The mystery of time
It is online on all major shops Avventura nelle palafitte (‘Adventure in the Piles’), a new short story by Ricardo Tronconi about the passage of time. And what better time to read it than Christmas, an occurrence with which the birth of Christ is cyclically celebrated each year?
True, this novella is not about the Savior. Time, however, is a fascinating and never obsolete topic when it comes to religion. In the Western Christian world, all religious holidays are marked by a well-defined time, by mysteries, sometimes by unexplained miracles. And we are not far from the plot of our story.
Two world-renowned archaeologists, specializing in Neolithic and pile-dwelling, discover among the finds from an excavation at Lake Lagone a watch of a well-known brand. Naturally, wild speculation is not slow in coming. Perhaps someone lost it during the last 70 years of excavation? Was it aliens who dropped it from their UFO? What if it was all about publicity? Yes, because the watch, while retaining signs of time, has a state-of-the-art design, too much even for the years in which it is found.
Our protagonists, however, quickly realize that something is not quite right. After a series of encounters and vicissitudes, they allow themselves to be persuaded to make a jump into space-time. The goal? To discover the mysterious origin of the clock. Thanks to a leopard-print Panda 4×4, they reach their destination four thousand years earlier, at the very pile-dwelling village they would study in the future and in which they would find the clock.
From here on you will have to solve the puzzle. Brace yourselves: it will be like riding a roller coaster, between space-time paradoxes and historical events experienced firsthand.
Going back to our initial reflection, then, what does Christmas have to do with all this? The key word is always time, symbolized by that mysterious clock that we do not know whether it comes from the past or the future and that leads the protagonist archaeologists to question their own origins. The entire narrative is marked by a sharp caesura between a “before” and an “after” (with clear reference to Anno Domini). Between what we perceive to be flowing and what we manipulate over time. Between the events that brought us to be what we are and the promise of something yet to come.
Once again, we see the protagonists of the novella scrambling to change time, which, however, is always true to itself and makes events happen exactly as they are supposed to happen, with or without human interaction. As always, the only glimmer of freedom for humans lies in the decisions they make: such as the last choice of Claudine and Mirco, the two archaeologists, which makes them precisely “free” from the time they had been chasing up to that moment.
And it is no coincidence that the novella ends with an unexpected pregnancy, which rumors suggest is longer than normal… a symbol of that rebirth that only those who know they cannot master time, but welcome it in all its past, present and future nuances, can fully enjoy in its liberating power.
Happy reading and Merry Christmas!