The Little Book of the Dead - Primetta

Can a river of love, buried deep within your heart, flow silently for decades, only to one day breach the surface and reveal itself?
That’s what happened to Primetta, my mother’s sister.
I think that I was one of the reasons she was committed to a mental hospital.
I was around thirteen. I was an idiot. I have been an idiot all my life without realising it. I was blinded by my narcissism. I was beautiful, an incredibly beautiful teen, a teenager blessed by Mother Nature with a cruel, asinine beauty.
I was so vain that I was ridiculously incapable of seeing the delicate human soul of another.
My aunt Primetta was such a delicate mechanism, a light soul who always needed attention and patience.
My mother had them both, but I had none. Not a shred.
I don’t remember exactly what happened. What I recall is that I was relentlessly teasing her, almost ruthlessly teasing. Could I say without compassion for her?
She had a breakdown at last.
I do not recollect whether I was regretful or devilishly content with it (I have something in me that is horrible—I try to keep it at bay, but sometimes it overpowers me, seeping into my body, mind, and soul, unleashing its poison.)
When she was young, she was in love, crazily in love, with a young man from Montaione. She was happy, radiant.
He died of tuberculosis.
She became like a nun, a virgin forever, eternally in love with him.
No other man won her heart or touched her body.
Many years later, that river of love reached the surface after breaking its closure, and she loved me—perhaps as she had loved that young man. Did I resemble him in her eyes?
My aunt Primetta died whispering my name.