by Antonio Napoli

“At the sunset of the last day of the year, you will die,” the nganga, the wise sorcerer, had foretold, while the wind on the dunes echoed the lament of those who had been lost, never to return.
The European traveler, accustomed to the boundaries of reason, was surprised and terrified by his surrender to the ancient superstitions.
And so, like the Pompey in flight described by Lucan, he rushed toward any possible destination of salvation.
He reached a barren land, far from the waters, where the dust mingled with the flesh of soldiers in battle.
“Here, death will have its work cut out for it. It won’t concern itself with me,” he thought. But from a distance, amidst the bodies crashing into each other, he saw a dark shadow quickly glide toward him. He saw it despite the chaos, heard its wheezing, despite the clamor.
Frightened, he fled toward the forest, his heart pounding like a drum.
“Here, death is too busy,” he murmured. “The animals crawl, fly, walk, leap, and kill each other in search of an insatiable hunger.”
Yet, amid the rustling of the leaves, he felt a presence. He shivered, a whisper between the leaves chilled his skin. Something was moving between the trees, adapting to every form, every crack in the earth, like a restless stain.
Death was closer than he had imagined.
He then remembered an ancient story, the tale of the city-labyrinth, a ghost town where no one could ever find him. And he ran to it, breathless, hopeful. “A labyrinth can protect me even from the death that seeks me.”
It was the last day of the year. The man wandered through the maze’s winding paths, searching for a safe refuge, but the labyrinth only fed his uncertainty and insecurity.
When he thought he had found an illusory salvation, he saw a winged shadow descend from the blue sky.
“It’s the angel who watches the tiny earthly things from the infinite sky,” whispered the voice of the wind, which knows all the secrets of both earth and sky. “It is the angel who casts the soul into the abyss.”
And at that moment, the traveler understood. He understood the mystery of time, and how, in Genesis, when the hand of God had not yet separated the earth from the sky, time was already written on the lines of the divine palm.
The hand that writes destinies, that marks the end of every journey on the skin, his hand, was now held by that of a black woman. The red sunset struck him like lightning before fading into the abyss.
Death itself had taken his hand, caressing its lines and closing it into a fist. And into a fist had also closed the soul of the European traveler, dead in that African land where superstition reigns supreme and the boundary between the real and the unreal blurs, like the line between sky and earth, in the sunset of all things.