Fatal coincidence and fate

Fatal coincidence and fate is a recurring pattern in the novel, where accidents can look at once brutally arbitrary and retrospectively ordained. A plane crash, a chance television encounter, and calculations about a death measured in hundredths of a second connect personal histories across years; the characters’ attempts to explain these events expose the gap between what can be calculated and what can only be interpreted after the fact.

Chance and the Larnaca disaster

Marco Carrera’s father had repeated that in 1959, the year Marco was born, air travel had overtaken sea travel in passenger numbers. Marco filed this away as one of his father’s harmless fixations, despite his father’s science-fiction reading and conviction that the future’s mobility would belong to the skies. Only later does Marco recognize the fact as a seed in what he thinks of as his karmic framework: airplanes have been bound to his life more powerfully than he understood.

The connection becomes unmistakable after Marco and Duccio Chilleri get off a plane shortly before it crashes into the sea near Cyprus. Marco’s first response to the episode is colored by anger and shame at Duccio’s panic attack and by his own fear that their ordeal will become known. Later, alone and unable to sleep, he thinks about the passengers left aboard, including boy scouts and flight attendants who had been relieved to see the two men disembark. The disaster has already happened, though Marco does not yet know it: the Koper Aviopromet DC-9-30 has gone down, and all aboard have died.

The public account calls it the Larnaca tragedy and reports 94 fatalities. But the catastrophe quickly loses space in the news. Another air disaster, an American Airlines crash in Chicago that killed 271 people, follows within hours; the arrest of Red Brigades members and the approach of political and European elections further divert attention. The press moves on before it can fully report the return of the bodies or recovery of the black box. This compressed public narrative leaves little room for the strange fact that Marco and Duccio had been on the doomed flight and escaped it.

Survival, silence, and later revelation

Marco expects journalists at his home and a summons from prosecutors. Neither comes. The possibility that inquiries might connect the two young men to the crash fades, although the account suggests that the absence of scrutiny is consequential: the pair’s unreported escape becomes one of the small Italian mysteries that decisively shapes their futures. They say nothing, first for two or three days and then for longer, until speaking seems increasingly impossible and they fear they would not be believed.

Their silence is also bound to Duccio’s reputation and to the extraordinary threat that his survival might seem to confirm. The novel’s account connects the episode with the eye-of-the-storm theory surrounding Duccio: those close to him may escape disaster while others suffer. If the men revealed that they had left the aircraft shortly before it went down, the fact that Marco remained alive could look like evidence for the theory, while Duccio’s part in the episode might make him terrifying to others. The two friends cannot even discuss the matter easily with one another. What has happened is known to them but remains unspoken, and the public story stops before it reaches them.

Years later, the crash returns by way of Marina Molitor, a former stewardess of the failed airline. In 1988, appearing on Rai Uno, she tells a story about the flight: she had been scheduled to work on the aircraft that crashed nine years earlier, but a last-minute replacement allowed her to donate bone marrow to her elder sister, Mateja. The substitution saved Marina from the crash, but her colleague died aboard the plane; Mateja later died after the transplant failed. Marina tells the story in tears, describing an act intended to save her sister that instead becomes bound to two deaths.

Marco happens to see the broadcast while sick with a fever and resting at home rather than going to work at the ophthalmic hospital. He recognizes in Marina a fellow survivor of the same disaster and someone else who has lost an older sister. These coincidences, together with his response to her appearance and grief, make him fall in love almost at once. The next day he finds her at the Lufthansa ticket counter at the airport and approaches her. The encounter does not merely echo the plane crash: it becomes the beginning of a rapid shared life. Within twelve months, the two move in together, conceive and have a daughter, and marry.

The mathematics of an accidental death

A separate episode gives chance a more explicitly numerical form. Probo Carrera tells Letizia Delvecchio about the death of his friend Aldino Mansutti, an event that has remained painful for eleven years. Aldino was riding a new Guzzi V7 Special on the Aurelia state road when a 170-liter water bucket fell from a Bell Model 206 helicopter engaged in firefighting near the lower Pisan hills. The incident is called a motorcycle accident, but its cause was a falling bucket detached from the helicopter’s hook.

Probo had tried to make the death bearable by calculating its probability. He gathered the investigation’s data: the helicopter’s course, speed, and altitude, the bucket’s weight and its load of water, the wind speed, and Aldino’s speed. His laborious calculations seemed to produce the opposite of the result he wanted. Rather than showing the accident to be nearly impossible, they suggested that it followed from a rigid field of forces with no way out.

He then changes the scale of the problem. The helicopter traveled 43 meters per second; Aldino was moving at 23.5 meters per second. If the hook had broken a second later, Probo reasons, the bucket would have landed 43 meters farther east while Aldino was 23.5 meters farther along the road, perhaps leaving him unaware of the danger. A tenth of a second would have shifted the bucket by 4.3 meters and Aldino by nearly 2.5, still enough for him to survive. Smaller intervals narrow the escape: at three hundredths of a second, the bucket strikes him. Probo’s account makes a life depend on a fraction so small that ordinary experience scarcely registers it. Calculation gives the fatal coincidence a precise boundary, but precision cannot make the death feel acceptable.

Stillness, upheaval, and retrospective purpose

Marco’s later understanding of his own life extends the pattern beyond aviation and bereavement. After a growth treatment, his body changes with startling speed: from November to June, he grows two centimeters a month. He experiences the transformation without fear or impatience, having been prepared for growth as the treatment’s purpose. In time, his experience as a hummingbird becomes simply a memory.

The novel describes a broader rhythm in his life: long periods in which he appears to stand still while other lives move forward, followed by an exceptional event that thrusts him into an unfamiliar condition. These transitions often bring pain and provoke the question of why they have happened to him. He does not find the answer by asking why at the outset; the significant question is when, the moment at which an answer becomes possible. In the darkest period, he comes to see his past as serving a purpose: Miraijin, Adele’s daughter, is the new human being whom he has been given the privilege of raising.

That interpretation does not erase the difference between a belief in destiny and proof of it. The novel places Marco’s retrospective sense of purpose beside the hard particulars of accidents: a plane’s route and a missed departure, a television appearance that he happens to see while ill, a helicopter’s speed, and three hundredths of a second. The sequence invites meaning, but its numbers also preserve the unsettling contingency of what happened. Coincidence becomes fate in the lives of those who must carry its consequences; the narrative leaves room for both the force of that meaning and the chance that preceded it.