For far too long I have cultivated the dream and ambition of writing a different kind of book – one without boring description, dialogue, characters, convinced that these are useful only to tell a story, as wallpaper. I had in mind the story of a way of being and feeling, not to undertake a career as a writer. The book I wanted to write despite everything, to which I dedicated time and confused aspirations with the obstinacy of a fixed idea, was supposed to be unique. Often, even cyclically initiated, it is the book that I never wrote. I remember the beginnings, that first line thick with expectations. If I managed to gather into a single image everything that was worth saying, I would stop, satisfied. I’d push away the notebook and close my eyes. I would appeal to the senses, more than to thought. I had to perceive the wind, the chiming of the clock, in order to describe the situation, to enter into the feelings of the protagonist, to let myself be absorbed by the words. A ray of sunlight lying on white pages, the signs of a spring as sparkling as the leaf buds on the trees, took me far away. I wasn’t committed enough; I got tired immediately. The ink dried up in the fountain pen, the satisfaction for a successful spell became the fear of not being able to write the next part. I would take a break, my eyes aimed at the ceiling. More than once I dropped into a deep sleep.
This is how it began: autumn, a boy climbs onto a train that will take him far from home. He hopes to find, at the end of his trip, the calm and clarity required to understand himself better; who he truly is, if he is capable of achieving his ambitions. With profound inner satisfaction, he climbs up into the train, breathing a sigh of relief at the thought of all the serious, dark and contorted things he is leaving behind. He cannot help but notice that this is how it has always been, having always associated leaving home with a sense of liberation from thoughts and situations that are gloomy and suffocating, and feeling by contrast a sudden sense of indescribable lightness; a carefree feeling that lets him breathe. He has filled a cloth bag with a few clothes and his favorite books. He is in the right mood to face any kind of adventure. But for now, he just wants to enjoy the trip, look out the window, stare at the houses along the way, open a book when it gets dark outside, drink café by the riveted lights at the small tables in the restaurant car. He won’t be going home for some time, and is relieved of having to supply explanations and being happy or else. And so I would have liked to have written a single book: the story of my formation, never completed, impossible to write, useless, that I settled for initiating, that I thought I would have written, one day or another, of which the actual writing is a pale and backward imitation.
The beginning was extremely important – the correct concatenation of words, the magic sequence capable of unveiling the horizon. Like a maniac hunting his prey, a succubus to my own obsession, I exhausted my energies in the search for the alchemic formula with which I would have deduced the next step. I specified the year, season, hour and place in which the protagonist entered the scene. I concentrated on particulars that were ostensibly unimportant – the time and weather – in order to define and create the mood necessary to undertake the trek through words. A conscious choice led to a predilection for sad and rainy afternoons to dedicate to writing. I didn’t prepare for an excursion in the mountains with a snack in my backpack, it was a voyage into the darkness and inside the heart and mind. Only in the late afternoon, in the moment in which evening takes over for day, would I find the right conditions. Temporarily suspending the frenetic inactivity with which I tormented the tips of my fingers, the traces of which I hid at dinnertime inside my napkin, I would turn on the lamp on my desk and, as if enchanted, would stop flaying the meat, made peace with reality, transferring into a less fickle me the task of dissipating the paralyzing torpor in which I found myself crystallized. And finally, when it was time to archive another day, I planned projects that I would forget by morning.
One November afternoon, many years ago, Emilio – the name evoked Rousseau – climbed the creaky stairs of a small hotel. In the room, ein freundliches Zimmer, there were a round table, two chairs, a bedside table with a marble top, an old bureau. The window looked out on the church tower, a bridge over the river that ran through the town, mountains in the distance, and the dark relief of forests beyond which the sharp peaks and rocky masses rose. Although he had already imagined the scene – a stark environment, books-solitude-nature – he does not know how to pass the time, which now seems slowed-down, its scansion spread out beyond measure, taking on threatening proportions that require a ready reaction if one wishes to avoid unpleasant consequences, like one time in an elevator when – horrified – he had measured an interval of just a few seconds in minutes. From now on he would organize his days according to a precise plan, work-walks-meals-sleep. On the tower, the clock chimed the hours. A ray of sunlight broke through the cloud-filled sky and brightened the ridge, at the bottom of the valley lights came on in houses. He tidied up, putting his t-shirts and underwear in the drawers, clothes in the bureau, books and notebooks on the table. He wanted to see new faces, cross stares with people his own age, because life is not real without participation. Will he manage to meet some girl, make friends and, triumphing over his habitual shyness, accept the idea that needing the company of others is not a sign of weakness? When he leaves the room it is dark outside and has begun snowing. Thanks to the landscape, to the snow that creates images of other landscapes and other snows, he feels distant and yet inexplicably close. This renders him euphoric and optimistic again, desirous of sharing the mutated condition of love. Up until just a few minutes ago, he had been in a blind alley with no escape, and now he thinks that the objective may be within his reach. The solitude does not weigh down on him. Before he falls asleep he’ll write a couple of sentences, a minimum of thought, a point of departure for the following day. He gets up at an early hour. The snow that fell during the night has transformed the landscape and spread a propitious and enchanted silence over nature. At the newsstand he decides not to buy Italian papers. He draws a copy of the weekly Die Zeit out of the rotating column. In the large section dedicated to art and culture he finds inspiration, a spark for his controversy-loving character. He needs a target at which he can point the arm of his dissatisfaction with the world, a thesis to refute, in order to externalize his anger.
A few days have gone by, but what he’s written doesn’t deserve mention. He has taken many hikes. Along his favorite path, repeated more than once during the day, he mentally creates. The minutes that it takes to reach the bench located in a panoramic position at the edge of the woods prove the most beneficial. At the moment in which he reaches his destination he feels that he possesses an abundance of caprice and energy. He doesn’t stay long. The desire to reach the bench from which to intensely contemplate the landscape is inversely proportionate to the short length of the stay. The pleasure of imagining himself seated and enjoying the view as he’s walking to the bench encourages him to continue walking towards new destinations. Usually these virtuous perambulations address the possibility of taking on new a new look, name, identity in a diverse social and geographical context. The self-identification that makes it possible to access multiple mental states becomes a form of knowledge that does not require verification, the criteria of truth for which is the profundity of feeling that spontaneously erupts from comprehension.
On Sunday, he reaches the edge of a lake on foot. The path runs alongside the old railway. A snippet of conversation gleaned from talk between travelers claimed that this track once served to transport the material taken from a nearby mine to the railway station, where it was sorted. To support this theory the speaker had added that, due to the abundant snowfall, it was not possible to check on the state of the rails, which were designed to support the passage of small railcars, and not to carry back and forth hordes of miners on a regular train.
More and more often, he finds himself hesitating at the moment of making a decision. As the ferry vanished into the dark, he stood there shocked by a sensation of something irreparable which to less problematic people would have seemed out of place. Margareth, the daughter of the tavern owner, showed him an available room. At six-thirty the kitchen would close. If he needed anything, he’d have to wait until the following day. Aside from the two mountaineers who were heading out that same evening, he was the only guest. After having served him fried eggs, onions and apple juice, Margareth retreated into the kitchen. There was absolute silence when Emilio turned off the lights. Only his thoughts made noise, a buzzing of flies, annoying and continuous. He slept a deep and tranquil sleep. When he woke up, he didn’t ask himself if there was something wrong in his life. For once, everything went smoothly; the hazy predictions of the previous evening were groundless; the fear of an oncoming crisis unreasonable. Emilio didn’t know why he found himself in that situation: twenty years old and a confused future. He felt that in the absence of a real vocation existence became boring, even unlivable. He could not conceive of the idea of finding a job and earning his own keep, he needed passions, something that gave significance, direction, order to the mass of emotions and contradictory sentiments waging war in him.
After many hours spent immobile in front of the open notebook without having been able to write, he began to doubt himself once again. He believed he had survived unharmed a period in which fear reigned above all else, a form of panicky terror that had transformed him into conquered territory at the mercy of every form of anxiety, a testing ground for unforeseeable mental experiments. Changing place and climate had served little, the hunted condition he was held to by the cruel emissaries of the mind survived unaltered. But if the frequency of the crises remained the same, their intensity had diminished. He no longer heard voices – once, landing back home after a vacation, he had heard voices shouting: fuck, this plane’s got no brakes! He no longer lingered in front of a closed window, uncertain if he would find, upon opening it, the same reality he was staring at from behind the glass, rather than a uniformly black screen into which it simply faded away. Lately, his fear had taken on forms that were less violent, though equally unsettling. One of these was connected with writing. It was the very fear of writing, not so much, or not simply, the fear of not being able to find the way out of the illusory world that words reproduced; rather he was frightened by the idea that by writing down his thoughts, they might become true, real.
A day of rain caused by a sudden shift in temperature, long paths filled with puddles of water that reflect upturned fragments of sky and trees, and Emilio is forced to review his plans. One month after his arrival he has not done much that is worth recording, the written pages are fodder for the wastebasket. Among the classified ads in the local newspaper he reads that a famous hotel in the area is looking for qualified personnel, and even inexperienced waiters. The task he is given comes in the form of a flat surface that must be turned into a parking area, several hundred square meters hidden under a blanket of snow that has developed a hard outer crust from the cold. Under the blinding light, with the tool for shoveling snow in his hands, instinct would lead him to take care of the entire job in just a few hours in order to earn the admiration of his new employers. Automobiles disgorge elegant women who don’t even dignify him with a glance, despite the fact that he’s the reason they can move about so freely. Even the path that leads to the restaurant is open once again thanks to Emilio’s efforts. Unconsciously, he tends to feel he’s earned thanks from the clientele, and their ingratitude and ignorance hurts him like a personal offense.
For Emilio, a twenty-year-old, falling asleep means dropping into sleep from vertiginous heights, and dreaming. On a boat out at sea in the summertime, a man and a woman talk amicably under the sun, cradled by the monotonous oscillations of their craft. In precarious equilibrium, Emilio passes over their bodies. Upon reaching the prow, in a loud and solemn voice he spells out: I A M G O I N G T O K I L L M Y S E L F. He is holding a large rock that is tied to his neck with a thick rope. He dives in without making any noise or splashing any water. His travel companions watch the spectacle, interested only in the pleasure they can take from it. When he comes back to the surface, an enormous pumice stone is floating alongside him. He is shaken by tremors of laughter similar to convulsions. Upon waking, he has the sensation of returning from a voyage in remote lands on carriages drawn by horses with thick manes and long tails, nocturnal bivouacs around fires that slowly die under skies as dense as oil. A rapid recognition of recent events, of the objects in the room, reassures him as to his coordinates in time and space. But there remains an unpleasant feeling of disorientation, an emptiness that assails him from all sides. In other circumstances he has felt an incredible shortness of breath, the victim of nights out in the open and exhausting treks under the sun and wind. He takes a drink of water. It had a different taste before, less chemical; now it tastes like medicine. The clock reads ten to six on that afternoon in August. The sky grows dark. A thunderstorm is coming, the first and well ahead of the regular season.
With the apartment available due to his father’s absence, on vacation with his omnipresent dog, Emilio listens to the sound of coffee dripping into its aluminum machine. Semi-naked, he observes the shadow of the coffeemaker on the carpet from behind a pair of dark sunglasses. The notes of a song give direction to his fantasies. What can he think up to escape unharmed from the feeling of omnipotence that the music transmits, a feeling that is always followed by a sense of loss and sadness as soon as the music ends? How can he avoid the post-concert desolation, elbowing with thousands of other wandering shadows along the road back-to-home after the euphoric wave of megalomania? Is it possible to stretch the duration of that feeling out forever? The music should never stop, but that’s impossible. Perhaps it’s possible to have an interior music that never stops, or only for brief intervals, which creates a dam for reality, preventing it from filtering through and conserving unaltered and liquid the rush of emotions, the flow of images. (He imagines a merry-go-round of brightly colored bears that spins on forever without interruption.) New word games cross through his mind, free associations of ideas, until an image of Lucifer, arriving loaded down with gifts like one of the three Magi, adds a touch of folklore to the unnecessary and irrational development of the day.
Lucifer, so-called for having captured the image of the devil in his own place while he was photographing himself in front of a mirror, wandered around the apartment sipping coffee from a sky blue Chinese porcelain teacup. On his face, hidden by a thick beard that made him look like a Canadian lumberjack and a thick head of hair ala Füssli, expressions between ironic and amused alternated back and forth. He tried to imagine life in the refined comfort that emanated from the furnishings around him, from the shadow of suffused light that recreated nocturnal atmospheres and chosen women. There were fresh flowers everywhere, others made of silk threw an amber net onto a collection of boxes and ancient coins. Painted ceramic medallions displaying Roman emperors with laurel-wreathed heads hung on the walls. A small vestibule led into the master bathroom, an object of numerous interventions that expressed an extenuated sophistication. From the ceiling, a drapery of pink silk descended softly towards the corners, like in the residence of some effeminate Bedouin in the middle of the desert. A large mirror hung over the two sinks. On either side, standing on bamboo tripods, two mediocre black vases held swathes of pastel colored artificial flowers. The boys had many things to say to one another, with which to express an indecipherable sense of humor. The ring of the telephone interrupted the river of words that were knocking against one another in a constant flow, now agitated, now tranquil. Emilio went to answer, Lucifer searched for the music. At the end of the conversation the expression on Emilio’s face was turbulent. They each popped a pill into their mouths from a round container of Tabu licorices that was standing on the desk. They rolled out happily together, both minds sharing a single thought: that after all the best way to hide something is not to hide it at all.
I am undergoing a crisis, Lucifer. I am here and dreaming about being somewhere else, I don’t do anything of the things I’d like to do, and what I’d like to do I put off. A daily dose of arrogance feeds my awkwardness. Disappointment anger impotence are the feelings I am most familiar with, and especially wickedness. I want to write, I know that much. But what sense is there in saying I want, when simply writing would be enough? Lucifer, I can read it in your eyes: take out what you’ve got inside, you’re thinking, that which is holding you back. What have you go to lose? What is scaring you? They took off their clothes soaked with rainwater after the long walk in the violent thunderstorm. Emilio turned the water on in the bathtub and added some bath soap.
What I’ve got in mind, that’s precisely what I’m afraid of; of my senses, that which I see and feel, that which I imagine, that which I think makes me afraid. It is a terrible thing not to be able to trust even yourself. Consider the possibility that someone or something is scheming against you, that it is you and not you, and at the same time many other beings composed of the same psychic substance with the ability and means to give your personality ten, one hundred different setups, all of which are incontrovertibly yours. Dozens of pairs of muscular arms that grab you and push you first one way then another couldn’t have the same mortifying effect on your will. That I will occupy myself solely and exclusively with that which I am good at is an irrevocable decision. There are many attitudes, numerous talents to be explored. Do you remember when we created stories starting with a single sentence, wordplay: the milk is curdled, the sky is saurian? Abstruse, imaginary worlds, devoid of any relationship with the real world, fundamental, without which we would not have been able to stand the other from which we have always wanted to distinguish ourselves. Doesn’t this world hate youth, perhaps, more than any other thing? Therefore we would have liked, in every circumstance, to have been mature beyond our natural years, to extract ourselves from the ignoble rhetoric with which adults cloak every consideration or statistic concerning youth. Do you remember how we liquidated our interlocutors? Old folk, old beyond any appearance, ancient, immeasurable when compared to existing parameters, that was the inevitable response. With the accusation of being infantile, of not wanting to grow up, our judges reveal a complete lack of imagination. But of course they have other reasons for not wanting to see us in a positive light. Undoubtedly they were like us once, once upon a time, and that makes us seem unbearable. Always, when I am invited to keep to sane realism, to keep my feet planted firmly on the ground as they say, it is because someone is expecting that I too bend my head and bow to common rules. They’ve got it wrong. In nature we would have the best predispositions insofar as we ourselves are living rules. We are neither clever nor could we become clever, living within this condition. Ingenuous, innocuous if not for the disturbance we cause without wanting to, we are so astute that before disobeying we are in a hurry to inform the person charged with punishing us. Judgmental, timorous, the law is inside us, not outside, and if we cause evil it is only ourselves we damage.
Whether Emilio was talking and Lucifer was listening or vice versa, each was expressing shared thoughts, interpreting reciprocal reasoning. The unified points-of-view were not a given, it wasn’t obvious that they’d agree, it was a verbal and physical fact, a ballet for solo voices in which the possibility of the tale rested on the faith that no matter which of the two was listening, he participated and was understanding. In the end, a series of figures conducted with mastery moved in ecstatic admiration of the interior landscapes evoked. Then, once the arguments were exhausted, the scene changed. Physically exhausted, mentally empty. The environment that held them, which was never truly hospitable whether it was the father’s house or the city, became an unsafe, foreign place. Emilio examined the pallor of his face in the mirror, seeing his forehead bright with sweat. If someone had told him that he had run enormous distances and was now in a lost, abandoned area, he would have thought the hypothesis believable. He was stunned, confused as if he had become disoriented due to some external cause and now, never having distanced himself, he did not recognize in the objects around him, those familiar things he usually saw without noticing, but being gifted with extraordinary perceptivity he recognized the tangibility of those outlines and surfaces, the specific character of their presence, their intrinsic existence, from the moment that they could come alive and breath life into the functions contained within their forms. If, in fact, the walls were a partition the aim of which is to contain and limit space, it is not only an exercise or deformation of the visual apparatus if, acting upon the senses and the mind, those characteristics became accentuated, giving Emilio the impression of being forced in some varying degree within those confines to conform with the movement now of contraction, now of expansion of those elements. As a spectator Emilio witnessed it all, observing the forms modify themselves right before his eyes. He would have been happy to limit his participation to the simple recording of data, avoiding any and every interference with his conscience and its mysterious broadcasting. Unpleasant things are precisely the jolt of a heart taken by surprise, which threw Emilio into a state of agitation, devoid of any defense, helpless. (Is this the reason why he cannot tranquilly leave and go to the cinema to reduce himself to the terminus for nervous stimuli?) The result of this state of things is a shift in attention from the external to the internal, from the objects in the room to the sensations and sentiments of Emilio’s sensorial and nervous systems. The introspective fixation that marks these states creates conditions of suffering from which he believes he can free himself removing, as if it were an old piece of clothing, the human substance of being – conscience and feelings - allowing himself to precipitate, his spirit suspended, into inert material.
The recurring questions are always the same: what is he doing there in that place, whose clothes are those in the bureau, why is there a portrait of a man there in that silver frame, the lines of which are modeled in a substance as spiritual as it is material, and which contains something at once familiar and foreign, and why does it continue to make him afraid just as it did when he, Emilio, was a little boy? Above all else, what is it in the familiarity of the father’s face that renders concrete the idea of a viscous substance that he would die to escape from at any cost? Who exactly is Emilio? What do you think, Lucy? Wouldn’t it be wonderful not to have a father, mother, family, debts owed here and there, heritage of descendents biological or genetic, to be unique and intact? He laid his head on the edge of the bathtub filled with water and pinkish-blue soap foam so that it was the only element sticking out, and took a deep breath in order to liberate his flesh and spirit from any obstacles. What would he give in exchange for the power to make a naked girl materialize stretched out on his body; the pressure of her breasts, hips, legs! It brings to mind a game that consists in furthering, without any inhibitions, someone’s desires. Whispering a few simple words, massaging heart and flesh while waiting. A sensation of cold liquid rising towards the brain, which expanded into an invisible frozen dust upon reaching the carotid. Swallowing the entire history of the body, its moods, in an effluvium of dissolution. To call, not to call, she loves me, she doesn’t love me provided the rhythm, a rollercoaster between excitation and disappointment, squinting the eyes in the face of reality, closing them to desire, the only element within reach. Other reasons or presumed reasons entered the scene, although from the opposite end. He intuited that excessive egoism might well be counterpruductive. A voice, a moralistic echo, was bruiting about in his intestinal cavity, that civil defender of consumer rights in the name of equality of relations. You are thinking only of yourself – a frequent complaint that he raised against himself – paternal inheritance, echoed in the courtroom of his conscience, outfitted ad hoc by an internal legal authority in order to remind him of the possible consequences of his actions, and advise him that at the right moment he would be held responsible. He had always found an accountant’s intrusion into the economics of relationships entirely detestable, the quantification of giving and receiving designed to obtain an equal distribution for everyone. It was necessary, according to Emilio, to take freely based on the needs of a given moment, or to let oneself be stripped, deprived, convinced that this was the only authentic way to be prodigal. This only if one gives possession, naturally, something to give liberally or freely. The only obstacle to the individualistic and orgiastic exercise of such an intense generosity was an ideal intransigent of purity that can be obtained only through the renunciation of every form of contact. The image of a periscope that rises from the moving waters of desire had provoked laughter from the actors, contributing to taking the pressure off the scene, freeing the impulses from the filmstrip of anxiety that covered them in the very moment they were being translated into action. As a result of the active caresses and abstract friction the time for flesh had come, putting off the bill from feelings, one can do without looking oneself in the face, once love is absent. This was, in the final analysis, an appropriate and legitimate utilization of the instrument that came with the package. Hundreds of little ice cubes melted simultaneously inside the cranium, irrigating the body through blood vessels, generating a sensation of cold dust that settled in the throat. In order to get a hold of himself, he disappeared under the water’s surface and held his breath. When he reemerged, several interminable seconds later, they exchanged roles.
The summer came to an end without Emilio’s having left the city. Before leaving for vacation, Emilio had told his friends that the month of August is the most beautiful month of the year because it’s the time when one is least likely to have unpleasant encounters. The book, having been initiated, required his attention and constant dedication. In the future, he would dedicate monochromatic afternoons devoid of noise and interminable evenings filled with light to writing. He had lain down on the carpeting in his father’s large bedroom to smoke and drink coffee at the center of the trapezoid of light reflected on the floor. After the bath he returned to lay down in the same place, in the sunlight, happy to give himself over to laziness, without a thing to do. He stared at the ceiling, his arms folded behind his head, and thought of what would happen later, what had happened the year before during those very same days, what he would like to have happen now. He decided to go out. The stores all had their shutters closed and had put out signs that read ‘closed for vacation,’ the shutters on windows were locked shut; it seemed that no one was left in the city. How could one explain the rows of parked cars in the sunlight, on the sidewalks, under the trees along shadowed lanes, as faithful as domestic pets? Was everyone still sleeping inside the darkness of their own homes? He met a few tourists walking around wearing horrible hats to protect themselves from the sun, plastic bottles of mineral water at their lips. In front of the main entrance to the park there were small trucks that sold drinks, sandwiches and prepackaged ice cream. Lying down on the grass or seated on the benches were a few young people and, in smaller numbers, some elderly, passing the summertime in homogenous groups or alone, each ignoring the other. He was reminded of an excursion into the mountains on the border between Liguria and Piedmont, the irresistible urge to climb one peak after another, to go and discover the landscape hidden beneath the woods, where paths marked with numbered yellow or red arrows led. What would life be like in that abandoned village standing facing the valley? Would he go early to bed or would he stay awake to read and write? Would he let himself be drawn by the lights in the town, by the profile of the mountains that etch out a black merlot against the horizon? It is early morning, a thin and humid fog is rising off the main road, calling out the sound of growing traffic. Summer, early afternoon, the background noise of cicadas. He observes the bars of dusty sunlight that filter intermittently from the green Persian shutters in oblique luminous strips, segments of light as sharp as razors. Would he suffer from loneliness? He dreams of losing himself for an indefinite period of time under the starched sheets of an out-of-the-way hotel, dissolved in the body of a woman. Upon exiting, he would convince himself he’d been prepared for the tightening of his heart caused by the dark, like the estranged vertiginous feeling a boy gets exiting the cinema on Sunday afternoon in the winter months. It was neither the first nor the last time that the city transformed itself into a theater set of emotions, the ideal stage of a subject devoid of plot or protagonists. The characters came out and exited from the scene less real than the concrete or possible relationships created by their passage. Flesh-and-blood people are interesting first and foremost for all the things that one can do or imagine doing when coming into contact with them. Consider the situation from an abstract point of view, in and of itself and not in relation to the subjects that move in it. As representatives of pure emotions, these subjects count less than the propaganda.
Elena entered Emilio’s life when he was still a little boy, and she wasn’t yet Elena, but rather a form of sentiment. In principle, if memory serves correctly, she was the promise of unconditional affection supplied by elementary forms of contact. Later on, she took on the characteristic tones of desire in the soft lines of a body with a bare breast exposed, the beauty of which had overwhelmed him. (In those circumstances, the young woman looked at herself in the mirror, covered by a transparent pink slip. She ignored the fact that Emilio, in a variable age somewhere between nine and eleven years, lying stretched out on a mattress, is awake and watching her without breathing.) She showed up again, without making a fuss, in Emilio’s rooms during the last evaporating days of that month of August. They didn’t recognize one another. Age aside, they had nothing in common. Predestined victim, the moving target of the sexual instincts of adults, she was doubly a victim, because that which made her attractive in his eyes was the opportunity for revenge which was on his part, it must be admitted, well-merited. Elena had called in the late afternoon, the legal studio where she worked closed. Her vacation period had begun the evening before in a nightclub in the city where Emilio had met up with his father in the company of colleagues of the only woman seated at the table. As was his custom, Emilio listened and observed without speaking. He felt sorry for Elena, and uncomfortable for the adults, who he felt were being too explicit in their behavior. But that didn’t stop him from rubbing her foot under the table just to see her reaction. When he’d had enough he said goodbye and, semi-drunk, left to meet up with Lucy, who was waiting for him.
Upon his return from the phantom city he felt discouraged. The inebriating effect that consisted in dressing up as the author of successful works constructed in the solitude of rooms that looked out upon shadowy, protected courtyards contained within austere buildings had evaporated, leaving him defenseless in the face of reality. He put a black Tabu licorice in his mouth in order to fool time and began waiting without knowing what he was waiting for. He smiled, thinking of the bizarre association between fooling and waiting. During that period, in addition to the largely-autobiographical book he had begun to write in fits and starts, demoralizing and humbling himself regularly, almost as if he needed to denigrate himself from time to time in order to return stubbornly to betting on his own capabilities, he was also doing some occasional photography. He was convinced that being photogenic depended on the fact that it was he himself doing the photographing, and not someone else. The interval of time between setting up the camera for automatic shooting and running to stand in the pre-established pose provided him with the possibility of assuming the expression most appropriate for the characteristics of the situation, whether he was standing still or in movement. A technical requirement acted as an involuntary director’s assistant. Worried about the precision of the gesture that he was preparing to incarnate, and by the limited time at his disposition to perform it, he forgot to take on an expression, and thanks to this distraction found the perfect pose. Emilio didn’t always have to be at the center of the image, the principal subject of the tableau, but simply one element among others in the scene. The stare that the lens could not fix was usually aimed at one of the elements of representation or some point outside the scene. This subordination with respect to the scene on the whole gave Emilio the impression of passing unobserved, diminishing his shyness and stage fright.
The second group of images was made up of a series of photographs that portrayed anonymous people both male and female of various ages captured in the moment they were about to enter or leave the transom of a door. Often these subjects were not looking into the lens, and did not know they were being photographed. Emilio placed the camera on something solid, chose his scene, regulated the shot, timing, aperture of the diaphragm, and at the opportune moment, took the shot. If the photographs were being taken in the evening, the light in the images took on an orange tonality due to the artificial light present and the kind of film he was using. The long exposure times gave the figures a certain evanescence. Emilio was imagining images, an entire series of partial images that did not aspire to be taken together as a whole. On the contrary, he wanted each shot, each single portion of image, to reveal the essentials that had been lost due to an intention. It was one afternoon, an evening of nervous extenuations, desire curled up into a ball, comparable to a film during which nothing happens for the entire first half, and during the second it redeems itself in the finale. In the studio apartment with kitchen in a residence in the city center, the heat was solid and oppressing. Elena begged Emilio to fill the bathtub while she put on a terrycloth bathrobe, hidden behind one door of the bureau. After the bath, she lay out on the bed so that he could massage her back which, she claimed, was killing her. During the days leading up to her office’s closure for vacation she had lifted up and put away an alarming number of boxes full of files in an attempt to put the archives in order. There was not one single centimeter of her body that wasn’t in pain or needed a little attention. Sometimes she gave the impression of having fallen asleep under Emilio’s weight. He was straddling her legs, and could feel with his fingertips the shape of her body under that swathe of bathrobe. If she wasn’t sleeping, she wasn’t giving any signs of participation either, nor did she seem willing to comply with his wishes, but rather lay immobile, limiting herself to offering her body as a stimulant to the state of wild arousal that Emilio was experiencing. It is possible that he was irritated by the remissive attitude of this girl, who may not have said no to his initiatives, but didn’t encourage him or communicate any degree of pleasure. How many times had he found himself in the same situation, trapped between the urgency of releasing the tension of a necessity and a sense of repulsion directed at the object he believed he desired. Too much time had passed to change the outcome with a belated and out-of-place act, now that even Elena was showing signs of fatigue, maybe for disappointment over the missed opportunity.
Upon returning home he congratulated himself for not having taken advantage of the situation, but how would he have reacted if faced with an explicit request? Would he have stayed with her? Would he have forgotten, or pretended to have forgotten under what circumstances and thanks to who he met her, or attempted to discover if she was sentimentally attached? His suspicions, more than simple suspicions, had a precise, specific name and face. He made a list of all the things he didn’t like in order to find further support for his weak moral considerations, finally concluding that he had done well to control himself, that this wasn’t the kind of woman with whom he would have liked to have had physical relations. He was lying, and in order to distract himself he relied upon the use of a kaleidoscope, the lens of which was filled with small colored bears that spun ceaselessly to the sound of a country band. It was always better than arranging the chairs around the apartment to create an elevated walkway upon which to escape the fleas that had been left behind with no dog. Towards midnight the phone rang again. Half an hour later, extremely white under her black-lace underwear, Elena smiled at the friend who stood at the door. She made a request with closed lips, murmuring: licorices for her too.
Among the guests staying at the hotel, his attention had been captured by a young woman and her two children, a boy and a girl aged four and five. Three times a week she accompanied the children to their ski lessons. Wrapped in a white fur coat that stretched down to her feet, she walked silently using her children’s miniature equipment as ski poles. They head for the field where the ski instructor awaits them. She never checks to make sure they’re following her, nor tells them to hurry up. Like a queen, she moves forward with her valets in tow. The brother and sister walk side-by-side at a regular pace, occasionally looking at one another and grinning. Well-mannered children. Days in the hotel went by identical to one another, according to a rhythm connected with the time dedicated to work and the time dedicated to rest. The monotony acted on Emilio as a potent anesthetic that made him forget most of the things that he would have done if he had applied himself as he wanted to. Desires and passions languished in a state of vaporous and sweaty somnolence. The only thought capable of lifting him above that bed of dense smoke was connected with the wait for the end of the day when, retreating into himself, he could dream of a fantastic life. His relationship with Annamarie, the young waitress he had made friends with, was not going anywhere. Aside from a few idle caresses, he had not managed to kiss her. During the day they rarely met. He served tables at the restaurant, she worked as a cleaning lady in the rooms of the chalet. In order to celebrate Emilio’s birthday, she bought a cake and a bottle of champagne. She felt sincerely friendly with him, but she didn’t want to go to bed without guarantees that their relationship would go somewhere. Emilio’s efforts to convince her that convenience played no part whatsoever in their case proved useless. After having emptied the bottle of champagne and opened a bottle of grappa that Emilio kept in his room, they fumbled about semi-asleep. Despite repeated insistence and her obvious drunkenness, Annamarie stubbornly resisted. She didn’t feel well. Emilio held her head while she vomited into the toilet.
During the next few days the hotel was booked solid for the Christmas holidays. The work rhythms were intense. Too tired to do anything in their free time, Emilio and Annamarie stopped going for walks to Badreichenhall or skating like they had done at the beginning of their relationship. They no longer stopped to chat before going back to their own rooms. On Christmas evening the management gave gifts to the employees. Emilio received a garishly colored tie and a record of Neapolitan songs. The morning after he announced he was quitting. During those days, a famous Swiss circus was setting up tents and equipment on the outskirts of the town, with all the carriages, animals, clowns and artists that characterize the circus. The circus was going to be there for the same length of time that was left to Emilio before quitting his job, then it would continue on its way to appointments in northern Europe. If he could manage to convince people that he’d been hired by the circus, he’d undoubtedly impress. He imagined himself working to feed the animals, clean the stalls, falling in love with the young trapeze artist. He talked with the taxi driver who drove him back to the hotel where he’d first stayed about the memorable victory earned by the Italian ski team in a slalom race held nearby. He didn’t care much about skiing, but he was satisfied about his progress in German. Frau Hofmann, the owner, offered him coffee and a glass of liquor, citing an episode of their first encounter when she had made a joke about Emilio’s last name saying: dass mir alles gefellt was mit rum anfängt. Before leaving ………. definitively, one splendid spring morning in January, he slipped a note under Annamarie’s door, even though they had already said their goodbyes and promised to stay in touch. He would never forget her. He saw the mother of the two children for the last time while he was getting into a car. She was arguing animatedly with her husband. That afternoon and night he spent in Munich. The evening after he got on the train that would take him back to Italy, to his city, his friends, his father’s house. He picked up a newspaper and leafed through it. On one page he read the following news: that night, with a knife, almost certainly a kitchen knife, a man had murdered his wife and children before taking his own life. The location from which the reporter had sent in the report was the same town, the crime having been committed in a room of the hotel where he’d been working. He put down the newspaper and took on a thoughtful expression. He wasn’t thinking, but rather seeing images, sequences of non-linear images, scenes taken by an invisible camera in movement, objects overturned in a room that was too bright, a road seen from above on a gray day, the path through the woods that surrounded the Königsee. He saw his bedroom in the city, his father in a good mood surrounded by friends, the empty violin case that belonged to Lucy, Elena’s big, protruding eyes, an island in Greece, the first two verses of Une saison en enfer: “Jadis, si je me souviens bien,
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