The first thing you need to know is that Ettore was not someone who dramatized things.
He was made of a different substance from almost everyone else — denser, quieter, with that rare quality of people who do not need to fill silence in order to feel at ease. You could spend an hour with him without saying anything important and leave with the feeling that you had said everything. He was that kind of friend. The kind for whom there is no precise word in Italian, and perhaps in any language.
That evening he answered the phone on the first call. It was already late — one of those late-summer evenings when the heat still has the upper hand, but you can feel that something is already beginning to change. I told him I wanted to talk. He said of course, as always, with that willingness of his that was never mere courtesy but something more solid, more grounded.
We met at the usual place.
It wasn't somewhere that would impress anyone from the outside. It was one of those bars that never make it into guidebooks and seem to have existed forever on the same corner of the same street, with the same slightly tired light and the same stools. But it was our place — the place where we had spent enough time to know the name of the person serving us, to have a usual order, to feel something that resembled home. Places like that are worth more than they look.
I ordered. He already had something in front of him.
First round
“Are you angry?” I asked.
He didn't answer immediately. He rolled the glass between his hands — something he always did when he was choosing his words carefully, and he always chose his words carefully.
“No,” he said at last. “Scared.”
There is an enormous distance between anger and fear, and he knew it better than anyone. Anger has a direction, points toward something, gives you the illusion of control. Fear is open. It has no target. It leaves you in the middle of everything without telling you where to look.
“What do you mean, scared?” I said.
“I mean that at thirty-three, in my head, I have a life ahead of me.” He paused. “Maybe another twenty, thirty years. And feeling like it is already only a matter of time is a little wearing.”
A little wearing. That is how he said it — with his tendency to minimize precisely, to use understatement as a form of honesty rather than concealment. He wasn't diminishing it. He was naming the exact thing without allowing it to take up more space than it deserved.
I told him I understood.
“I don't know if you do,” he said. Not harshly — with the direct frankness that was his form of love. “But I appreciate that you're trying.”
I laughed. I think he did too.
“Another round?” he asked.
Second round
We talked about what really hurt. Not the disease itself — Ettore had already come to terms with that, looked it in the face and decided how he would live beside it. What hurt was what the disease was taking away his chance to do.
A child.
He used one dry, precise word: a legacy. Someone for whom he would be real. Someone who would have a living memory of him, not only a photograph and a name. Someone to whom he could pass on — not money, not possessions — that difficult-to-name thing that was his way of being in the world.
I stayed silent for a moment.
There was nothing right to say, so I didn't say anything right. I told him I was glad he had told me. That I would rather know. That I would do better staying close to what was true than to what would have been easier to hear.
“Yeah,” he said. “I know.”
Someone passed outside the window. The street was nearly empty — that quality streets have late at night, when they belong to a version of the city that does not exist during the day.
“Do you remember when we were all at Parco Pepe?” I asked.
His expression changed slightly. He didn't smile right away — he thought about it, like someone retrieving something from a long way off.
“When?”
“That night everyone was talking about going on vacation together. Everyone wanted you to come. Someone kept pushing.”
“Ah.”
“You answered sharply. Almost annoyed. No one said another word.”
“Yeah.”
“Years later I found out about your mother.”
Ettore looked at the glass. “It wasn't something to parade around,” he said.
“No. But that scene stayed with me.” I leaned in a little. “I want to answer people and life with the same firmness you did.”
He smiled — that particular smile that rose on one side only when he was about to say something precise and cutting. “Not perfect,” he said. “Perfect would be too boring.”
I laughed. Ettore laughed with his whole body when something genuinely amused him — a laugh with nothing controlled or calibrated about it. It was one of the few luxuries he allowed himself.
Third round
He was the one who brought up Thomas Mann.
He did it obliquely, the way he always did with things he genuinely cared about — almost hiding them, to see whether the other person noticed without having them pointed out.
“There's a book,” he said. “Colored Stones. By Mann. Pretty boring, actually. Not exactly commercial.”
“So?”
“So the title gave me an idea.” He rolled the glass again. “They're stories about ordinary people in the nineteenth century. Austrian villages, quiet people living their lives. Each of them is a different stone. Not precious, not rare — different. And if you look closely enough, each one has an innate grace and beauty.”
“Right.”
“I was thinking I'd like to meet people capable of seeing that beauty. People from outside, I mean — not only the close circle. Someone who passed by and saw it.”
I looked at him. “You have met them, Ettore.”
“Maybe.”
“Not maybe. Every morning you wake up.”
He was silent. Then: “You're one of the colored stones too. All those mornings you answered the phone. All the evenings like this one.”
I didn't answer. It wasn't necessary.
Outside the street was emptier still. The clock behind the bar showed some late hour — the hour when places empty out and the only people left are the ones who have a good reason not to go home yet.
“Another round?” Ettore said.
Fourth round
I asked him for two promises.
I didn't do it solemnly — solemn promises weigh too much; they break under their own weight. I did it the way you ask something of a friend when it is late, the noise in the room has died down and the conversation has already reached the good bottom of things.
“The first,” I said. “Every thought, every emotion that comes to you — don't make the mistake of identifying yourself with it. Watch it. Remember who you are and what you still have to do on this earth.”
He nodded.
“The second. Don't leave before you're finished. Swear to yourself that you won't go, no matter what, until you've reached what you need to reach.”
He stayed silent for a moment. Then he said, “I promise I'll hold on to life as hard as I can.”
It wasn't an easy answer to give. It was the true answer — the one that cost something, guaranteed nothing, but was the only thing he could give honestly.
“You are the best thing life could put in front of people,” I said.
“Don't exaggerate.”
“I'm not exaggerating. It's true, and you know it.” I stopped for a second. “That's also why I chose you as my witness. For me.”
He lowered his head. When he raised it again his eyes were bright — he wasn't crying; he was one moment before crying, that threshold where the body is still deciding.
“I'm trying to hold on,” he said.
“I know.”
“It hurts,” he said. He didn't specify what. He didn't need to.
“Make sure you stay beside me,” I told him. “For all the moments of fog that are still to come. The way you have in the past. I'll need you in the future too.”
“I'll be there,” he said.
And I believed him. Not because it was an easy promise — it was the hardest promise he could possibly make. I believed him because he was Ettore, and Ettore did not say things he didn't mean.
Fifth round
It was very late by then.
The place had almost emptied. Someone remained at the bar, someone at the other side of the room — those quiet presences that populate places at night and always seem to belong to another story.
I reminded him of an evening years earlier. A different bar, a different night — we had drunk too much, as we sometimes did, that combination of lightness and tiredness and wanting to stay a little longer. Some older men had come in — five, six, I don't remember — and at some point a song came on. One of those songs you know without knowing that you know it, that belongs to the air of the place where you grew up.
We started singing. Quietly at first, then at the top of our lungs — all together, us and those older men we had never seen before, arms around one another as if we had known each other forever.
Each of those men carried an entire story behind him that we would never know. A life, grief, joy, evenings exactly like that one — with other friends, in other places, many years before. Colored stones, every one of them. Each with its own grace, visible only up close.
Ettore smiled — a different smile from the others, softer, without the usual defense.
“I could never forget,” he said.
“I guard every memory connected to you jealously,” I answered.
Then I stayed silent for a moment. And then I said, “I love you, Ettore.”
He didn't hesitate. “I love you too, Sandy.”
We said goodbye outside. The night had that still quality it gets when the summer heat has finally loosened its grip and the air is almost cool, almost clean. I told him to write to me, call me, use me however he wanted — as a diary, as a sounding board, as somewhere to put the things that had no other place to go.
“All right,” he said. “I will.”
“Be avast,” I said — our expression, the one we had used for years, with no precise translation but meaning something like be well and see you soon and I know you're there all at once.
“Va bien,” he said.
And he walked away.
I watched him until he reached the corner. His way of walking had remained the same despite everything — that firm stride, a little slower now, but recognizable. A colored stone in motion, with its own innate grace, visible only if you stayed close enough to see it.
I couldn't sleep that night.
Not because of the pain — the pain would come later, with all its precision. I couldn't sleep that night because of something else: the strange, almost physical feeling that I had taken part in something rare. One of those conversations that happen only a few times in a life — when two people stop managing the distance between them and inhabit it instead, without defenses.
A symposium, the Greeks would have called it. Not in the banal sense of a banquet — in the original sense: drinking together, thinking together, being together in the truth of things.
Ettore died. Cancer won the biological part — the body, the measurable part. In the days that followed, many people who had known him said goodbye the way we say goodbye to the dead in the age we live in: with a song in a story, a post, a quotation. The same songs we had listened to together for years — songs that for us were not a soundtrack but something more precise, more intimate. Something that had an exact name, even if we never said it out loud.
Music for lonely guys.
It isn't a melancholy definition. It is the most honest one I have ever heard applied to two people like us. Because people who feel things in a certain way — who cannot do them superficially, who experience everything with that particular density you do not choose but simply are — often end up feeling invisible. Not alone. Invisible. There is a difference. Ordinary loneliness is the absence of other people. This is the presence of other people who still do not truly see you — who look but never reach the bottom, who listen but do not hear what lies beneath the words.
Our greatest pain, I think, was exactly that. Wanting to be seen. Truly seen — not as we are in the role we play, not as we are when we are presentable, but as we are on late evenings when the room empties out, the summer heat has finally loosened its grip, the glasses from the last five rounds (plus bonuses) are sitting on the bar, and neither of us has the slightest desire to go home.
Ettore saw me. I saw him. It was rare — rarer than people think, rarer than we like to admit.
The people who used those songs to say goodbye to him hadn't understood anything. Not out of malice — they simply couldn't. Some things can only be understood from inside, only if you have spent long enough in that specific place, under that tired light, on those stools, inside that quality of silence that forms when two people stop managing the distance between them.
Then they stopped, the way everything stops on social media. Life moved on, as it always does, indifferent and punctual.
But every time I answer life firmly, without explanations, without asking permission — I know where it comes from.
Every time I stop long enough in front of someone to see their hidden grace — I know where it comes from.
Every time I say I love you without waiting for the right moment — I know where it comes from.
And every time I sit somewhere late at night, with something strong in my glass and far too much desire to stay a little longer — I hear his voice.
Another round?
Yes, Ettore. Always.