My Dad Part 1

Starting from the end.

Duccio Turin in 1975. Photo Cas Oorthuys.

My dad died in a car crash in July 1976, aged 50. It happened on a nondescript open road in flat Piedmont countryside when a truck, the only other vehicle around, failed to stop coming in from a side road. His car was the famously aerodynamic Citroen GS, meaning it had a raked windscreen. He hit the truck midships, and the car became wedged under it, collapsing the A-pillar until the top of the windscreen was inches from his face. There were no airbags in those days, and he banged his head against metal at full speed. He was externally almost undamaged aside from a cut to his forehead, but his brain had sloshed inside the skull and was bleeding. They took him to two local hospitals, both ill-equipped for this, and by the time he ended up at the Molinette in Turin, blood and lymph had squeezed his brain into a non-functioning mess.

I got the phone call at 3AM from his sister, whose home he had left hours earlier, and flew from London to Milan to pick up my mother and drive to see him in hospital. They let me into the ICU, and there he was, handsome, tanned —this happened at the end of a holiday visit to his relatives—wearing a neat piratical bandage on his head. There were three other beds in the ICU, and the hiss of the respirators sounded like an evil wind blowing across the room. He had by then been recognized as an important person, and they could not turn off the machine without some decorum. The medic in charge explained to me that there was no hope, and that others younger and less damaged needed his bed. I assented. I am sorry I did not take his handsome hand in mine one last time.

Deaths are a near-death experience for all those that live on, and they elicit frantic hindsight. My mother, estranged from my father for decades, was shocked into remembering an episode that had taken place before she even met him. My father had visited some sort of astrologer, who apparently blanched at his birth chart and ended the consultation without revealing the awful portent she had seen. My mother’s take was that Aries were famously prone to head collisions. Also, the driver of the truck that killed him was named Volcan, and this fit well with a bad aspect of Pluto (a planet discovered when my father was 4). She decided not to come to the funeral because she felt her presence would be upsetting to my father’s young second wife and small child, both unscathed in the accident. Instead, I was dropped off at the mortuary by my stepfather, who acted nobly, like a victor deprived by fate of a worthy foe.

My father’s burial was to take place in the nearby Waldensian mountain village his family came from, where many graves bear his surname. He hadn’t visited Italy for years. It felt as if a vortex had lain in wait for him to come close by, so as to pounce and suck him into darkness. The hearse left the hospital with a number of cars in tow on the forty-mile drive. The hearse driver treated this as a delivery, and sped like mad in front of us, going through traffic lights just before red and forcing the column of cars to drive as if there were no tomorrow for any of us.

At the cemetery, strange things happened. Standing beside the coffin, I found a guard of greeters, purportedly close family, making sad faces and shaking hands with mourners. None of these people were known to me, and they ran off when I explained I was the son. To this day, I have no idea who they were. The only familiar face outside immediate relatives was an old family friend who, despite being only my father’s age, read the obituaries every morning, and had hurried in her little car to make it in time.

Also present was a Swiss frenemy of my father who most recently had demanded an exorbitant fee for a consultancy he had done (my father was a big UN shot at the time) and had been asked to reduce the fee. The frenemy had insisted it was all or nothing, and my father, who could be trenchant when pushed, had said fine, so nothing. Presently this guy was driving me at breakneck speed back to the accident site where the car, all smashed up, still lay in a ditch. The driver-side door had been prised open to extract him. There was some blood on the seat and a ragged bundle of hair stuck to the sun visor. I pocketed the hair and later dropped it discreetly in the garden of his sister’s place.

When I next spoke I was surprised to find my voice was changed: I suddenly sounded like my dad.

His hair, fine, black and slightly lank, has recently resurfaced on my young daughter’s head.