The Perfect Circle Read online

  The traveller is intact. Only his shoes deteriorate. He is entering the country of others, he sometimes imagines, simply for the pleasure of giddiness, that he will stay there for his whole life, but the next day he’s off again, his life is elsewhere because it is everywhere. The traveller has a name, the one on his passport. In other languages, he’s often asked to repeat it, people pronounce it incorrectly, always, it’s the name of a stranger, the traveller is a stranger.

  At the best of himself, in the root of his eye, the traveller is intact. The journey takes place outside him and new faces, unfamiliar tastes, the colour of the houses merely consolidate that which he already was.As what is known is dispersed, he notes that, enriched with new images, he is more and more simply himself, more and more stripped of the superfluous that we accumulate when we stay at home, more and more poor in the poor eyes of normality, yet more and more independent, as he has fewer resources.

  If he can walk, the traveller walks. He watches places parade before him that don’t belong to him, with houses to which no one invites him. Fountains are friendly because their users are anonymous.The traveller bends down, wets his hair and drinks some water, sits for a moment and then sets off again.

  The traveller sets off again. The journey, he knows, is merely a metaphor for his own life, for everyone’s life, a metaphor for life itself: with no other content than that — the space between. He lacks the time to grow attached to anything, he carries no heavy objects. He has only his two legs, only his thinking, and his thinking improves day by day, as landscapes open in him the gate to a cloistered consciousness, a consciousness that’s waiting for a key for itself.The traveller’s heart waits calmly for the journey, the way a puppy waits for us to find a name for him, without even thinking about it, already prepared to respond as soon as he is called.

  At a hotel I met a Dutchman living in England who had decided to walk in the Italian mountains for four months. He had hesitated for a long time before choosing the book that he’d bring with him. In the end he opted for poetry because he could reread poems a number of times. I asked him what he missed most while he was walking. He told me, Music, I think. That night I lent him some music that he could listen to in his room. He was gone the next morning. He’d left the music on my doorstep, along with the book of poems.

  The traveller doesn’t burden himself with anything. After a moment, he realizes that he no longer burdens himself even with himself, that he himself is stuck to his own footsteps in a manner so tranquil that it scarcely weighs a thing. He realizes that he is becoming what he always was, without a doubt: a footstep.

  Because he knows that he will leave no matter where he is, he keeps himself in a state of perpetual mourning that is less and less painful, that at times even makes him happy.That’s because the state of mourning is also a state of wakefulness, as are real funerals. It is a state of exacerbated wakefulness and during it the traveller accompanies things until the next moment, imminent, when they will disappear.The traveller is like a person who chooses the wrong door and ends up in the room of a dead man. He greets the corpse, telling it at the same time hello, delighted, goodbye, farewell, knowing at once that he has arrived at a corpse that has already embarked on decomposition, but is trying nonetheless to make his acquaintance.The worlds the traveller visits are these: they are worlds that have been embedded in their own habits for a long time, motionless worlds where the inhabitants keep watch with more or less energy, attention, and singular patience.The traveller enters there one day, he sees them for the first time, and because of his new way of seeing, still capable of astonishment, worlds light up in their slightest details.

  Should it happen that the traveller stops and settles down, that he ceases to be a traveller, little by little the worlds die out and are covered with dust.The traveller finds a hook for his coat, buys himself a cooking pot and some cushions. In each of the objects he acquires, he will deposit a fragment of his soul, in his consciousness he will open only doors already open, and soon he will only be astonished that he’s no longer astonished, by anything.

  She gets on a train and gets off at the station nearest the village. Marco was supposed to meet her. He’s late. By the fountain where she had waited for him when she came back from France, she is waiting for him again. It seems to her that few ingredients have been added to their love story between these two times of waiting, as if waiting, linking all these moments together, has finally made them only one — one long moment spent at the train station.

  He turns up late and unsmiling. He takes her to the village. It’s the first night of the Fish Festival. Between the pine trees, long tables at which the whole province has come to feast. Above the tables, a huge fishing net. Marco and Marianne, sitting side-by-side, have already been separated by the frescoes and the friction of the rails, the wings in the wind of Assisi and the wear and tear of her sandals, they’re already far apart from one another at the moment when, at the fish table, she decides never to end up like them, with a net hanging over her head.

  IX

  THE BROKEN CIRCLE

  During the night of September 26, 1997, Marianne and Marco are sleeping together and they don’t wake up. The epicentre is in Foligno, a town near Assisi. In less than ten seconds Cimabue comes crashing down. His slow fading ends rather brutally — in a thousand pieces on the floor of the apse. Frescoes live for seven hundred years. We think that they’ll bury us all, along with our grandchildren. We visit them once, their beauty scalds us.Twenty days later they crumble into dust.There’s nothing to be said. It’s the end of an image. It marks the true death of the painter, much delayed. We rarely hear the pulsation which marks the fragility of all things, especially that of stone.Two priests lie dead beneath the rubble; dozens of people left homeless couldn’t care less about the fate of a fresco. But experts examine Giotto and are waiting for news as one might wait for news from a friend with heart disease.

  The next day, something new. It’s not even the echo of the first tremor, it’s a second earthquake.The destabilized houses finish crumbling.The vault of the basilica collapses in a huge cloud, in front of the trembling cameras that were examining Giotto as if with a stethoscope. Television shows it happening continually, in slow motion. The vault collapses. So much patience reduced to nothing. But Giotto is intact.

  In ten days, maybe sooner, Marianne will have left the village.

  Walk alone, you said, get by without me.

  The last days, I only perceived metaphors of my own distress, the worn skin of fruit, the icy about-face of the lake under the tramontana, the furious four-hour storm, the pine tree bowed down with its head in the water, cheeks drained of fading flowers, the weeping of willows, dog excrement on the walkway in the harbour, the curses of an empty-handed fisherman, the islands mired in mist, the barricaded hotel, the missing hand on the statue of Christ, out-of-tune scales, weeds, power failures, nets stretched on the beach.

  The earthquake in Assisi, the houses in shreds, and Cimabue swept into a dustpan by some tearful lovers of medieval art.

  The sighs of Fulli, who wants to play outside, your own sighs, devoid of any instructive word, those of the empty house with its crumbling plaster when the terrible shadows of noonday ghosts pass over it.

  When I arrived in your country I had an unshakeable trust in the vaults of churches.Trust remains: more fragile, it becomes trust in the effort made by vaults of churches to resist earthquakes.As for what’s possible: I only trust the vault of prayers surviving that of churches.

  I passed among you, who are motionless. I trust only my own footsteps, beyond the walls, towards the horizon glimpsed as I learn to lean on my steps themselves.

  It’s anger that saves her. All at once it becomes impossible to mask it with distress, to put it to sleep in the afternoon, to bury it under the beauty of a body. Anger rises. Cold anger, anger like the sinew of angers, the pure force of one who only wants to live. Anger, one day, suddenly, does away with expectation.

  It�
�s afternoon, everything is closed, but the grimy café at the corner of via degli Alberi sells cigarettes at this time of day, she knows that, she also knows that they sell the strongest brands. She buys a package, smokes three, one after the other. The square is deserted and with no cars, no humans, no shadows, it seems immense, its cobbles shrink back to the roots of the roofs, the sun overwhelms everything with the same torrid colour, it obstructs windows — a killer. Marianne heads for the only telephone that works. She’s going to call the airline. She will tell them: I have to leave here. Crossing the square, she hears a man’s voice behind her, a voice that’s calling Sabina and is aimed directly at her, there’s no mistake, there’s no one else. Marianne turns around. A man all in leather gets off his motorcycle and makes his way to her. He smiles. “Are you Sabina?” “No,” she tells him, and he looks disappointed.

  “I’m trying to find Sabina,” he explains, “and you look like her.”

  “And who’s Sabina?”

  “A girl I loved seventeen years ago.”

  “And then?”

  “We haven’t seen each other since. I was in the area and we’d arranged to meet here, today, to get together.”

  “And I resemble her.”

  “Yes, you resemble her, but you aren’t her. Where are you from?”

  “Canada.”

  “Canada?”

  “Yes. And I’m leaving tomorrow.”

  “Will you be away long?”

  “Forever.”

  He falls silent. Marianne puts her hand on his arm the way the locals do and wishes him good luck with Sabina. He smiles and wishes her a safe trip. She walks to the telephone, he sits on a bench, the square is deserted, and Sabina doesn’t come.

  Actually, thinks Marianne, he did recognize me. I’m a forerunner of Sabina, here in the desert of the central square, from now on I am Sabina, who’s come here to look for the face that changed her life seventeen, twenty-five, a thousand years ago, and at this moment, there is no difference between my soul and the square, only the unbearable similarity between one desert and another, both of them without shadows or humans — deadly.

  Leaving this country, she knows that she’s about to enter another that is even more cruel, the country of fascination and absence — absence that’s connected to the being and that time fails to fill, even after it is cured of the absence of the body, of speech, of laughter, even after it is cured of all the rest.

  When Marianne announces to Marco that she’s leaving the next day, his face mobilizes, impassively, all his right angles, but Argo, in the garden, starts to cry. Marco pets him and the more he pets the dog, the more the dog cries. Marco looks up at Marianne and tells her, with a big grin: “He’s a very sensitive dog.”Then immediately lowers his eyes.

  Perhaps the desire for God emerges like that, with a sudden awareness of time that condemns us to lose small things — the red shovel, a billfold, some gloves — and then the important things — a friend, my grandfather, and summer, several times.A struggle against loss, the desire for a thread that can bring together the passing of everything and hold it in its invisible hand like a bouquet.When I passed through my night in you, stripped of everything, even my mother tongue, even the familiar way of thinking that my tongue knows how to mould, the only thing left that was true was the desire for God, made obvious and crystalline by my extreme nudity.

  But nudity, like the desire for God, is the exact point where the fact of being numb with cold cohabits with the ecstasy of being alive. Confident nudity is faith.

  It’s the risk of freezing to death in faith and it’s the fact of taking that risk while smiling with happiness.

  One day, I decided to leave your country. I phoned the airline, then went back to the empty house and took my suitcase out from under the bed. It was dusty, a scorpion had shed its skin on it. I was in a state of despair close to ecstasy, as if the furthest limit of my sadness were exalting, in a remote corner of my being, the heartbeat of life.The heartbeat of life I remember, stripped of everything with which we dress it, tossed naked onto my pain as if to give it a meaning, as if to direct it towards the time after suffering. I opened the suitcase and left it on the living-room floor for a moment. Stepped into the garden. The sky was grey, heavy, the rain would start any time now, and the harrowing dampness made the flowers look darker than usual, as if they were letting themselves be inhabited from the inside by a secret, impalpable night of splendid density.

  In the garden, I spread my arms as wide as I could and looked up at the sky. It was a prayer perhaps, an offering, it was the desperate gift of my own life to life, the hope that the soul of the world would sustain me while, to keep from perishing, my own soul was erased. I was entering deep darkness, but in the midst of my distress, discreetly, a mysterious gratitude flared, an indescribable joy at having been brought so far from things that assemble, and so dangerously close to the bottom of all worlds.Through insults then, I was thanking heaven. And beneath my revolt against so terrible a wound, I think that for the first time, I chose to be alive. Not by enduring the kind of life that is anticipated, not by taking it from waking to waking, through activities that pass the time, but rather in its perilous nudity; with utter selflessness, I chose life with its black night and its white day, chose it fully and letting nothing slip, with my arms spread wide, in the garden, I accepted everything, all at once — and all at once, everything accepted me as well — me, a church ruined by a shiver of patience, a child stuck in an artesian well, a fresco in fragments on earth that is quaking, a red shovel swallowed by the sand; I knew, suddenly, that in my pain there also grew the wings of life, life that moves on without a word, not one, without even saying my name, yet picking me up by the scruff of the neck, straightening me up without a sound, and supporting my open arms to keep them from closing.

  Because I was leaving your country to keep from collapsing, life, that evening, greeted me with its blue pungency. I could sense it clearing a path inside me, distributing its strength to all the hollows of need so that the terrible plane by which your face would be erased would take off.

  Marco is still asleep. In sheer compensation, Marianne is eating some bread while she packs. She is eating bread, then all at once she doesn’t want anything and she starts to cry. Fulli gets up and approaches her on the tips of his paws.

  She holds out her hand, he licks it, then licks it more and more frantically and so energetically that Marianne ends up laughing. Then Fulli sits down and cocks his head. “Mission accomplished,” he thinks. He sits there, motionless, watching Marianne. He really does know how to smile, she’d never noticed till now. She offers him the bread, which he hasn’t asked for. In the memory of her that he’ll hang onto, she will be simply herself, with nothing to criticize. Fulli will be the only one to remember Marianne. He won’t phone. He won’t write.Yet he’ll be the one and only lost friend.

  That night, with exceptional kindness, Marco’s mother prepares a stuffed turtledove. No one’s really hungry but she does it with the utmost diligence, to leave a happy memory in Marianne’s stomach, to celebrate or to console herself on her departure. Marianne struggles to swallow her portion. The mother offers her another, which Marianne turns down. Then, in an outrageous act of regression, the mother dumps the whole contents of the pan on her plate. It’s her final exercise of power and her final act of generosity. Marianne submits. Eats.

  On television, there are slow-motion images of the earthquake.The vault collapses and rises up to heaven like a cloud.The light soul of St. Francis, finally released from the architecture made to contain his enlightenment, disappears through the gaping hole of the church, above the altar, and the camera trembles in the sigh of his liberation.

  The wind reveals neither where it has come from nor where it is going. It meets no resistance, depending on what direction an invisible power pushes it; the wind itself is that power, it turns without breaking, crosses the street wherever it wants, asks no one for anything.A total presence in this continual
departure, it is everywhere at once, yet it is here and now and tomorrow again, effortlessly.

  Marco has been patrolling his village for years. Women travellers find their way into his bed, but none will agree to marry his village, his mother, his dozens of uncles and cousins — precisely because they are travellers. Marco is true to himself, he lets them go, he remembers their passage as a benign burn, knowing already that his peculiar way of being both root and leaf will prevent him always from going with them. Marco’s soul is like that of Francis held in his basilica, prisoner of a solidly medieval architecture, and the earth only trembles after seven hundred years.

  Marianne, in front of the TV set between Marco, his mother, and the stuffed turtledove, is watching for the fifteenth time the collapse of the basilica’s vault. A tear falls onto her plate, adding a little salt. A tear for the happiness of Francis, a tear for the vanity of human architectures, a tear for Marco embedded in his village, and a tear for herself, who will fly away tomorrow, with her faith totally demolished, with her desire suspended, with the small amount of strength she has left to thwart the temptations of a last-minute hope, and try to hope that hope will be possible somewhere else.

  Everything is difficult now. Francis’s soul rises up to the sky along with the dust of the vault, you can see the heavy stone shatter on the ground, its fragments added to those of the fresco in an appalling disorder. The ground is scattered with debris. Few of us are able to fly.

  When I close my eyes, I no longer see your face. I see the lake. I see Fulli, who comes running when I knock on the door, I see a scar on your left forearm, I see your back relax all at once when sleep overcomes you. I see a glass of lemonade and my thirst seeking it, I see hammered copper trays, the night; I see distinctly the candlesticks on the tables, the wild boar in its sauce, the circles of oil around tomatoes, the circles of oil around boats, I see men at the top of a ladder, shaking an olive tree. I hear olives falling into their outstretched nets, my own teeth biting into a perfect apple, and I hear the desert widening between us, all the way to the last words murmured in the dark so tears will stay hidden.