un diario, a manuscript

Dei paesaggi scorsi di là dai finestrini in questa “crociera” serpeggiante di ferrovie che reticolano la terra compresa tra una costa e l’altra ricordo solo intagli approssimativi, luminescenti, svelti lampi di colore, da cui piccoli barbagli puntellanti le praterie e le campagne schiarite da balle di fieno simili a piccoli soli possano condurmi dentro una mappa di dettagli che ho dimenticato, possano aiutarmi a ricostruire tutto ciò che lì dentro c’era. O tutto ciò che dentro avrei voluto vederci, per trovare conferma alle mie supposizioni, giustapposizioni, senso estetico e simbolico, catene di immagini: sento già mugghiare il bestiame a partire un ipnotico dipanarsi di palizzate, deformate dalle velocità del treno, e già osservo il volo nerolucente di grossi cormorani non appena l’ombra delle rotaie e quella dei canneti si intricano lungo un tratto di pozzanghere salmastre. Eppure, mi sembra di ricordare distintamente -per quanto mi sia possibile- le più minute trame di quella pausa, il cerchio di territorio, il suolo cosparso di paglia ingrigita e spettrale disposta come in stuoie di steli risuscitati da una cenere del tempo, e i ruderi scheletrici assemblati dall’aberrante sovrapporsi di rimasugli di muriccioli squarciati e intelaiature di aratri e altri attrezzi. Spiazzi fangosi, rotolii di maiali che hanno modellato conche; vedevo fluttuare nell’aria, in miraggi trapassati da luce pulviscolare, i bagni di polvere rinfrescante, e meditavo sul luogo in cui si dirigono tutti i nembi granulosi sparpagliati dal movimento delle cose, quell’ovunque-e-in-nessun-luogo che non permette mai che il ricircolo desolato e senza meta delle sue particelle si esaurisca del tutto. E mi chiedo quanta di quella polvere di secoli passati, ancora selvaggia e vorticante invisibile nell’aria, io abbia inalato stando lì in piedi, in immobilità, sotto l’ombra del mio largo cappello bianco. Scendevo di rado. C’era una qualche esigenza fisiologica che dimenticai subito. Trovai la fattoria come una piazzetta spalancata al culmine di qualche viuzza ai lati di una stazione. Mi ci addentrai, allontanandomi dalla radura in cui il treno sarebbe stato fermo forse per qualche ora; qualcosa mi chiamava, mormorando, silenziosamente, confondendosi nella mia semplificata, essenziale memoria col sussurro di glaciali torrenti che di tanto in tanto mi sembravano ricomparire nel viaggio, ora immersi nel sottosuolo ora scarnificati ed esposti all’azione arcobalenante del giorno sui banchi di spuma sollevati dalla corrente, quasi ad accompagnare il treno, il suo infilzarsi nelle viscere del continente. E io non so più dove sono, da tempo, da prima di allora, e dal tempo trascorso attorno, che riconobbi circolare e intricato nei crotali attorcigliati decorativi di ceste lasciate vuote in stanze vuote di villaggi che mi capitò di osservare, nel corso di rarissime altre fermate in questa mia traversata senza fine -non deve aver fine. Villaggi di vallate, gufi lignei totemici mi osservavano di rimando, figurandomisi come specchi estratti dai miei sogni e incubi, e mi aspettavo parlassero, con parole parzialmente attutite, con la voce di quel vento straniero che stavo respirando. Ricordo tutto questo ricordando il tempo della radura, il cerchio, la fattoria abbandonata da secoli: lì avevo colto qualcosa d’essenziale del continente, del nuovo mondo che alienamente visitavo, in dispersione, naufragio. Approdai presso paglie e felci, tra le polveri e gli aratri, e due lati percossi dal vento -mangrovie e betulle da una parte, salici ed eucalipti alieni dall’altra- cingevano la circonferenza convergendo su un’apertura, un confine d’erba alta con una foresta di granturco e altri gigantismi erbacei.

Stetti lì in piedi, volgendo le spalle al treno, volgendo il torace alla possibilità di separarmene, continente vasto d’erbe e rovi e spine e zanzare che m’assorbe dentro sé, facendo mutar forma al mio vagare. Vento che dai rami se n’era ripartito col ventre gonfio di linfa e resina, galoppava pazzo e si gettava a capofitto nelle mie vesti e carni, refrigerando le trame, provocando quasi impercettibili e naturalissime glaciazioni dentro le vene… riconobbi nella sua corsa il principio invisibile che in queste terre, da me attraversate senza memoria né ricomposizione del suo ordine spaziotemporale, aveva informato lo scalpitare dei cavalli degli indigeni, e l’inquieto migrare senza sosta delle mandrie. E nonostante la memoria, nonostante la sua voce distinta e udibile, di quel luogo, non seppi nulla al pari di tutti gli altri luoghi: me ne andai, non sapendo se fossi nel nord o nel sud del continente, nell’est o nell’ovest. E confermai il mio credo d’allora, che su questa terra non potessero esistere “nuovi mondi”, da nessuna parte, galleggianti nell’oceano in attesa d’anime smarrite; tutte uguali sono le coste ignote di questa terra, tripudi di zanzare e canneti. Da quel luogo raccolsi soltanto una risma di fogli semisepolti nella melma. La mia unica lettura nei giorni seguenti, quando la corsa scellerata del vagone sferzava fortini polverosi e senz’alberi, massicci rocciosi, boschi spaziosi, fitti solo di cicatrici sulle cortecce. Furono per me, questi fogli, la poesia stessa della terra senza nord e senza sud che avevo invaso, che avevo scelto per i miei giorni seduti e di sguardo vacuo verso un mondo vitreo che, sapevo già, non avrei rammentato, non avrei vissuto.

Potrei ricercare qualcosa di profondo e complesso nel moto d’affezione, nella vicinanza con questi scritti. Affinità con l’autore. Forse sono opera mia -anche questo pensiero mi è giunto, sì, quasi provenisse dai suoni attutiti dal vetro, latrati e pianti striduli in notti fredde, di bestie astute e malinconiche in egual misura, sopravvissute della frontiera. Non una sola volta mi preoccupai di decifrare le parti più oscure, sentivo di conoscerle, sentivo di sapere, di aver visto ogni terra e riflessione ivi descritta. E poi, non c’era niente da decifrare. Tutto era là. Tutto quanto io potessi conoscere. A manuscript. Lo riporto e mi sembra di arrossire, come fosse la fotografia di un amato, seminascosta a mo’ di segnalibro tra le mie pagine preferite, tra le fiumane d’inchiostro più prezioso nei miei pensieri –‘a manuscript’ è ciò che trovai scritto in fondo all’ultima pagina, in basso a destra, come fosse una firma, posta sbrigativamente in sostituzione di una parte conclusiva, bruscamente interrotta, o forse chissà, altri fogli orfani erano immersi e congelati nel fango della fattoria abbandonata, sotto la polvere, sotto il vento gravido di fogliame. Immediatamente amai quella firma, e l’idea che l’autore e la cosa che aveva scritto coincidessero, che si fosse scritta da sola, e da sola si fosse data poca importanza, stracciandosi, dandosi alla polvere di un cerchio di suolo quasi del tutto cancellato dal tempo, quasi tutto divorato da un crotalo titanico e inesorabile camuffato nelle ombre dell’esistere… quasi tutto immerso nella penombra e nel cullante anonimato che avvolge una cesta intrecciata, abbandonata, con la scoperchiata bocca di tenebra a spalancarsi nel confine tra l’aria e i suoi recessi canopi, per accogliere l’anima di tutta una terra. Per queste ragioni, radicate nel rispetto e perfino nell’amore, io riporto a manuscript con il nome che esso stesso si volle dare.

“They will write in letters flaming, overshadowed by dust clouds sweeping down from lunar deserts like adverbs formed by craters in syntax, they will visually chant for all those downhell to see, that ‘God’ and ‘Love’ didn’t exist when we arrived there. Already turned into exchange for some bargain bifurcating in a direction identical to the one some previous, unnamed shape -the one formed by such high-flying beings- imposed on a moldy ground. Walking along the paths we tried, even though I don’t remember, to keep an eye on it -that mess of patterns and traces in mud, whatever it was, whatever it meant, if anything was supposed to mean anything, and we had a fleeting suspect of both possibilities. Meanwhile we went along the coast; swift river, mumbling, murmuring, tumbling down on itself in crystal crests always repeating, and I knew -and I knew nothing else at that naked moment- that it would be the sound never ceasing in our future collective tall-screaming memories, in our already past individual revery-clad memories. And it would be like a Mother, warm and simple and staring down on our yet graceless and milk-hungry shape with sweet misleading eyes, an elven deity of vast flesh landscapes that would substitute for us those concepts, substitute each unnerving or exiting thing in life, substitute the woods of fragile bark made clay-like by the downpouring rain of those mosquito-latitudes, and the smell, and the breathing of each part of the whole. Concepts. Of which some vague reminiscence clouded our “minds”, we call them that now, but it was different then -simpler, I might fall in temptation to say so, and make myself look like the very astute face of the first encounter we had, swift in making himself showable, able in penetrating perception. It was not far, I think at least, from the first shell of clay that was the barren ground between soaking-wet straws and protruding roots, the portion of land deturpated by marks no being had ever seen on earth at that time -as if that shell-looking ground was the wreckage of some flying dome, fallen from high skies of uncorrupt black, a once alive spaceship whose owners had forgotten everything, had forgotten owning, had forgotten traveling, or even standing with two feet on a planet’s soil, feeling like they belong.

Ricordo che leggendo in treno ebbi sporadici conati, una nausea restia a nascere, ritrosa nei comportamenti come la mia stessa anima, indecisa se sparpagliarsi nella fronte o nell’addome. E una leggera vertigine, quasi un’ansia, provocatami dall’uso che l’autore faceva di quel pronome, sempre parlava di “noi”, “noi”, una massa che mi sconcertava e che mi sembrava accerchiasse in agguato le mie spalle scoperte, come eserciti d’ombre, come un’imboscata che, nella tenebra normalmente placida di un sogno, giungesse a far germinare paure mai sentite, un’imboscata quasi d’uomini primitivi in piedi, muscolosi, ridotti a calchi d’inchiostro incorporeo, pitture rupestri, prive di lance, dotate ancora di penetrante sguardo in cui tutta la forza dei loro corpi e istinti assenti fosse confluita, e io, al centro, nel cerchio della loro caccia, del loro istinto osservatore e muto, senza esigenza di parole per dire cosa fossi, tutto di me sapevano discernere senza descrivere, riconoscere con la maestria zoologica tributata a cervidi e mastodonti, prede propiziate da disegni. Chiedo scusa per aver interrotto un paragrafo di “a manuscript”. Ma ho creduto così facendo di dissipare, in minima parte, le presenze che mi avevano turbato. E di mettere in salvo le mandrie in fuga tra i corridoi rocciosi di una notte antica.

“Weren’t we the ones who came all the way from far-out galaxies, different shades of milk flowing through the breasts of space, and subsequently lost themselves in bogs and mangroves? Meanwhile rain was pouring, as again I ponder, I rebuild blocks of thought that my proto-mind was tinkering with, doubts, cramps in instincts prowling around mazes in the bowels. We met him there, as I was saying. One hoof against disheveled bark, walnut colored and tawny and denudated white. I saw his two horns, raising from both sides of his forehead, curl squirmingly, as if living things, I saw them become curly and scaled right there in front of my eyes, one flash of light, or whatever it was that day that poured down from atmospheres grey and invisible, infiltrating in blank spaces between the air and logs. I know -from collective collected stuff of later days- that everyone saw the smile, though. It was the first. Blinking, peeping reptile-like from the fur. Fur on face and chest and leg, it was familiar. A gesture making us move, as if he managed to grasp in just one glance that we were one hive; then it disappeared, that slight of a wrist; that might have been the origin of ‘fear’, even though I was not afraid.

I could have begun to nourish some disquieting bustling of my inner workings, and play at making myself float as if I was a soul whose power of movement could make it descend inside each one of the individual barriers that confined so many of us -each one, in fact- in clearings separated from our one big and only forest: basically making me feel and think, we say today, what one might have felt in that time, that space, that beautiful and so refined space that for some reason in our tireless march, started for no reason, we cherished so much with the exiting quiver of our inner nostrils’ bristles. And so some might have shivered, and shivered again at the queerness of that first shiver, feeling an unseasonal cold bare the soil of each inner cell, bringing winter chill to confining maps of innards -all at the sole thought of having seen and then not seen anymore, in an instant, and it was like air, that demon made of what reasonably, like us, looked like nothing else but ground, and solidified mud, and hair, and stench. But I wasn’t impressed by that, not in that moment I wasn’t. I would have later remembered something. Seen it again in dreams, once “fear” was made better know and recognizable, anywhere, anytime. But I remember, curly horns, movement, some kind of twisted will. And immediately I thought -or rather I saw, far-distanced in some tunneling land of mind- of altars and incenses burning, bellowing, gushing from final wounds, at the end of the forest, in meadows vexed by sunbeams and scattered bug wings. Those meadows we would then call ‘spring’, we would then call ‘sacrifice’, and we would rejoice in knowing that it was alright, always returning, always gleaming with the same color of a never-changing reflection projected from the sky or somewhere similar.”

Notai segni cancellati nella trama. Pensai al fango che dovevano aver visto. Dio e Amore, scritti nel suolo, già al loro arrivo classificate tra le figure pagane e teriomorfe di templi di civiltà da tempo scomparse. Pensai al ripensamento. Qualcuno doveva aver creduto, per poi non più credere. E allo stesso modo l’autore aveva creduto di dover scrivere, per poi cancellarle (e lasciar intendibili con un certo sforzo di concentrazione), le parole che mi sembrava di veder sbiadite in un magro spazio del foglio tra i paragrafi, bianco come un dente. Qualcosa si proiettava dal cielo, o somewhere similar, e, aggiungeva, somewhere similar we knew was both there and not there, something we could not grasp nor understand, beings made of senses intertwined, beings blessed or cursed by the precise need of knowing that it was not understandable, and feel contented that way. La virgola era diventata un punto.

I paragrafi sottostanti singhiozzavano tra macchie di inchiostro, strappi, voragini scavate dalla pioggia che in maniera diseguale aveva rovinato quegli appunti, salvandone buona parte, consegnandone altra, ignota, all’oblio più irreversibile, fluire d’elementi. Forse la mia prima pagina non era davvero una prima pagina. Forse altre storie, interi libri di intere vite appartenute a quell’individuo e quell’inquietante “we”, erano sgretolatura fluttuata nello stesso luogo dei banchi di polvere, della ruvidità particellare per sempre vagante nel cerchio, dove l’avevo respirata.

Continuai a leggere e rileggere, mentre il treno entrava in un sistema di insenature rocciose rossastre, d’aspetto marziano, corridoi d’altra polvere, ancora polvere. Fu in una di quelle pause (non scesi, ovviamente), uno di quei riposi in cui contemplavo come da un altro mondo la terra spoglia, attendendomi avvistamenti dell’unica fauna lì possibile, una fauna a base di silicio -fu riprendendo i fogli da siffatto sonno torpido brulicante attorno agli occhi aperti, che per la prima volta lessi un passaggio, uno degli ultimi, conducenti alla brusca conclusione che, curiosamente, fuoriusciva da una serie d’argomenti che nulla avevano a che fare con gli eventi descritti nel paragrafo in questione, come fossero stati scritti in un momento precedente. Un’enfasi strana era posta dall’ispessirsi delle lettere.

“By that time we already came to know many things. Hell, we knew everything. That is, everything that was useful to us right there and then, and it didn’t amount to much. Everything we needed to know about this place, about ourselves, and it was quite surprising at first to notice that often they overlapped. I’m not sure what I mean by this, but I think that the others would agree. We think alike, each one of us, I found out. And some boiling eel-shaped instinct buried deep in my gut suggests me in most unexpected moments -waking at night in pools of my own sweat, or upon falling from horses we learned to conduct here in orderly manner- that it’s for this reason that I am behaving like this. There some kind of ‘role’ in this kind of deed, already disappeared in trivial matters, like any other deed, and like it’s due. There’s a need for a diarist. So I recall the time we mastered ‘language’ (or a new one? Did we have a old one?), and at first it seemed like it didn’t really change the fact we already knew everything -as if the expansion of our intellectual capabilities so caused didn’t really affect the relationship between reality and the things we had to do, or… I don’t know. Because I don’t need to, perhaps.

I was swinging rakes, shovels, things maybe brought by some of us with a keen eye for such peculiar objects with downcast heads, all weird-shaped and shiny like magpie feathers. There was a ‘role’ for that too. All we had we needed, no different from the state of notions. A need to be ‘king’ of the land, and sometimes, it would seem, to be ‘king’ meant to draw new wounds, good-looking wounds on the ground, each portion of soil bearing marks of a new state of being, in which, I dreamt once, we would symbolically search, in future times of barren scape and of forests vanished in invisible fires, for spots and stripes we once had seen in furs of bobcats and ringtails elusively hopping in and out of the shadows in our bordering fields; these marks, according to my vision, would become surrogate for our nourishable eyes of both rare and everyday images, beasts undefined just like their own spots, whose agile movements keep on darting somewhere in the back of our mind long after they’ve disappeared. And as I was ‘king’, mastering the land but not yet the ‘gift’ or ‘scam’ we were to receive that day (is it ‘kinging’? How do ‘verbs’ work?), I thought about the marks we had seen upon our arrival, I thought that ‘love’ and ‘god’ might have been something like the swing of my arms, the springing up of soaking clods from each dig, the wild red-tailed bucks galloping far away from our scent and noises brought downwind. And as in such fashion I was there, ‘kinging’, pondering, I saw him approaching, and waved, to signify I recognized him -we were at that point able to do so- and wanted us to exchange greetings, then move on.

He seemed pleased to understand that we no longer held the habit of looking at him in perplexed curiosity and fascination each time he appeared to us without notice in some forested or boggy crossroad, each of such times being as if we crossed our paths for the first time. No, he seemed to be glad -everyone was looking at him-, he was glad, that goblin, to be hosted with unspoken, subdued courtesy due to an old acquaintance, not unworthy of obedient respect. I pride myself in being keen-eyed, like an hawk or eagle, when the flaming eel inside me of which I have spoken requires, almost to the point of making me internally simmer in clouds ascending from deep to brains, that I observe, that I capture fleeting glimpses of the ‘unusual’ in frames of light and in visible things, to be later added in musings expressed by the candle-lit solitude of my diaristic duties, to be later rendered ‘usual’. In that moment I thought I had seen clods of rain-soaked dirt and half-decomposed matter (like lumps of filth and bones, like those pellets regurgitated by nocturnal birds) tumbling down from his lower back to his hoofed feet, kicking as he stood there, looking at us, smiling again. Lumps of dirt sprang back from his kicks, swung far behind him towards our huts of recent building, towards our gardens, as if sowing seeds of dead matter (I don’t know if this was seen by the others too, the only doubt of such sort I’ve had so far). Then he talked, and his smile changed. Someone, once again, felt ‘fear’. Remembering gloom that in shadows flowed down from branches in wild, feverish encounters of those always rainy days.

It had been a while, in fact, since he let us see him, and it seemed like the very fact of his temporary vanishing from our everyday worrying had made it possible to remember him as soon as he showed his face again. Upon glancing over the silent asking of our questioning eyes, having renewed his gladness in witnessing how we all agreed without need to ‘agree’, he answered to us, he ‘said’ -it was the strangest sound- that he had stuff to do, you know, things to learn. Things to learn, he said. We thought it peculiar. It was at that point that I remembered his curling, living horns, his smell of sacrifice and lambs that filled my eyes and lungs at the moment of most bewilderment I had with him, privately in our connected minds. And we noticed in mild amazement that he no longer was naked, and a black vest was now hanging from under his woolly armpits, making it seem like his goatish lower region was a pair of pants, and his hooves a pair of boots made out of wood and bone so that the autumn and winter of that turbulent region could sweep uneventfully throughout his feet, like they did with feet of root and fossil that constellated the land.

Sure, we were used to his presence, even when he was not there, even when we didn’t remember him, as long as he didn’t show up. He was like the beasts of the land, and the weather, only distinguished by the extravagance that comes with being a unique specimen. But under the ‘usual’ silver-colored sky of that day he appeared different, ‘changed’. So things did change, apparently. Even when they were far out from conscience, from all our worrying, our marching, our stopping, our ‘kinging’. I thought it marvelous and terrifying at once that things, once left unguarded by reason, could go on living a life of their own, like it had been for his horns of bone springing up serpent-like from a musk-smelling forehead, like demons and animals of our fields and woods. It was at that time that I shivered.

So he said this and that, he said that he learned something we might be interested in learning. I didn’t know what it was and I never cared to comprehend it: I was not interested and for that reason I suppose nobody else was. But there were among us the ones who had a duty to fake interest (and that he knew very well, and smirkingly, quietly rejoiced), and, maybe, to gradually take genuine interest, and make us all interested, at some point in time. Giving birth to change. Evolution. A second shiver. I thought: what’s going to happen here? How will this land look like?

I can know only what pertains to my scribblings -now I can name my ‘role’ and ‘work’, without questioning any meaning, without lingering on those sentiments that sometimes make nights long and unsufferable in journeys without moving, in vertical falls within wells only inside me excavated, when in moist darkness I ask myself why, and what happens when I write down of demons and flashes of darkness and light, of things I’ve seen that, now that I know shivers, make me shiver, time and time again, forever tumbling downwards to embrace some bitter end laying there underground for everything to unquestioningly rest over. No, I must not linger. I must write. And I write not of their conversation, in which he was a master, in which his hands and fingers swooped and wriggled in bat-like formations to lead the eyes of pupils. As he told them, they followed, they agreed, they would listen to and deem it worthy, a proposal that made the most sense to them. Sign a paper, he said -and I write not the details, his reasoning, his talk of consequences I could not understand, despite my pride in logic, despite my devotion to the good advices of this virtue. It was, though, in a way, the very first paper, the first sign, and the first talk of blood we heard in that land -blood! How surely it was one of the things of which we remembered something, a scent like iron, never quite defined, somewhere in galaxies of past forgotten reached with our vessels, our floating domes (this is the image I came up with, as I previously wrote; it must mean they’ve seen it too, in dreams, in who knows what). But this 'blood' he spoke of was different, even though we couldn’t tell what the difference was, for we didn’t remember how it was back then. Different blood, used only for signing, and not for… who knows what it was used for. But it must have been something both largely different and largely similar.

Let’s make a deal, he said, teeth dancing in his gaping mouth. Smell like sour graped breath. And an invisible will, all around, enveloping.

Along with blood and its shining letters, curly and alive as they took shape on paper, were created worms in our brains, always squirming, always… speaking. So now we had new labels for things. Different from inner workings of those digesting habits hidden in the other said of our eyes, our contemplation that fixed perceptions in shapeless bodyless paper. But I write not of consequences and talks of ‘profit’. I write of scenes. I write of a window.

Like a frame in a painting, a square shape in a mud hut, and in soft blackness at its opposite and distant corners, stiff-shouldered gentlemen dressed in black, buttoned white, their glasses and facial hair and ears eager; on the opposite, there he was, almost entirely hidden in his pitch-like hollow at the ends of visibility, when image became wall, and wall became skull and flesh, framing my eyes and gaze as I stood there, like the others, peeping at the ‘event’ as their day went by, registering. It was the first window I had looked in. The first, maybe -not quite possibly- to have been carved like a wound in mud standing still, brown and red and black. And it was like art, terrible and curious, a parable of moral frights. And I almost could hear him… roar? He had fangs and mane around his neck, and horns that, in the unseeable abyss blackly hidden around the edges of that dark empty room, may have been wriggling in madness, in hissings most wildly joyful. And I pondered on what strange things that strange being might have encountered in his soulless wondering while he led his animal life away from us, what made it so that such ‘change’ was made possible in his realm and then in ours. And I thought that the dirt he kicked might have come from past days he wouldn’t move a step again in, past days of prairies and bogs and shadows deep in wooded marshes, north and south; and I thought that as he was freely dancing, unseen, like wild dryads and satyrs of past frolicking, and hopping alone from one wind to another, merging with grim-looking dying trees and gaping crevices -I thought that maybe in those days, in which he was ‘masters’ and we were ‘pupils’, he might have unknowingly learned something from us, something we didn’t remember we had learned or invented, and then taught it back, in bellows and cries and far-distanced muffled spectral roars unheard of.”

Continuai nella mia cabina silenziosa a leggere le poche e semivuote pagine successive, con più distrazione, arrancando sino a raggiungere il finale, in cerca delle sue bianche insondabili spirali di omissioni.

Venivano a quel punto descritte giornate povere di avvenimenti, osservazioni sparse tra legna e animali e passaggi di gente nelle vie che come affluenti di un fiume nascevano naturalmente dagli spazi tra le abitazioni, crescenti in numero, ma in ritmo ancora lento. Strano che mi distraessi proprio quando l’impoverimento della narrazione e dei dettagli poteva schermirmi dall’unico punto di distanza tra me e l’autore, quando cioè non più lo spettro della folla antenata sembrava aggredirmi in maniera sottile, tempestandomi dall’interno, un rumoreggiare basso e continuo, come il ronzio tutt’attorno a me, nelle pareti e pavimentazioni del treno, nell’incessante dolorare delle sue apparecchiature caracollanti. Strano che quegli ultimi passaggi e paesaggi trascorressero davanti ai miei sguardi assenti, scagliati in incolmabili lacune lontano dalle rocce rosse e i burroni che il vagone s’apprestava ad abbandonare, per farmi inoltrare in un’altra distesa d’erbe secche e arbusti spinosi.

Ricordo però la sonnolenza, come ricordo la fattoria, il cerchio, la radura, lo stordimento -e analogo stordimento era, quando dopo l’ultima lettura sentii un prurito sommesso lievitare lentamente come lacrime tiepide in un corridoio tra cavità oculari e fronte che scoprivo in quel momento, che sentivo in quel momento, facendomi credere di poter sentire tutto, e al tempo stesso di sentir tutto spegnersi in un colpo solo d’interruttore.

Mentre la coscienza andava precipitando in ombre alte e vive, come quella della voce che m’aveva parlato in cabina dalle pagine raccolte, e che vedevo ora ergersi impugnando attrezzi agricoli o lance, ora stare all’erta come in cerca di presagi dinnanzi al balenare grigiastro di vibrisse e una coda ad anelli tra i cespugli -mentre così un’ultima volta la scorgevo, pensavo alla sua angoscia, al suo dovere, e se veramente fosse riuscita ad arrivare laddove i dubbi non più la fermavano, e se la sua scrittura di “a manuscript” davvero riuscisse a palesarsi al suo sguardo con il vivido fulgore della necessità e del verbo, senza annegamenti nel nulla, in cui ogni ora precipita, viaggiando eternamente in ferrovia, o marciando, col proprio corpo donato agli abbracci scorticanti della vegetazione, della landa, dell’indefinito. E nelle brume del sonno una piccola secondaria ansia mi strisciò sulla pelle illusoria, quando pensai che forse non ce l’aveva fatta, nemmeno quell’autore, a ‘credere’ del tutto (Dio, Amore, Dovere, Arte…), quando il suo inchiostro s’era fermato in fondo a una pagina menomata, insignificante, lasciando soltanto presagire le ondulazioni del suo possibile là attorno agli spazi lasciati bianchi, vuoti, incompiuti, saltando due righe solo per posarsi infine su un nome, il proprio: a manuscript, deposto a terra tra le macerie, perché nessuno mai lo leggesse.