The Life of Andrea

”Ziba, if I write a letter to Fr Giussani, will he ever read it?” “Why shouldn’t he?” “I am nobody, he doesn’t know me.” “Andrea, don’t worry. Write it.”

”Ziba, if I write a letter to Fr Giussani, will he ever read it?” “Why shouldn’t he?” “I am nobody, he doesn’t know me.” “Andrea, don’t worry. Write it.” The letter read by Fr Giussani during the Spiritual Exercises of the University Students of CL in 1994 and then published under the title Recognizing Christ was born like this, simply, as almost all the important things are born. It was one of the most intense moments in the video that was shown during the recent Fraternity Exercises. Andrea went to high school with Marco Zibardi, known as “Ziba”, then a recent graduate of the Catholic University in Milan. “Dear Fr. Giussani: I’m writing to you calling you ‘dear’ even though I do not know you. (…) I think I have reached the end of the line of this troubled life of mine, carried by that train called AIDS,” he writes in his letter. Moved, Giussani asks for help in reading it to the end. “Pray for me; I will continue to feel useful for the time I have left by praying for you and for the Movement. I embrace you, Andrea.”

Up to today whatever we knew about Andrea was written in that letter. But today, twenty years later, Ziba goes back to that story. Out of discretion he doesn’t mention his friend’s last name, or give us a picture of him.
“He dictated, I wrote,” says Ziba. “He spoke with difficulty. Those were his last days in the hospital in Parma. We had to write it in pieces. We would start then, when he was tired, we would stop. It must have taken one whole week. It wasn’t easy for me either: it was a struggle because I resisted a little about some things, those which were related to me…”

Their friendship, as Andrea explained in his letter, started during high school. “We were classmates at the Settimo Scientifico in Milan, which is now called Allende,” says Ziba. “We graduated in 1987. During the last two years, we shared a desk. I was in GS; he was the leader of the student union. But we were always great friends. Each of us had his own ideas, but we would also go on vacations together.” Andrea was intelligent, studious, and had good grades. He played soccer, loved tennis and skiing. Besides the typical things of his world: picket lines in front of the school, peace demonstrations, and nights spent at the Leoncavallo social center.

Then he started dating a dear friend of mine, Elena. Thus, together with other three friends, although we went different paths, we stayed in contact,” remembers Ziba. “We would meet on a Saturday night for a beer or during a weekend to go skiing together. Andrea had started Physics, Elena Medicine. Then Ermanno studied Law, and Daniele Engineering. I studied Literature, and I was the only one who belonged to CL.”

That evening in 1991, the five of them were in a pizzeria between Piazza Abbiategrasso and Gratosoglio, in the suburbs of Milan. Andrea, out of the blue said, “I was tested. I am HIV positive.” Elena already knew it, the other three didn’t. They are all shocked. At that time a positive test was still a death sentence. That same year Freddie Mercury died. The simple word “AIDS” generates fear and prejudice. At the end of the dinner, Andrea said, “We must bear together this adventure now.”

The four friends took him seriously and they really accompanied him. They got organized and took turns to visit him every day. He went to various hospitals: Milan, Bologna, and Parma. During those months a dialogue started that Ziba defines as sometimes “turbulent”. He even involved the patients next to him in the discussion. He got carried away, started arguments, reprimanded the nurses who, according to him, didn’t know how to treat his disease. “Every now and then, in his own way, he would talk about the problem of God and would tell me angrily, ‘Your God doesn’t exist and is useless. Look at what is happening to me: I am 27 years old and I am dying.’”
One day, at the end of 1993, Ziba brought him a copy of The Religious Sense by Fr. Giussani. “It was a time when he scolded us for visiting him every day. He told us that we were acting like Florence Nightingale, ‘It’s no use, I will die in any case. Why do you do this?’ Then I, giving him the book, told him, ‘Start reading this, then we will talk about it.’ He took it and threw it on the night stand. ‘This is just bullshit.’ The next day he had already read the whole book.”

The content of their dialogues changed. Andrea started asking questions. “He had read the book deeply. From that day began a beautiful period, most of all for me. It was clear that he had understood it much better than me, who had been working on it for years. He asked me questions about the ‘heart,’ about the thing that all human beings have in common. What struck him the most was probably that even what was happening to him could have meaning. He walked the whole journey from the religious sense to faith like he had it written it somewhere himself, without having known it. At first he wouldn’t talk about God; it was as if following his own path he wanted to let me see that he had understood. He moved forward in steps. He had already read the whole book. He knew how it ended…”

“Ziba always told me that what matters in life is to have a true interest and to follow it. I have pursued this interest many times, but it was never the true one. Now I have seen the true one, I see it, I’ve encountered it and I begin to know it, and to call it by name: it is called Christ.”

And their dialogue didn’t stop being turbulent. It was at that point that Ziba began saying the Angelus in front of him. And Andrea, as he mentions in his letter, started swearing to his face. The nurses rushed to his help, and asking Ziba if he was beating his friend… It was a path marked by his temperament and by his full awareness of journeying to the end. He had to go to the depths of the fact that he was dying.” After questions about The Religious Sense he started asking questions about Father Giussani and about CL. The last month and a half was like “rush” to the end. Andrea started saying the Angelus with Ziba. Then, with only a few days left, that question: “If write him a letter, will he read it?”

“I didn’t know what he was going to say. I had no idea that he had arrived to that point of adhesion. I saw that something was happening. I found out that he had called for the hospital’s chaplain but I don’t know what they said to each other. Up to the point of that letter our discussions never arrived to such an explicit point. It was a surprise. A gift.”

“CAN I READ IT?” In the years after high school the two friends went on having discussions. “He had made a choice for his life, I had made another one,” Ziba went on. “Between us this was clear, we weren’t going to change our minds. Yet, he was somehow struck by my position. For him it was inconceivable planning one’s life based on a religious choice. In his mind, faith was intimism and irrationality. Then, what happened to him made him understand that he had had that question all along. For me it was an unexpected grace. Those three friends and I stood in front of what happened, and we saw that within disease and death the miracle of a new life happened.

Andrea wrote: “Ziba has stuck over my bed St. Thomas’ quote: ‘Man’s life consists in the affection that mainly sustains it, and in which he finds his greatest satisfaction.’ I think that my greatest satisfaction is to have known you by writing you this letter, but the even greater satisfaction is that in God’s mercy, if He will, I will meet you where everything will be new, good, and true. New, good, and true like the friendship that you have brought into the life of many people and of which I can say: ‘I was there too.’ I too, in this wretched life, have seen and participated in this new, good, and true event.”

Ziba picked up the letter and brought it to Fr. Giussani. “This is from a friend of mine from High School. It is really beautiful.” He didn’t have time to explain anything to him. Andrea had a complication a few hours later, when Ziba arrived, he found him in a coma. Fr. Giussani’s phone call arrived after the funeral was already over. “This is a wonderful letter! May I read it in public?” “Gius, the letter was for you…” Then, on the night before the beginning of the Spiritual Exercises for the University students Fr. Giussani called Ziba: “I want to read Andrea’s letter, can you drive me to Rimini?” On the way back, after Recognizing Christ, he said, “I have never met a person who understood The Religious Sense so well and could thus summarize it in two brief pages.”