The fourth most important person (La quarta persona più importante)

Mirka, a 15-year old girl, recounts her adventures in the first person. Her parents committed suicide within one week of each other for no apparent reason, and left her alone with her grandparents, avid and without any affection. Her uncle Ludovico, a charming but nutty forty-year-old, convinces his niece to follow him on an adventure on the road through Italy, with the aim of saving her from her grandparents’ negative influence. While trying to escape their chasers, they hear on TV that God came down to earth, and decide to talk to him and ask him the reason for the double suicide. So they get in touch with Raffaele, a disabled usurer that enters into an agreement with them: he will help them to reach God on the condition that he could also go and talk to him. The means to reach God is Veronica, a television reporter interested in the scoop of her life: an interview our Lord and at the same time a television broadcast with Mirka and her uncle, who represent the case of the moment. At a certain point, things deteriorate. Mirka accidentally causes a funny mishap where Ludovico and Raffaele are injured, which leads them to check into a hospital. Ludovico is also reported to the police for his nieces’ presumed abduction. Mirka joins Sabrina, a lesbian policewoman who wants to bring her problem to God’s attention: the will to adopt a child with her partner Etta. When Mirka and Sabrina, joined by Veronica, reach God, they find out that he’s not as they imagined him; he’s a giant: tall, muscular, completely covered in tattoos and piercings. He chose to become a tattooist because “I like to mess around with people’s skin”, he confesses to Mirka. Shortly after, Mirka is left alone in a big hostile city. She meets Max, a killer that assassinated people, then a haberdasher that probably is a ghost, as he appears to her during the night in the lobby of a building where she and Max find shelter after the shooting turns out to be a trap for the killer. When Mirka and Max go different ways, the girl convinces Veronica and Roberta, a colleague of her’s, to help her talking with her uncle Ludovico, who is guarded by police. In order to do that, the three women implicate Alfred, an odd inventor with passion for ornithology (hence his nickname in homage to director Hitchcock, author of the film “The Birds”) who plays out an invasion of winged animals within the hospital, and the chaos that comes after makes Mirka finally access her uncle’s room. She will have partial answers; Ludovico doesn’t know the reason that pushed Mirka’s parents to commit suicide. At the end, she finds a letter from her mother in a shoe, which reveals that her and her husband’s suicide is due to the fear to face the future, a possible disease, a marriage crisis. Hence, ultimately suicide springs from the incapacity to live the unpredictable day by day.

In the end, Mirka will go and stay with her grandparents. Before the end, she will sign an agreement with God: the end of any addiction towards him. Anything happening to her will be only the result of her choices from that moment onwards. God will get out of the girl’s life forever and she tastes her freedom.

A novel about sorrow, grief, death of beloved people and sense of parting, but with lightness, irony and amusement. Indeed, the aim is to narrate a dramatic sequence of events with disenchantment and a smile, to make it even funny in certain circumstances.

Francesco Franceschini was born in 1967 in Narni. He has a degree in Modern literature and teaches Italian literature, History and Philosophy in a private school. He has published two novels edited by Verbavolant of Siracusa: “Apocalypse in slippers” (2011) and ” The most important fourth person”(2013). He keeps a blog (sdraiatosuibinari.blogspot.it) that was visualized by over 35000 people. In 2008 he earned a diploma in dubbing at Gastone Moschin and Marzia Ubaldi’s School. In May 2015 he was the promoter, together others, of the “creative writing laboratory” where he teaches about techniques and contents of storytelling. Since 1999, he has been a radio speaker and responsible for TNA radio programming.

Series: Admaiora!

Genre: fiction

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