Trick by Domenico Starnone

Author:Domenico Starnone
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Europa Editions
Published: 2018-01-23T00:00:00+00:00

6.

As I carried the child’s limp body in my arms, down the dark hallway, I felt a distressing bitterness inside me. I put him on the bed still dressed, without turning on the lights. All I did was take his shoes off. Leaving him there, I felt he’d retained my heat.

Once more, quickly, I crossed the rooms of the dark house—I had to learn how to feel the ghosts around me—orienting myself by the glimmer in the living room, where a light had stayed on, along with the chatter of the television. I sat on the armchair previously occupied by Mario. I tried to focus on the TV but I was cold and tired, I didn’t feel like watching anything, so I turned it off. I checked to see if the radiator in the living room was still on and I almost burned myself grazing it with my finger. Maybe the cold was coming from another room but I gave up trying to figure it out. I was still struggling to find the right light switches. I thought of Mario with a mixture of wonder and rancor; he’d noticed my incompetence right away. Yes, he was just like his father, sprung from centuries of the most scholarly of scholars, pedantic, persnickety. He had nothing of my family, nothing of me, not the looks, not the behavior. The child was made of foreign matter, chromosomes hailing from some other place, hidden molecules crammed with information that was obscure to me, perhaps hostile, going back thousands of thousands of years. I thought, with a sad sense of irony, that even my ghosts would have been insulted by that child, he was hooked up to some other genetic motor. They were furious with me because, having banished them in early adolescence, I’d turned weak. Young Master, they were saying, you wanted to become a gentleman of fine sentiments, and look where you’ve ended.

I shooed those images away and got up, groaning, from the armchair. I forced myself to wander again through the house, but this time turning on all the lights. Still on the threshold of adolescence I was seeing—if I moved in the dark, or in half-light—relatives of my mother and father whom I’d known or seen only in photographs. They’d died during the war, I was sure about that, and yet there they were, standing in various corners of the house, hidden behind a door, hidden behind a closet. When I spotted them they made signs telling me to be quiet, they resorted to winking, they laughed without sound. Then that season had passed, but now I remembered more dead people than I did as a child—so many of my friends and acquaintances were now deceased, after dreadful illnesses—and my anxiety had also centupled, so much so that at times, in Milan, I’d wake up suddenly, convinced that there were thieves or murderers in the house, and I would wander sleepless through the rooms, shuddering when I thought a trick of

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.