The Perfect Circle Read online

  They grow like plants in a pot so old, beneath a sky so blue that they suffer without ever thinking of any possible elsewheres.

  I liked the calm on your attentive face, a warm breeze passed over it, and migrating ducks. I was overwhelmed now and then, at brief and precious moments that made all the others fade and that leave me still today — and for a long time yet to come — grateful but removed from everything.

  I am a shambles of images huddled one against the other. A red mark between the paving stones of Florence marks the spot where Savonarola was burned. I saw Michelangelo’s David, elevated, white, smooth, perfect, nearly triumphant, at once sure of himself and anxious, with a youthful anxiety that no one probably ever sheds. Around him, the Prisoners left deliberately unfinished, bodies trying to escape from the sick stone, eclipsed torsos with no hope of light, straining from the effort to be free, in the infinite task of assuming a shape. There is always the crushing pressure of what is against what will be. Stone is the skin is fear is the weight of everything is the obsession with good and evil where the head is held in both hands so as not to give in to the temptation of sleep.

  I would like your perfect blood in mine, your worker ant’s mouth on my back, I have stepped, I think, too close to your sun. I wake up with my throat parched, you only exist somewhere else.Your sleep is six hours away from mine, immersed in dreams you believe in with all your heart, but understand nothing about.

  One day I walked with you in a sloping field from which we could see the line of the water.The grasses bent to September, you looked at me looking into the distance, I was wearing clothes of yours and the wind blew inside them, onto my white belly, green waves in the trees, the air more and more mauve, and at the end of the fields, an apple tree covered with apples, a fig tree covered with figs, green and purple grapes which you threw to your dogs as if throwing sticks.A ladder leaned against the branch of an olive tree, it pointed towards a moon that seemed to be within reach at the top of ten wooden rungs.

  I wake up thirsty, I’m always a little cold, I always know at any moment of the day that we can fly in the toboggan tracks of shooting stars, up against the shivering water that runs from leaf to leaf in the square garden, as if the trees and only they, seeing us finally asleep, were murmuring, happily, our brand-new story. I wake up in the inferno of thirst, drained to the lees by the ravenous memory of your male pleasure, with very little left for me, really very little, enough to say hello, here, now, and to find work around your absence, to fill the time that’s on the march and that will save us — maybe, soon, at last — from the other’s skin.You exist somewhere else, which is to say nowhere, yet this red fig bursts, red still and always, on my inner walls, as if trying to thank me for having come to you in the land of ripe fruit and uncoiled voices.

  If only when we fly the ground never came to meet us, if only we could open our arms like a child who appropriates for himself sea, sky, and vast horizon, with a smile even wider than her arms, happy in the embrace of the world that has come to transport her. If only we’d had every day the power to tumble down the dune, laughing, and the patience to swim as far as the blessed moment when it would become possible to breathe underwater.

  “It’s time to wash your clothes.”

  “All right.”

  “Bring them tonight, at supper time.”

  “All right.”

  That night, Marianne brings her clothes.

  “Where’s the washing machine?”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of it.”

  “No, no, I’ll do it.”

  “No, no. Put your bag on the armchair, I’ll take care of it. Did you bring your sheets too?”

  “No.”

  “It’s time you washed your sheets.”

  “All right.”

  “It will all be ready tomorrow.”

  The next day, the clothes are clean, dry, pressed. The mother hands her the bag, saying: “You look ugly in those old pants, you could find some pretty ones at the market for next to nothing if you’d just make an effort.”

  The following week, Marianne puts up a clothesline in the garden and decides to wash her own clothes by hand.

  “I saw your clothesline behind the house.”

  “Oh.”

  “It’s a bad choice.”

  “Why?”

  “There’s no shade.Your clothes will burn.”

  “There’s shade in the morning.”

  “Then hang them out in the morning.”

  “Yes. Thank you.”

  Because of the terrible bareness of her days in the empty house, because of the wandering souls drifting in a landscape made for gods, the terrible question appears in the air which is suddenly, dangerously limpid: why this life rather than another, rather than nothing? Is there a thread to hold onto within sight of a fixed point?

  The clothesline itself Marianne gradually comes to see as a rope strong enough to support her own weight, she imagines a fine knot swaying under the living-room chandelier, wholeheartedly offering its meagre embrace. She sits outside and stares at the rope, she sits inside and stares at the void. But her drawings hung on the wall keep repeating the same observation: death is as impossible for you as life because you haven’t yet decided anything.

  For weeks she wanders around with that dark notion dangling from the end of the rope, and she admires Marco’s moral fibre, ruled in his sleep by the diver’s costume.

  Death was there. I remember, in the empty room of the empty house, I had opened the doors and death was making them beat like a heart about to fail, its arteries all shivering. I was sitting on the floor and I watched her stretch out on the walls, making them crumble even more into plaster dust, I could see my drawings resisting her with all their lines, failing more and more at keeping me alive. I saw the corners of the paper fade, I saw the colour go mouldy. I felt that soon my body would refuse yours, I felt that soon I would hate the language learned for love.

  Friendship comes to her now only from fragile presences — dead leaves, dirty glasses, a beached eel, a bare boat, the gnarled trunks of old olive trees, bushes disguised as dust at the side of the road. The grammar of a reasonable life is erased by the first signs of madness.The shutters bang in the night. And Marco’s voice resonates all the way to her in moments of presence, but can’t save her from what one must experience alone: that nothingness of the self to carry all the way, one tiny step at a time. She becomes a dormant thing at the foot of his love. Unable to leave and unable to stay. She is the unliveable world of the world. Her only work consists of not fearing the depth of the water when she swims, each day farther from the shore.

  “Are you hungry?”

  “Yes.”

  “Very?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did you have for lunch? Qualche panino? What do you eat when you don’t come here?”

  “Qualche panino.”

  “I see.That’s what I thought.”

  For weeks now she hasn’t been going to his place to eat, he hasn’t been coming to her place to sleep. It happens repeatedly, as if at regular intervals a wall emerged from the ground and rose up between them, leaving them powerless to connect. During these periods she sits in the garden, motionless, or walks along the lake, endlessly. She waits for rain, which won’t come. She waits for Marco who, in his way, might be waiting for her too.

  During one of these periods, Marianne hears the garden gate open. Marco knows that she’s inside. He walks through the garden, picks up the pruning shears he’d left on the window ledge, then leaves, slamming the gate.

  Marco on one side of the window — outside, Marianne on the other — inside; a transparent, normal, clean window, curtainless yet hermetically sealed to their respective states of helplessness. Come back, she wants to cry to him, though she knows that’s all it would take to make him disappear for good. An urge to cut all the flowers in the garden, to be outside like him, and also to have the right to a handful of reality, ends up in a gin on the deserted t
errace of the hotel — a gin in broad daylight. Ever since the snow, which was already long ago, there’d been no anger. Marianne storms into the bar and breathlessly asks for something to make her feel good. “Iced tea?” “No, gin,” she replies in a bass voice, pounding the counter with her fist.The three owners exchange a look. One asks what the problem is, in that typical way of condensing into a single word their countless questions about other people’s lives.

  “Marco?”

  “What, Marco?”

  “Where is he, what’s he doing?”

  “How should I know?”

  Marianne picks up her drink, thanks, and slumps into a seat on the terrace. She would have liked this precise moment, this moment of anger, to dissolve into another person’s presence, she would have liked to grab hold of a sleeve to keep from departing reality at such breathtaking speed. She looks at her drink. The pulp of a lemon floats peacefully in the gin. Let’s drink slowly, she thinks, without other resource. She drinks slowly.The terrace is deserted. She thinks the gin isn’t strong enough, it doesn’t have the reassuring taste of alcohol. She should have ordered a grappa. She should have brought her cigarettes. She should have stayed in her own country.

  Much later that night the garden gate opens again. Marco approaches her, touches her arm, it’s his hand, yes, warm, cushioned, and Marianne hates herself for feeling relieved. “How are you, what are you up to, can I take you out for a gelato?” She says yes. A few minutes later she realizes why he has come tonight, preceded by his hand as if by an ambassador. “I went to the hotel a while ago,” he says. “I don’t know what you told the women, all three of them laughed at me.”

  It’s confirmed. There is no first aid. They all appropriate the rumour without approaching the pain. She should have taken out a better insurance plan. She should have transformed anger into definitive courage.

  VII

  NOTHING

  Now I would like to write a story with characters, but in such a story I can clearly see that there’s only me, you, your dogs and your mother, a little wind, thousands of sunflowers, and the strange time we all flew into, the time of our unmade bed, the time of my emptied life that now, moving backwards, I ought to fill with words that can heal.

  I can’t.

  I must.

  Marianne goes to the harbour where the sky is wide, cold, clear, where the moon seems more fragile, more miraculously suspended.The harbour chimes in the wind, the boats moan a little, squeezed against one another just as they are on all other nights. But this night is a night of eclipse. Slowly, it closes its black eyelid over the moon.

  And then, slowly, opens it again. At first, only a line, a slender, perfect curve. The sky slips away from the moon, undresses her, clears a path for her; the moon pushes it, struggles to grow from it. Each competes with the other in passivity, apparent or real. In the end, the exhausted star is of a purity never before seen. It punches a hole in the thickness of the dark.

  It sometimes happens that monks experience doubt.Their faith departs, with all its belongings, they stay behind, numb, inside the pale structure of their Church, inside its clammy stones.When faith comes home again it is purer than ever, so it’s said. Marianne thinks about everybody’s night and about her own, about the foolhardiness that sends her deeper every day into the darkness, she thinks about the striking proximity of the absent God as the moon breaks away from the seat of shadow, sets fire, victorious, to the immeasurable, then becomes again the nearest star, there where everything is distant.

  Her mistake — there’s no mistake: she is simply confronting the danger of living a poem.

  We walk alone by the thousands across our little planet, always short of everything, of patience most of all.The eclipse lasts for an hour. Human strength should resemble that regal passivity. When we reach out stubbornly towards a specific point, we neglect to take the necessary detour that will lead us gently to our goal without breaking anything. Marianne spends an hour telling herself that all is lost and that it’s good news.

  Then Marco comes to look for her with Fulli on a leash, not even glancing at the sky. “It’s freezing cold tonight,” he says, “let’s go for a drink.”

  When I was a child I built sandcastles on the beach alongside the St. Lawrence. I liked to see the damp sand emerge like a cake from my bucket. I had a red plastic shovel for filling it and for flattening the sand till it was smooth and firm.

  I also liked making wells. At two metres from the shore I would start to dig a hole with my hands until I’d reached the point where the river runs under the beach. I liked the pressure of the sand under my nails, I liked its coolness and the way it got progressively wetter till the water came gushing out.

  I remember one night. It was towards the end of summer.The river still rose a little at that hour, but I wasn’t aware of it yet. Slowly, the water came and touched my shovel. Just as I looked up, a wave enveloped it.When it withdrew I watched, transfixed, as my shovel disappeared.

  Frantically, I searched the face of the sand. I found nothing.

  I had just seen presence transformed into absence through a mutation that was sudden, unpredictable, irreparable. Red, my shovel — and then, nothing.

  The worst thing was the indifference of the vast river, an enemy, its whole gigantic anonymity aimed directly at my toy, its complicity with my beach, it was my helplessness in the face of such a conspiracy. Then I consented to the disappearance of what had disappeared, though something else would never vanish: disappearance itself.

  Time drains away by itself as a result of doing nothing.Time is what is shown on the unchanging village clocks. It is truth. The day is at once long and short, it depends on how the eye is drawn to the island’s silhouette, to the curve of the wind on the castle tower, and it depends on how carefully we scan the horizon and do only that: stop like the clocks, eyes wide open.

  One night around two a.m. a storm wakens Marianne through the open window.Above the roof, the sky cracks like a whip. She goes out, naked inside her raincoat and running shoes.The rain hasn’t started yet, but the gravel and the pine needles snap meticulously in the heavy air, waves hurl themselves at the wharf, and as they bump into each other, the masts seem to be sounding an alarm. Marianne goes as close as she can to the water. She watches the storm move all the way around the lake, whet its lightning above the villages as if to curse them, as if to absolve them, and now and then wrap them all together in a wrecked day lasting less than a second.

  To have nothing to say. To get up at night and follow the storm, to sleep in the afternoon listening to Fauré, to be at any hour awake or asleep indiscriminately, as long as the body makes no demands. Deduct the night from night and the day from day. Sit in the still garden, decline the rosary of what is necessary, and understand that all has been lost along the way: work, play, friends, everything else.

  It feels to Marianne as if she’s been living in the village for centuries and inhabiting herself for millennia. In her other life, her active life, measures of time filed past in order of size, as on the pages of a datebook: in the year, months; in the months, weeks; in the weeks, days: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, the days were chronological, each with its hours of light and its hours of darkness, dawn, morning. Noon. Dusk, evening, night. Dawn again. Orderly time, organized time, meaningful time, time that advances: life, deprived of unexpected bursts of fever or rage.

  All at once, to board a plane and literally kill time. To advance now only by staying in place, with milk on your lips and a hazelnut to say autumn already, just barely, to say autumn forever, straddling the summer, a cat stretches on the burnt grass and Monday is also Sunday, and morning sleep is just as good as the sleep of nighttime. There’s no sidewalk on the avenue of tall pines, their needles carpet the street and cars zigzag through the trees: in the distance, sand from the beach climbs the steps of the hotel and gets into the rooms. It’s total anarchy. Anarchy that recalls, beyond timetables and urban layouts, the pact sign
ed by life with itself when inflicting mortality on humans.

  Anarchy has come from the desire for a body, for Marco’s body, his body only just removed from the mud, a body advancing beyond languages, like a piece of nature accidentally transformed into human awareness, and covered with the white scars of a life scraped by games with dogs and pleasure with women, by the needles in the undergrowth, the cries of birds shot down in flight. Happiness is fragile, violent, and Marco puts his hand on the wound he himself has committed, to reconcile everything with its brief presence.