Eva Mikula - Loose End

Meanwhile, Biagio, my son's father, would not give up. Just relying on the bad experience I had lived, he insisted: “Do you see what people are out there? People who use you for money, for your skills, for your beauty. You will hardly find someone who is looking for you and who wants you for who you are, for what the real Eve is”. Biagio was really helpful to me at that juncture, but I still had no intention of resuming the relationship with him. I was more and more fragile and he proposed to me to get back together, not me, I felt inside me that nothing would change, that soon everything would return to the situation as before, to quarrels, to misunderstandings. But I was certainly interested in maintaining a good relationship: we had a child together and we had to take care of making him grow up peacefully.

The heart of each of us cannot be closed to love forever, not even mine. What is certain is that all the experience led me to develop a sense of mistrust towards people, in particular for the male gender. I necessarily had to protect myself a little, but I didn't put my feelings in a safe locked with an impenetrable combination. Another unspeakable, tragic suffering had to come, and it did. But nothing happens by chance and nothing happened by chance coincidence.

I had started putting short stays in Hungary and Romania on my agenda. The painful scam I ran into had made me think a lot and I began to think that perhaps it would be appropriate to leave Italy to plan a new life in Hungary.

Perhaps this involved ceasing from action, giving up some dreams. The relationship with my parents had reconnected and consolidated in recent years. My brother, on the other hand, had died a while ago, at 37. His wife found him lifeless in bed due to a heart attack, perhaps...

I started a new relationship with these assumptions. Through my sister-in-law, in Budapest, I met a man of sound principles, a hard worker. After a few months of dating and the ritual introductions to the family, we longed for a life together. I also thought about drawing up some work projects in Hungary, referring to my now familiar restaurant business, with the addition of hospitality. I had in mind to build a hotel with a restaurant, a children's playground, a swimming pool and a tennis court.

There was also the availability of land that was perfectly suited to the project: I had just received it from my parents. I had taken action to have the funds allocated by the European Union, so I was able to enter and benefit from a tender aimed at developing rural areas.

I was a 35-year-old woman who had started living in a fulfilling love relationship again, in fact I got pregnant. Somehow fate was giving me the opportunity to fill that inner void that prevented me from feeling one hundred percent mother with the firstborn. My possible mother-in-law, however, did not agree on the relationship between me and her son. She did not agree with the idea that she was having a nephew and that we were not yet married. Furthermore, I still lived in Rome, there was my son whom I could not give up and the real estate company that had to be followed. We would have had to wait at least a year to get organized and to create our nest in Hungary. There was a timing discrepancy between the objective situation and the pregnancy, a reflection that could also make sense. Also, my man's mother didn't like the past of “Eva Mikula”. For her I was the ex of a criminal, involved in a bad story of the Italian underworld, so I could not be included in the group of reliable people.

In summary: I would never have been a good wife. She hammered her son from morning to night with these considerations.

The fate tragically thought to resolve the dispute in the worst possible way. A referee decided for us that no one would ever know if I would be a good wife and what kind of dad and husband he would be. While he was traveling to Rome by car, just to organize our future together, he had a fatal accident on the highway. Our life flew to heaven with him. I will never forget the phone call from his friend informing me of the crash, of his tragic death. From his mother an embarrassing and absolute silence.

After the phone call, I felt bad. It was 5 in the morning, I was 3 months pregnant and I started bleeding. I called the ambulance and the operator questioned me instead of understanding the emergency, and then told me that the ambulance could arrive in 30 minutes. How could I wait so long alone and bleeding? I had only one support on which I could, however, count in Rome: Biagio. He picked me up and rushed me to the hospital, where I was stuffed with tranquilizers and injections for ten days to avoid losing the baby.

I had had a 50 percent placental abruption. A cruel unknown began to torture me: would my daughter be affected? The doctor, on the other hand, recommended not to underestimate the evidence that she would have offered me a life as an unmarried mother, with a son without a father. In fact, the daily difficulties I would have to face were evident. I imagined them very well, and I knew that the only person I could actually count on, namely Biagio, didn't take very well the fact that I had set foot in another relationship. However, I carried on with serenity the months until the birth. I rolled up my sleeves, worked out the mantra within myself, the guideline: “Yes, raising a child alone is one more reason to fight, to give myself new goals”. I did not want to remain anchored to the past, to the problems and conflicts with Biagio, even on how to educate our son. It was another important step. Responsibilities increased; I could no longer make mistakes and take risks that could then fall on the creature that was growing in me. No more wrong paths and inadequate men; I had already suffered too many disappointments from them.

In the meantime, we had reached 2010; the reputation that preceded me in the private sphere was excellent.

I was able to build a good image of a decent person and a hard worker with my work, seriousness and professional reliability. With neighbors, with the employees of the restaurant bar. In my real estate business, I had good feedback and some rewarding friendships. Instead, among those who had no direct contact with me, for the outside world, I was always and only the Eva Mikula of the White One Gang. I wanted to get out of that discriminatory aura that surrounded me due to the indelible history of judicial news in which I was involved in spite of myself. People outside my circle of relationships, “the insignificant others”, continued to perceive me as the complicit woman of murderers, the sly and ruthless dark lady seen in the courtrooms, on TV and in newspapers and told following the construction of a a convenient truth that had little to do with due process.

My image was as if embedded in that indelible story, very heavy to bear; an oppressive prejudice of public opinion that did not reflect the truth of the facts, neither yesterday nor today. “Don't care Eva” I said to myself, “you have the most beautiful thing in the world, soon you will be a mother again”.

After my daughter's dad died, I waited for a call from what would be my little girl's grandmother. It never came. I called her, out of a form of due respect, when her niece was about to be born, a week earlier. I was kind and loving. She answered me badly, very badly indeed, and slammed the phone down. I have never seen her again, never heard her again, never looked for her again.

All my vicissitudes, meanwhile, seemed to never end, it seemed there could be no peace for me. I still had my belly, it was June 2010, I was having lunch alone, in peace, sitting in the kitchen and stroking my baby who was about to come into the world. I was watching Tg5 of one p.m. as usual. I was lost in thought. I rubbed my eyes, maybe I was wrong, it couldn't still be me in the photo they were broadcasting.