It all started with an email entitled ‘worried’ from my mother.
No one had heard anything from my father for two days. “He’s not answering the door, or the phone,” she wrote. “The lady who lives below him hasn’t heard anything at all. And he’s locked the door with the key from the inside, so the cleaning lady can’t get in either.”
My parents split up when I was two years old, and although when my mother moved back to Italy a few years ago some old romantics (including me) thought they might rekindle their relationship, they live three and a half hours apart by car. But whenever there is a crisis, my mother hot-foots it up there from her home close to Rome, ever loyal and always heroic.
I had spoken to my father a few days before the email, and he had asked me to get Quentin Tarantino’s email address. “I have an idea for a film for him, about Fellini,” he told me. Being a dutiful daughter I had found his agent’s email address and sent it to him, I had not heard back. This is not unusual, my father corresponds as and when he feels like it. In fact he does most things as and when he feels like it, including answering his doorbell.
The day after the email my mother called to tell me that my aunt and uncle were on their way to my father’s flat and that she would be joining them as soon as she could get there. “I fear the worst,” she said.
I spent some extremely sombre hours imagining that my father had fallen over and hit his head and was lying somewhere in the apartment suffering, dying or even dead. I kept thinking about all the things I still want to talk to him about, and how I had been planning to see him in April.
Eventually the news came through that the fire brigade had broken into the flat through a window. It is a first-floor apartment in the main square of Novafeltria, a small town in northern Italy, and the gathered crowd enjoyed the drama enormously. They had found my father in bed apparently in a coma. He was carted off to hospital where my mother arrived soon after and sent me a text. “Benedetto in fine form,” it read. “Call us.”
I was utterly amazed. How could he go from coma to fine form in a matter of hours?
“What happened?” I asked him when I called. “Are you all right?”
“Of course I’m all right,” he told me. “I’m not in a coma, it’s everyone else that’s in a coma.”
He then spoke to his granddaughter, Olivia. “I couldn’t understand a word he said,” she told me, handing the phone back. “But he’s talking, and that’s the main thing.”
I’ll second that. He is being discharged in a couple of days, to give them time to fix the window.

Copyright: Helena Frith Powell 2013