This was Mirto.
I can assume that it was born from the 1920s to the 1930s.
Her mother was called Pia, she was born in 1900 and died in 1969. I know that Mirto loved dogs and that, like many of his generation, he was a soldier, probably an aviator. I know he got married, probably more than once and that in 1983 he went to Sea Word and saw the dolphins.
His life was sold to me on a gray afternoon in October 2019. On the internet I found a sales announcement and, among outdated appliances and furniture, there was a box of photographs and documents.
On the other side of the screen, I was answered by a man who presented himself as attorney general, who was in charge of the sale of assets resulting from a death in order to pay off the debts incurred by the deceased. When I meet the prosecutor I am told a slightly different story, it seems that the ex-wife of the deceased gentleman is still alive and I am told that he had no children.
I dont investigate further.
In the following hours, I lived my whole life on pills.
I know that he lived in Venice but that he spoke a Slavic language. I know that he was in love with Miryana and that she was probably (or still is) Polish. I know that she received long love letters that I read with all the delicacy I could find. I carefully looked at each photo, the girl with the swollen face, her mother's eyes, the furnishings of the houses she probably frequented.
Now I think I know a lot about Mirto's life, but I don't know him and I will never know him. I don't know if he was a good man, if he was short-tempered or affable. I know that in the mid-nineties he had a Fox terrier, as I had in those same years. I don't know if you ever met us, a child and he an old man, in the streets of Venice.
I know his life was sold to me. Over a thousand photographs, many of which have words or information written on the back, various letters and postcards received from friends or lovers, various holy cards and sacred images, letterheads from when he was a soldier, an American passport from Miryana, greeting cards and in the background a small silver frame with a small photo of a woman with a child inside.
I bought Mirto's life so that he wouldn't get lost in the void, to preserve his memory, because remembering is, in addition to a human act, also a political act. Because Mirto is not part of history, because no one will remember Mirto anymore, because in fact it was not relevant. I want to elevate his life, as a representative of the life of the single human being, to a subject worthy of attention, worthy of being remembered and even celebrated.
His life has been liquidated, sold off and now we, who have never known him, can only imagine it, trying to connect the fragments. But the true meaning of those moments we would never know, it is gone forever.
His memory has been erased and I can only offer a reflection of it.
The images, which had a meaning, which evoked memories, have become commodities to be sold for a short time and are now part of this work, basically, a commodity too. Yet these images tell the life of an ordinary man, with its dramatic moments, comic situations, moments of happiness and telling this life is perhaps telling the life of other men who have crossed the twentieth century.
I don't know when Mirto died, but the photos stop at the end of the nineties.
I don't know if the question "What will remain of my life?" Is ever asked, probably yes, like each of us, at least once. This is why a voice whispers in English (a language he probably knew) "how much does your life cost? What will remain of your life?"
I'll never know his answer. The wind and time that blows and flows relentlessly took her away, accompanying her memories.