TOWER OF SILENCE

Chapter IX:

"... So, At That Hour When Time slips from us,
are we wedded to Whom I stood before him,
and With The sacrament of his kiss I signs himself unto us,
and makes us of one flesh With Him. '"

(Simeon Solomon, A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep)

-Everything was all so ambiguous and confusing- continued David-, and I hardly knew what was happening between passed: time, events, milestones, and other ones less so; the question about Anthony's paternity (no, he is not my son; his father was one of the many ills that Eleanor used to take revenge of Jason); my divorce;his divorce; the military life in Afghanistan, when he came home covered with wounds, and I took care of him day and night, leaving all for to moist those feverish with a few drops of water, and he begged me for a kiss that I repeatedly refused ...

Then came the founding of the unit, in which we put everything we had, and still lectures, tours, research, books, awards and recognition we received throughout everyone for himself, and altogether.I already say with conviction: I was always good, but he was certainly the best one .Without any doubt.

After the accident in which I lost my left eye, as I had done with him,he did not leave my side for a single wasn't neither eating nor sleeping: he just watched beside me, sitting next to my bed.I remember him joking in public,before the doctors and nurses, sayingthat I would be now like Hannibal or Wotan ,an in famous one-eyed guy.. But, alone, when I felt asleep, he wept bitter tears ,so desperate as I had never seen before in a man .He caressed and kissed me , whispering that he would have gladly given me his eyes, because he was tired of seeing so much misery and human filth ... He called me: "life of his life and soul of his soul" ...Those words broke my heart, and I know he wasn't pretending always used to feel guilty about anything ,even about what could not be avoided, as if he weighed on his head the image of living in eternal guilt of all of this,he used to drink as a sponge, increasingly, to the point that, when he was summoned by your superior orders he was really and absolutely sick ... and the disease was alcoholism.A legal technical euphemism turned it , however, into post traumatic stress.

After that time, time of continuous fatigue and superhuman efforts(time when we slept together more than once ,embraced, knowing that we were not allowed to explore all that separated the torso from the waist ), I decididely came to my retirement (not sure if it was due to my personal fear,a sort of constant feeling that I would have to work day and night beside him) , and then was when I received the letter in which he said that, at last, as never before in his life, he had fallen in love.

He regretted that the "little freak of nature, endowed with all the gifts as a budding dark archangel" (the pompous phrase could only be yours) was still almost a child, barely pubescent, absolutely innocent in his naive beauty and natural astonishing beauty and his sweeping intelligence had blinded him to such an extent that, contrary to every principle established by Regulation (the damn rules!), he himself became his personal mentor, risking even Van Houten (who still walked by Nevada) would be able to hunt him. Then he did not care to live "in the capital of tacky and outlandish raids" (as he called Las Vegas), because it meant being close to his subject of took him to Berkeley, with the resulting scandal ( a boy of fourteen, a little genius presented by a renowned protector ... whom, unfortunately,had a very bad reputation in his private life.) "

Rossi paused, and took a long sip of coffee..During that pause, Aaron felt like if the universe was collapsing again over universe whose order was blind. His arm was clawing to feel that nails were bleeding in a superhuman effort to hold on to his poor, low, miserable hope.

-'Do you know if anything…. could have happened then?- he asked, and then he,the SSA Aaron Elijah Nephtali Hotchner , the man who never recoiled before anyone or anything, confessed to himself: "I am a coward."

personal ethics (because he had it , but twisted and incomprehensible to the others) did not allow boy was only fourteen, and, except for his overwhelming intellectual superiority, he yet behaved as a c Gideon looked happy in his role as an adoptive father .Proud and happy.

One day he came home to talk to me exclusively about that boy.A fact, he spoke quite showed me photographs (he was a freak: photographing all the people around him, and displaying the images in front of him, looking intensely, insistently, as devouring with eyes). Then ,he played the piano most of the afternoon, and he said he knew I could infer all just listening to the music.

-And could you?

-Yes,I know very well that, when he wanted, he knew how to be understood without words.

Rossi paused;then,he lit a cigarette, and said, gravely:

-Now, besides all this, and responding to your constant demand : yes, I thought, indeed, that the crimes had really taken place. With L 'Heureux and I received the photographs, with no return address, finding the names of the alleged ví stay dates coincided with Gideon's visits to the countries involved in the issue.-Rossi punched furiously on the table -And I believed this…I believed he was a murderer! Someone who had done what he did with Frank Van Houten, and with that prostitute, someone who had punished in a way as ruthless as when, at the time, rushed to the ones who humbled Reid at the University, was well capable of this, and even more!

Aaron shook, and made efforts to do not show he soon felt that he should not worry about whether the disturbance was manifested or was like something coming suddenly to him: he felt that everything was useless.

-The fault was mine, maybe –Rossi continued -I should have researched more have seen: Garcia solved it all with a simple clic. Regarding who sent those letters and those photos, and why the hell he did it , I have no more blooding doomed idea.

David sighed long, finished his coffee, settled his long gray raincoat, and took his hat.

-I shall not go back to America .So…this is the goodbye in my name to the others, please.

-Wait !One more detail…

-What?

-Why did you counsel us to shoot at kill? And how did he know we were coming?

-Because he had asked me to do so. And he knew we were coming because he asked me for to notice of this I wasn't worried about Spencer: I knew he wasn't in a real danger.

-Did you already know that Gideon was sick of terminal cirrhosis? Since then?

-I always knew the beginning of his I was always in the disposal of to seem cruel and inhumane if it could save him from more pain..He had already suffered too much in this life -he sighed,doing a long ,he continued:

-What can I say ... I advise you as a friend, not as a professional: Aaron, please,take care..When one has lost the sense of reality towards a chimera, when things are stripped of their materiality and everything becomes confusing, and diluted in a reverie that never stops ... it is pain that , with pain, it comes always of the soul, loneliness of spirit, a disease that is increasing over time, and exhausts us, kills us, little by little, drinking our life dropwise.

-That's what happened to him?

David nodded.

-And to me- he said, before slowly leaving the door open to the night, for the last touch of a dark past that definitely had evaporated when tossing that handful of ashes.

An old photograph and the Eibar special were left on the ón put the gun in his pocket, and looked at the picture, which, in the dim light of the lamp, it acquired the tinge of a phantasmagory .It was Gideon (he would have little more than twenty years in that picture, but Aaron recognized him instantaneously,at that "unmistakable aura" emanating from a familiar , rare light, incisively coming from the apple of his eye), probably dressed for a party,in the costume of a swashbuckler, with mustache and goatee to the Spanish; long hair, almost black, and again those bright eyes, lit by a malignity that was a sly mixture of tenderness, infinite wit, insolent contempt and helplessness .. Atrocious eyes wrenching on a smiling face ... Aaron recognized in that vicious young lad the features of a pure blood Sephardi . "strong warrior." El unbeatable.

He was beautiful in that distant time, without experienced an immense pity for him, for Rossi, and for himself.

He drained his glass, then stored the picture in the same pocket with a strange kind of mercy he was surprised by how deep and unusual, and went upstairs.

The journey was tiring, but almost a relief compared to the events that had been left behind.

Derek fortunately didn't do more only asked if Rossi would accompany them back home, and, to meet face to face with the silence of Aaron, silent, he headed his headphones, and got lost into his world.

Before boarding he bought perfume for all the girls, and also to his mother, sisters, aunts and cousins, plus a magnificent ring of great beauty, extremely has not need to ask who was the addressee of this last special present . Derek spent all he had, and he did so with great pleasure and infinite affection.

Aaron felt a healthy envy: why he could not do as Derek, whom intelligence had managed to get along with a simple heart, noble and affectionate?

Why, in the narrow world of Naphtali Elijah Aaron Hotchner, everything was subject to a permanent structure, which depended on the environment settings, circumstances, and even expectations, desires, aspirations, etc., of others?

A pogrom mentality, certainly: a permanent spirit of ghetto strictly controlled from within the ruins ... that is not noticed from the outside.

Unscathed hieratic, severe, with eyes shining like sparks mourning inquisitive, digging through the stinking reservoir of human misery: he had been trained well, because it had been raised so , and so was his father's world, and his grandfather's, and his great-grandfather's, in the Jewish quarter of Prague.

During the trip, Spencer was dozing with his head on Aaron's chest, like clinging to a shelter that he, Aaron, could not offer.

Thank God, the boy slept almost the entire period of the long journey, or remained in the intermediate state between sleep and wakefulness (that world of shadows and delusions), muttering incoherent words (perhaps still circulating in their blood the remains of those infamous substances ), curling up like a hungry child in search of the chest to be fed.A c hest that was dry, hurt, tired, but could not afford to show not one of his wounds.

Sometimes he looked up, glancing at Aaron with his beautiful sleepy eyes, barely open, asking something that did not quite put into words, and he, Aaron responded with silence and more silence, stroking her hair soaked in sweat, wrapping the strands that stuck to his forehead, dying for to place a kiss on it, but without the capability of to do it, feeling exhausted forces in a mere gesture that never came to fruition.

(Back at Quantico)

It took several weeks to ordain and arrange redacted his irrevocable resignation, signed it , and submitted it to his superiors, resulting joy of the Strauss woman , who looked at last free from her most hated obstacle.

He would not go more into it, accusing her of blatant discrimination and anti-Semitism, but made it clear that he had suffered countless humiliations by that proud woman, who filled his mouth calling him "fagot Jew dog" in how many times she may be put before him.

Derek would take command again: he was more than qualified to do so, and he would have also, the help of a special kind of very experienced man, as it was Sam Cooper, the best at what they were doing, only just a step below .. the master.

After congratulate Derek on his upcoming wedding (he had finally decided to make Penelope throw downstairs her absurd "operetta fiancé"), Aaron went to his lonely apartment (his son Jack was at his sister Ruth's, in DC) waiting for the acceptance of his resignation.

When the phone rang (he had spent just over a month since his return), he thought he wasfrom the office for the confirmation.

But it was a long distance call: Ms. Mariangela Rossi Di Leonardo, whose beautiful villa in the Neapolitan coast David had taken as a refuge, announced to him that his brother, the former chief Supervisor of the BAU , had died of a stroke , two days ago.

A shiver ran not only Aaron's body ,but also his soul.

("Aaron, take care ...")

He was still under the effect of the news ,shocked by what had occurred ,when he received the call he had been waiting.

His resignation had been finally accepted unconditionally.

….

(Refectory of the Urquhart's psychiatric clinic ,, in Chevy Chase)

The nurse accompanied Spencer until his stared at him,in boy looked somewhat better, but still he had not said a word.

-I'm going to get you out of here -'said Aaron- We will go away from this . I'm taking the child also with us: I will situate him in a boarding bilingual school.-

He clutched the white hand, which felt cold, as if he had run out of blood,and continued:

-But please my life .. please ... speak ... say a word ...

In response, Spencer looked up, and stared at him, until his tears sprout, that eyes veiled in mourning were bathed like a in slow,painful rain ...

-Tell me something .. for mercy! ... Aaron insisted, and his voice muffled.

It had been a month that Spencer had joined the clinic after intense depressive symptoms, which led him to an almost catatonic had crumbled just when the plane touched down in America.

His lips were eyes,like his climax of pain and despair, Aaron had to solve the indefinite medical leave, interning him in Urquhart's clinic, one of the best institutions specialised in this type of of this together with the formalities of his resignation, and the rest of the unit with their damn questions, and the Strauss woman laughing in his face ... And Rossi, who had died so suddenly, and so far ... without have said goodbye ...

Aaron wondered how far he could bear.

And,perchance for the first time in all his life, he made a bold decision in the area of his own privacy.

After leaving Spencer in the refectory, he asked to speak to Urquhart, and let him know that he would take Reid with him.

Urquhart, contrary to his expectation, nodded, smiling:

-That's exactly what I was going to propose, Dr. Hotchner. Dr. Reid is not really sick: if we look at the characteristics of his actual state, I will tell you that it is anything but a form of post traumatic stress: a type of shell shock. In order: you know enough about human behaviour to having to waste my time (and make it miss you, too) with more explanation.

That said, he signed what Hotchner asked him, and after a brief nod, he retired.

…..

A week later, after to have seen Spencer spending seven days with his chin resting on his knees, hearing continually the second concert of Rachmaninov in twenty different versions, and still without having uttered word, given the desperate look of Aaron, both the lovers ( accompanied by the little Jack, for whom everything was a kind of game) left the country, for to do not return nevermore.

(TO THE EPILOGUE….)