the book of my life
NoonSeptember 14, 2022 – 09:00
«The second-hand stall in via Cilea. That’s where I started buying lyrics “
from Maurizio de Giovanni
Thirty-six years, two months and a handful of days. Nights included. This is the time that has passed since I began my coexistence with Florentino, Fermina and the enchanted world of Colombia in the early 1920s in which they lived. I, you know, was a book boy. In the sense that, despite having a normal social life, cultivating a sport and being present in the family and at school as it should be, as soon as I could I ran away inside the pages. I spent my money like that, almost all of it; increasing purchases with exchanges, two for one at the second-hand stall that was on the bridge in via Cilea, who knows if anyone remembers it. And the habit remained with me even when school had replaced university and then work, and when a girl had replaced the group of friends, and the hazy future had become a circumstantial project. Books have always been there, but like people they have had a different value and a different presence. It’s a question of scars.
There are many books that pass over the soul of the reader as if it were waterproof, without any trace. Few leave a wound, large or small, which heals more or less slowly; the soul every now and then caresses one of those signs that evoke the tender memory of a won battle. Each of these few books will come back to the surface in a sentence or a feeling, giving a wonderful feeling of already lived, and will be in a smile or a regret, deeper than any learned quote. Among these few, very few books, which you could count on the fingers of one hand even if you are a bulimic reader, will have changed you without your noticing: like an ancient love, they will affect your tastes and your tendencies, and maybe your idea you have of yourself. Love in the time of cholera, as far as I am concerned, made my heart blossom. In its immensely epic simplicity it told me how atrocious and wonderful love can be, a life sentence in a golden prison, outside of which there is no admissible existence; in an age when you think you know everything about love, and instead you know nothing.
Florentino sees Fermina, on the street, and falls in love with him: a banal premise for the greatest story written in our time. “Fifty-three years, seven months and eleven days, including nights,” with no other thought, no distraction, a single devastating obsession. And every step on the job will be done to be worthy of her, in each of the countless women she will look for a fragment of her, no breath will be allowed outside of the air that may have already been breathed by her. Love, its meaning: a word to which, before this novel, I obtusely attributed a gross positive meaning, and which Florentino taught me to be a cleaver that falls violently on life, a flame that devours everything it encounters and nothing leaves standing in its path, if not the terrible ghost of its memory. Since those magical days of a distant summer, experiencing the miracle of seeing an author repeat himself from history to history confirming his greatness, I have never lost the part of me that is Florentino; nor the part of me that is Fermina.
I had been a citizen of One Hundred Years of Solitude, like most readers of that time, but with this story I discovered that sometimes, some rare, very rare times, the setting could be me. I was the place where the meetings and dialogues took place, I was the theater of events. I was the main character, split between all the characters. I think the innocent fault of the great delay with which I started writing is this novel, along with a few dozen others. One cannot objectively think of being defined as a writer, in the same way that one who has composed this brilliant symphony of feelings is defined in encyclopedias. I am amply justified, I think. Gabo said that a hundred years of solitude he had written to make himself known, Love in the time of cholera to make himself loved; in light of the facts, this sentence sounds like a sentence. May you be blessed for Macondo, Great Master; but may you be even more blessed, and constantly cursed, for having understood that love is the most atrocious of happiness. And for having explained it in the only and most bitterly sweet way possible: by telling a story.
September 14, 2022 | 9:00 am
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