It’s already been a while since I removed the cast from my arm, but it seems that my brain has remained within a cast … it doesn’t move. This is why I am studying with Silvia. Only she can help me to recover from the days I’ve missed; I wouldn’t want to ruin the summer by failing some subjects. Together with Silvia I am strong. I am happy. But when I think about Beatrice, I continue to feel lost. After the umpteenth time when Silvia has to bring me back to Earth from one of my daydreams, she gets up and takes something from a notebook she keeps in her room, one of those notebooks where girls write their thoughts.
In this respect girls are better than us, I mean, Silvia is certainly better than me, because girls write the important things down in their diaries. Every time they discover something important, they write it down, so that at any time whatsoever, they can reread it and remember it.
I have a ton of important things I would like to remember, but then I never write them down, because I am lazy. Therefore, I forget them, and I always make the same mistakes; I know, but I don’t want to sit myself down, with my butt on a chair, glued to the seat. This is what it means to have abilities but not apply yourself. To have a butt and never sit on it, which is the point of having it after all … If I wrote down everything I’d discovered, who knows how many things I wouldn’t need to learn all over again each time. I believe that rather than a diary, a novel would come out of it. I think I might like to be a writer, but I am not sure how to start, and besides, I’d feel discouraged right away, because when I try to think up a plot, it never comes. In any case, Silvia had one of those diaries that help you to remember things. In one of the pages of that diary there is a piece of paper.
“Here, this is the rough draft of the letter we wrote to Beatrice.”
In that moment, my soul recomposes itself. Like some sort of miracle, all the pieces of paper that the river swallowed up with my rage and cowardice are there in front of me, reconstructed by a miracle performed by Silvia, who preserved those words.
“Why did you save it?”
Silvia doesn’t answer immediately, she plays with the edge of the paper, almost caressing it. Then, without looking at me, she murmurs that she liked those words, she liked to read them over, and she wished that one day her boyfriend would dedicate such beautiful words to her. Silvia is searching my eyes, and for the first time, I look inside her eyes.
There are two ways to look at the face of a person. One is to look at the eyes as a part of the face. The other is to look at only the eyes, as if they were the face. It is one of those things that make you afraid when you do it. Because the eyes are life in miniature. White all around, like the nothingness in which life floats, the colored iris, like the unexpected variety that characterizes life, until you dive into the blackness of the pupil, which swallows everything, like a black well without colors, bottomless. And it is there that I dove in, looking at Silvia in that way, into the deep ocean of her life, entering within and letting her enter mine: through the eyes. But I didn’t hold her gaze. Instead Silvia did.
“If you want, we can rewrite it and you can take it to Beatrice. If you want, we can go together.”
Silvia is able to read my thoughts.
“It’s the only way I can do it,” I tell her with a smile so wide that the edges of my mouth seem to reach my eyes.
Then we hit the books, and when Silvia explains things, everything becomes easier: life becomes more comprehensible.