Life, death and Saint Anthony

Sometimes life is a matter of minutes… and death too.

Last Saturday, I was with my wife in our kitchen, cleaning, when all of a sudden we heard like a rain of something hard falling near us, on the roof at first I thought, or maybe outside; somewhere anyhow very close to us.

Both of us didn’t know what to think for a moment. We froze, like if what had happened did not make sense. I bizarrely thought one of the blinds in the living room or in the bedrooms, recently put up, had collapsed, and I ran into every room to check, but the blinds were all there.

My wife was in the meantime outside in the garden, looking puzzled at some stones, egg size, approximately twenty of them, scattered all around.

The flat where we live is a two-floor maisonette in a building of three floors, and our kitchen is an extension covering part of our garden. The rocks could have only had fallen from one of the two floors above us, and we both looked above to the higher floors for some understanding, but nobody came out.

It was absurd. Nothing had really happened but everything could have. Often we eat outside during the weekend when it is sunny. The rocks could have fallen on us when we were outside, and just one of them falling two sets of floors above on anybody’s head would have been enough for a one way ticket to the afterlife.

My wife and I were damn lucky to have been inside at that moment. I was actually expecting a guy to come around my place to buy some CDs racks that afternoon, and later on a masseur was visiting us. The guy arrived no more than five minutes after the rocks fell into the garden, and the masseur twenty minutes later.

Nobody came out from the higher floors, so I went up the communal stairs, still shaken, trying to find an explanation. I knocked at the neighbour directly above us a few times, but nobody was inside.
I then walked to the next floor above and knocked at the flat door. A man came out, and I asked him if he had seen any rocks flying into my garden. He said no, but then, speaking with his wife and daughter next to him, he told me they had an owl, and this owl did some trouble in their patio, and somehow the stones must have had fallen from the vase into my garden.

I was still shaken, and I don’t know why I was so calm. The scene looks to me so absurd. The three of them were there acting like the accident had almost nothing to do with them, and I was there, unhurt, but with the feeling that these three bloody stupid idiots could have had terminated my life or the life of the people close to me, or any people at the wrong time in my garden.

The thing is, they looked so pathetic and dumb, that I couldn’t even hate them.

When I came back to the flat, I told my wife the conversation with the neighbours and hugged her. I was immensely pleased the rocks had not hurt us.

While in the kitchen, I looked at the statue of Saint Francis of Assisi standing on top of the door and felt a true believer once again, and then, looking at the Italian calendar (where every day has a patron saint) I was reminded that Saturday 13th June is the day of Saint Anthony of Padua. The saint was born in Portugal but spent the last part of his life in Padua, near my town, and it is probably the most famous saint in the region. Funnily enough, a month ago, in Madeira, I had bought two statues of the saint: one for me and one for my grandmother.

Saint Anthony’s statue is in my living room now.

I don’t know if the rocks had fallen by coincidence on his day (out of all the days in the year), and if the saint had made a miracle or not, but I’d like to think that he did, and so I thanked him for that.

I also think, I should probably buy a net to put over my garden.