“It’s me,” he said softly, “I’ve come.”
He waited a moment, then repeated in a louder voice: “It’s me, I’ve come.” Only then did he suddenly feel absolutely certain that no one was there. Despite himself he began to laugh, first softly, then more loudly. He turned round and looked at the water a few meters away. Then stepped forward into the dark.
Author’s Note
This book owes much to a city, to a particularly cold winter and to a window. Writing it did not bring me an inordinate amount of levity. All the same I observed that the older one gets the more one tends to laugh on one’s own; and that seems to me a step forward towards a more composed and somehow self-sufficient sense of humor.
Spino is a name I invented myself and one I have grown fond of. Some may point out that it’s an abbreviation of Spinoza, a philosopher I won’t deny I love; but it signifies other things, too, of course. Spinoza, let me say in parenthesis, was a Sephardic Jew, and like many of his people carried the horizon with him in his eyes. The horizon, in fact, is a geometrical location, since it moves as we move. I would very much like to think that by some sorcery my character did manage to reach it, since he too had it in his eyes.
A.T.