Como (Italy) The Beauty that Moves a Man’s Life The story of a designer “obsessed” by the passion for beauty, searching for it in work and in love, but unsatisfied, until he has an encounter that changes everything. It puts him on the road of a new, unexpected creativity, in a work of communion by Paola Bergamini At the top of the stairs, Erasmo clutched some cloth samples and the designs of his brand new line of interior design fabrics. He was happy. His dreams were coming true, in spite of his family’s pressure to stick him behind a desk as a bookkeeper at the family firm. He had gotten his high school diploma in accounting only because he was forced to do so, but whenever he had had a moment, he had sat down to sketch interior design ideas and restructuring projects. Nobody had understood him. He had felt as if he were in a dead-end. Then, something unexpected had happened. After countless interviews for a job as a bookkeeper, he had spoken with the owner of Ratti fabrics, in his own city of Como. The owner had asked him about his hobbies, and Erasmo couldn’t hold back; he’d gushed out all his ideas on interior design. The owner then said, “Okay, I only have a position for a bookkeeper right now, but I like you. Listen, I’m thinking of creating an interior design division, and the day I start it up, I’ll call you. In the meantime, study this.” In his hands was an interior design encyclopedia. Mr Ratti had kept his promise, and now Erasmo was doing the work he had always dreamed of: attending to beauty. Erasmo’s thoughts were interrupted suddenly when he caught sight of a young woman coming toward him. Small, slender, hard features, and dark, Mediterranean coloring. It was a question of a moment, the batting of an eye, like when a camera lens stops time for an instant that fills reality. Erasmo had only one thought: to be with her, forever. It seemed impossible. He had always ridiculed the idea of love at first sight, and had always said he’d never get married, because no bond could last that long; once the thrill was gone, each should hit the road. But no. He took a few steps and said, “My name’s Erasmo.” “Pleased to meet you. I’m Serena.” They got to know each other and fell in love. A promise in a gondola She came from Cagliari, and had never traveled. In the course of a year, Erasmo brought her all over Italy. He taught her to ski and to swim. They passed every minute together. Then they decided to get married, and to do so in a church, to make their relatives happy. As an atheist, he saw religion as just a set of wearisome rules that at a certain point he had rejected. They got married in Venice, because the city had fascinated them. Everything–the clothes, the church, the ceremony–was esthetically perfect, beautiful. Just before arriving at the church, Erasmo had stopped the gondola and said, “Listen, Serena. Promise me that we’ll never have children. I don’t want to share you with anyone. Just you and me, forever. Otherwise, let’s just drop it.” Perhaps she had a moment of hesitation, but at the heart of the matter, they wanted the same thing. And so she said, “Alright.” Seven stupendous years followed. At work, Erasmo achieved his dream, staying as a consultant at Ratti, but also opening his own interior design center, a sort of showroom for the home in which every piece of furniture, every component, was his idea and design. He was in great demand for reconstruction and interior design projects. They continued on many trips all over the world, in ever more distant, ever more beautiful places, as if trying to satisfy the desire for something beyond, for which he had no name. One morning, Serena discovered a mass in her breast. After exams and follow up, they learned that it was nothing serious, but it was a shock for Erasmo. He had only one thought: “If all this ends, I have nothing left. If Serena should be no more, I would need someone to love, and to love me.” The forever had to continue: it was the desire for a child. Later came their daughter, Dafne. Then, an external, painful circumstance broke into their perfect existence, and caused them to question the meaning of life. Beauty, so sought after and loved, was no longer enough. The love between the two, the three of them, was no longer sufficient. Only the suffering of living was left. To what end? “Live in communion” Without even knowing why, Erasmo accepted a friend’s invitation to go to Yugoslavia. They stopped in Medjugorje, and there he felt a certainty: Paradise exists. He caught a glimmer of a greater belonging that even embraces your pain. It was the simplicity of Christianity. Many years before, when he was fourteen, he had felt the same experience, with his parents and siblings in Assisi. Praying in the Porziuncola, he had thought, “I’m staying here.” He hadn’t told anyone. A few years later, the same thing happened during a meeting in his parish with a missionary. When he had looked for her, she had already left. The time wasn’t right. Time is the Lord’s. When he returned home, he spoke with Serena. “There is a road. I can just make it out. We only have to understand how to get onto it.” It was the beginning of a new thing, breaking into their lives, uniting them. A few days later, Erasmo’s father suffered an infarction, and sent for his three sons. “I leave you my faith, which I’ve tried to transmit to you. I only have one thing to urge you: live in communion.” His sentence took root in Erasmo’s heart. That evening, he and Serena began to pray, and this gesture, more than all the years they’d lived together in the most complete intimacy, united them in a new way. It marked the beginning of a new life, of new gestures. “Live in communion.” They spent Sundays at his mother’s house, with his brother Innocente and his wife Marina. But it was not enough. They understood that they needed a place, a companionship. They began a spasmodic search, in the parish, in some groups, but nothing seemed right. Their sister Maria Grazia invited them to try the experience of CL. “No way–not CL. They all talk and think the same.” Preconception. “ Enlarged” families One morning, Maria Grazia invited him to go listen to Fr Giussani. Here was the road! It was just like the encounter with Serena on the steps of Ratti, an immediate sense of correspondence. It was the answer to their spasmodic search, a religion full of love and freedom in the context of an encounter; a tangible, visible presence that you can’t hold back from communicating. So who else would he communicate this presence to, if not Innocente and his wife, who had begun to share this new life with them, to the extent that they had decided to get married in church? Christianity is communicated from person to person. In those years their second child, Giovanni, was born, another gift of the Lord. Every year, Innocente and Maria, both physicians, spent a few months in India working in a hospital there, at the invitation of a missionary friend, and each time, they would leave their children with Erasmo and Serena, who “enlarged” their family to receive them. The families became increasingly united, and their gestures of a new belonging took the form of attending Sunday Mass together, reciting the Rosary, and, later, sharing vacations. The words of their father seemed to be finding concrete expression. So then, why not look for a housing solution so the two families could be closer? By chance, Erasmo heard about a tumbledown house with a big yard that the owner wanted to sell quickly. They went to see it, and found it to be the ideal solution. They began the work of restructuring. A work of communion The puzzle pieces seemed to be falling together. Only one piece didn’t yet fit: work. Erasmo loved his job, but the environment seemed to clash with the quest for meaning that continually resounded in every instant of his day. Even the search for beauty was pure aestheticism. His own creativity seemed to him to be merely an element of distraction. But he loved that work, and knew that he had an innate gift. He didn’t yet know that it was a talent to be used to bear fruit. One day, some friends told him that there was a Memores Domini, Susy, who did the same work. He tried to reach her for a year. Then, “by chance,” he met her right in his own showroom, where she had come for a photo session. Without mincing words, he asked, “How do you manage to make memory of Christ in this environment? It isn’t coherent.” She responded, “Come to my house, and we can talk about it. In any case, I don’t care about coherence.” They spent entire evenings in the trattoria in front of the Memores Domini house, discussing the issue with their new friends. Then one evening they were invited to dinner, and Fr Giussani was there at the table! Erasmo asked him the same question, “How can I do this?” Fr Giussani’s response was simple and disarming, “You have a very beautiful gift: put it to service. You can do every job with the memory of Christ, because it becomes a hundredfold in its true meaning.” Erasmo replied, “Okay, let me set up a business with Susy so we can help each other together.” After a while the answer came: “Start out together on this adventure.” Erasmo risked everything, intuiting that the hundredfold was involved. He sold his showroom and opened a new studio with Susy. It was an immediate success. In the meantime, their house was finished. They had another meeting with Fr Giussani, with Innocente present, as well. They asked another question, “How do we live together?” Fr Giussani answered, “Do a work of communion.” These were the same words their father had said so many years before. “Do some gestures, daily Mass, Lauds, the Angelus, School of Community. In fact, I’ll do it with you. Come here.” And so it was. A Cometa on the road A year later, the sisters of Martinengo asked the Figinis if they could host two brothers who had been removed from their families. Erasmo and Serena, years before, had already hosted a boy with family problems. For Innocente, it was a new experience. For the sake of that communion, they both said yes, and from that moment on, their homes opened up. Many knocked on their door. Short-term foster care, young people with problems who needed daily help, couples in crisis, and young, unwed mothers… Here was the work of communion. It had been sufficient to say yes, to entrust themselves, and the Lord had led them along a new road. Today, the families of Erasmo and Innocente have been joined by two other couples who wanted to share this communion. The Cometa–the name chosen for the Association that oversees the structure (see Traces, February 2004)–hosts 15 young people in residential foster care, and 50 in day foster care. Then, as when a constellation shows the way, other activities were born, such as a family-run nursery school, and a school for earning high school equivalency. There are many projects, as many as Providence will sow along their path.