Each reference to the Cuban people and folklore, especially of Yoruba origins, wants to be a tribute to this extraordinary land, rich in historical, cultural and religious references, present and past.

Dedicated to…

This novel is dedicated to brave people who despite the dark manage to grasp all the nuances of life.

And to all those who want to continue to be the bright shade in someone's dark life, despite everything.

To my father who never told me how to live, but he lived and made me observe how he did it.

With an open mind.

PROLOGUE

- I think I've been here before. -

The girl, walking along the corridor, touched the white wall and followed the path with two fingers of her right hand.

She remembered the feeling of the cold floor, the feeling of his bare feet coming off and rising slowly, alternating in steps.

She also felt the long white nightgown, lightly brushing her ankles, as well as the light weight of the dark braids that fell on her shoulders, just as she wore them as a child.

She sensed the presence of a person by her side, but could not understand who it was.

All that white bothered her a lot.

The reverberation of the cold light of the neon lights attached to the ceiling did not allow her to have a clear vision but she continued, dazzled and confused, with her gaze fixed on her.

- Have you ever had recurring and detailed dreams, so realistic that you cannot understand if you are sleeping or are awake? - Asked the girl.

- I think you shouldn't make confusion between dream and life. -

The calm and reassuring voice answered. Then she continued:

- I will ask you another question and I know you will forgive me: have you ever been on a train and from the window see the one next to it move? -

The girl nodded with a nod.

- Well see, we've all had at least once, the distorted perception that our train is leaving. Instead it stands there, motionless.

We are still and also our train.

It is a bit like life, we believe it is something personal in constant movement and evolution, but only when the empty tracks are revealed, beyond the glass, do we end up realizing that we are still stuck in the same place.

In the same way, only when we perceive the emptiness that we have in the soul, can we realize how deeply we are bogged down in our pools, made of fears and regrets, disappointments, anger and all the ballast of negative feelings that we carry with us.

We take for ourselves some episodes stolen from the life of others, we put them together with crumbled parts of ours and we have the illusion of an authentic experience.

But that's not our life.

It is the life that we would like but that we do not have, and it is this lack that creates that emptiness.

Perhaps there is not even a remedy for that black hole in the soul and the human being, too greedy and curious about everything, should not waste precious time looking for it. -

- What do you mean? I don't understand ... –

The girl stopped to think.

- I mean, basically, if every person, man or woman, looked inside, deep inside, who would ever admit to being completely satisfied or happy, one hundred per cent, of the life they lead?

A car, a job, a family, a full fridge, a new sofa, a dog or a cat.

It doesn't matter if you have all this, all you need and even the superfluous. Man will always feel that something is missing, there will always be a hole, large or small that he will not know how to fill. For some it is the evil of existing, others will call it psychic pain, others with still different names. The time has come for you to understand how to fill that void. Try Stella, maybe it's the right time. -

At the end of the corridor, in front of the fourth door, the presence handed her a small golden key which she grasped with some hesitation.

Open and look who or what is inside, just like you did with the other three doors before. -

So, as if she were projected onto a screen, she found herself living someone else's life.

1. MARTA

Looking at her figure reflected in the large mirror in her room, standing in front of her, Martha asked her: what do you want, what are you missing?

But she already knew that she would only move her lips and eyes in sync.

She stopped looking, she understood that all she needed to pass the time was a new canvas, a brush, tempera paints and Valium's bottle of her mother.

That bottle, that modern elixir that allowed her to appear so perfect and socially "acceptable", so much so that she too was a drug addict.

And this was the ritual of the evening, before the shadows entered their room. She looked out the window and thought it hadn't been long. She would have liked to feel the metallic smell of the rain that, at that moment, was drawing fractures on the glass that seemed to be sending it to pieces, at any moment.

Many asked her why she painted only still lifes. People were convinced that it was desperation, death or other shit like that, but she didn't have the answer and didn't pretend to have it, no more. She only knew that she liked to paint woven baskets of rattan, with dried fruit and autumn leaves inside, using the shades of colors that most relaxed her, especially the brown, warm, orange ones.

The sliding of the brush on the canvas, after imbibing it in the color, gave it a serenity difficult to explain. It was the most similar to the ecstasy there is, perhaps it was precisely that creative ecstasy that all painters have experienced at least once in their lives and that only in the older ones, originating from inner motions, in the end generated masterpieces.

She spread the colors on the figures at regular intervals, creating a rhythm, an alternation of full and empty spaces and the empty surface became a score.

Time was dictated by the moment: it could be the chirping of a cicada as the tinkling of wind chimes on the window opened in summer.

In that instant, the sound of the rain on the glass acted as a metronome, a fortuitous sequence of beats that followed one another and gave life to the sound. She heard thunder and this made her think of her grandmother who smelled of a good and clean old woman, thanks to her jasmine colony.

She always told her a story, when in the bed she jumped at the sound of thunder, looking for the cold and flourishing hands that held hers to give her courage.

“It all started with Saint Peter's mother, a stingy and flawed woman. Passed to a better life, the woman was relegated to hell to pay for her sins. One day Peter, grieved for her, asked Jesus to bring her up to Heaven.

Jesus replied that the woman had made too many mistakes in life, but if he had found even one good deed, for love of Peter, he would have made her go up. The saint then consulted his mother's book of life and discovered only one good deed: she had given to a poor man the skins of the potatoes she was peeling.

With those peelings the angels made a rope that was lowered into hell.

The rope was very fragile, but sufficient for the light transport of a single soul.

The woman, happy, grabbed it immediately, but at that point other souls of the damned surrounded her to climb up behind her. The woman screamed, warning the others to stay back.

The rope was just for her and she started kicking to keep the damned away.

But in doing so, the fragile rope broke.

The cries of anger, together with the thud of the woman who had fallen back into hell, became the sound of thunder that often accompanies thunderstorms. So you have nothing to fear, it's her own fault."

How much she wished she was with her at the time. She decided the next day she would have called Alessandra, her best friend.

- I wonder if she'd like to go to the mall tomorrow. - She wondered.

Her parents were supposed to be back four days from ski week. They had decided to save their marriage, even though Marta had never believed in "heated soups", especially since she saw her mother with another man.

From a human point of view, it was really difficult to feel even an ounce of sympathy for her, but not because she was cheating on her father, but because she had lately seen her as an inconstant, sometimes envious and paranoid woman.

She was sure that she hadn't noticed her a few days earlier when she was in the car.

She was waiting for him, she realized it when she saw the man arriving a few minutes later, a man she had never seen before.

In that situation, contrary to what other teenagers angry at their mother would do, she didn't tell anyone, much less her father. "I have to stop now, put everything in order and get into bed."

They were about to arrive, as they do every night at that hour: twenty-three and three-quarters would suddenly appear, a shadow from the mirror and then immediately afterwards another smaller one. She didn't know what they were, but she was sure they came for her and wanted something from her.

She never thought to tell anyone, because no one would believe her.

And then here they came, fast, stealthy, dark, dark.

A hand came out of the wall, crossed the mirror and then the rest of her body made its way, it lay on the floor, slowly dragging itself towards the footboard of her bed, to go up again, floating lightly on the pink moleskin sheet, until it was on top of her, parallel to her body and only a few centimetres away from the ethereal substance it was made of.

The creature's eyes glistened as if they were made of liquid metal, black and heavy.

Marta did not move, paralyzed by terror. She could not make even a small sound, hypnotized and enraptured by the rustling of her clothes.

She looked around and remembered that she was alone, so she begged that being not to hurt her, whispering bumpy and confused words until, in the same way they had arrived, the shadows disappeared.

She talked about it only once in her family in the first period, when it all began, a few years before.

She tried to inflict cuts and wounds on herself, hoping that the pain would take her away from that dark evil.

Not getting much, she switched to smoking heroin on the corners of the most hidden streets of the neighbourhood with a boy, other times within the walls of the house when her parents were at work.

The visions stopped for a few months, but her parents considered the drug to be the cause and not the remedy and locked her up for months in a clinic for psychiatric patients.

Those horrible visions were defined as nocturnal sleep paralysis, hypnagogic hallucinations, a consequence of the lack of regularity of circadian rhythms.

They put her on tranquilizers and after a few months of methadone they sent her home.

As if it was enough just a trivial tablet, a physical numbness, to heal the mortifications and dissatisfactions of the soul.

The hallucinations resumed on the very evening of her return home, when she saw the ghostly presence across the living room.

She thought it must be a kind of divine punishment and torment, deserved for having done something of which he was unaware.

Since then, she decided to stop asking questions.

"Death or these "things," sooner or later they'll come for me." She repeated her resignation to that discreet and punctual company.

"Perhaps they will put an end to this torture when I beg them to take me."

It almost seemed to her that during those temporal fractures they were waiting for a nod, a precise expression of will to death.

But she wasn't ready to die yet.

She had her paintings to finish, their music to listen to.

The next morning she took the bus to the bus stop below her house.

She waited for him for a few minutes and then saw him coming. The driver closed the door with a smashing noise and the bus moved, roaring deafly, with sudden scrapings and singulars.

The square was silent at that hour in the greyness of a Saturday morning.

Flashes of fog enveloped the bell tower of the Matrix, you could only hear the roar of the bus and the voice of a greengrocer in the distance inviting women to buy oranges.

Her clothes were a little crumpled, but she had hidden them under a long black coat that cleverly made her stand out from the slender figure that Mother Nature had given her.

That figure, and the haughty-looking poise, had always made her look older than her age.

If by some women, like those in the alley where her grandmother lived and where she spent most afternoons after school she was admired, by her classmates she was envied and criticized: too tall, too thin or her butt too protruding.

The truth was that Marta had always been a beautiful girl and certainly did not go unnoticed among teenage girls.

The latter, humiliated by a sense of impotence to beauty, had such feelings that she was paradoxically inadequate and unworthy compared to the others.

Except for Alessandra, she was a faithful friend.

They met in kindergarten and since then they have grown up together: the same elementary school, then in middle school and high school, even in the gym.

Alessandra's house was four, maybe five kilometres away, but with a long uphill stretch heavy to do on foot.

When they were little, they often rode their bikes. The bus suddenly nailed to the bus stop.

-Damn the brakes! - exclaimed the driver.

Finally, after a long time, she saw her friend again, visibly excited about that ride together at the mall.

Between the two girls there was affection, constant and industrious, and he was happy to see her standing up and feeling good.

She pulled out of her closet a black miniskirt that she wore with a turquoise t-shirt with little glitter that made her glow in her clumsiness as an overweight girl.

- Do you think I've lost weight? How do I look in skirts? You, on the other hand, well... you're damn skinny as a button! Are you eating? –

Alessandra, among her schoolmates, was famous for her exaggeratedly worn-out speech: she could speak for more than an hour without being interrupted.

Her need to speak was so great that, in the absence of interlocutors, she was able to speak to herself in the third person.

She was that high school student who was always expected to speak.

The one the school headmaster couldn't stand and who, in school meetings, was not afraid to take the microphone and leave it until the school administration was challenged and demolished, point by point.

Marta was one of the rare people to whom, if Alessandra asked something, she would even listen to the answer. Because despite all her problems, she felt she was tied to her, for a reason unknown to her, with an invisible red thread.

She loved pass her temperas when she painted a canvas, to hear those ramblings that even her mother didn't waste any more time listening to.

She went to the kitchen and in the bowl she emptied pockets on a cabinet, took the keys to her mother's Fiesta. In Marta's company she felt more beautiful.

On the other hand, it is known that at school boys look for the alpha, the leader of the pack to feel stronger and girls the prettiest to feel more beautiful.

Their friendship was beautiful, the kind that everyone in life should remember they had in time. They always shared everything, when they had to vent, talk about a problem, do their homework or have fun, the first contact was just the best friend. And yet, because of one boy, Alessandra was put aside for a while.

He was a guy everyone knew how to use drugs, a junkie.

As a good friend, she advised her to stay away from him, but she didn't want to understand until the boy was taken away from his father. Not even the judgment of the people was able to affect the purity of such a natural and innocent feeling, that first love, even if on the other side so violent.

They headed for the mall, visited the shoe store, then a clothing store.

Finally, they went shopping at Arca, a pet shop, where Alessandra bought a pink leather collar with fake glitter for Goga, her beagle.

The girl was not used to make judgements about past events and Marta liked this: she was simply a person who could listen to another one in trouble.

They drove through the underground parking lot to get to the car when, suddenly, Marta felt a strange sensation, a sort of déjà-vu.

The round, red and green lamps above each parking space, the ones that indicate whether it is free or not, had suddenly turned all red. The light reflected intermittently on the white border strip below had become similar to the slow motion effect of American films.

- Ale, we hadn't parked here, our parking was S3 not F8. -

Even Alessandra's steps had become slower, less fluid.

A dry leaf fluttered very slowly, completely asynchronically with the wind that had pushed it upwards, a fraction of the time sequence certainly altered.

Time seemed to have stopped, but she seemed to be the only one who felt it. She turned left, saw the two shadows passing in front of her, unconsciously brushing against Alessandra and vanishing into thin air. Once dissolved, Marta breathed again, saw the leaf hanging in the air falling on the leaden concrete at the usual speed.

Her friend turned around and asked her something she did not understand, still dazed by the vision. It was the first time she saw them clearly outside her home, and this was enough to convince her that something horrible was about to happen.

Alessandra started the engine with a keystroke after sitting in the Audi.

- This is all wrong, something is wrong. -

- What's wrong? - Asked Alessandra intrigued as they surfaced from the underground garages.

- The car was in the wrong place. First something happened in the garages and now we're in an Audi.

- Of course we're in an Audi, it's my car, don't you remember? I don't understand, what's going on?

- Your mother's car is a Fiesta, not an Audi. Pull over. We have to stop now!

- I can't pull over now, I'm cornering. Calm down and tell me what's wrong with you!

The weather was beautiful, the road was strangely lonely, the one that was always the same, travelled thousands of times in traffic was no longer so.

The car slid smoothly from corner to corner where there was supposed to be a straight.

- Stop now please, something's happening. How can you not see that? –

Marta took off her seatbelt, tried to open the door but Alessandra locked it through the central controls.

- I'm sorry, I can't let you get off, I love you very much, but it's better this way. Trust me one more time. –

- What's better like this? Ale...-

At that exact moment, the perception of time and space was altered again.

Marta saw dazzling headlamps aimed at her friend and realized that her time was over.

In a split second, she remembered the relative definition of time and space that her philosophy professor made one day during a lecture.

"The unit of measurement of time, among the people of the ancient Near East, was the day, the month and the year. In Mesopotamia, the day began at sunset and not at sunrise, so it was the interval of time between two successive sunsets.

For this reason, when for me the day begins, I have to accept the idea that for another it ends.

It is an entirely human concept to count time, all the more so if I apply it to my personal dimension of body and spirit.

Jung once said, "Body and spirit are two aspects of the human being, and that's all we know, which is why I prefer to say that the two things happen together in a mysterious way by staying here, because you can't imagine the two things as one.

For my own use, I have conceived a principle that must show this fact of "being together", I affirm that the strange principle of synchronicity acts in the world, when certain things are produced in a more or less simultaneous way, behaving as if they were the same thing, even though they are not so from our point of view.

It was only then that I fully understood its meaning, that continuum of which the professor spoke, had been broken.

He felt the blood dripping on her face and from there it flowed on her left hand.

The acrid smoke from the airbag saturated the air in the car, and went up her nose, pinching her throat. Alessandra's body was leaning forward, towards the steering wheel, held by the seatbelt which had probably jammed in the crash.

A woman with a strange smile was driving the other car, the one that crashed into them, and seemed to have been unharmed.

She also saw a couple of pedestrians on the road, immobile, a man and a girl who were merely observing what had happened and who did not seem to have any intention of providing any kind of assistance.

Then, nothing else.

She realized her time was over.

2. STEFANO

Stefano Mencarini was a man of curious and lively intelligence, short black hair with a tuft that, from a young age, he never managed to keep down.

He had been married for about six years to Anna, his work colleague, and did not disdain good company and beers with friends on Saturday nights.

In short, a very ordinary man, as many can find around the world.

They hadn't had children, despite the thousands of visits made by specialists from all over Italy and all in all, he had never represented a real problem for the couple, taken as they both were by their career priorities in the biomedical engineering sector.

His life proceeded regularly, until the day he was appointed to personally oversee the opening of a new office in Havana.

He discussed it with his wife who advised him to accept the proposal.

After a few months away, the relocation would certainly have benefited their income, they could finally renovate their house, a matter always postponed for economic reasons. Moreover, the promotion that had already been in the air for some time, would almost certainly have materialized.

So after a few weeks, he left.

Upon arrival, he realized how small José Martí International Airport was, and to an inversely proportional extent, how many mustard-colored police uniforms there were.

Obliged to go through the whole process of checking, he noticed the presence of only one detector at gate number two and realized that it would not be quick.

His high enough forehead surmounted a regular, rather handsome, but common face.

What made it special was a scar on the corner of his right eye.

It was that something lived, unique and personal.

The fact that he always wore a suit and tie made a loud squeak with his appearance, to which a leather jacket would be more in tune.

An overwhelming smell of fried food rose up his nostrils, so much so that he felt as if he had gone straight into a fryer, the predominance of red present and the anachronistic structure of the building made it look like an old bus station from the fifties.

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