In Italian I lack a complete perspective. I lack the distance that would help me. I have only the distance that hinders me.
It’s impossible to see the entire landscape. I rely on certain paths, certain ways to get through. Routes I trust and probably depend on too much. I recognize certain words, certain constructions, as if they were familiar trees during a daily walk. But ultimately when I write I’m in a trench. 
I write on the margins, just as I’ve always lived on the margins of countries, of cultures. A peripheral zone where it’s impossible for me to feel rooted, but where I’m comfortable. The only zone where I think that, in some way, I belong.
I can skirt the boundary of Italian, but the interior of the language escapes me. I don’t see the secret pathways, the concealed layers. The hidden levels. The subterranean part.
At Hadrian’s Villa, in Tivoli, there is a gigantic network of streets, an impressive and imposing system that is entirely underground. This complex of passages was dug to transport goods, servants, slaves. To separate the emperor from the people. To hide the real and unruly life of the villa, just as the skin hides the unsightly but essential functions of the body.
At Tivoli I understand the nature of my Italian project. Like visitors to the villa today, like Hadrian almost two millennia ago, I walk on the surface, the accessible part. But I know, as a writer, that a language exists in the bones, in the marrow. That the true life of the language, the substance, is there.
To return to Fuentes: I agree, I think that an awareness of impossibility is central to the creative impulse. In the face of everything that seems to me unattainable, I marvel. Without a sense of marvel at things, without wonder, one can’t create anything.
If everything were possible, what would be the meaning, the point of life?
If it were possible to bridge the distance between me and Italian, I would stop writing in that language.
VENICE
In this disquieting, almost dreamlike city, I discover a new way to understand my relationship with Italian. The fragmented, disorienting topography gives me another key.
It’s the dialogue between the bridges and the canals. A dialogue between water and land. A dialogue that expresses a state of both separation and connection.
In Venice I can’t go anywhere without crossing countless pedestrian bridges. At first, having to cross a bridge every few minutes is exhausting. Each journey seems abnormal and somewhat difficult. In a short time, though, I get used to it, and slowly this journey becomes habitual, enticing. I ascend, cross the canal, then descend on the other side. Walking through Venice means repeating this act an incalculable number of times. In the middle of every bridge I find myself suspended, neither here nor there. Writing in another language resembles a journey of this sort.
My writing in Italian is, just like a bridge, something constructed, fragile. It might collapse at any moment, leaving me in danger. English flows under my feet. I’m aware of it: an undeniable presence, even if I try to avoid it. Like the water in Venice, it remains the stronger, more natural element, the element that forever threatens to swallow me. Paradoxically, I could survive without any trouble in English; I wouldn’t drown. And yet, because I don’t want any contact with the water, I build bridges.
I notice that in Venice almost all the elements are inverted. It’s hard for me to distinguish between what exists and what seems an illusion, an apparition. Everything appears unstable, changeable. The streets aren’t solid. The houses seem to float. The fog can make the architecture invisible. The high water can flood a square. The canals reflect a version of the city that doesn’t exist.
The disorientation I feel in Venice is similar to what possesses me when I write in Italian. In spite of the map of the sestieri, I get lost. The Venetian maze transcends its own map the way a language transcends its own grammar. Walking in Venice, like writing in Italian, is an experience that throws me off balance. I have to give in. Writing, I come up against so many dead ends, so many tight corners to get myself out of. I have to abandon certain streets. I continually have to correct myself. There are moments in Italian, just as in Venice, when I feel suffocated, distraught. Then I turn and, when I least expect it, find myself in an isolated, silent, shining place.
Over the years Venice has had an increasingly unsettling impact on me. Its devastating beauty pierces me, I’m overwhelmed by the fragility of life. I’m enveloped in a passionate dream that always seems about to dissolve. A dream that’s truer than life. Crossing the bridges again and again makes me think of the passage that we all make on the earth, between birth and death. Sometimes, crossing certain bridges, I fear I’ve already reached the beyond.
When I write in Italian, I feel the same disquiet, in spite of my love for the language. The step that I’m taking seems like a leap into the void, an inversion of myself. Like the reflections of the buildings that tremble on the surface of the Grand Canal, my writing in Italian is something impalpable. Nebulous, like the fog. I’m afraid that the bridge between me and Italian doesn’t, ultimately, exist. That it will remain, at best, a chimera.
Yet both in Venice and on the page, bridges are the only way to move into a new dimension, to get past English, to arrive somewhere else. Every sentence I write in Italian is a small bridge that has to be constructed, then crossed. I do it with hesitation mixed with a persistent, inexplicable impulse. Every sentence, like every bridge, carries me from one place to another. It’s an atypical, enticing path. A new rhythm. Now I’m almost used to it.
THE IMPERFECT
There are so many things that continue to confuse me in Italian. Prepositions, for example: alla parete, per terra, dal calzolaio, in edicola (on the wall, on the ground, at the shoemaker, at the newsstand). To review them, I could take notes nel quaderno or sul taccuino (in the exercise book or in the notebook). I have a grammar containing a series of exercises of this sort, to help foreign students: “Mettiti miei panni e prova vedere la situazione i miei occhi” (Put yourself my clothes and try see the situation my eyes). They are tedious, but I do them anyway; if I want to master the language, there’s no way out. And yet I never manage to fill in those blank spaces perfectly. Maybe this stupendous sentence from a story by Alberto Moravia would be sufficient to teach me the prepositions once and for alclass="underline" “Sbucammo finalmente su una piazza al sole, in un venticello frizzante da neve, davanti un parapetto oltre il quale non c’era che la luce di un grande panorama che non si vedeva” (“We finally emerged onto a square in the sun, in a crisp breeze hinting at snow, in front of a parapet beyond which there was only the light of a grand panorama that couldn’t be seen”).