PER IL MONDO ESTERNO (VERSIONE INGLESE)
It was quite late, when Kensuke finally came back home. He had just returned from he trip he had organized by himself : watching all alone at Japanese Navy general manoeuvres in Osaka harbour, an occurrence he had been waiting for a lot of time It had been wonderful….all those giant shining irony frigates and destroyers …. He had filled up good four diskettes by video-taping scenes from the manoeuvres –he had also attracted attention from the other spectators present there, by yelling repeatedly: "Great! Superb! Wicked!" -.
In that moment no-one was at home: Kensuke's father used to spend all time at Nerv Base for his job. He usually met his son for launch or dinner, or neither in those cases.
Kensuke suffered because of it, because of the loliness his father's lack caused him , and yet he couldn't blame him. At the end of the day, after Kensuke's mother's death, both of them had assumed the same demeanour, trying to escape their pain, by busying themselves in different kind of business . Kensuke got obsessed over military stuff, and watching at the other persons' life. His father devoted himself to his job.
The young man went to the kitchen, then he opened the fridge and took some food for dinner.His father was in Osaka, and had communicated him by phone he wouldn't be back for dinner .
That had not surprised Kensuke that much, so he started cooking . Those gestures he was doing reminded him of his mother, whose memories sorrow Kensuke had always tried to hide behind the mirth he showed to the other persons' eyes.He was good at hiding. But whenever he found himself all alone, like in that case, it was impossible for him to stop his train of memories of her.
Kensuke's mother's name was Noriko, she was a very attractive woman, blondish haired –as for the hair colour Kensuke had taken after her-, and she was an housewife.
Her attentive presence made him not experience loneliness during his early childood. In the same years, his father had already got his job as a Nerv employee.
When Kensuke was twelve years old, her mother wa taken seriously ill. Doctors diagnosed a cancer, an incurable one.
Kensuke-chan and his father visited Noriko assiduously, trying to bring her some comfort, and still she was losing strength irreversibly; in her last days, she couldn't even speak.
One evening, while Kensuke was watching at her bedside, his father went to the hospital bar, to take some drink for him. In that very moment, the telephone which was in the aisle rang, and he went to answer .
Nothing important , the conversation lasted one minute . Then he made his way back to Noriko's room, and he found out her wife was dead…
Her hear-tbeat had ceased in that moment, the nurses hurried up , trying to reanimate her: to no avail.
Kensukestood speechless: how odd…it was tragically odd. His father had always been beside her mother, very often together with himself. Now that he went away for only a minute, he lost the possibility to be next to her, in her death moment.
Kensuke didn't say a word, nor when her corpse was buried in the coffin, either during the funeral. He was in a kind of trance.
When he finally came back home together with is father, that was the time when Kensuke burst out crying desperately, flopping into his father's arms, maybe realizing for the first time the void her mother's death had created.
Their mourning lasted for a whole wook, then Kensuke's father had got to go back to his job, because his leave of absence from work had expired.Not to leave his badly hurt son alone, he asked his friend whether he could send someone to keep Kensuke's company. His friend sent his own son, Toji Suzuhara, who started to see Kensuke regularly; in the beginning, he did it to obey his fahter, but a big friendship had to spring up between them.
It was thanks to Toji's friendship that Kensuke finally found the power to react . And yet, one couldn't say he reacted in the right way: he definitely brought himself not to retire from the outside world; on the contrary, he started living only for it..
He dedicated himself to every kind of military matters, in order to avoid painful thoughts, then he got a camera to video-tape anything interesting happening around himself.
The reason for it was that he had resolved to care about the people, filming what was going on on the outside, only to forget about himself.. It was a wrong way to be..One couldn't escape for ever what's inside oneself.
And yet he could not do otherwise, for the time being. It was the only way he could feel relieved, somehow..
Recovering from these thoughts over her mother, Kensue became aware he had slightly cried.
Same old stories...
Behind his mask of gaiety, he concealed a terrible sorrow, which one couldn't expect..
Kensuke finished to prepare,then he swallowed his frugal dinner.
He finally went back to his room, and kept on putting all his diskettes in order: there were a good hundred of them. It was all life he had recorded, life belonging to the outside world. Kensuke looked like living for those tapes, one could say it from the care he used to preserve them..
Those diskettes were filled with other persons' lives, but they could have never ever filled his personal empty.
He too knows it very well.
THE END
