Friday evening in Vera’s house square of the Saintthe last configuration of a nomadic life, had moved there two years ago, a small independent building inside an ancient building, next to that of Lucrezia Cornaro, with windows overlooking the internal courtyard lined with jasmine. Outside a great concert in the square. The din, which arrives muffled, underlines the shocked silence of the house. I enter the living room to discover that he had brought his study there, the study that was the work tool, the headquarters of a life. On the shelves the spines of books that we had shared for contingent reasons, very few important ones. Some treatises of psychology.
The recreated studio
Recreated in a corner of a room, the studio that welcomed me for eleven years, more or less equally divided between the first office in Roman bridges and the second in via San Francesco: on the walls the two paintings of whirling dervishes and that Boldini-style portrait of a woman, in a corner the slightly dusty dried flowers, the wooden desk, the chaise longue Of Le Corbusier in black leather, even the paper holder lined with that old map… In an instant I relive the eternal waits in the room and then the convulsive sessions, interspersed with twelve absurd phone calls about work and relationships, the messy and cheerful and imperious going, the endless times to ask me – but will this help? -, the same number of people telling me how indispensable it was, and then calling everything into question again; rI see a father in a car with a no parking sign and four indicatorshis fisherman’s hat pulled down over his nose, dozing off on the reclined seat while waiting for his son who still doesn’t have a driving license, the fatigue, the comings and goings between Cortina and Paduathe pain, the exasperation, the expectations, the beginning and the end of my studies, and after my nomadic life that began, in a straying involuntarily symmetrical to his: the roads of the Veneto worn for work and for curious trips, and other kilometers again, and again, out of distraction, out of compulsion, and in the evening arriving home with the car that smells of friction, his objects that he takes out of the car like so many prostheses of everyday life, the phone wedged between your head and shoulder on yet another phone call while bracelets jingle on your thin wriststhe jacket creased from hours of driving, the Maltese girl rushing to urinate on the lawn.
The reference to a later time
The enthusiasm, the outbursts, the useless negotiations. The laughter. Twenty-five years. A dull shiver in the impossible attempt to understand them in all their absurd diversity, contradiction, mutation. In the exasperated, pathological closeness she would have said, and then in the relative distance, in the detachment, in the flight to survive, in the postponement to an after, that there wasn’t. Hug Rosy, Federico, Deli, Regina. I go out stunned into the quiet of the garden. It will rain soon.
