In Other Words (13 page)

If I want to understand what moves me, what confuses me, what pains me—everything that makes me react, in short—I have to put it into words. Writing is my only way of absorbing and organizing life. Otherwise it would terrify me, it would upset me too much.

What passes without being put into words, without being transformed and, in a certain sense, purified by the crucible of writing, has no meaning for me. Only words that endure seem real. They have a power, a value superior to us.

Given that I try to decipher everything through writing, maybe writing in Italian is simply my way of learning the language in a more profound, more stimulating way.

Ever since I was a child, I've belonged only to my words. I don't have a country, a specific culture. If I didn't write, if I didn't work with words, I wouldn't feel that I'm present on the earth.

What does a word mean? And a life? In the end, it seems to me, the same thing. Just as a word can have many dimensions, many nuances, great complexity, so, too, can a person, a life. Language is the mirror, the principal metaphor. Because ultimately the meaning of a word, like that of a person, is boundless, ineffable.

R
eading an interview with the novelist Carlos Fuentes in an issue of
Nuovi Argomenti,
I find this: “It's extremely useful to know that there are certain heights one will never be able to reach.”

Fuentes is referring to literary masterpieces—works of genius like
Don Quixote,
for example—that remain untouchable. I think that these heights have a dual, and substantial, role for writers: they make us aim at perfection and remind us of our mediocrity.

As a writer, in whatever language, I have to take account of the presence of the greatest writers. I have to accept the nature of my contribution with respect to theirs. Although I know I'll never write like Cervantes, like Dante, like Shakespeare, nevertheless I write. I have to manage the anxiety that those heights can stir up. Otherwise, I wouldn't dare write.

Now that I'm writing in Italian, Fuentes's observation seems even more pertinent. I have to accept the impossibility of reaching the height that inspires me but at the same time pushes me into a corner. Now the height is not the work of a writer more brilliant than I am but, rather,
the heart of the language itself. Although I know that I will never be securely inside that heart, I try, through writing, to reach it.

I wonder if I'm going against the current. I live in an era in which almost anything seems possible, in which no one wants to accept any limits. We can send a message in an instant, we can go from one end of the world to the other in a day. We can plainly see a person who is not with us. Thanks to technology, no waiting, no distance. That's why we can say with assurance that the world is smaller than it used to be. We are always connected, reachable. Technology refutes distance, today more than ever.

And yet this Italian project of mine makes me acutely aware of the immense distances between languages. A foreign language can signify a total separation. It can represent, even today, the ferocity of our ignorance. To write in a new language, to penetrate its heart, no technology helps. You can't accelerate the process, you can't abbreviate it. The pace is slow, hesitant, there are no shortcuts. The better I understand the language, the more confusing it is. The closer I get, the farther away. Even today the disconnect between me and Italian remains insuperable. It's taken almost half my life to advance barely a few steps. Just to get this far.

In that sense the metaphor of the small lake that I wanted to cross, with which I began this series of reflections, is wrong. Because in fact a language isn't a small lake but an ocean. A tremendous, mysterious element, a force of nature that I have to bow before.

In Italian I lack a complete perspective. I lack the distance that would help me. I have only the distance that hinders me.

It's impossible to see the entire landscape. I rely on certain paths, certain ways to get through. Routes I trust and probably depend on too much. I recognize certain words, certain constructions, as if they were familiar trees during a daily walk. But ultimately when I write I'm in a trench.

I write on the margins, just as I've always lived on the margins of countries, of cultures. A peripheral zone where it's impossible for me to feel rooted, but where I'm comfortable. The only zone where I think that, in some way, I belong.

I can skirt the boundary of Italian, but the interior of the language escapes me. I don't see the secret pathways, the concealed layers. The hidden levels. The subterranean part.

At Hadrian's Villa, in Tivoli, there is a gigantic network of streets, an impressive and imposing system that is entirely underground. This complex of passages was dug to transport goods, servants, slaves. To separate the emperor from the people. To hide the real and unruly life of the villa, just as the skin hides the unsightly but essential functions of the body.

At Tivoli I understand the nature of my Italian project. Like visitors to the villa today, like Hadrian almost two millennia ago, I walk on the surface, the accessible part. But I know, as a writer, that a language exists in the bones, in the marrow. That the true life of the language, the substance, is there.