How will you have fun?
I’m very, very, very slow… it took me thirty years to become a child.
I was actually born when I was 33, ironically speaking of course, that is when I started writing not only postcards from Igea Marina, but also books, plays, newspaper and magazine articles, in which playfulness and irony were the distinctive features of a poetics that surprised first of all myself.
Towards 40 I discovered myself to be a visual artist: at first I would find faces in shoes; then, not knowing how to cook or draw, I cooked drawings with out-of-date pasta; sculpted the wind with poker cards; stumbled upon a cosmogony of amazing figurative elements in the cracks in the pavements; finally now, and for the past three years, I’ve been moulding tissues making them look like majestic marble sculptures by placing them in perspective with the most beautiful buildings and squares in the world.
In the mirror labyrinth that is the memory, the visual one was the only sharp tool I could rely on when I was young (I don’t remember anything from my childhood, or even from a month or day ago).
Recently, my visual memory has been fading as well.
That’s it: I keep being slow while my memory is failing me faster and faster.
Are you asking me how I will have fun?
I can already see myself in front of the mirror say “ehm… I recognise this guy, I think I know him”, but that’s not going to last long. Soon the mirror won’t even be able to render myself. I will then have fun watching my niece laugh at me, while along with the leaves, one of my teeth falls out, and I will pick it up, observe it astonished, tell her that it might be a gold nugget or that if we rub it, it might turn into a diamond or a lamp genie. She will point out to me that it has roots. “If we plant it then,” – I will say to her – it will grow into a tree of sparkling marbles with which all the children will be able to play!”. She will whisper that my eyes are marbles reflecting the world.
I will ask her to come near me – because we will be able to stand very close to each other by then – and I will say to her: “Look well, look better, and tell me what you see reflected…”
She will say “Me!”
“You!”
“Yes. I can see myself in your eyes”.
“You were right then! In the marbles that are my eyes you can see the most beautiful of the possible worlds, that is you, youth!”.
And we will laugh. A hell of a lot, or rather, a heaven of a lot! Surely hugging each other tightly – because by then not only it will be possible, but it will be the most natural of habits we’ll have inherited from this period. To be combined with our imagination, which nobody can take away from us…
