• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1426 0

moonlight, is free completely and, in every clause, of that angrily assertive manner of certain northern beasts, and their married-scorched Führer: (in a bonfire of gasoline). It is pleasing, pleasing to our ears to abandon ourselves to such happy argumentation, like a cork conquered by the gentle current of a stream towards the valley, towards the call of the depths. The sonorous flow is but the symbol of the flow of logic: the source of Eleatic statement has been transformed into a moving course: boiling up in the disjunctions or dichotomies of the spirit or in the blind alternations of probabilities, it is perpetuated in a dramatically Heraclitean deflux πάνγα δε πόλεμος filled with urgencies, with curiosities, with desires, expectations, doubts, anguish, dialectic hopes. The listener becomes able to form opinions in any direction. The objection of the other side is pulverized in that musical voluptuousness, coagulates with a new nose, like the herm of Janus, when you stare it in the face, and then, immediately afterwards, from behind. All were silent.

At the reading of that text, or at hearing it read with such involvement, a text which, to tell the truth, was a little out of the ordinary, one would have believed that, at the moment she wrote her will, poor Liliana, prey to a kind of madness, or divinatory hallucination, already foresaw her end as imminent: if she hadn't positively been meditating suicide. The testament bore the date of January 12th, two months ago: her name-day, as her husband pointed out: a little after the Epiphany. It was "the unbosoming of an overexcited woman," someone opined tacitly. And the writing, too, to Balducci, Don Ciccio, Don Lorenzo, betrayed a certain jerkiness, a certain agitation: a graphologist would have earned the fee for his expertising. A strange ecstasy in this detachment from worldly things, and from their names and symbols: that voluptuousness of farewell which immediately distinguishes heroic minds as well as minds unwittingly suicidal: when one, not yet departed on the long journey, already finds himself with a foot at the water's edge, on the shores of darkness.

Ingravallo was thinking: he thought that even Christmas, that the Crib, the Epiphany . . . with their children, their gifts, their Three Kings . . . with that sunburst of golden rays under the Christ Child . . . straw in the manger, light of the divine source . . . could have concentrated, as in a mental storm-cloud, certain melancholy fixations of the signora: January 12th. The poor testatrix, at that moment, must not have had all her emotions under control. Damnit: and yet . . . and yet she had maintained the provisions: she had changed nothing afterwards, in February, in March, not a syllable. Therefore, indeed, she had trusted the will to Don Corpi, urging him to "hide it and forget it."

An enigmatic expression: already clear to Don Ciccio, however: to forget it for the duration of her life, as if she wished to see buried, as soon as possible, that guilty list of possessions: which, only in the final loss of herself, she was permitted to scatter: which at every new day led her back towards the obligations, the inane reasons of living, while her soul tended already towards a kind of expatriation (her dear soul!) from the useless land towards maternal silences. The city and its people would know the future. She, Liliana . . . Forgetful of markets and cries, with brief opal wings, in the sweet hour, when every farewell is necessary and every still-warm wall loses its color in the night, Hermes, appearing to her in his true being, would at last have looked towards the doors, with silent command: the doors through which one leaves, at last, as the populace continues talking, to go down, down, into a more pardonable vanity. "Evasi, effugi: spes et fortuna valete: nil mihi vobis-cum est: ludificate alios": at the Lateran museum, a sarcophagus: Liliana had remembered those words: she had asked him to translate them.

That giving, that donating, that sharing out among others! Ingravallo thought: operations, to his