We piled ourselves into my cousin Claudio’s car. Being the shortest of the men, I was relegated to the centre seat in the back; it was a tight squeeze. We were having dinner at Gino’s house; the young arsonist cousin of my father who lived on the outskirts of Udine with his wife Rita.
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| Clockwise: Dad, Gino, Rita, zia Maria, Claudio, me, Mom |
After dinner, while having coffee and grappa, talk turned to the young man that had been electrocuted so many years ago. Memories were jogged and the time travel began… after a few minutes a name was recalled. Italo Bravin; he would no longer be anonymous to me. Gino provided even more details. Young Italo was actually trying to catch eels and so he must have gone out around midnight and not early in the morning as my father remembered. It’s quite likely that dad was actually the last person to see Italo Bravin alive. That has to be a strange feeling; being the last person to see someone alive before an accidental death is quite different from the last time you see someone alive. One begins to wonder if some small change in what you said or did may have made a difference in the outcome. It’s easy to understand how something like that could haunt you.
As we were about to leave, there was a brief mention of the barn fire. With a glint in his eye, Gino recalled a detail that gave the barn burning a JFK assassination feel to it. But instead of a grassy knoll, Gino says that he may have seen a shadowy figure in the darkness that night. I detected a smile on Gino’s face, ever so slight.
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