He went down, straight to hell, but then he went back up. "Franco is strong and he will make it," his wife Desirée Puddu had always repeated, even in the hardest moments. And Franco Labagnara, the 48-year-old bartender beaten to a pulp by two boys for giving precedence last October in via Brigata Sassari, finally made it. Now he is here, still a little battered, in the bar he runs with his brother Marcello in viale Marconi where he wanted to return after three months in a coma and three in rehabilitation. "I am the one without the middle ground," he says, "I fell asleep feeling great and I woke up feeling terrible."

No memory

What they did to him, they told him. He doesn't remember "to say that I hate those who reduced me to this is an understatement. I just hope that justice is done." His voice is still shaky "I'm doing exercises every day to relearn how to speak perfectly," and a hand and a foot are still causing problems, "I still can't grip things well and put my foot on the ground well, but slowly this too will pass." After all, it's nothing compared to what he went through, to death that one day suddenly seemed to have come to take him. "After three months in a coma in the oncology unit in Cagliari," he recalls, "I was transferred to Oristano, as my wife and brother told me. I spent another month in a coma there too."

Franco Labagnara nel suo bar con i tanti amici andati a trovarlo (g. da.)

The return to life

Then he woke up. "I saw people coming and going and I didn't understand where I was. There were doctors and nurses and I wasn't at home, I wasn't in Quartu. In those moments I was still very confused." The beatings in via Brigata Sassari, the fear, the screams of his wife locked in the car will only be told to him later. "We waited," his brother Marcello intervenes, "just as the doctors had advised us. When the time came we told him everything." And so, Franco continues, "I found out and I didn't want to believe it. I was shocked, it was as if they were telling me something that had happened to others. How can you reduce a person to this state?" Those moments are no longer in his mind. The pain has erased them.

The first words

"The first memory I have in the hospital in Oristano is when I saw my wife and said "hi darling". The last, a message from October 14, about ten days before the attack, from some of my friends who had sent me a video of a lunch". Now "I struggle to sleep well. Sometimes I dream of my dad, who is no longer here, who asks me how I am. And then I dream of my friend Maurizio who comes to the bar to tell me what happened to me". The day after returning from Oristano, on April 17, "I wanted to go straight to the bar, which is my second home. And I hope to be able to go back to work soon to help my brother, who has had to do everything on his own in all these months".

Love for the wife

Franco speaks sitting at a table in his bar, surrounded by many friends who come to greet him and give him a pat on the back. Next to him is always Desirée who in this Via Crucis made of stations that seemed insurmountable has never left him. "I knew he would make it" she reiterates, "when he said "bye darling" to me I understood that the ordeal would be over. Then, everything has its time and we believe that justice will be done". In the meantime Franco is impatient, "now I hope they give me back my license to go around, anywhere".

Georgia Daga

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