Time Ages in a Hurry Read Online Free Page B

learned it in the blink of an eye. I write the letters on the blackboard, the teacher said, I ask him to repeat them, like everybody else, and he stays silent, there are two possibilities, either he’s a difficult boy and is refusing, or he just doesn’t understand. I suddenly grasped the problem one July day, we were at Forte, a woman with a white apron and a basket on her arm was walking along the beach, yelling: doughnuts! We were under the beach umbrella, you wanted a doughnut, and your father was about to call her over, but I said to you: Ferruccio, go and get one by yourself, then I’ll give you the money, do you remember? He said nothing, drifting back. Go on and try, she said, see if you can catch hold of the memory, you were sitting on a black-and-white rubber ring your father had made for you from the inner tube of a moped to which he’d stuck a waterproof, papier-mâché duck head he’d found in a warehouse for carnival floats, it must have been one of the first Viareggio carnivals after the disaster, you were hugging it all morning long but didn’t have the courage to take it into the water, now can you see yourself? He could see himself. Or it seemed like hedid, he saw a skinny little boy hugging an inner tube with a duck head attached to it and the little boy saying to his dad: I want a doughnut. I see him, Aunt, he confirmed, I think I’m back there. And then I told you to go and get the doughnut, she murmured, you left the duck and ran toward that white apron on the beach, hurrying hurrying, afraid that apron would go by, an imposing man was standing at the water’s edge showing off how elegant he was in his white robe and he took you by the hand, not understanding, and called to us in a haughty voice, and I said to your father: the kid can’t see distances, he mistook that man for the doughnut woman, he is really nearsighted, no way he’s retarded, take him to an eye doctor.
    The aunt’s phrasing came back to him. She’d never say a game was nice, it was really nice, and she hadn’t bought him a colorful book but a really colorful one, and we had to go for a walk because that day the sky was really blue. Meanwhile she’d moved on to another memory, murmuring in that silent room, all those devices over the bed: the tanks, the plastic tubes, and the needles inserted in her arms, then she went quiet and suddenly the silence grew heavy, the sounds of the city seemed almost from another planet, the vast grounds surrounding the hospital isolated it from everything. And in that silence he listened to her murmuring in his ear, leaning forward, curiously his back pain had ceased, and behind that feeble voice he found he was navigating in a self he’d lost, back and forth like a kite twisting on a string, and from up there, from that kite upon which he was seated, he began to discern: a tricycle, the voice of an evening radio broadcast, a Madonnaeverybody claimed was crying, a little girl from a “displaced” family, with bows in her braids, who as she hopped on a chalk pattern on the ground exclaimed: square one, bread and salami! and other things like that, the aunt by then was talking in the dark since even the dim overhead light had been shut off, only the pale blue lamp over the bed remained and a glowing slice of neon coming from under the door. She closed her eyes and fell silent, she seemed exhausted. He straightened up in the chair and felt a sharp pinprick of pain between his vertebrae. She’s fallen asleep, he thought, now she’s really fallen asleep. Instead she brushed his hand and beckoned for him to come closer again. Ferruccio, he heard her breath saying, do you remember how beautiful Italy used to be?

    How can the night be present? Composed only of itself, it’s absolute, every space belongs to it, its mere presence is imposing, the same presence a ghost might have that you know is there in front of you but is everywhere, even behind you, and if you seek refuge in a patch of light