The Dark Side of the Sky by Francesco Dimitri

Author:Francesco Dimitri
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags:  
Publisher: Titan

7

While Becca’s life had gone down, Ric’s had gone up. Mum was doing surprisingly well with the farm, better than Dad ever did. They were not rich, but they were okay. He enrolled in a Psychology course in Lecce, in the conviction that Becca was unwell and if she did not want to seek help, it fell to him to help her anyway.

His university years were some of the best of his life. He missed his sister, very much so, but everything else was easy. He read voraciously, a lot of the same books his sister was reading, in the search for words that could help him understand her. He read William Blake; he grabbed everything he could find on Joan of Arc, who heard voices and let them lead her to be burnt at the stake at nineteen. He studied William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience, Emile Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, T. M. Luhrmann’s Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft, along with works on neurochemistry, attachment theory and Lacanian psychoanalysis, with its focus on the unquenchable thirst that moves our every action.

Among the perks of being a Psych student was that Ric found himself one of the very few men in a largely women-attended faculty. He had been awkward with girls at school, but now he flourished. His ways, on the verge of rudeness but still polite, made him a hit.

(His handsomeness helped: Becca and Ric were the two best-looking people you would ever meet.)

First he found in himself a healthy appetite for women and no shortage of ways to indulge it, then, after a drunken experiment with a teaching assistant, his appetites grew to include men.

Books and sex were not a bad way to spend his early twenties. If only Becca had been more present in his life, his world would have been complete. He could barely talk to, or about, her without getting angry, but he still wished she would see reason, one day, and allow him to help her.

Anger was, he would be the first to admit, his main problem. Not that he was ever gratuitously violent, but he did have a temper, and having been raised in open countryside, doing small jobs since a very young age, he had the meat to make his temper dangerous. When a young priest was outraged that Ric kissed a boyfriend in front of the Basilica di Santa Croce, one of Lecce’s dazzling baroque churches, Ric punched the priest so hard he spat a tooth with the blood; when a tourist’s hand fell as if by mistake on Ric’s girlfriend’s ass, Ric grabbed the hand and twisted it until it broke. The tourist was with friends, and they might have beaten the crap out of Ric, but at times like that he had a madness in his eyes that convinced people that discretion was the best part of valour.

He wrote a dissertation on the psychology of belief, and after reading the last draft, the professor who had been mentoring him praised it highly, and assured Ric an academic career was his to have.

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