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You know when everything really became clear to him? When everything seemed already clear and already over, on the sixth of August of forty-five. At a quarter past eight that morning, if you want to know the time as well. That day Tristano understood that after the monster was conquered came the monstrosity of the conquerors … it was the second crime against humanity in this happy century now coming to a close … that morning, the first atomic bomb used as a weapon of mass destruction was dropped on one of our cities, and that city was annihilated, two hundred thousand people incinerated. I say two hundred thousand, but that leaves out the thousands who died later, and all the stillbirths, all the cancer … and they weren’t soldiers, they were defenseless citizens whose one offense was being blameless … There’s a place, in Hiroshima, called Genbaku Dome, it’s a pavilion, meaning it’s an atomic dome, and this was the epicenter of the explosion, and here the soil temperature reached the temperature of the surface of the sun; near the monument with its peace torch is a stone slab, a doorstep, an ordinary doorstep like you’d find in front of any of our houses, where we lay the doormat to wipe our feet. Inside that stone, that piece of marble, I imagine it’s like paper absorbing ink, and there’s the imprint of a body, the arms outspread. This is all that remains of the body of the man who melted on his doorstep at a quarter past eight on that sixth of August of forty-five … If you can, take a trip there, it’s informative … it’s been said that those victims were pointless, the monster’s head had already been crushed at Dresden and Berlin, and to break Japan all the Americans needed were conventional weapons. That’s a mistake, that the victims were pointless — for the conquerors, they were extremely useful — in this manner, the world would come to know its new masters … History is an icy creature, she doesn’t have the slightest pity for anything or anyone; that German philosopher who committed suicide in a small hotel on the border, so escaping Franco and Hitler and everyone — maybe even escaping himself — he’d reflected too much on this ruthless lady that men court in vain, and it didn’t seem to do him much good … in his reflections he wrote that when faced with an enemy, if that enemy wins, even the dead aren’t safe … and I’d add that this includes all enemies, even someone who’s the enemy of evil men, because being the enemy of evil men can’t make someone do good — and what do you think of that?… I understand your objections, I’ve been too succinct, of course if evil won there’d be no way out … but speaking of good, I wanted to say … well … good, okay, good conquered evil, only there’s a little too much evil in this good and a little too much imperfection in this truth … The truth’s imperfect … That journalist who snuck an interview with me years ago — by pretending we were just talking over a drink — he wrote this concerning the subject: that Tristano admitted to the existence of God, but it was a short-lived existence. Too bad you didn’t explore this more in your novel, it’s a topic that warranted some reflection; you know, this understanding of Tristano was a bit too simple, as if what he meant was that even gods die, but we all know that: take Jupiter, for instance, who lasted a good long while before being replaced, but that’s not what Tristano meant. Sure, of course, everything grows old, probably God, too, what we believe in, but God won’t die a natural death, then be replaced by something else. I’m afraid he’s got a more painful end coming to him, if things keep going the way they are, think about it … one day … imagine a heat like the surface of the sun, but not in just one spot, over the entire planet, thousands of Hiroshimas, a whole slew of Hiroshimas, Hiroshimas all over … an immense roar, and then an immense silence, a big bang in reverse, not a living soul left, not even a cat, everyone kaput … Sure, he’ll still exist, but who cares, if no one’s around anymore to believe that he exists … an unemployed God … we’ll make him useless, pointless, because what’s the point of having God if no one’s around to believe in him?… I’ve gotten off track again, as usual, today I meant to tell you about our Hypnos Pages, I think without our ever saying it, we started doing this in answer to that philosopher who questioned the possibility of writing poetry after the unspeakable had occurred. Not only was it possible, it was probably the only thing we could do that made any sense, because when the monster’s been conquered and you don’t believe in the monster’s conquerors anymore, all you’re left with is believing in your own dreams … in dreams begins responsibility, like I told you, is the line we used as an epigraph in our little books, because the arm reaches only as far as the hand, but a dream can go on and on … a prosthesis slipping past the prison of existence. Seems to me we started in fifty-two, we did a book a year, so we made thirty-six, they stopped eleven years back, when the others died … Any poets that weren’t Greek we all translated, Daphne and I, and her friends, Ioanna and Antheos, who signed his name as Marios because that’s what I called him. Handmade, you know, with a hand press from an old print shop, a contraption once used for printing leaflets against the Ottoman Empire, that’s what the man from Cyprus said who sold it to us, and it’s certainly possible, the thing was gigantic, weighed a ton … Why Crete and not here at home? Your question makes sense, with a nation like ours that’s full of saints, sailors, and poets … not that Crete was Paris, but people from Crete had character, you know what they did when the Germans invaded? — they wiped out an entire Nazi battalion that was armed like the Nazis always were, and you know how they did it? With their billhooks for harvesting olives — they even strangled Nazis with their bare hands … And Italy back then … you’re too young, you were just a boy … Pella, Tambroni, these names won’t mean much, if anything, to you, Don Gnocchi’s crippled children, the Polesine flood, the processions of the penitents, the weeping madonnas … Do they still weep? Around here madonnas’ tears come easy, and saints and sailors seem to be on the rise. Luckily, we’ve still got poets, too, but they must feel a bit uncomfortable in this company … You’re a good writer, too bad you write prose … sorry, I’m not being fair, as far as I’m concerned I should be grateful you write prose, if you’d been a poet, you wouldn’t be here patiently gathering all these bits and pieces I’m telling you, maybe you’d have disposed of me with an elegant elegy or a poison epigram, the kind they kill you with even after you’re gone … or some little nonsense rhyme, a limerick, maybe, like the British are so good at, let’s see … let me think … There was an old hero they say, Who tucked all of his dreams away, But they started to rot with the gangrene he got, So it’s dreamless and legless he’ll stay.