the life that flowed in his veins. He showed it to us himself in a diary found by his father after his death: handwritten pages and letters never sent to his family in which Andrea for many years was able to put on paper the emotions he lived, the fatigue that accompanied him, but also the beauty and strength that inhabited it.
Yes, a fragile force that led him to write beautiful sentences about the meaning of life, the value of friendship and love, the importance of family.
Words that are now everyone's heritage.

Here is Andrea's confidence: «Lights… it's darkness. A rainbow rises and rises.
It's all colorful and you like it, it knows it's beautiful! A hand wants to touch his shadows but in reality he hopes to create light for himself ... he dreams! At night you dream and ... and so it was that I opened my eyes and saw an Indian cheyenne with his head down and eyes shining, a tear on his face that came down never to stop. He was born many years ago, his mother gave him birth by creating a destiny for him.
The sage said, "No, he can't." So the strong wind rose, the leaves fell from the branches, they broke among themselves, shaking the past of an ancient world that no longer has a voice and his is nothing but remote light. So it was that Cheyenne chief invented some dirty words and the child grew in him as in a God. This is being someone, believing even those who do not trust you ».

Here is Andrea's ability to let go: «A leaf attached to a branch follows his destiny by looking from the other side of his imagination at all the things that pass and move and never come back. One day she knows she has to detach herself and lose the colors that make her elegant and fine, but her friends leaves die with her and accompany their pain with the wind from heavy rains and the birth of an event that has no end ... She will be back to live, in the earth, on the edge of the imagination, buried in flowers and trees that have stripped themselves of life. One day she fell in love with her shadow of her, she didn't want to leave her anymore and her hard being swept her away, as if all things must have a beginning to disappear into the black of the absolute, into the distant comet of times. But his wake came, he knew the world, he lived there like that cry fallen into hell and overshadowed by a cobweb on whose net the fire fell, he warmed the hole, the snow came down, wondering why and convinced that he never existed .
The breath and the look, the lips and the hands, the beating heart is stronger than him and the eternal chain of him, a temple to which he belongs, to be and not to have, but to believe ».

Here is Andrea's faith: «A light passes and creates tears. It's him, he's crying!
He doesn't know he is loved but he loves. He thinks about the memories, a shiver runs behind his back, sobbing from the Magone.
Because? I am born, alive, so that everything must have an end. It's not right. We will be stars that move in the infinity of silence and there will not be a voice. His shining eyes do not stop crying, his lips touch and he had the strength to cry out in the darkness of the times, to the billions of years that will still have to face an unknown destiny: God, heat in the cold, light in the black, voice in the silence, time of the times, let me cry again. He does not love himself if he does not suffer ».


Matteo Spicuglia
NP June / July 2021

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