Versione Italiana | Nota biografica | Versione lettura |
The first day out of the hospital.
How long had he been waiting for that moment and now that the nurse had come with the release papers signed by the doctor, Gabriel felt an immense joy in his chest and would have screamed it out like a baby who had just come into the world, if only he did not remember he was an old man in his eighties who still cared about his reputation in town.
He had been missing for only ten years, after all, and that nurse assured him it had all remained the same as it used to be before he had gone into a coma.
“You just had a long, good sleep!” she laughed, her big green eyes sparkling with sympathy.
“Not a big deal, after all…”, she added, encouraging him to get up, “nothing changed meanwhile”. Yet she did not answer when he asked where his old friend, Doctor Richard, was, but stopped smiling instead and turned her face away.
Only a few hours later he realized that she had nicely lied to him, trying to put a cushion between his memories and reality, and made it her duty to give him a handful of consolatory words before she finished her shift and left for the day. Those words sounded now like pocket money handed to a silly boy you want to hush for a minute.
Everything was so alien and different, that for a moment he even thought it was not the same town, but some unknown place they had transferred him to while he was dead to the world.
That town did change, so much that it fit him no more, just like his clothes fit him no longer and had to be kept together with braces and belts or he would lose them behind.
He kept walking up and down for hours, trying to understand what could have changed so deeply that place he used to call home, and was now making him feel like he had just been dropped off a train for a short stay before he would catch the next connection.
Something bothered him and could not figure out what that was. Not only the roads were not the same, covered with dark smelly tarmac that seemed to melt with the heat and kept the marks of all the passers-by like a giant database of footprints, drawn onto each other endlessly. Not only the skyline of the houses, that once used to leave all the firmament free over the roofs and let the sunrise get through in a spectacular surrender to light every morning, and now were overbuilt randomly with penthouses and extra floors put over, following some undecipherable logic, like an awkward lego of a child who doesn’t quite know yet all the laws of gravity. Nor the violent colours of the huge adverts covering the walls, the windows, even the pavement with funny pictures of improbable things the passers-by were invited to buy at every metre.
It was rather a void, something missing from the core of that town he no longer recognized. Something that used to shape the core of his life too. It was only after several hours of walking up and down the streets, crossing, with his tired old body, the thick heavy air, like a big cake he had to cut in thin slices to help swallow it easier, that all of a sudden he realized there was no place in town where he could buy or leaf through a book.
No bookshops, nor libraries, no people sitting on a bench for a good read, not even children carrying heavy school bags on their backs, full of coloured manuals.
“Come on”, he said, in a whispered incredulous voice, “they can’t have burnt all the books in town!”
Like an out-of-times and out-of-fashion knight of modern times, he started that surreal hunt for a book, that seemed to have become precious and rare like an exotic animal.
“One book, guys. Just one book…”
No matter how thin or thick, how fine or rough, white or yellowish, old, smelling of dust and dampness or new, just come out of the typography, smelling of fresh ink and petroleum letters, he was badly longing for a page of a book to pass his fingers through, voluptuous touch, almost morbid, in a sort of paper fetish, like a woman who left you long before, but you are still looking for a garment of hers, be it only a garter, to smell and hold tight in your lonely nights.
As far as he could remember, his whole life flowed on the pages of one book or another, good or bad moments of his past were all connected with books, like old dry flowers forgotten between the covers and come out unexpectedly years later.
His first love, never confessed nor shared, so secret that it had never taken the shape of words on his lips, found a generous shelter on the borders of a poetry book, filled in with minuscule rhymes handwritten with a guilty stub of a pencil. And so it had to be, as his great love looked at him from behind a cathedra and drove a massive car and lived two streets down with a fat dog, a small baby and a big husband.
Seven years later, love was already not just something to fancy about on the borders of the books, but had become real matter he could sense with his hands like dough; and it was in the school library that he made love for the first time. With febrile, hungry hands he had taken off Nora’s clothes like one would take the crust off a warm loaf to taste the soft core. He still remembered how he couldn’t help laughing when he realized that, naked in front of him, she only kept her glasses on: she got so offended to almost cry.
Then her offence and his laugh melted together in a long kiss that still smelled of chewing gum and chocolate, while their young bodies already started to smell of adult pleasure and mysterious odours rising up from their hidden places as they discovered each other.
They didn’t quite know where they were supposed to put their hands and awkwardly moved them on each other’s skin like little blind mice looking for a place to shelter.
But he had found what he had to find with a sort of gentle stubbornness, while her virginity was slipping away and got lost among manuals and exercise books and maps and iron regulations and forbidden actions and antique sins.
They both groaned with their first shy shiver of pleasure, not quite an orgasm, as he would have realized later, but a light hidden vibration, a secret point of no return, as if they were all of a sudden given birth into a different world, like Alice in wonderland.
He did not remember if they spent five minutes or five hours in that storage room, as if time had become just like their bubble gum and they could chew and stretch it as much as they wanted.
But he remembered that, before they slipped back into the austere corridors of St. Martin’s College, they exchanged a book to keep for life. In that warm April morning, the sun’s rays delicately passing through the yellowish blinds and their hearts beating under the sweaty skin, those two books had the significance of special wedding rings meant to seal their love for eternity.
He used to keep that book wherever he went. It survived all removals throughout the country and the transfers abroad.
When, years later, he married Julienne, with real white costumes, a real church filled with lilies and roses, and a flesh and blood priest to read for them, it did not feel that same genuine way and the wedding rings, although shiny with gold and diamonds, did not have the same value as the small books bound in fake leather.
As time passed by, tiny spots of coffee, tobacco and tired fingertips had started to show here and there, slowly changing the geography of the pages, but that made the book even more precious, like a favourite garment he had worn for a longtime: although washed-out and mended so many times, he had not the heart to give it away and it had become organically part of him.
“There’s the library”, an elegant young man told him, pointing to a squarish block down the road, brown with green blinds, a bit surprised by his question and staring at him several times before he walked away. Yeah, he could have seen it himself: the small building was right in front of them, and two videos were showing colourful pictures of books sliding on all the time.
Gabriel entered what he considered was a mediocre edifice with a certain sickness at heart. That block couldn’t be the library! There wouldn’t be enough space for a few magazines, let alone for hundreds of books one would expect to find even in the smallest of libraries.
“What the hell is this?” he asked, in a shrill incredulous voice, although there was no one around to answer his question.
Tens of monitors of all sizes were spread around, on the walls, on the tables, even on the door next to the main entry. A glance around and he soon realized they were all archives, just like the ones he used to consult when he entered a big public library years before, but instead of paper index cards, there were icons on a monitor.
He had never been a brilliant computer user but there was no need for that, as all the tools were extremely easy to use. It was enough to touch the screen and shelves of virtual books popped out, ready to serve you further with this or that volume, enriched with information about the author, awards won, articles written about it and events related to it.
There was even the author’s email where one could leave his or her feedback. The room smelled of burnt bulbs and dust and a light buzzing pervaded the air, making it sound as though silence did not exist anymore and it had been replaced by a surrogate of background electronic noise that was by now part of anyone’s life and they had to adjust all the other things of life around it.
“I’m too old for all this…” he whispered, and, desolate, stepped out, back in the street.
There was nothing left for him there, all that kingdom of electronic knowledge and technology, wide enough to contain all the libraries of the world, was not large enough to welcome the weary and shrunk body of an eighty year old teacher.
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He offed onto the main street, aimless and discouraged like a stray dog, stopping from time to time to read the ads on the shop windows, or the menus dangled up in front of restaurants, fascinated by the texture of the paper just like a child would be fascinated by the millefeuille pastries in confectioneries.
That was it. No more books to read on a train or at a bus stop, in a waiting room or at home in his own peace. That’s why he saw so many people around carrying compact plastic things, half phones half computers, and they opened and consulted them like little precious diaries.
“I’m too old for this” he kept repeating, as he was walking towards the abandoned warehouse downtown, trying to remember what used to be in there before his accident. It was getting windy and spare pieces of plates and metallic wires hanging out of rubbish containers were making a weird noise, like a modern out-of-tune piece of music.
All the bowels of the town seemed gathered together and piled up in those rusty containers spread around all over the port, useless and desolate like cut offs in the operating theatre of a hospital.
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He was walking through, in a childish slalom, and funnily enough he felt a bit at home, as if, as a matter of fact, he too was a leftover, no more needed and thus discarded in the outskirts, waiting for someone to decide what rubbish category he would fit in.
There were even parts of a guitar and the leather ripped- open part of an African drum. He smiled, looking for a place where to sit and have a break. After all, all this did feel a bit like home.
He lit up a cigarette and let the smoke penetrate his body with that piercing feeling. He wondered where his half burnt match would fit in all those well classified containers. Grouped together next to a battery container, there were some wooden boxes, old pallets, confectionery tins and…
No, he could not believe his eyes: deep under the broken pieces of wood, creased and turned yellow by damp and dirt, yet still neat and clear, there was a book. He moved off all the layers of rubbish and gently picked it up, carefully not to spoil it, as if it was a wounded bird. He blew away the dust and used his handkerchief to clean it. It was an old edition of ‘Hard Times’, a pink bookmark still lying between the pages.
He opened his jacket and put it in, like he would have done with an infant he needed to shelter from the cold and the rain, looking around with cautious eyes, as to make sure no one saw him and no one could claim back the precious stolen goods.
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If that was the last book, he would save it, he thought.
Then teacher and book walked back to town, fading away into the folds of times gone by at a slow pace, with that delicate and soft sound, similar to the familiar rustle of turning the pages of a book.