Novel Excerpt

Translated by Catherine Foulkrod.
____

I had a suitcase and wanted to get out. To devise a reality adaption plan, I searched a library for volumes on people who grew up locked-in. I discovered that only those whose life curve has not yet entered decline can hope for restoration. Otherwise, detachment collapses the equilibrium, and it is not uncommon for dislocated individuals to end up digging holes in the ground that they crawl or roll into when overtaken by nostalgia for enclosure. I read that many of them are unable to interpret distance. They may attempt to touch objects that are too far away then become permanently frozen with the impossibility of reaching them, emptied out with dissatisfaction. It is a condition akin to the experience of regaining partial sight after living for ages with the certainty that darkness will never dissolve. A section of the book devoted to this kind of awakening documented the responses of blind patients to questions about breadth and depth.

One boy responded to “how deep is a person?” by creating a tiny gap between his forefinger and thumb. Following a risky surgery, he began to see faint outlines and silhouettes, and said that everything was as he had expected, except that people could have such inhuman and unlivable dimensions.

I then found a text that described the case of a girl who grew up in a desert. She did not know her name and had never seen herself in a mirror; she did not even know the color of her eyes. When she was liberated, they gave her a small mirror to inspect herself, thinking she would find a happy ending in her reflection. But looking at herself, the girl found that her skin had significantly more layers than she thought and had a violent fit. I wondered what the unreal casing she had enclosed herself in all her life looked like, and whether the original version would end up killing the one that appeared in the mirror so as to cling to the light of the Sun.

As children, in our muddy little piece of land, my brother was the critter that could best entertain me—second perhaps only to spiders, no, third to spiders and wild pigs. He knew he had to lie to me, to recount anecdotes and scientific facts with distortions that would give me particular pleasure and make me linger in the story, creating a stirring liquid of things sticking together in the brain. I used to run off to walk alone among the ancient olive trees, chanting his stories, the bizarre excerpts that thrilled me. He wanted me to stop being so lifted away from the concreteness of things. He took me by the arm and pulled me to the ground, forcing me to sit, to cast off distractions. The clasping of his hand around my arm gave off my elemental odor—now, all of my primordial solids have that smell of transparency that became my preliminary sense for being in the world and the forgetting of it as soon as it began to move forward. He did not explain that I would have to develop a sense of smell to be able to take steps in uninterrupted directions.

I can still see myself, small and sitting cross-legged, listening to him repeat stories from the start. He knows I follow by the way I move my lips, slowly repeating his voice, creating an atmospheric echo when he stretches out words I seek to confront. He told me this was the only way I would let them go. The mind wants to listen to obsessions in their entirety; evoking fragments forces repetition and drives you mad. The best way to expel words from the mind is to give them a means to project themselves in full. The result is relief rather than climax, but that is how people survive.

We lived in a world that is both this one and another one far from reality’s common plane. We used to say it was a walled village and would play trapped mimes, our palms outstretched to feel the fence we knew was imaginary only up to a point.

I asked: “What happens if we try to break out?”

My brother looked around and lowered his voice, not wanting to be heard: “We are in the sights of a sniper.”

It was easy to reproduce bullet hole wounds: we used the juice of sour cherries, crushed them in our hands and pressed our fingertips against each other. We tickled each other until we became viscous. Our sweetness attracted bees and we kept our eyes shut tight to savor the fear advancing between our skin and the buzzing of their tiny wings.

Whenever I tried to confide what it was like to be born there, in that community of metamorphic individuals, I had to splurge on clarifications and illustrations for those who looked back at me while letting their imagination bloom with the idea of a place lost at the turn of the century.

Yes, we had running water; yes, we had a value system; propane, however, came to us via a trapezoidal crate that had been placed in a dugout in the garden. To fill it we had to call a man with a truck who did this as a profession: he transported gaseous fuel to people locked in a seismic crater. He would come to us with news about energy market prices and had a twelve-color pen to fill out receipts. A point of reference who perhaps no longer exists, for us he was a vital spokesman for the civilization we had driven away. He functioned as an agitator, as an unnerving influence on our placid scenarios. He and his twelve-color pen reminded us that outside our community the world moved fast and we would never be able to keep up. They taught us not to want it. We acted out revolutions within ourselves, and no one could see us as we blew them up.

____
Both Sara Verdecchia and Catherine Foulkrod live in Naples, Italy.