For all this I didn’t know the reason. I was impelled by instinct, without thinking. Nothing could be more alien to me, at that moment, than ambition toward a goal, or the expectation of some result. Time had been replaced by an infinite heat, knowledge by a distracted indolence, and all my desires by a harmless, mute suffering under my heart. I have never existed so little as on that ship, which gently cleaves the boiling dampness of the evening, transporting me and my eleven things to the white of an island that knows nothing of me — and I almost nothing of it. From land we’ll both be invisible, in the space of a thought — vanished to the world. But enveloped by a graceless beauty I was there at nine, in a curious homage to precision that, sincerely, I now can’t understand. I heard the Uncle moving about in the kitchen, then I saw him arrive. He hadn’t changed, either, he had only taken off his jacket. He arrived carrying the bottle of champagne, chilled.
The food is on the plates, he said.
He sat down at the table and fell asleep. He had barely looked at me. I began to eat — I chose the colors, one by one. He drank, in his sleep. I didn’t use the silverware, I wiped my fingers on the dress. But I don’t know why. Every so often, without opening his eyes, the Uncle poured me some champagne. I don’t remember asking myself about the absurd precision of that gesture, or its unlikely punctuality. I drank and that was all. Besides, in that house of life interrupted, in the privacy of our mad liturgies, besieged by our poetic maladies, we were characters orphaned of any logic. I continued to eat, he slept. I wasn’t uncomfortable, I liked it — precisely because it was absurd, I liked it. I began to think that it would be one of the best dinners of my life. I wasn’t bored, I was myself, I drank champagne. At a certain point I started talking, but slowly, and only about foolish things. In his sleep the Uncle occasionally smiled. Or he gestured with his hand in the air. He was listening to me, in some way, and it was pleasant to talk to him. It was all very light, elusive. I wouldn’t have been able to say what I was experiencing. It was a spell. I felt it closing in on us and when there was no longer anything else in the world except my voice, I sensed that in reality nothing that was happening was happening, nor would it ever happen. For a reason that must have originated in the absurd intensity of our defeats, nothing of what the two of us could do, that evening, would remain in the ledger of life. No calculation would take us into account, no sum would come out different as a result of our activity, no debt would be discharged, no credit opened. We were hidden in a fold of creation, invisible to fate and freed from any consequence. So, while I ate, sticking my fingers in the warm colors of the food that had been arranged with maniacal care, I understood with utter certainty that that lovely emptiness, without direction and without purpose, exiled from any past and incapable of any future, must be, literally, the spell under which that man had lived, every minute, for years. I understood that it was the world into which he had expelled himself — inaccessible, without names, parallel to ours, immutable — and I understood that that evening I had been admitted to it, thanks to my folly. It must have required a lot of courage for that man to imagine an invitation like that. Or great solitude, I thought. Now he was sleeping, in front of me, and I, for the first time, knew what he was really doing. He was translating the intolerable distance that he had chosen into a polite metaphor, legible to anyone, ironic, innocuous. For he was a kind man.
I wiped my fingers on my dress. I looked at him. He was sleeping.
How long since you haven’t slept? I asked.
He opened his eyes.
For years, signorina.
Maybe he was moved, or maybe I imagined it.
What I miss more than anything else is dreams, he said.
And he remained with his eyes open, awake, looking at me. There wasn’t much light, and it wasn’t easy to see what color they were. Gray, maybe. With bits of gold. I had never seen them.
It’s all very good, I said.
Thank you.
You should cook more often.
You think?
Wasn’t there also a bottle of red wine?
You’re right, I’m sorry.
He got up, and disappeared into the kitchen.
I also got up. I took my glass and went to sit on the floor, in a corner of the room.
When he returned, he came over to pour me some wine, then he stood there, not knowing what to do.
Sit here, I said.
It was an immense chair, one of those places where I had seen him sleeping countless times, while the breakfasts flowed, river-like. If I think about it carefully, it was the same chair from which he had greeted my return, with a remark I hadn’t forgotten: You must have done a lot of dancing, signorina, over there. I’m glad of it.
Do you like to dance? I asked him.
I liked it very much, yes.
What else did you like?
Everything. Too much, perhaps.
What do you miss most?
Apart from dreams?
Apart from those.
The dreams you have in the daytime.
Did you have a lot?
Yes.
Did you fulfill them?
Yes.
And how is it?
Pointless.
I don’t believe it.
In fact you mustn’t believe it. It’s too early to believe it, at your age.
What age am I?
A young age.
Does it make a difference?
Yes.
Explain it to me.
You’ll find out, one day.
I want to know now.
It would be of no use.
Still with that story?
Which?
That it’s all pointless.
I didn’t say that.
You said it’s useless to fulfill one’s dreams.
That, yes.
Why?
For me it was pointless.
Tell me.
No.
Do it.
Signorina, I must really ask you…
And he closed his eyes, letting his head fall back, against the chair. It seemed drawn by an invisible force.
Ah no, I said.
I put down my glass, I got up, and stood over him, my legs spread. I found myself with my sex on his, it wasn’t what I wanted. But I began to sway. I stood with my back straight, I swayed slowly over him, I placed my hands on his shoulders, I looked at him.
He opened his eyes.
Please, he repeated.
You owe me something. Your story will be enough, I said.
I don’t believe I owe you anything.
Oh, yes.
Really?
You weren’t the one who was supposed to return, it was the Son.
I’m sorry.
Don’t think you can get out of it like that.
No?
You’ve ruined everything for me, now I want at least your true story in exchange.
He looked at the exact point where I was swaying.
It’s a story like so many others, he said.
It doesn’t matter, I want it.
I wouldn’t even know where to begin.
Begin at the end. The moment you started sleeping and stopped living.
I was at a table in a Café.
Was there someone with you?
No longer.
You were alone.
Yes. I fell asleep without even nodding my head. Sleeping, I finished my pastis, and that was the first time. When I woke up and saw the empty glass, I knew it would be like that forever.