Ever since I began writing about ghosts, I’ve wondered what it really means to be a psychopomp.
Not in the mythological sense of one who ferries souls across a river, but in the more human, forgotten sense: the one who cares for death.
Not only to the dead and their tombs, but to everything that dies — relationships, ideas, seasons, languages.
It’s a humble and uncomfortable job, because our age has outsourced death to silence and care to protocols. And yet someone must remain at the threshold, to translate the language spoken at the passage.
The psychopomp’s task is not to save, nor to console, but to listen to what keeps speaking after the end.
It’s a craft that demands pity — and rhythm: the ability to recognize when a voice must be let go,
and when it must be repeated, like a refrain that hasn’t yet grown tired.
(for episode 2, “God’s Jongleur”, see here)
(for episode 1, “At Henri Toulouse Lautrec’s table”, see here)
The night is made of glass and wind.
My Florentine room smells of lavender and old rain. I’ve left the window slightly open: what comes in are not only draughts, but voices.
On the chair, my kefiyah and the sweatshirt that says “When in doubt, I argue” lie crumpled on top of each other like two exhausted animals.
I check my phone one last time: my friend Giovanna writes that she’s fed the homeless at Campo di Marte and that she’s tired now.
I think of her — of her hands kneading and serving — and of Leo, her husband, a gentle beast who clears the table in silence. I realize they are the third station in my inner map: the courage of care, the strength that does not fear tenderness.
I fall asleep with a bittersweet taste in my mouth. And the dream begins immediately.
I’m standing in a wheat field lit by an enormous honey-colored moon.
Lou von Salomé sits beside a fire. She points to an old radio resting on a stone. From its crackling speaker comes Zombie by the Cranberries.
Dolores sings with a voice full of wind, and with each “in your head” the wheat sways like a sea of souls.
This song reminds me of a radical idea I often think about, since my teenage years: those fighting in our heads are always the dead (But you see/ it’s not me/ it’s not my family/ In your head, in your head, they are fighting). This is why indigenous people like silence. However, if those fighting in our heads are aliens, how can we save ourselves from madness? How can we recognize or own voice among the many?
Lou smiles. “Listen,” she says. “This is the music that calls the dead. Not because it wants to hold them back, but because it recognizes them. Each note is a word that hasn’t finished saying itself. Whoever walks with the dead must learn their broken grammar — the rhythm that stitches together what the word divides.”
Then she turns on another radio, smaller, red, its antenna broken. Bonobo Power by Caparezza explodes into the air like sunlight.
The wheat field bursts into flame — but the fire doesn’t burn, it dances. The dead laugh, and I find myself laughing with them.
Softly, the voice of Ursula Le Guin reminds me that the True Language is the one spoken by the body. If you learn to distinguish it, you can easily avoid going mad.
“There’s the other pole of your musical Tao,” Lou says. “One song to summon, another to release.
Hunger and fullness, spirit and flesh. This is the smuggler’s rhythm, Margherita — the rhythm that carries souls from one world to another.”
From the fire, a familiar figure emerges: the High Priestess, the second arcana of the Tarot.
She wears no crown, only an apron stained with tomato sauce. In her hands, she holds a bottle of oil, which she offers me as a gift.
“Tomorrow we’ll go to Siena,” she says. “We’ll bring this oil to those who guard the dead, and let the saints teach us the craft of the living.”
Beneath her veil, silence does not conceal — it filters emotions.
The Priestess’s knowledge does not descend from above; it grows upward, like wheat, from below,
where flesh and earth exchange their news.
Next to her stands Leo, Giovanna’s husband, watching in silence. His eyes have the calm of gentle beasts who know pain but do not fear it.
Lou rises and touches my forehead softly, like a teacher taking leave of her student.
“Go, my child. The journey continues south. Every step you take will be a question turned into flesh. Remember: knowledge is useless if it doesn’t make you laugh at yourself.”
Then, from the circle of fire, a man appears with a quill between his fingers. He writes without looking at me, and each word he traces seems to hang mid-air.
“Who are you?” I ask.
“A friar who told the living as one tells the dead,” he replies.
The fire lights up the kind, ironic face of Salimbene de Adam, the chronicler of the rise and fall of the Swabian emperor Frederick II.
He doesn’t speak like a historian; he speaks like one who has seen too much. His sentences don’t explain — they examine; they don’t record — they reveal.
“I don’t arrange facts,” he says. “I listen until they vibrate with pity. Every word I write is a seed sown in the furrow of memory. Men first, then their destinies. If man has anything left, in the misery he’s made for himself, it’s only his voice. History comes after.”
Then I understand what I meant by psychopomp: not a priest of death, but an archivist of the present. Someone who fabricates the form of remembrance, who plants seeds in furrows, who summons presences — testing their weight, their worth. Someone who accompanies them without possessing.
His gaze clouds for an instant. “Laugh, if you can,” he murmurs. “Pity cracks the voice — but it’s through that crack that life takes shape.”
I wake up at dawn.
On the bedside table sits a bottle of oil I don’t remember buying. Outside, the October wind breathes like something ancient.
I look at my phone: a message flashes on the screen.
“My friend, let’s go to Siena. I’ve understood the game. I’ll wait for you at the station tomorrow morning.”
— G.
I smile. Then I see something next to the bottle: a small leather-bound notebook, dusty, as if it had stepped out of time. On the first page, in handwriting that isn’t mine, I read:
“Chronicle of one who saw men and loved them for their weaknesses.”
Signed: Frater Salimbene de Adam.
Outside, the sky begins to pale. And from some corner of the dream not yet gone, I hear a hoarse, warm, theatrical voice — the voice of Paolo Bonacelli, my father’s friend, who once played Salimbene in his Enzo Re:
“Remember, Margherita… one doesn’t study the saints to imitate them, but to laugh with them.
In laughter lies grace. The psychopomp doesn’t console — he teaches us how to laugh at the boundary.”
I close the notebook and hold the bottle of oil in my hands. The night dissolves, but the dream continues. And I know that tomorrow, in Siena, I will meet those who will teach me once more the craft of the living.
