Mama Leone

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When I was born a dog started barking in the hall of the maternity ward. Dr. Srećko ripped the mask from his face, tore out of the delivery suite, and said to hell with the country where kids are born at the pound! I still didn’t understand at that point, so I filled my lungs with a deep breath and for the first time in my life confronted a paradox: though I didn’t have others to compare it to, the world where I’d appeared was terrifying, but something forced me to breathe, to bind myself to it in a way I never managed to bind myself to any woman. Recounting the event later, first to my mother, and then my father, and as soon as I grew up, to friends, they brushed me off, said I was making stuff up, that I couldn’t have remembered anything, that there was no way I could’ve started drawing ontological conclusions the first time I cried. At first I was pissed they thought me a liar, and I wasn’t above spilling a few bitter tears, hitting myself in the head, and yelling you’ll be sorry when I’m dead! With the passing of years I calmed down, having figured that this world, of which I already knew a little and could compare with my experience and my dreams, was predicated on mistrust and the peculiar human tendency to think you a total idiot whenever you told the truth and take you seriously the second you started lying. This aside, relatively early on, when I was about five or six, I came to the conclusion that everything connected with death was a downer and so decided to shelve my threats of dying, at least until I solved the problem of God’s existence. God was important as a possible witness; he’d be there to confirm my final mortal experience and he could vouch for me that I hadn’t lied about the one in the delivery suite.

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