Your life was a hypothesis. Those who die old are made of the past. Thinking of them, one thinks of what they have done. Thinking of you, one thinks of what you could have become. You were, and you will remain, made up of possibilities.
Your suicide was the most important thing you ever said, but you’ll never be able to enjoy the fruits of this labor.
Given that I am speaking to you, are you dead?
If you were still alive, would we be friends? I was more attached to other boys. But time has seen me drift apart from them without my even noticing. All that would be needed to renew the bond would be a telephone call, but none of us are willing to risk the disillusionment of a reunion. Your silence has become a form of eloquence. But they, who can still speak, remain silent. I no longer think of them, those with whom I was formerly so close. But you, who used to be so far-off, distant, mysterious, now seem quite close to me. When I am in doubt, I solicit your advice. Your responses satisfy me better than those the others could give me. You accompany me faithfully wherever I may be. It is they who have disappeared. You are the present.
You are a book that speaks to me whenever I need it. Your death has written your life.
You don’t make me sad, but solemn. You impair my incurable frivolity. Whenever I am too spontaneous and self-centered, and, for some reason or other, your face appears to me, I realize again the importance of the people around me. I see things from a perspective I’m rarely able to achieve. I take advantage on your behalf of things you can no longer experience. Dead, you make me more alive.
You were five years old, and you still couldn’t manage to slip on a sweater. Although two years your junior, your brother showed you how it’s done. Your father belittled you by suggesting, mockingly, that you try to live up to your little brother’s example, and in the end declared you incapable of it. Your brother, who admired you just as much as he did your father, was caught between two authorities. Not wanting to hurt anyone, he didn’t brag about your father’s praise. His modesty completed your humiliation.
You lie alone in a stone tomb upon which your first and last names are engraved in gold lettering. Below can be read the date of your birth and that of your death, separated by twenty-five years.
When I hear of a suicide, I think of you again. Yet, when I hear that someone died of cancer, I don’t think of my grandfather and grandmother, who also died of it. They share cancer with millions of others. You, however, own suicide.
A ruin is an accidental aesthetic object. If it becomes beautiful, this was certainly not the intention. A ruin is not constructed or maintained. The tendency of a ruin is to crumble down into a heap. The most beautiful parts remain standing despite their wear and tear. The memory of you is what stays up, your body what subsides. Your ghost remains upright in my memory, while your skeleton is decomposing in the earth.
You were glad to be born on the twenty-fifth of December: “All the people celebrating don’t realize that it’s my party too. Being forgotten spares me the trouble of having to shine.”
A man once said “I love you” to you. It wasn’t me. I didn’t feel that way about you while you were alive, but today I can say the same thing, though it wouldn’t be the sort of love formerly declared to you. My words come too late. They would not have changed your decision, but they would have changed the way I remember. To love someone from the moment of his death: is that friendship?
I have only one photograph of you. I took it on your birthday. You were at our place. My mother had baked a cake. I had prepared my camera in advance to avoid your having to act out the scene several times for the photo.
I took the photo without flash while you were blowing out the candles. The image is blurred. It’s in black and white. Your cheeks are hollow from blowing, your lips pursed to expel the air. I had composed the shot around you; no one else can be seen. You were wearing a thick woolen sweater. Life rushes from your lungs to put out the flames. You look happy.
Having died young, you will never be old.
Your grandfather used to speak even less than you did. He would smile in silence when passing by with his fishing rod, walking along the line of trees in order to take the path that led along the riverbank that demarcated the boundary of the park and which was where he was going to spend the afternoon. One day, when I was doing stunts on the branches above the water, my watch fell in. Years later, in the run of a dry summer, the river being low, your grandfather found it. I wound it up again. It started. You’d been dead for two years.
A woman who was a friend of yours, whose father-in-law ran a big hotel, got you a summer job. You were a porter and a housekeeper. I had some difficulty imagining you in a bellhop’s uniform, with antique cloak and a red and black cap. Cleaning the rooms, you found some strange objects. One day, in the night-table drawer of a man whom you had identified as “the banker,” you discovered a collection of homosexual pornographic magazines, still wrapped in plastic, and a never-used dildo. You showed them to me. You had left the magazines unopened. Were these discovered again after your death? What did people make of their presence in your home?
You often spoke to me about Ruin of the Garnieri. Its author, Prospero Miti, didn’t use to reread his printed works; he would only look at the proofs. One day, as an exception, he did reread one of them, and he realized that the order of the chapters did not correspond to what he had written. Since he liked the book this way, he didn’t ask for future editions to be corrected. You came across this anecdote after having read the book. You never tired of rereading it to try and discover the original order.
You used to take the elevator to go down, but not to go up.
You used to believe that with age you would become less unhappy, because you then would have reasons to be sad. When you were still young, your suffering was inconsolable because you believed it to be unfounded.
Your suicide was scandalously beautiful.
One day, in winter, you set out across the countryside alone on horseback. It was four o’clock. Night fell when you were still kilometers away from the stud farm. A storm was gathering. It broke while you were galloping through desolate fields. The outline of the town was silhouetted in the distance in blue and black. The thunder and lightning did not frighten the beast. You were roused by the onset of tempestuous weather. You clung tight to the creature, its odor amplified by the rain. You finished the trip in soggy darkness, the horse’s hooves lashing the loamy earth with each stride.
You preferred reading standing up in bookstores to reading sitting down in libraries. You wanted to discover today’s literature, not yesterday’s. The past belongs to libraries, the present to bookstores. You were, however, more interested in the dead than in contemporaries. More than anything else, you used to read what you called “the living dead”: deceased authors still in print. You trusted publishers to bring yesterday’s knowledge into actuality today. You didn’t really believe in miraculous discoveries of forgotten authors. You thought time would sort them all out, and that it’s better to read authors from the past who are published today than to read today’s authors who would be forgotten tomorrow.
There were two bookstores in town. The small one was better than the big one, but the big one allowed you to read without feeling obliged to make a purchase. There were several sales clerks and several rooms; the clients weren’t spied on. In the small one, you used to feel the eyes of the owner on you. You didn’t go there to discover books, but to buy the ones you had already chosen.