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‘That’s OK,’ the reader tells me. ‘I understand. But what I don’t understand is why the hell you’re dumping all this rubbish in your novel rather than talking it through with your therapist. Stop messing me around,’ the reader adds, ‘and write something that’s actually entertaining: images, not sob stories. Like those legs encased in black fishnet stockings.’
‘Point taken,’ I say, ‘point taken. I, too, scrupulously avoid poems written by housewives, and all the sob stories and psychoanalytical material people want me to swallow as if it’s literature. But wait a bit longer, be a little more patient and trust me. I promised you a bunch of grapes, and I can’t get on to the grapes themselves without crossing this squalid, vulgar terrain.’
‘Fine,’ the reader responds. ‘I’ll give you half a page more to masturbate over your delayed adolescence; but I swear, if this goes on much longer I’m ditching this book. You see, I actually have a Chandler on my bedside table that …’
‘OK, OK, let me do things my way, and stop interrupting. You’re not the only one with better things to be doing; I myself have a Beckett on my bedside table …’
:)
Well, I may have had my body, but I saw it as worthless. For a start, I thought I was short, despite my five feet nine and three quarter inches; it’s amazing what an inferiority complex can do. From my height I looked down at a fairly respectable portion of the population, and yet I felt everyone was looking down at me. There are reasons for all this, but I don’t want to go on criticising my parents, especially now I’m a parent myself and my children aren’t exactly lacking in reasons to criticise me. Put simply, my sexual needs, and my need for something resembling affection, made me seek out prostitutes as an emergency solution, while I waited to see what on earth would become of that life of mine which had suddenly, ever since the gaze of the green-eyed girl, transformed into unsteady flailing and going round in circles and bumping into invisible walls. I was like a fly that’s flown into a bottle and got stuck and can feel itself running out of air (ricocheting off G, in the end, was what helped me escape).
Before that, I moved through the city like a sleepwalker; although my eyes were open, I saw no more than the bare minimum I needed in order to get where I had to go. But then, in the time opened up by the green-eyed gaze, the city filled all three, or four, of its dimensions; I lived in it, breathed in it and breathed it in, coming to know its pleasant and not-so-pleasant smells. I began to pick up on the slight sadness of particular neon lights glimmering on particular pavements, or the fleeting joy of an unexpected reflection – the red of a car in a torrent of water, traffic lights on rainy nights (the jubilation of the brilliant red or the gentle purity of the green, wet from the rain and bouncing off the asphalt; marble walls or the shiny surfaces of cars, which contrasted with the sweet, infinite sadness of those meek, tireless March and April showers that fell endlessly onto a city carpeted by the plane trees’ yellowish-brown leaves). Yes, there are happy autumns, just as there is happiness in sadness and even in despair: the point is to be alive and to know it, to feel it – and I curse and curse the dull fear of these long years, when all our lives are gradually drying out, dwindling, reducing, with never any place for sadness: nothing but fear, nothing but hatred, nothing but that long-lost, oft-hidden morsel of hope, worn out from so much manhandling, from our longing to squeeze just a few more drops from it, a few more drops to get us through the present with its shrinking horizons and impenetrable lead roof; and oh, how I also came to hate this city, which was falling to pieces, which was burying us under ever-higher walls and rubble and dust and noise and silence and shame.
And might this not be the real reason for what happened with G? If my heart belonged to someone else … Even now, there are nights when I return to that part of the city, and I feel, of course I do (fool that I am, unable to connect to my feelings unless I sit down and write like a man possessed), I feel a sweet ache; and I glance, of course I do, I glance around, and I don’t dare look any more closely or approach that figure huddling in a doorway, because it might be her, what’s left of her, destroyed like the city by the same cruel, miserable force, the same stupid meanness, the infinite blindness of man. I’m afraid of seeing you defeated, and far more afraid that you’ll recognise me and feel a surge of hope that I’ve come back to you; I wouldn’t dare insult you by throwing you some change, you, who were once whole; and nothing in the world, nothing in the world could make me return with you to that room, to the smell of freshly ironed sperm, to the bells on the doors and the staff listening to tangos by Canaro or Roberto Firpo or football matches on the radio.
I’m sorry, literature, you who also have something of a guileless and pitying prostitute about you, I’ve abandoned you too in this reverie of self-absorption, reminiscing behind your back. I’m losing you, too, but it had to be done. I hope you understand: I’m trying to put my own jigsaw together, calling out in a voice that has to travel down tunnels that are fifteen, eighteen, twenty years long, calling to my scattered pieces, to the unburied corpses of myself, grotesque spectres that never rest, images that never had a mirror to reflect them, broken glass crushed under the wheels of a thousand cars travelling down the road in the same direction, all going to the same place.
I was pleased to see such a high incidence of individualism; although limited, that capacity for transgression made me feel hopeful about the future of ants, a domain of Nature whose societal model had seemed as perfect, absolute and mechanical as that of bees; a model in which the individual counts for nothing. And what became of the individualist transgressors? If you ask me, they got drunk on sugar and had a wild night of hedonism and sexual excess. That’s my opinion. But in fact, what I saw that night by artificial light was a group of ants forming more little black balls. When man, i.e. me, intervened with his twig, they separated with some difficulty, moving slowly and clumsily and never straying too far from the centre of the gathering; not a single ant took hold of another ant’s leg; and at the centre of the gathering was invariably an ant of the same type but with a slightly smaller body. Man went further; he separated two ants from the group and put them on the table. They stayed there for some time, walking around in rather listless circles, looking disoriented and not showing much flight reflex when man goaded them with a stick. The next day, there were no ant corpses to be seen; and neither, oddly, did a single ant take any notice of my bait. They were all busy with their usual tasks.
lol
[...] Q was a friend of mine who was also very well furnished in the breast department (the other woman, O, perhaps wins the prize – but I have no valid excuse to involve her breasts in this novel, at least not for the time being. Which is a shame, because they deserve a novel all to themselves). Although our friendship (my friendship with Q, that is) has been very long, our romance was fairly short, for many reasons, and fundamentally, I think, for one: because before making love she took off all her clothes except for an enormous crucifix, with Jesus on it and everything, which she left hanging around her neck; and a particularly tormented Jesus, too, all writhing and anguished-looking – for which you can’t blame him, of course, given the circumstances. If I suggested that it would all be much easier and more comfortable if she took off her crucifix as well, she’d say: ‘Isn’t He the God of love?’ – and that was that. You just try, sir – and for once, the female reader will forgive me the obligatory exclusion – you just try, sir, to maintain a good erection face to face with the image of the suffering Redeemer, however well appointed he might be between a pair of magnificent tits. Perhaps you – as a good atheist – could do it. But I could not. It was hard work, believe me. The girl was lovely, sweet, gentle, warm, fragrant – a real delight. I’d close my eyes and get lost in the moment and for a while I could forget everything, but then, crack, the crucifix would end up in my mouth, or in my eye, or give me a scratch on the cheek. Or I’d open my eyes – since you have to open them, of course, and open them wide – and there they’d all be, parading past: the Sacred History, Death and the Resurrection, Good Friday, Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday; the three denials of Peter, the Sermon on the Mount, the wedding at Canaan, the raising of Lazarus … and the Apocalypse. The image of the Redeemer, which demands, even if you’re not exactly a saint, a kind of supernatural respect that pushes you to examine your conscience and confess your sins, set against those erect nipples wet with saliva and … anyway: I generally managed to bring things to a satisfying conclusion, but afterwards my head, spine and kidneys were a mess. I don’t think these things should mix, despite the fact that ‘He’s the God of love’, which He certainly is, and despite the intimate, profound connection there is between religion and sex. Goodbye, Q. Sometimes I worry my luminous novel will turn into a similar mixture. I want to believe it won’t. I want to believe I’ve been able to balance the two poles of what is, I think, a unique phenomenon. I’m also afraid people will consider me a cynic, a liar or a heretic. I might be a heretic, but I have a theory in my defence (it’s very simple, too: if Christianity was imposed through blood and fire and money and the Inquisition and other things like that, and now here we are, brought up with no alternative and within the cage of dogma – and, worse, of popular superstition deriving from badly digested dogma – we surely have the right to make all the adjustments we need in order to carry on believing – and, at the same time, to be free). But whether I like it or not, I seem to be arriving – via some erect nipples – at my conversion. Or ‘conversion’, since this is something I’m not very clear about either. I don’t know what my exact relationship with the Church is nowadays – and I’m also writing this, partly, in an attempt to find out. Nor do I know what my relationship with the Church will be in the future: I’m in the dark, or the half-light. But did a conversion take place? Yes, it did. And was it luminous? It was.
oh my god
I mention these things to explain the gap in my childhood where a father figure should have been, and my lifelong difficulties with exerting even a tiny amount of self-discipline. The thing is, I could never identify with a figure who had any real authority. My mother was the one with the authority, but because it wasn’t real authority, she always exercised it in that ambiguous way women do, ambiguous and arbitrary, and exaggerated, over-the-top, hysterical, when a bit of love and intelligence would have sufficed. And this authoritarianism has evidently become a part of me, judging by how I treat myself when I want to be more disciplined; as some of my friends have pointed out, I turn into a kind of fascist sergeant. Without achieving a great deal, of course, which is always the way with illegitimate authority.
i mean same
[...] In church I'd thought I couldn't live without him, but time was passing. I continued to live. That impression of indispensability was changing. Indispensable now seemed to me not his physical presence -- I imagined him far away in Milan, happy, engaged in countless fine and useful things, recognized by everyone for his merits -- but reorganizing myself around a goal: becoming a person who could earn his respect. I now felt him as an authority equally indeterminate -- would he approve if I acted in such and such a way, or would he be opposed -- and indisputable.
[...] I was amazed by a gesture, a look, the expression on a face. These were moments when everything seemed to have a secret depth and it was up to me to discover it. [...]