ABSENCE
It's 10 p.m. I turn off the lights in my room and I can feel that, in the darkness, the memories drift by tenuously… Sensei, the lights for you were turned off forever, on a rainy and warm summer morning… a whole world of experiences that flee through the air.
I don't regret that you have died, for you're never too young nor too old to die; moreover, that the time when we die is as little ours as the infinite lapse of time which preceded our birth… It is simply the pain of never seeing you ever again.
I want you to know that I am proud, for the bravery and humility with which you have faced that difficult trance, in which courage falters and will breaks. May this memory accompany me always and never allow me to be cowed or to cry out for salvation. And so that I learn how to die, as men die… as you have died, sensei. May that example deserve to last forever in my memory, for it is of tramps and not altruists (as the Yami Akuma used to say) to be disgusted with death.
You were not a bad sensei, but there's in you a figure that rises above these puerile considerations, for these aren't just the emotional words, fruit of the love of a son for his late putative father, nor the words of a student for his lost master. It's the admiration of a man for the virtues of another man, for if I'd been a child, I would have written something like… "and I will ask the gods to help me build a stairway to heaven, so that we can meet again, on the shores of a stellar morning, sensei…" but I am no longer a child. And at sixteen, I will keep only the memory of, what I consider, were your greatest virtues: Your brilliant intelligence, your unbreakable will, your ease of speech, your simplicity, your social emotion… your sense of justice, your honesty, your humanity, your faith in men and their infinite possibilities. It's a pity that your eyes will not see those great changes; it can't be helped, maybe next time. Once again the bad guys won… (you know what I mean).
We're really gonna miss your engaging conversation, your sense of humour, your stentoric laughter, which I can still hear clear, resonating in my mind, Jiraiya-sensei. But you and I know that only a part of our existence ends with our individual mind, with the cessation of our brain-animal consciousness. For the one who felt, in some way, in the midst of nature and the rest of mankind, doesn't die at all, because he continues to live through them…
That, we both know. And still… I don't understand why it costs me so much to swallow this bitter feeling and why it discourages me to know that there is no hope for you anymore of a new dawn, sensei. And because I'm really sure I won't be able to erase from my mind for as long as I live, the image and warmth of your smile… your fainting gaze seeking us all and your hand trying to reach my head… the traces of the torture on your face, for the arduous and painful works of death… and also I don't understand why, when the evening falls and a dark sheet buries the village transforming it into a jungle of indefinite forms: confused with the noises of the night, so propitious to nostalgia, my heart skips a beat, because I seem to hear your steps at the door or the window frame… and then that infinite echo… Pitiful prayer of your tired and unmistakable steps, that at the customary hour, pray to come back… to come back.
Could it be that sadness makes you doubt what you have learned?
Perhaps I still have trouble accepting that you're gone…
