I listen to the old man’s anecdotes and I say to myself that telling stories, much like playing chess, is the act of proposing false futures. Like the chess player, the narrator produces false expectations. Then I think again of Giovanna, her strange way of punctuating time with silences, of leaving the conversation always on the verge of an inconclusive revelation. Revelations are always a bit vulgar, says Tancredo, and maybe he’s right. Art is just the opposite, producing half-seen subtleties: imagined dioramas in the middle of the desert. As the old man starts talking again, I can only think of the sequence of events that have led me to this empty town: Giovanna’s first call, her always opaque proposal of collaboration, my walks through the New York metropolis, the hours I spent imagining stories that would end with the image of an insomniac woman, reading. I’ve remembered the happy period of silence and peace that came after that strange project, Giovanna’s partial disappearance, and then the arrival of that dreadful archive that has brought me here. The trick, I tell myself as I go back to listening to the old man, is to propose images and futures as though proposing a life.
Today, sitting across from the town mayor, I felt a sudden consternation, and I understood that I was annoyed by the same question as always. The question that has led me here and toward whose reply old Toledano’s story seems to be heading, but of which only today I realized also implicates me: How does one end up in an empty town? The question hit me suddenly, while the old mayor, an ex-miner almost ninety years old, was trying to tell me the town’s story year by year. For this old man, I thought as I watched him struggle with his memory, there’s nothing left: his life was written here. His life would end here because that’s how men live and die. Then I asked him about Toledano, and I noticed his hesitation. I thought his memory was failing him again, but after a few seconds John interrupted to ask who I was talking about. The photographer, I replied, and the mayor corrected me, insisting: “Ah, crazy old Roberto Rotelli.” Only then did I understand the obvious: the old man was never Yoav Toledano to them. Then I remembered that in one of his last articles, Toledano started with a citation I’d always liked, attributed to a certain R.R., that said: “In 1912 I decided to be alone and to move forward without destination. The artist must be alone with himself, as in a shipwreck.” Perhaps, I said to myself, it was this R.R. who inspired the old man’s decision to become Roberto Rotelli. But I didn’t say anything out loud. As always, I simply listened as the mayor told the story I’d already heard, but that he tells better than anyone: the story that for him ends the day the highway that led to the town split in two. That day, he repeats patiently, he realized he would die in a ghost town, unable to betray the memory of five generations. He tells it to me straightforwardly, and I start to think of old Toledano’s many masks. In learning to tell a story one must self-impose a shipwreck, I tell myself, thinking again of the epigraph. We stay for coffee and then, when we see that the mayor is falling asleep after half a cup, we take our leave. Outside, I start to tell my friend about the game of names, but I immediately realize I would be betraying a man who has wagered everything on becoming anonymous.