2005 · As a child, just like many other children my age, I was hooked all summer to the Japanese animated show The Heart. it was the story of Marco, the young Italian boy who went, alone with his little monkey, to a tough and dangerous journey to find his mother in Argentina. Much later in life, when I and my Italian girlfriend went to live in Milan for a year, I came across the original story and read it in Italian. It made me wonder - what if his mother hadn't stopped writing and Marco stayed in a limbo? What if it wasn't her who wrote those letters?
Marco
What happens when the lie that held the monster in check is now decaying?
Marco Casale has not missed a morning on the pier in thirty years.
His mother left for Argentina when he was eight. She writes to him, not often, but enough. Small letters about the weather in Buenos Aires, the price of beef, a neighbor who reminds her of someone back home. Marco collects them from the merchant ships and reads them standing at the end of the dock, facing east, where she went.
His mother died of fever before the first letter ever arrived.
An old scribe named Aldo saw what Marco did to a boy who laughed at him on the wrong morning, and he made a decision. He began writing the letters himself, in a woman’s hand, signing them with her name. The village found out within the year. Nobody told him to stop. The wine came next: half the port pays Marco’s tab at the tavern, and no one has ever discussed why. Each time Marco has come close to real violence, someone increased the wine and a letter arrived ahead of schedule.
Aldo is dead. The last letter came forty days ago. The wine is running out. The old woman who reads cards by the sea wall said it at the market last week, to no one in particular: a man who has been waiting will stop waiting, and when the waiting ends, the fire begins.
The village has three days to figure out what Marco will do without the lie that kept him still for thirty years. The answer is simpler, and worse, than any of them imagined.
An intense psychological pressure cooker story, starting when the safety valve just cracked.