Assem Akram - The '1492' Conspiracy

From the airport I went straight to my apartment. It really felt good to unload everything and drop on my bed. The entire trip had been emotionally and physically draining: over all, a few hours short of five days for a transatlantic journey… My entire body ached and I still had the echo of the awful rumbling engine noise in my ears. I was too tired even to get up for an Alka-Seltzer. It was the early afternoon and the jet-lag syndrome had perturbed my inner horologe.

I was lying flat, motionless, eyes shut on my bed, but I could not sleep. Soon, I was overwhelmed by a sentiment of uneasiness. In a succession of images, I could see Ungari – the father – bursting into the living room and showing us pictures of his sons; then the vision of Necromonti’s face in the Moroccan restaurant while he was giving us a lesson in the science of ‘pasta recognition’; followed by that of his brother Emilio - an ecclesiastic - giving me a lesson in tolerance, and a few hours later the same Emilio, inert, in a deserted airplane… As these and other images invaded my mind in a disorderly manner, the same question tortured me: how are we going to tell his father that Emilio too is dead? My apprehension was that the old man would either completely burn the fuses and wind up in an asylum, or decide to commit suicide, devastated by the news. Either way, I felt for him but I also felt immensely guilty because I was the one who had pressed Emilio to accompany us.