FRIDAY, 24 DECEMBER 1915
Vincenzo D'Aquila is in hospital in Udine
First of all he hears the sound of small bells and then he sees a small group of people coming along the corridor. A priest in a surplice is walking in front and he is flanked by two nuns carrying candles. D'Aquila tries to decide which of his brothers in misfortune they will be visiting this time.
They enter the ward. Someone is to be given extreme unction.
Vincenzo D'Aquila is in the military hospital in Udine where, like so many others, he is suffering from typhus. He was brought here by ambulance a few days ago along the skiddy winter roads. He was lying on a stretcher high up in the vehicle and his head almost hit the roof every time the ambulance drove over a pothole. When they eventually arrived D'Aquila was in such a bad state that the orderlies thought he was dead and carried him into the unheated mortuary, which was where he was later found lying on a stretcher on the floor.
His illness has worsened. His high temperature has overheated his brain and in his delirium he has been shouting for Kaiser Wilhelm in order to hold him personally responsible for the war. When the nurses placed something on his head he thought it was a golden crown: it was an ice-bag. He has heard voices, supernaturally beautiful voices, and he has heard music.
These bells, however, are very real. The priest and the two nuns walk through the ward. D'Aquila follows them with his eyes, feeling sorry for the poor soul for whom the bell is about to toll. Imagine dying on Christmas Eve, at "the moment which all the world is supposed to commemorate with the greatest of good cheer and happiness."
The small group passes bed after bed, their bells tinkling. It is as if time becomes extended, stretched, slowed down in D'Aquila's fevered mind. Time does not count. It's as though the whole of eternity can be contained in a single moment. The three figures come closer and he does not take his eyes off them.
They come to a halt at his bed. The nuns go down on their knees.
He is the one who is to die.
D'Aquila does not want to, does not intend to and will not. The priest mumbles his prayers and anoints D'Aquila's brow with oil, but to D'Aquila's mind he has become an executioner whose actions are intended to take his life. D'Aquila, however, is so weak that he cannot utter a word. His eyes meet the priest's. One of the nuns blows out the candles and he is left alone.
D'Aquila tells us what happens next:
Everything about me was in pitch darkness which helped, I suppose, to produce an extraordinary feeling of suspension. It was for all the world like standing still in the air, neither moving to the right nor to the left, forward nor backward, neither rising up nor sinking down. The ether itself stood still. It was a state of immobility carried to absolute zero [...] Abruptly, after an oppressive dose of suspended animation in this impenetrable medium [...] a wall of light like a silvery screen appeared against the jet black background. A kaleidoscopic as well as multi-coloured projection of my entire life cycle, from my very birth and babyhood up to that moment when I received the Sacraments of the dying, was then slowly unrolled to my gaze, evidently for my absorption and edification.
Everything changes and he goes from fighting against death to welcoming it with joy.
The visions continue. He becomes a woman giving birth. He flies through the universe, past planets, stars and galaxies, but then his whirling path through the cosmos bends and he returns to earth, to northern Italy, to Udine, to the hospital on Via Dante, where he passes through a narrow little window into the hospital ward and to that thing at the outermost limit of existence—his own waiting body.
~From "The Beauty and the Sorrow" by Peter Englund, p 194