Book IX- Jean-Paul Sartre

"My first real love affair, a few years later, was with a woman, an actress who used to kid me, but without any harshness, about my ugliness.
'So how come you love me?' I asked her.
'You talk good,' she replied.
'What if I were uglier still,' I insisted.
'Then you'd have to talk all night,' she responded."

Jean-Paul Sartre

Chapter 1: Jean-Paul\'s Story: Blue Sky (Piraeus 1)

On a summer's day at a park in Milan where great oaks spread canopies of leafy shade, a teenager in rebellious plumage appears on a macadam path wiggling to his Walkman. He ambles along moaning to his muse, baggy pants flopping rhythmically about worn sneakers. Passing strollers look back as he passes and shake their head in disgust -- kids and their scatological rap, they snicker. He wears a long black vest hanging open revealing pasty white skin and nipples pierced by pins, thorny tattoo vines encircle his skinny biceps, and cheap rings adorn his fingers.

He notices a frail old man reading a book on a park bench. He stops, stares and walks over to face him. The man looks up, contemptuous, but surely frightened of the lanky spiked-haired kid, and shrinks back. The kid bends over, nose-ring to old nose, his eyes crazed, face contorted, and mouth in a satanic grin. Carefully he reaches for the man's hat and lays it next to him on the bench. Like a rabbit before a viper the man is frozen. The youngster, his eyes wide and dancing, removes his earphones and carefully puts them on the elderly citizen and stands back. The man recoils, body stiff, arthritic fingers trembling about his book in fear. The kid points to his ears grinning. The man lifts his hands and clasps the headphones to his ears: expecting a stream of screaming, cursing, cacophony of music, he hears only the deep sonorous tones of a poet's voice...bewildered he listens. Now, incredulously, aware of the mellifluous cadence of soothing words from a Shakespearean sonnet he looks up at the kid, amused. No words, just a glance between generations, like echoes from the moon. Then the kid lifts the earphones from the old man's head, places them back on his own, and with a wink continues on his way.

The kid's name was Fausto Biaggio. It wasn't his real name, but he enjoyed the vowels rolling over his tongue. Through an odd turn of events he died or at least disappeared with no trace not long after this incident, early into the third millennium. There was no mythology of the beautiful loser, or romantic self-destruction and existential cool. Although, like Rimbaud, if one hung around him he did have an air of vulnerability that made people care about him even as he took advantage of them. He left a notebook, a diary of sorts, the only evidence of his short life that his family cherished.

The notebook begins with what his family assumed was his end. Inserted in small cramped letters at the top of the first of many well-worn and greasy pages was printed the word 'Emma' and further down where there was once the photo of a golden haired little girl taped to the page, a smiley face sticker stared back. He left a short sentence, a post-script, directly below her name, which said: "Hey Emma today I died." Most likely he had postdated his brief inscription to the next day. An act not unheard of and reminiscent of a young soldier's letter to his wife the night before he was to fight, and die in a bone-crushing battle. How Fausto knew that during an otherwise peaceful day, in the grimy industrial section of Milan, he would never see the sunset is, or was, a mystery; or for the more skeptical, a certain condition of statistical probably and possibly a lie.

A 'runaway' was discounted by the Italian police, since everything Fausto needed and held dear was as he had left them, scattered about in his seedy hotel room including diary, wallet and French passport. On the other hand, it was said by some of the family that he could have been speaking metaphorically. Certainly, the period of his boyish existence was coming to an end, that his persona of rebellion was finished, and possibly he was attempting to be reborn. Or, perhaps more likely, the hatred for his father had finally consumed his young life. For those who looked to the obvious, the last entry in 'Emma' dated a few days after her birthday, said it all: "Blue Sky." He was put on Interpol's missing persons alert.