The Innocence of Error
I removed the books one by one like thorns after a fall among brambles and unfamiliar plants. The authors awaited their removal orders, their spines straight like proud backs. And I removed the books one by one, from shelf to shelf, discovering the skeleton: spaces, empty shelves, nothing but the trace of those books, a faint line of a different white, where the dust had settled, where the dust remained. And I read the titles one by one, like a story, a sign, a sentence as long as absence.
Tell me how you really are. I have been dreaming of you often, lately, and I dream you uneasy.
Behind a flowered curtain I had hidden my regrets, arranged and then buried like roads to be erased. I found my footprints again, went down into the street, and threw everything away, everything I cared about. Without allowing memories to follow me elsewhere, I shut outside (in an ordinary box) train tickets, restaurant receipts, distant days and neighbouring chairs, wine glasses, rye bread, travel notes and the winds of Ostro and Sirocco, low clouds and hotel keys. They are the skies of days that will never come, they gathered water from deserts and sand from oceans, yet they are my memory, they are my past (when it turns its back on the past).
Tell me how you really are. I have been dreaming of you often, lately, and I dream you uneasy.
Now I have changed. I have another doorbell. My name on the door gives the stairway and the apartment number. There is the smell of fresh white paint, and those old floors seem returned from a forgotten move: ancient mimosa, yellow ochre, madder lake. You know, I no longer have those love letters. Mine leaned toward the future; yours were only uninhabited sentences, inside rooms without skies, behind weathered doors. Now those words of mine have found the light. Burned, they fly from the window of this train that smells of wet dog. Now that my words have found the light of my new windows, facing East, I no longer know how to speak them, I no longer know how to repeat them to anyone, for the time for speaking is not the time for remembering.
Tell me how you really are. I have been dreaming of you often, lately, and I dream you uneasy.
And I am left with only a few pages to keep track of those few objects that were not given to me (as a smile is given). Written in a little list that serves no purpose and that no one would understand. I kept the accounts of memory without caring about profit or loss. I squandered words, left in other people's drawers. I separated myself from who I was, and kept with me hurried notes: half a mineral water, two starters, bread, service, fifteen euros, second-class regional train, (room numbers like omens), seat fifteen, gate ten, number the same as another, like photographs to photograph is no longer to immortalise, only to let die poses that are not posing, time that is no longer memory.
Tell me how you really are. I have been dreaming of you often, lately, and I dream you uneasy.
I kept the books of memory like a distracted accountant. I granted myself the luxury of remembering parts for the whole, glimpses for panoramas, details for horizons, little rooms for great halls. I had no windows facing East, and it was never a matter of staying. I measured the new rooms as though they were ephemerides, questioned my new spaces. To move things is to give depth: an archaeology of the everyday. Dice, wooden toys drawers filled with objects inks and vanilla candles seashells, black sand dark as volcanic lava and pages left out to dry as you did with our roses sheets that had turned yellow my nervous handwriting my handwriting already fading. Then I asked you, I went on asking you:
Tell me how you really are. I have been dreaming of you often, lately, and I dream you uneasy.
You always answered me without undoing a single button of that dress stitched onto your life. I knew it did not fit you well, but I could not tell you. This is not the time for answers, just as it is not the time for memories. It is the time of photographs, of verses borrowed from elsewhere. It is the time of showing oneself without being seen. And it is the time of letting everyone know about open doors through which no one enters, about places displayed and never lived in. There is no time for speaking, only time for writing, and never time for caresses. They remain on the page: the affectation of absences pretending to be an embrace, a kiss, the lying future of writing see you soon.
Now light the fire and look outside. The meadow is untended, the branches of the trees are broken, the grass is high and your wall has collapsed. No caress can reach this far. Light the fire, and still wear that dress of dreams you no longer know how to dream.
Roberto Cotroneo, The Innocence of Error, from Metamorphoses (2014).
This translation is my own, though I am grateful to @karma--police for several insightful suggestions.
