The exemplary student from the wealthy province and the lost young man from the ghetto: lives the opposites until the meeting on the cursed road
FROM THE CORRESPONDENT FROM WASHINGTON. They were kept away from the Atlantic, Davide and Renato Giri, the son who had taken off from Alba, passed from the Polytechnic of Turin and flew to conquer the world, from Shanghai to New York and his father a mathematics teacher in a classical high school in the city. Since 2016, room 467 of the Computer Science Building of Columbia University was the kingdom of David, the niche from which he scrutinized the world and his future and took refuge in the intimate thoughts that all those who greet his homeland cyclically face.
His father knew he was happy, technology then shortens physical distances, almost makes you feel the scents when smartphones hook up to the Net and carry the voices to vibrate together.
Professor Giri today is left with a WhatsApp from the evening in which his son was killed with a stab in the abdomen. Davide told him that the football field he trained on was a bit too far from home, he wanted to change teams. Simple things, little confidences of daily life that make us stay closer, embraced on the journey.
Even Vincent Pinkney, 25, a non-existent profession, an established criminal wanderer, has a father. Which is in Harlem, where the stabbing son who knows how much and how he shows up. He told reporters for the New York Post: “Vincent is always out, it is true that he spent some time in prison but he is not violent.” Mr. Pinkney doesn’t know Vincent. He knows nothing about it. Or pretend at best because the truth is a boulder. Yet, he wouldn’t even need WhatsApp to talk to Vincent and scrutinize his troubles, fears and dreams. The night before the fatal attack he could have looked into the eyes of that son swallowed up by a gang that perhaps he chose or perhaps he could not avoid choosing. Maybe. They are locked there in the quadrant around 125th street in Harlem, there are not seven thousand miles to separate them as for Davide and Renato. “I saw it last night,” the end.
In this dialogue – non dialogue between father and son there is a lot of the life of David and Vincent. The boy from the Italian provinces, among the richest and most industrious, and the boy from the black ghetto in the shadow of the skyscrapers of the Big Apple. We are not in the script of “The Lives of Others”, here no one has an interest in spying on the other, not even knowing who the other is.
Davide meets Vincent in Morningside, it’s the moment that erases everything. Their differences clash there at 22.56 on an anonymous Thursday evening in December between 123rd Street and Amsterdam Avenue.
Their total strangeness suddenly becomes pure coincidence, it merges into one thing. And it seems impossible that there is a place and a fleeting moment of existence in which two people so different from each other can be together.
When Davide studied in Turin in 2012 and was one step away from a degree with full marks (after graduating in 2009 in Alba), Vincent is just 15 years old and is already in his first arrest, he will pack another ten before Thursday’s. evening. Davide studies piano, Vincent makes his way into street gangs, joins “Every Body Killas”. One explores the world, studies the map, fantasizes about apartments to look for, university residences, courses to follow and struggles to fill in registration forms that lead him to jump like thousands of Italian and European peers children of globalization, from one side to the next. other of the planet, to mix customs, foods, tastes, languages. The other is a prisoner of a violent banality, he soon becomes a man without knowing how to give a definition, in 2015 they catch him for an armed attack, they send him to prison. Just as it will happen a few years later: 4 years in prison, he serves three, he goes out on probation. Davide in the meantime is closer. He is also in New York. It is in West Harlem, Columbia University, controlled and protected, where, however, for a few months the grumbling about the safety that the neighborhood no longer guarantees as it once was. Crime in the Big Apple grew 11.2% in one year. In western Central Park they are still looking for the assailant of a tourist injured on 1 December. It is suspected of Vincent, this thin African American, just over 60 kilos, who seems possessed when he attacks, after killing Davide, a couple for a walk with the dog. “He wandered around … he hopped as if intoxicated.” The close encounter of opposite existences had just been consummated.
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