Numero 1
Beginning · Rebirth

The light must have seemed unbearable to him; he had never seen it before, he was used to the dark. He felt a strange shiver run across his skin, a cold shiver, like icy water. He thought with regret of the warmth that had wrapped him before — before, he had everything he needed, he felt sheltered, protected, he had no need to worry about anything, he wanted for nothing else.

Now, though, he was discovering the power of his voice — that sound rushing through the air was astonishing, a vibration of the throat that grew sharp and piercing enough to torment the eardrums, enough to summon terror and fright. He realized that screaming carried an innate power to command: the right modulation was enough to force someone to satisfy his every wish, and the more insistent the screams, the more attention and comfort they drew. He understood that alternating the right pauses was enough to win intense pleasures — in the emptiness of a silence, light caresses would run over his inconsolable, greedy skin, and moist, consoling lips would settle on his small salty eyes, deep as sea abysses.

The cry, he thought, was the most effective means to claim his right, his wish to return to that shell of absolute bliss, to that pouch brimming with dark honey and a consoling nothing — perhaps irretrievably lost.

In the moment of truce, though, drawing a whitish liquid from an immense nipple did not appease him; it felt like a vain, insufficient pleasure, a surrogate, a provisional remedy that could not bring him back. This awareness dragged him toward the chasm of terror, while a sudden weariness, an exhaustion with living, seized him and, at the same time, led him to a happy place that resembled very closely his lost island, in the land of Morpheus, toward healing sleep; it was there that every gesture, every action took on the definitive sense of a perfect morning, self-sufficient, unchangeable. Then, like a flash of dazzling light, he saw a shape lighting up in the dark of the room, an animal form that resembled a cat. The animal looked straight into the depths of his pupils, as though they were its natural refuge; he had the impression that it moved to conquer them, that it had crossed steep terrain, ravines, stony deserts to finally arrive home, to rest. He returned its gaze, looked at it the way one looks at a friend, studied it for an infinite time in every detail, in every fold. Every ridge, every roundness remained an indelible memory, and when he finished counting, one by one, every detail of its coat, he finally arrived at the conclusion that this animal lived in the most total perfection, that no element could be changed, that every point was irreplaceable, every part necessary, every fragment placed where nothing could move it. In that same moment he saw a dark, seething magma where anything could happen, even the cruelest of crimes. This he saw behind the glimmer of those pupils. He understood the power of that desire and welcomed it. He prepared it a shelter, a corner to rest in, somewhere inside himself.

Awake again, he went back to crying, and cried harder than ever, harder than winter rain, cursing and embracing his defeat all at once, stubbornly refusing it and desiring it with equal intensity.

At last he saw someone, restless as a shadow, moving things, carrying the objects out of the room; angrily, one at a time, they carried away the bowls, the clothes, dragged the furniture and the beds with force, with method, with stubbornness — forgetting nothing, leaving nothing on the nearly dark walls. With skill they erased every scent that had lived in the air, then left, leaving behind only an unnatural, disturbing silence.

He found himself alone and naked in the middle of a floor as wide as a frozen lake, and as his cries bounced from wall to wall, he became aware of the infinite distance between the ceiling and his small body. He never would have imagined that so empty a room could take on the volume of a cathedral — austere, solemn, gigantic. He felt his little eyes drying out and his nerves loosening as, in the half-light of the ceiling, tiny portions of light appeared, illuminating fragments of painting, small patches of vivid color that widened among sinuous lines and gathered into compact shapes. He watched the darkness retreat and, growing ever clearer, all the scenes of an enormous fresco appeared. He understood that every image concerned him, that every moment of his future life was described in every detail; every person he would ever know was already there, in advance, presenting themselves boldly, brazenly, before his disbelieving eyes. He saw the houses, the rooms, the countryside, the woods he would inhabit; he saw a river of red wine running down his throat, stunning him, clouding him; he saw the mass of food he would devour; he saw, lined up like warriors, all the embraces, all the bodies he would touch and possess. The crimes, the follies, the pettiness, but also the gentle small gestures and the generosities, and then the madness, the bewilderment, the sudden dawns in unknown places, body wrecked and without memories, nothing but nausea and a bitter, murky taste. His whole life crumbled piece by piece before his hardened face. He had already taken on the posture of the tragic mask, eyes wide and mouth agape. There — now he understood, he knew that nothing would bring him back, that there was nothing left for him but to live, to live whatever fell to him, all the way to the end.

He felt a new river flow through his whole body, calm, powerful. A faint smile came to visit him, like a happy memory, like a welcome meeting, and that — that was the first time — he realized that beauty could also be an empty room inhabited by silence.

When he arrived among us, when they brought him, we were shaken. His small, swollen body showed the marks of a relentless, destructive design. He was so battered that he could hardly move, a shapeless husk, a color of ash streaked with red.

I took him in my arms; he wasn't crying. I thought it necessary to wash him — the water would carry away the tremor of dark, murderous days, of broken legs, of wounds on backs pale as wild roses.

My sisters didn't know what to do, how to behave; they were too young to grasp what needed deciding in the face of so cruel a test of balance. A thick fog had invaded their thoughts. Their arms, their legs, found every action impossible.

I had to command them. I ordered the water boiled, told them to find something to cover him, something to feed him.

They obeyed. They scattered through the rooms. They ran like frightened hares, between rows of small shrubs and walls of moss. They searched and found everything that might serve the remedy, an effective material for any shattered organism. They gathered it all on a great wooden surface, and before we began, we looked at each other, each of us seeking in the other the necessary complicity.

We tried to do everything our experience allowed. We set bones straight, stitched wounds, cleaned an entire stretch of skin that seemed to have passed through a bramble thicket. We carried out our work with care — we knew we were handling a precious being.

We finished our work. We sat and looked at him; what appeared to us was a new form, reborn, a small body chiseled like an ancient metal. We let him rest. I don't remember how long he stayed so still — perhaps a thousand years, perhaps a moment, I don't remember. But in that eternal time I thought that the game of life, in appearance so devoid of logic, hid underground plots that reveal their nature only when, in the interlocking of certain events, one notices how one thing without the other would never have taken place, how important an action that seemed so senseless had been, how the tears we shed, which seemed to us so unjust, become the comfort for someone else's tears. For us, who had lost our one dearly loved brother, we might not have recognized in that child the grown body of our dear brother. For us it was like finding him again. We saw again the deep gashes, the irreparable lacerations, so discordant, so out of place on that body — so fresh, so beautiful. How hard it was to accept the thought that his breath had left him.

But the child was still breathing, and resting, far away, as if he dwelt in another place. Then suddenly he opened his eyes, sharp, piercing, and looked at us, and it was as though he recognized us — as though he were looking at something else, though, not at our bodies but at something else, beyond. He smiled at us. His smile appeared to us like a bright spring morning.

After that, our time became a time of enchantment. Days of wonder crossed by a mild, limpid air, while vigor returned to his body. We played among rigid geometries of light and soft half-shadows. Games of wide-open eyes, of grimaces, of gaping mouths, of ridiculous sounds, of invented words. He slid as though floating on a river of arms, of motherly hands, swaying up and down, low and high, up to triumph, up to hanging suspended, like a star in the sky, and he inhabited that space as though it were his dwelling place, his residence, the air his natural home.

My sisters competed to win themselves a task, a moment of care. It seemed that every action drew from them a happy pleasure; from that small body it seemed streams of crystalline water gushed, and they drank them; it seemed a scent of sweet almonds was released from his mouth, and they threw open their lungs, breathing it in; it seemed that ripe, blood-red berries of the wood grew in his hands, and they ate them, greedily. How solemnly they led him, on the evening walks, in the weary light. They carried him proudly, the way one wears a new dress, the dress of celebration.

And he always smiled, as though he were thanking us. It seemed he was planning some gesture of reward, a gesture of gratitude meant to project itself toward eternity, toward an infinite time, crossed by deep, nocturnal skies, by flashes, by perpetual sparks of ice, by light, constant, cool breezes on bare backs, amid the laughter of friends found again, together, in a time of leisure, when one moment follows another in the flow of unbroken days, without parting, faces turned upward, toward the mystery.

Then, when our backs asked for rest, when the dark gathered every night bird by the thousands, we sought a sheltered bed, an impenetrable, safe place, far from any persecuting will. We lay down slowly, held each other close, forming a single body like an animal in its den. We kept the little one among us, the warmth of our bodies multiplied and slowly wrapped him, warmed him. Sleep arrived on time, promising us a vigorous waking and still more days, more perfect days again, mornings of songs, of wings, of flights, lazy afternoons soft as fox tails, evenings suspended between timid shadows and brilliant colors, and yet more nights, of sleep, of new healings.

But we knew the day of parting would come; we had always known it, from the very first moment, from when we first held him in our arms. This was the darkest, most sorrowful shade of color, but it was also the reason that made every moment so dense, that gave every gesture, even the most trivial, the weight and the imposing mass of a boulder, that forced us to carve every memory into the stone slab of our memory.

And so, all at once, his child's legs grew beyond measure. When they swiftly learned to stretch like chestnut branches, when they learned to leap like the cricket on a summer evening, when they learned to clothe themselves in every creature of the wood, blending with them, when we could no longer tell wolf from boy, we understood that the moment had come, that we would lose him forever.

And as we watched him leave, as the child yielded his shadow to that of the young man, as his back blurred into the edges of the path, the way autumn sometimes merges with winter, we remained just as we were — seemingly still, fixed, like shining stars, in an empty sky, without weight, without support, without boundary.