Sunken City by Marta Barone

Author:Marta Barone
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile
Published: 2022-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

It had been a long time since I had thought about any of these things, but over the course of the spring when I found out about L.B. they started coming back to me at odd intervals, at the strangest of moments: when I was on a tram, or doing the washing-up, or walking down roads where the cherry trees and magnolias had blossomed, or coming back in after an evening out – walking home, more often than not, even when I was a long way from my flat, because I loved the length of it, the way time expanded in the quiet streets, the illuminated windows of the houses, the yellowish light of the streetlamps behind the dark, deep foliage in the night. (I have never walked as often, as far and as unnecessarily as I did in those two years when I lived in Milan.)

So, that was how they came back to me: quite randomly; and then they almost immediately melted away, flickering. And the constellation they formed was disjointed and illegible. They were like those stereographic scenes from nature that people used to look at through binocular viewing devices in the nineteenth century: they emerged from the blackness, with no link between one image and the next, and with an illusory three-dimensionality which gave me no real sense of their meaning or of their depth.

I, who had always been convinced not just that I remembered almost everything, but also that I had understood – that I possessed – the things I remembered, suddenly found myself bewildered by what I remembered.

I couldn’t extract Lipari from my memory in one piece. It emerged only as splashes of light wrapped in a sort of rosy mist which was blurry and impenetrable, and the same thing was true of the period when he lived in the attic, which was even remoter; and the sense of impotence resembled the feeling I had the first time I encountered the idea of death. As I fought to remember, for some inexplicable reason an old picture book resurfaced from the darkness of the attic, a book of fairy tales I used to read when I went round there; it had been the only children’s book in the flat. Left behind by a previous tenant, perhaps? Apart from Wildcat Under Glass, there wasn’t a single other object I could call to mind, a single colour or detail, if not the semi-darkness of those rooms. Two rooms, or maybe three. Yes, three: one of them had been occupied for a few months by a young man who looked like an Indian holy man with a long, black beard, but I think I only saw him once, sitting cross-legged on the floor of his room. He had smiled at me and waved. Then he, too, had vanished. I thought about the book. A fuzzy vision of one of its pleasingly old-fashioned illustrations was floating around in my head. It must have been the fairy tale about the brothers who were turned into swans by a curse.

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