4.

I woke up convinced that it was four-twenty, the exact time, give or take a minute, that my sleep terminated in Milan. Gusts of rain still fell. I turned on the lights; it was two-ten. I pulled myself up to go to the bathroom and the warmth I’d been enjoying under the covers gave way to a shudder of cold air. On my way back I glanced at Mario, who’d tossed off the covers in his sleep. He lay on his stomach, his legs splayed, an arm stretched along one side, the other folded with his hand clenched in a fist next to his half-open mouth. His bare feet, when I brushed them with my hand, were icy. What if he got sick while his parents were away? I pulled the covers up to his face and went to sit on the edge of my bed.

I felt sluggish. I was sleepy and yet certain that, were I to lay down, I wouldn’t sleep: I was too hot under my skin, which, paradoxically, seemed cold to the touch; my toes were also cold and somewhat numb. I took the James story and some pencils out of my suitcase to knock out a few sketches, then I got back under the covers, leaning my back against the wall. I looked over the work I’d done in the preceding weeks and didn’t like any of it; on the contrary, I regretted sending the publisher two plates that hadn’t even been touched up. I reread a few passages in the book and tried to pin down an image or two. But I couldn’t concentrate. It was as if Mario’s breath, combined with the breath of the wind and the rain, and the reality of the room—in the apartment Betta and Saverio had adapted to their needs, renovating it over the years—all blocked my imagination. So I set the story aside and abandoned myself to a state of half-sleep in which the memory of the old arrangement of the house assumed a precision capable of making any other image, either real or imagined, fade. I pulled myself up again and started to draw the spaces in which I’d been raised. I drew the entryway with the window that looked over the freight yard. I drew the living room that meant so much to my mother, with furniture that had just been bought, the sofa, the armchairs, the ottomans, things that must have been the height of elegance to her. I drew her, too, and then immediately afterward—I thought I could do it—her gaze upon that bright, wide space, upon the table with its wavy border, the silverware with its rounded tips and four tines, the gallery from which you could see part of the Hotel Terminus. I drew the hallway with the telephone unit nailed to the wall, my parents’ room, the two of them in bed, my father seated on the edge in his T-shirt and underwear. And I drew the storage room full of old stuff, the enormous bathroom, the room, in that very moment, that I was sharing with Mario. Back then it was full of military beds, like a dormitory in the barracks. My grandmother slept on one, and we five children, head to toe, on the others, an encampment then partially vacated. The room was soon turned over to my grandmother and her three youngest grandchildren, while my brother and I—the two elder grandchildren—went on to make our beds, in the evenings, in the living room, putting an end to my mother’s elegant aspirations.

It was frenetic work. It had been a while since my hand was so loose. I drew spaces and people and objects from memory, also reproducing, in a sort of aside—at the top of the page, at the bottom, and on fresh pages—details, details, details. While I’d boasted of a certain capacity throughout my adolescence—and it slowly had imposed some direction on my life: The drawing teacher in middle school was astonished, saying, this boy is self-taught—later, growing up, studying, the talent of my body, hand, and nerves seemed unrefined. I pursued increasingly cultivated choices and, as a result, increasingly distanced myself from talents that seemed vulgar to me by then. When I was twelve, other people thought I was a prodigy who dazzled and disturbed, and I myself felt that way; but by the time I was twenty I’d learned to deride the facility of my hands as if it were a weakness. I saw myself, I imagined myself, I tried to draw myself in those two ages, at twelve and at twenty. But abruptly my hand cramped up. I kept at it in vain, my fingers again turning heavy and subordinate. I scribbled a while longer, words, sketches: how I was, who I was, what had happened during those eight years in which I had fully grown up. Around four in the morning I stopped. How foolish, wasting time this way. What was it all for? I looked over the sheets crammed with drawings, stunned by that unexpected eruption of creativity. And I was struck, in that throng of images, by two figures who were all too precise: Betta and Saverio. Betta had turned out marvelously. I’d put her into the kitchen sixty years ago, in a pose my mother often struck, as did I. She resembles you and your family, Ada used to say. Even though she’d been the one to give birth to her, even under those circumstances, I’d excluded her. My son-in-law on the other hand, a perfect likeness, in the kitchen as it was today—with scant references—was dull. I’d portrayed him as a surly stranger, I’d erased, unwittingly, all positive traits. I turned off the light, pulled the covers up to my face, and at the hour when, normally, in Milan, I woke up, fell asleep.