Reminiscences (I) / A Tale Of Unhappiness

However, Akira didn’t succeed in saying anything to her in that moment, both because he had no forces in him to spit a word and because the doctors immediately came to visit him and see how he was. In that whirlpool of persons going in and out Samai was obliged to wait outside, while the doctors were visiting Akira. Then, she was allowed inside and she and Akira started listening to the doctor diagnose. 

“It is incredible to say, but… he has nothing, he’s as healthy as a fish. It seems like his body fought against the poison and successfully eliminated it from his organism: his fever has gone down and now he is just feeling a sense of fatigue because of the fight that his body had to take. Still, it is pretty rare that a body alone can defeat such a threatening poison that even we had no idea how to fight. As such, we are going to let him stay here for another week, but, if nothing arises during that period, he is free to go home. He is not in danger anymore”. 

Those words made a beaming smile appear on Samai’s face and a faint one on Akira’s one, who was looking at the void like a ghost was to be found there. Then, as the doctor was illustrating to Samai what activities he had to take in order to fully recover, his eyes slowly closed, sending him to the sweet and gentle embrace of sleeping, this time not for weeks, but for only some mere hours. Still, he succeeded in sleeping for an entire day and, when he woke up, the night was starting to fall on that day and it seemed to Akira like he didn’t even sleep for a single hour. However, the scene in front of his eyes was different: Samai and the doctor weren’t to be found there, instead a nurse was near him, with some paper sheets that she was constantly observing, switching her attention between those and the patient in front of her. When she made one of those switches, she noticed that Akira was awake and, with a gentle smile that had been trained in order to make patients feel safe and cared about, said to him “Hey, sleepyhead, hadn’t you had enough of sleep when you were in coma?”

Then, as if her only task was to wait for him to wake up, she went towards the exit, but before she could exit the room Akira asked her “Excuse me, how long have I slept for?”

The nurse turned towards Akira and said, with an entertained voice, “If you mean now, you have slept for a whole day: if you mean since when you entered this hospital, then… probably two or three weeks. You made various people worry a lot, especially that lovely girl who was always by your side”. Then, before Akira could ask anything else, she went away, returning to her other tasks. Akira quickly tried to get up, succeeding in that simple action without any fatigue. He felt like nothing at all happened to him, like his body had already rehabilitated itself with that full day of sleep. He then looked around his room, a normal spartan hospital room that you can find anywhere, except that this room had little to none electronic devices that could help monitor one’s health, and then headed to the window. From there he could see a big garden with some lamppost along the various paths that it had and, near them, he could see various benches, surrounded by various trees and bushes, which in that moment of the day fused the green colour of their leaves with the red-orange and black colour that the fading sunshine was giving, creating a strange and indescribable tonality that seemed to linger from a dark orange to a dark yellow with some green veining in it. While looking at that spectacle, he heard some steps that hinted that someone had entered the room. He turned around to see who it was, only to see Samai, this time not dressed with her usual black and white uniform, but with a sleeveless blue dress decorated by some aquamarine decorations at the lower end of it, which emphasised her figure and her face, with her long black hair let go between the front of the dress and the back. When she saw him standing, at first she showed a worried expression, like he had just broken the doctor’s prescriptions, but then, with tears in her eyes, she ran to him and embraced him. Akira didn’t expect that: Priscilla would have probably done that, but Samai? The same Samai that had been afraid of him for a lot of time and then just started saying two or three sentences when he was there? Still, it wasn’t a bad feeling to be held like that, so he made her do as she pleased, while he also embraced her a little, but not as much as she was doing. Then, while in that position, with her head on his shoulder, Samai whispered “Akira… You are well… I am so happy…” and Akira did the only thing that came to his mind to make her calm down: that was, giving her some head pats. He placed his hand on her head and repeatedly said “I am here, Samai, I am here. You don’t need to worry about me anymore”. Then, she got away from him, a clear embarrassment visible on her red face, even though she was smiling through the few tears that still got out of her eyes. After a bit, Akira asked her “For how long have you stayed here?”

“For all the time you stayed here, so for three weeks…” replied Samai, cleaning her own tears with her right hand.

“And you did not alternate with someone else?” asked Akira, surprised by the fact that she stayed by his side for three weeks without asking someone to take her role even for a single day.

Samai shook her head in denial and replied “I had nothing to do… since Priscilla has been confined in her room since the day you collapsed… and she couldn’t come and see you… so I decided to do the only useful thing I could for someone: stay by your side”.

Those words touched Akira right in his heart: no one had ever said something like that to him, even though those words hinted that Samai considered her useless when she was not serving Priscilla, or so he thought. A thing which wasn’t absolutely true, and she just demonstrated that by staying with him for all that time, a task that many would have rejected, especially since he hadn’t been to the Natò residence for a long time and many were still dubious about him, even though they accepted him.

As if to manifest his feelings, Akira said to Samai “If you think that you are useless, you are wrong. You said that you had nothing to do apart from serving Priscilla, but you did another useful thing: you watched over me for weeks, a task that many wouldn’t have even considered an option. So, have a bit more trust in yourself: you are not useless”.

Samai smiled at those words, moved by the fact that someone was talking so high about her, but before she could say anything to thank him, Akira added “And I have something else to say you: thank you for being by my side for all of this time. You don’t know how much this means for me, having someone like you near me in dire moments like this”. That was the moment when some other tears of joy started coming out of her amber eyes, making a sweet smile come out on Akira’s face, as if he was watching two lonely stars crossing the sky together on a cloudless night. Then, after a bit, Samai regained her composure a bit and asked Akira “Akira… when you woke up the first time, you said that you needed to talk to me about something. Do you remember that?”

“Yes, I sure do, and now I am even more sure about my choice. It is about time I free myself from this weight that I brought alone along all my life” said Akira: he was unsure to whom he should have said the things he had to say, but, after what happened in that minutes, he was sure that Samai was the best person with whom to talk about his past. She looked over him for three weeks without anyone asking her to do that – if you exclude the probable request that Priscilla made her in order to have someone trustworthy look after him -, she cried when she saw he was okay. It could have all been an act, even though Akira doubted about it, but, even if she had acted since he got to know her, he didn’t care: he had decided that he wanted to live again, for real this time, and he was ready to take some risks along the way, if that meant that he could reach a moment of true happiness, of fulfilment. “Still,” continued Akira “what I am going to tell you is going to be a long story, and I will need a lot of time to tell it all. If you are tired and you don’t want to stay up late, then we can do this discussion later: only if you want to hear about it, of course. What do you say?” From the look on his face Samai could see that Akira was being serious about what he said: she didn’t know what he wanted to say her, but she could understand that it was something important to him. If she could do something for him, then she would have willingly done that.

“… I want to hear it. If there is something I can help you with, then I will do what I can to help you” was her response to that proposition. At those words Akira replied with a grateful smile that made Samai blush a little for no reason whatsoever. “Then, do you mind if we move to the garden? I want a bit of privacy and, you know, hospital rooms aren’t exactly the most reserved place on earth” said Akira, at which Samai nodded.

A bit later, in the garden, two figures were seen sitting on a bench right under what seemed to be a red maple. They weren’t looking at each other: instead, both of them were looking in front of them, towards the fading light of the sun that was slowly disappearing in a cloudless night filled with stars. Each one of them had their own reason to look in that direction: the male was gathering the words he needed in order to tell the tale of his life; the woman was waiting patiently that the other human besides her shared his thoughts with her. Then, the male’s eyes lifted from the void and looked at the sky, as if he was stargazing, and the woman looked in his same direction. Then, the male turned towards the female and asked, whispering, “What I am going to say is probably going to confuse you, because there will be many things that you have never heard of. I ask you to please refrain from making questions: take what I say just as it is. Can you do me this favour?” When the girl slightly nodded with a serious yet interrogative expression on her face, the male turned again towards the void, looking intensively at the spaces that were left in the darkness from the light of the lampposts.

That was the moment when Akira started narrating his long journey through life.

“You see, my life hasn’t been what a normal person would call a “happy” life. Still, there was a moment in my life where I was really happy, and that was when I was born. I was the son of a Japanese woman working in a bank and of an Italian man, working in an import-export business: that’s how you call people who bring goods from other countries and sell it in their own or do the opposite, I don’t know how you call them here. Both my parents, from the few memories that I have of them, were very caring and gentle, especially my father: he would let me do anything I wanted and, if I did something wrong, he was there, ready to make me understand why what I did was wrong. We were in a very stable financial condition, if not to say that we were kind of rich: we had our own house, our own car, we even had a second house near the ocean. I remember it because I wasn’t able to swim, yet every time I saw that immensity of water I constantly run into it, trying to go as far as I could. However, in all of this idyllic happiness, there was a single problem: my father’s job. Officially, he worked for an import-export business, but his real job was far less legal: he was part of a criminal organisation. Apparently, that is also how he got to know my mother: he was doing some… transactions in her bank and, when he saw her, it was like a lighting stroke the both of them: he immediately asked her out and a year later they were married. If my mother knew about his job? I’m sure she did: my father was very open about his job with my mother and she really didn’t care that much. She had literally balls of steel, she wasn’t afraid of being involved with criminals: moreover, she loved my father way more than anything else, even more than her life. Returning to my father being part of a criminal organisation… he wasn’t that high in the ranks, however he was still an important member of it: important enough to earn the money that he needed in order to provide his family with every commodity that we could have ever needed. However, no matter how important you are in that life, there is a general rule that everyone knows: you can’t get out of that life alive, only few people can do that and those are rarer than white flies. My father, however, seemed to be one of those flies: after he got me, he decided that he had enough of that life and wanted to straighten himself up and find an honest job. The organisation he was part of was formed by various families and, when they discussed that matter, all of them agreed to let him return being a normal civilian because of the achievement he reached and the help he gave to the organisation: however, one of the families wasn’t okay with that decision because of things my father knew about their business and so they decided to act alone, without letting the others know. And the way they deal with problems in the underground is really simple: they kill people that aren’t needed around. That’s exactly what happened to my father and mother: one weekend, one of that family came to see my dad and, when he was welcomed into the house, he simply killed with a shot in the head both my mother and my father. How do I know this? I was there when that happened, in the same room where that person killed them. I vividly remember the hitman looking at me, while I was crying because of what happened near the corpses of my parents. I am only alive because the organisation followed a simple rule: no matter what, children weren’t to be touched or harmed in any way. Even though I’m sure the orders that man received included also my elimination. When that happened I was four years old, that is also why I clearly remember all of this: a trauma such as that is impossible to forget, for how much a person tries to. Anyway, after that happened, the other families immediately did two things: eliminate the family responsible of my parent’s assassination, which didn’t succeed in covering its traces and were easily discovered after a brief internal investigation, and adopt me into one of their families. Probably they thought that was their way to atone for my parent’s homicide, but I am not so sure: I have never asked them why they took me in. All of these facts happened in Yokohama, but after this I was moved to Sapporo and I went living with an old guy, a person that anyone would have considered a slacker at the first glance. Little could those people know that he had been the boss of the entire organisations back in the days and that, now that he had retired, he passed his days enjoying his well-deserved relax. He was a good man, but had many bad qualities that make me understand why all of his wives escaped after a bit. He was very strict, a heavy drinker, verbally and physically violent… Still, he never punched me, or abused me: he did that with the people around him, but with me? Not even once. Why did he take me in? Because he was in debt with my father: he said that, back in the days, he had saved his life and took a bullet for him, a bit before he decided to go into retirement. That was also why he never laid a hand on me: he respected my father too much to even think about doing that. During this period my life slowly started becoming less and less liveable because of some circumstances: I started going to elementary school, in a private one where no one knew something about my past, so that I could start making a life from zero. Still, I had the memory of my parents killed in the back of my head, which made a process develop in me that made me maintain distances with other people: I had fear that, if they had come near me, they would have been taken away, as my parents had. Plus, I had the looks of a foreigner, thanks to my father being Italian, and my personality was a strong one: in other words, I was a violent child and a hothead, with a tendency to be alone and the looks of a foreigner. Not exactly the best combination, I have to say. That also caused me to not be accepted by the other children, snobbish creatures that didn’t even know what humility was: of course, that meant that bad blood ran between us, and it didn’t take that long before that hatred transformed itself in physical actions. In other words, going to school was like going into an arena: I started having fights since the second year of elementary school, and had fights for all of the remaining years of elementary school. At first I wasn’t that good, but then, with time and training, I got better, and then fewer and fewer people continued fighting me, and so by the end of the last year in that school I ended up being undisturbed and alone. If someone ever stopped us? No: teachers didn’t care and always looked the other way when things heated up, and the school cared even less. All it cared about was that every student that went there payed the requested amount of money, then they didn’t care about the students anymore until it was time to pay another sum of money. Around that time, I was also introduced to the art of fencing and kendo: I got to know about fencing from that old guy, as it was one of his passions, having also a niece that competed at international levels, who he had trained in the past, while I started practicing kendo because of another old guy that lived nearby. Once, I wandered in the garden near his house, and I saw him training: he saw me and invited me to try it, and after that time, under his instructions, I started training with him. Still, I never participated in a kendo tournament, even though my master always repeated that, if I had tried, I would have easily won the nationals. While I liked kendo, I didn’t really enjoy fencing, in fact I stopped practicing it when I was in my third year of elementary school: still, the feeling of having a sword in my hand was always a pleasant one, no matter what sport did I practice. However, towards the end of my years in elementary school, some facts happened that shattered my life in a thousand pieces: the criminal organisation my father was part of had been completely shut down because of a gigantic police operation aimed at foreign criminal associations and the old boss who took me in died. The first fact meant that the people who took care of having me living a decent life had disappeared, but it would have had no value to me if it didn’t happen around the same time the old boss died. The organisation couldn’t give me a new home, and the sons and daughters of the old guy were fighting over the heredity, which made them look at me with eyes full of suspicion, as if I could advance any pretence on the family heredity. So, they got rid of me: they used the few connections they still had with the underground world to put me in a house, officially under the care of a Chinese businessman, but in reality they sent me off to live by myself in the outskirts of the town, with a little bit of money to take care of myself at least for two or three months. That was when what I would call a little hell started for me”.