I’ll come get you. I don’t want you riding with someone, maybe driving drunk. No come on mom, I’m not a child. There’s no arguing, I’ll take you all home. I can’t sleep anyway until you come back.
It is an imaginary dialogue, a probable hypothesis. We don’t know if it really happened, but we know what happened next. Her mother, Marika Cucchiarini, 45 years old, died on a provincial road in the night, due to the fault of a drunk. As promised, she had gone to pick up her son and some friends after a party at a farmhouse. It was around two in the morning, her Citroen C3 with her son, two other boys and a girl, all eighteen years old, on board was hit at a red light. She was hit by a Renault Clio that was traveling at high speed and didn’t even brake. The driver, another 24 year old boy, was found to be drunk on an alcohol test. Arrested, he is under house arrest in his home in Ferrara and declared that he had not seen anything. How this is possible is not clear, that is, how you can drive so drunk that you don’t notice a construction site or a car stopped at a red light. Instead it happened, it happens often and lives are broken for no real reason other than the high, recklessness and idiocy.
It happened on the Adriatica state road near San Nicolò di Argenta, in the province of Ferrara, on the night between Wednesday 5th and Thursday 6th June. The woman died yesterday at the Maggiore hospital in Bologna, her son and her friends were injured.
This is one of those stories in reverse, like the man who bites the dog, because in accidents of this type children die, young people returning from parties and discos, in the so-called Saturday night massacres, which are also a typology if they happen on Wednesday, because the methods are the same. The end of school, the beers, the spritz, the cocktails, a few joints, maybe even a few pills, the summer night, the first heat, freedom, friendship, the first kisses, love. Go find out. All things that have to do with life, with joy, with the future, in a script where death is not foreseen. But death always invites itself, crashes parties and discos. Mothers know this, which is why they try to protect their children, who are less familiar with death, because (generally and fortunately) they have not yet encountered it in their shortest life. We always think about protecting our children, that misfortunes should happen to them, because that’s what a parent fears most. We think we can protect them. This is what Marika must have thought.
To be poetic, one could say that the mother found death in her son’s place. But it’s not true. She could have been the son who died in the crash. Who knows, against such a mocking fate it is difficult to try to understand and explain. Perhaps it was simply written that Marika Cucchiarini’s time had come.
If we want to be realistic however, and the statistics and even the premium rates of insurance companies say so, the young male behind the wheel is a constant danger. The odds were in Marika’s favor, the mother behind the wheel may be boring but she often saves your life. Even if there’s no mother to hold against the case.
If we look at it from Marika’s point of view, we can be sure that she would have chosen this way, she would have preferred to die instead of her son, assuming that the choice is ever possible, because this is the order in which things must happen . First the parents go and then the children and any parent who loses a child in a car accident would have willingly exchanged it, she would have wanted to be in their child’s place. Because life after that is hell.
If you look at it from the survivors’ point of view, their lives will also be marked forever. That of her son and her friends, but also that of the murderer, when she realizes what she did and how simple it would have been to avoid it. Especially this one. This banality of evil that makes you shiver and enrage: it was enough not to drink before getting behind the wheel. But we will continue to tell stories like this as long as those who drive, and especially young males, drunk on alcohol and speed, continue to feel superior to the laws of physics and those of life and death.
