At the end of the winter I noticed that one of my students wasn’t coming to lessons, wasn’t submitting works to review, nor sending emails. All that could compromise his year work not permitting him to sustain the exam in the summer session. I asked a few classmates about him, and the answer froze me: he was dead.
Dead? Possible?
Yes, it was possible: we can die in our twenties. And nobody even had an idea on what happened: he was in good health, he hadn’t committed any rash actions, he didn’t use drugs, he hadn’t been involved in dangerous activities… Nothing at all: he was a normal boy who studied and led a regular life.
So what?
They told me that one Saturday night he had arranged to take a pizza with friends, but he didn’t arrive. The delay went on, and so, in the end, after several unanswered calls, they went to the small apartment he was renting – a couple of rooms in an old house in the city center – and found him into the shower. No traces of other presences, of break-ins or even less of violence: nothing at all. All the rooms were in order.
In the following days the police made several inspections with no avail. Then finally they noticed inside the small bathroom, in a corner, a very thin slit running between the tiles. So they could understand what had happened. That damned slit was connected to the old flue of the stove of an apartment below, which in that cold day had been in full operation, and from there had come out the carbon dioxide that soon saturated the small environment thus making the unfortunate boy fall asleep forever.
Since then I have never forgotten to recommend to my students to design the flues with all due caution, possibly inserting reliable stainless steel pipes.
