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### Viola Victor

## Nocturne

English edition edited by  
Carmelo Massimo Tidona

Nocturne  
Copyright © 2012  
Zerounoundici Edizioni

Published by Zerounoundici  
Cover: Image Shutterstock.com

###  Introduction

This book was born from a dream and a Voice.  
One night, Viola dreams of waking up and finding an unknown book beside her. In the dream she reads it: it is a story that tastes like the night, of a love and a mystery. Then she wakes up, this time for real. But she does not know how to tell the story of the dream book: it tastes of anxiety, but not of urgency, so she waits.

One night, on the shore of a small lake – the only light that of an ancient abbey in the distance, on the hills – Viola is sleepy. She hasn't been sleeping for two days, surprised by the unreal illness of insomnia, and she tries to go back home.  
In that moment, she hears a voice talking in her mind. No, not talking, dictating. Dictating the story it sent her in a dream some time ago.

Viola writes at the most unusual times, whenever the Voice decides to talk. The Voice belongs to Viktor, it comes from the heights of a tower, from the fading distance of a lighthouse.

It is the voice of punctilious oddities, as naughty as a child long forgotten, who befriended the shadow. And from the same shadow it learned the suggestion and the indulgence we owe to our irrational foibles. So there it is. Viktor does not like even numbers. It is to accommodate his express wish that chapters are numbered with odd numbers only.

### 1 - The Clock Tower

The clock tower is by far the darkest place in the city.

It seems counterintuitive, if we are in the large square, the only one of this small cluster of a town, and look up at the impressive clock. Next to the clock there is always the moon. Sometimes on one side, sometimes on the other, sometimes over the embattled spire of the hands competing with it.

The moon and the clock are the most important lights for those who roam these streets at night.

That is, no one, apart from some drunk who is afraid to go back home to his wife and her rolling pin, merciless with short pastry and ravioli as well as with her missing husbands.

But drunks do not care, neither for the bright dial interrupted by the clock hands, nor for the changing moon. How many things they have in common: they are constantly changing. You look at the hands, and shortly after they are no longer where you saw them. The moon too. It looks like a secret agreement.

One evening I was sitting on top of the clock, on the brightest side of the tower, flanked by the big yellowish disc that casts long, slightly oblique shadows on the surface of the terrace, which then disappear, silently swallowed by the trapdoor. There begins the belly of the tower, without light, so that the moon itself, try as it might, cannot enter the bowels of the slender building.

It seems incredible that I can do what it cannot: I can get out and come in from the trapdoor whenever I want. I do that to go out on the terrace and watch, emerging from the darkness, the silence of the sleeping city, from its brightest point, with the brightest companion that remains, however, always outside.

Despite this limitation, and also because it is not a person but an object, I see how easy it is to write verses to the moon, distant and unattainable as it is, not to mention its light. Many poets do, and it is not bad to be a poet. Who knows how many people had things worth being said, also beautiful and important, still unknown because no one found the right words.

A shame, really. I should try that, being a poet. After all, it is so easy to write verses to the moon. Beautiful, still, distant. It seems not to care about anything, indifferent to all the words that someone could devote to her, and therefore waste.

When I find the right words to say important things, maybe I will become rich and famous, and I will leave this simple small town, where I am only the guardian of the tower, oiling its massive luminous hands and talking to the moon when, at night, I come up here, even though it doesn't care at all.

And why else would I be in a place like this in the middle of the night if I weren't the guardian of the tower?

All in all, I do not mind this job: it is simple and leaves a lot of free time. Time to search for hidden words with which to say the important things that certainly, sooner or later, will fight to come out. Even this small town is not so bad. True, we are far from the great life, the thunderous events of the century, the progress and the life of lavish fashionable entertainment of the big city. Which are not so great, after all, because they are crossed by nerves, in which travellers and news move relentlessly, making of the great city a slightly smaller city, all looking the same. Apparently it is the fashion phenomena, that distances are shortened. But then, why go so far, if then you have to waste so much effort to bring closer what was previously cast away?

I can even understand that, sure. It must be because of the bewilderment of being in a large metropolis. One no longer knows what to do, it is a anthill without rules. So the spontaneity of the aggregation law unites every little lost ant – what is a man in a big messy built-up area, after all, if not an ant full of dismay? – making of it a city ant in a reassuring anthill.

This is why I think that living in such a small place, with the bright hands, the big moon always closer to the tower and the drunken husbands pretending to get lost in the streets, is not that bad. Here happen things that do not happen where everyone knows what to expect.

I should be clearer, I know. It is not an immediate idea. This is why I should be a poet. If I were, you all would have immediately understood what I was thinking. But I am not, and you will have to settle for a lopsided report – the moon collapses, dragging away the now-slanting shadows – and incomplete suggestions, which I am really regretful for. So with difficulty: do you see how words stumble and collide with one another? And the confusion? I'll try to be more precise.

It is only in places like this, I mean, that a girl and her nightgown tucked into the folds of her clothes can climb to the top of the dark-bellied tower of the skinny town whale.

Of course I was very surprised when, barely emerging from the trapdoor with the strength of her thin arms, she cried aloud: "How dark in here!"

She asked me why I smiled. Not even with smiles I can say what I want, how can I aspire to be a poet? My smile with the broken left incisor meant to tell the girl that I was very happy to no longer be the only one who knew this secret. Happy she had noticed it too, whoever she was.

"From down there," she explained, smoothing the wrinkled dress, from which the hem of her nightgown, still under the clothes worn in a hurry, hung, "it seems a bright place. But when you get here there is only darkness. What disappointment!"

My smile faded, hiding the broken incisor along with the healthy one. I was surprised that one could infer from the evidence before the eyes of both of us that that place – the brightest place from the outside and the darkest one from the inside – could be disappointing and not magnificent.

"I find it magnificent" I made it clear.

"Don't be upset. I didn't want to offend you, sorry. You live here? How can you bear to be so in the dark? How do you do when the moon isn't there?"

Not having clear memories of moonless nights, I shrugged absently, hoping she would understand that it was a minor, if not irrelevant, problem, and I accepted a biscuit that she pulled out from a handkerchief she kept in a small bag.

She came and sat beside me on the edge of the big raised step, trying to look at the city and find its charm, but failing.

"I thought better," she confirmed, chewing on the ginger biscuit she had taken for herself and pulling down the hem of her skirt that had risen almost to her knee while she was climbing the step and finding a position comfortable enough. I looked away, so she would not think that I was looking at her ankles. Actually I had had the chance to see them earlier, while she was distracted. I was a little ashamed: I had taken advantage of her indifference to enjoy the view that the light of the moon offered of her ankles, which she seemed to have forgotten about. They seemed to me white and thin, ending with little and graceful feet. But I didn't want to leave a bad impression, so I did not look at them again for the rest of the evening. She would become a beautiful girl, when she got older. I liked her little oval face and jet-black hair almost as much as her feet and thin ankles, but she never seemed to forget about her face, perhaps because that's where the eyes were, and behind the eyes there seemed to be someone. Her, of course, who never forgot to be there, but forgot about her ankles so easily. She was there, I noticed. Behind the eyes, I mean, not on the tower. She would be there wherever she was.

I wondered how old she was exactly. "Twelve," she said, I don't remember what about, also because I don't think I ever asked her. Might I be becoming a poet? So much as to communicate without even a word? But what kind of poet is it, one who does not use words and forgets when he uses them? I really don't know.

Anyway she was twelve. She didn't ask me how old I was, not even in that sloppy way in which she had told me twelve. I'm not even sure she was talking about her age, but I think so. Certainties, ladies and gentlemen, are but a few, but we'll make do with them. The tower, the clock. The moon, the girl with her nightgown caught in her clothes watching from behind two black eyes that hid her, for sure. Who else? And I still think it's not so difficult to write beautiful verses in a night like this.

"Sure it is, silly. What do you think? That it is enough to sit perched on a tower and howl like a hound to churn some nice verses? How naive! It takes much more!"

What? She wasn't able to explain, but certainly – whatever it was – I didn't display it.

Never mind.

"Anyway I'm glad I found someone here. It will be less boring."

"What?"

"My escape from home."

"Oh, right. Is that why you are still wearing your nightgown?"

"Yes, or rather not. I mean, it's a rehearsal, not the real thing. First I wanted to see how it would go. I thought of inspecting the tower to make sure it was deserted, to have a place to hide for a while. But..."

"But here I am."

"Yeah," she admitted, sighing faintly, as if my presence – legitimate, of course – was for her yet another disappointment in her cherished attempt to run away from home.

"But still better than what I was afraid to find. I mean, you seem fairly innocuous. You won't get in the way."

Then I stiffened. For a bout of pride, obviously. I wanted to look scarier, even though it was sure that she was running no risk. What on earth could I do? Push her down from the tower? Of course not: it would be an awful sight, and probably I would have to pick her up myself. Not only. What kind of guardian would I be if I allowed any stranger to climb on my tower and even jump from it? This is no amusement park.

"And what where you expecting to find? What would you be afraid of? I don't know, pirates?"

She looked at me from head to toes, laughing scornfully. She pulled out another biscuit that I grabbed with both hands and began to munch. Perhaps that was what made me so little scary, my weak spot for ginger. Could the biscuits be poisoned? Did she aspire to take my place in watching the clock?

I ruled that out.

"We're a thousand miles from the sea! There are no pirates here."

"And how do you know? If I were a pirate – and who tells you I'm not? – and I wanted to hide, the last place on Earth where they would look for me is right here, a thousand miles from the sea. A cave in a deserted bay is the first place they would look, if that was what you were thinking about."

"And the ship? You should leave it to come here. A pirate never leaves his ship."

Touché . The girl seemed to know much more than me about pirates.

"Let's say criminals. A gang of vicious kidnappers, for instance, or thieves."

"Better thieves or kidnappers?"

"Both worse! What a question. But if I have to choose, I'd say thieves. With kidnappers I'd start from scratch. They would ask for a ransom and bring me back home, so all my efforts to escape would have been vain. And with the ransom, farewell dowry. I would end up in a convent, and it seems that it is impossible to escape from one of those."

"You want to marry?"

"No, I don't, blockhead! If I wanted to get married I would stay home, why to escape? You're not that smart, uh?"

She was really good at confusing people. And she wasn't even that, half-saying things like that. With less than understandable allusions. We had something in common and that pleased me, though honestly I should have been upset for having been called blockhead.

I kept chewing the biscuit I had left half-eaten, nodding slightly, so she could imagine that whatever she wanted to tell me was clear to me, although it wasn't at all. Maybe I could get another biscuit, they were pretty good.

She moved to change position, adjusting her dress in which, hard as she might try, her light, white nightgown didn't want to enter. She looked around and stood up, starting to walk back and forth, flashing glances of the coal-black eyes, behind which she was sheltering, towards the dark houses. Perhaps she was wondering where hers was.

"Do you always stay here alone? Obviously you don't know the good society, you don't have a bit of education or tact. You didn't even ask my name or why I want to run away from home. Aren't you curious?"

No, I was not. But something in the tone of her voice suggested me that I had better ask those questions, even though it was obvious that I didn't care. Why should I? She had climbed up there and was offering me good biscuits from behind coal-black eyes. Couldn't I just kept enjoying the city in silence as I did every night?

"In fact, I spend most of my time alone. If you want, however, I'll ask. What is your name? Why are you running away?"

She turned her back to me, annoyed irritably, resting her elbows between two battlements of the parapet she could barely reach.

"If you don't care, I won't bore you with my story."

No good: I had to change strategy. I looked at the bag of biscuits hanging from her belt.

"Forgive me. You're right. I'm always alone and sometimes I don't know how to behave, but I really care. Tell me your name."

"You first, silly. You introduce yourself to a girl before asking her name. You really don't know anything."

Her little hand went up to the bag at her belt, which she settled without giving the impression that she would take out another biscuit. I could only sigh and humour her.

"I'm sorry. As I said, I'm not used to socializing. My name is Viktor. Now may I know your name? "

Her look without conviction nevertheless convinced her mouth to emit the sound "Martina".

Martina, I thought. Martina, Martina, Martina. I must not forget it or she will be angry again. Martina. Fact is that names are the easiest thing to forget, for someone as absent-minded as me.

I can remember only what requires no effort. Perfumes, for example, entering your nostrils as a creeper you cannot eradicate. Or faces, eyes perceive them with no intention, they are self-impressing.

Martina: along with your name I won't forget the coal-black eyes, the scent and ginger flavour of your biscuits, and your ankles, I promised myself.

"Now I'd love to know why you decided to run away from home."

"I'm not really running away, though. It is only a rehearsal, remember? But soon I will. I just need a place to stay. It is not recommended for a girl to go around alone at night."

"Then how did you get this far?"

"You're simply impossible! It is obvious that if you escape you have to go out of the house. But then you have to find a safe place to stay, you cannot go wandering around. A place where no one would ever think of looking for you. Here, for example."

"If someone ran away from home, this is the first place I would look."

"Because you come here. But who does, besides you?"

"Martina."

"Okay, I give up, you're impossible. You don't have a shred of logic. No one besides the two of us would come here looking for me, and we are not a danger for my escape. Naturally, you should not tell anyone. But where do you live?"

"I live in the tower. I am the keeper of the clock, so it's natural for me to have a comfortable accommodation to do my job. Moreover, I am a light sleeper. If someone tried to climb while I'm sleeping, I'd notice."

"And then what would you do? Certainly you wouldn't scare them. And who might want to climb up here anyway? There's not even anything worth stealing."

"Someone who wants to make a prank, for example. It happened once. A young man, a little drunk, went as far as the gears to move the hands. He thought it was fun. The next day everyone would be confused, if the clock hands were not at the right place. But I watch so they are always where they should be. I could have let him fall in the gears, when he slipped, but I didn't want any trouble. So I even had to save him: if I hadn't grabbed him, he would have died inside the clock."

"Did someone really try to tamper with the clock? And you saved him?" she said, visibly impressed.

"Yes, but there's more. There are also people who think it's a good idea to jump down from the tower. Now, you won't hear me saying that it is never a good idea to jump off a tower. But when it is this tower, it's another matter. That is, I don't like that people jump down from my tower."

"Why so? And it's not your tower. It's the tower of the city. So it is as much yours as of anyone who wants to jump off it."

I was certainly right, so I was surprised that she wanted to be too, and even more so that she succeeded.

"But when someone fails the jump and gets caught in the hands, who has to get them back up? I'll tell you who. Me. And when those who jump well enough get to the street, who gets to clean? Me. It's not pleasant at all. You wouldn't think, but I am easily frightened. And I don't like to see what's inside things, because usually the outside is better than the inside. And then I fear that some mechanisms are quite unreasonable. It is as if, if you find out how they work, they stop working. Apart from the clock, that's another story. If you get what I mean."

"No, not at all."

"Cars, for example. You know? That beautiful mischief they unleashed on the streets? Have you ever seen one inside?"

"No, never. Why, you did?"

"Yes. And I assure you it cannot work. It is full of things, like pipes and boxes. You cannot fill an object with pipes and boxes and expect it to walk alone."

"But..."

"Yeah, a nice mystery, uh?"

"No. If you were smart and educated enough you would know how those pipes work. Except that you're not, so you don't understand. And anyway, when you see the inside of a person, it means that they definitely stopped working, so it can't make you afraid."

"You don't understand. The point is that also other people, inside, are like that, and they work. But no one knows how. If all of a sudden everyone stopped working, what harm would there be? It happens all the time. Isolated cases, of course. But what prevents them all to stop working all at once one day?"

"You're twisted, and I don't like this discussion. Stop it, please."

I guess I had done something wrong again.

"And anyway, now it's late. I must go before they notice I'm not in my room," she said without taking a single step towards the trapdoor. I kept sitting on the stone step, watching her. I thought she wanted a sign of encouragement, so I nodded, trying to look depressed. And I even was, a little. You know, because of the belt that the biscuits were not leaving.

"And you? You don't say anything. I am leaving and nothing? You sure are a weird guy!"

Here we go again. What did I forget this time? Maybe I didn't look depressed enough? I pouted my lower lip, to be more eloquent, hoping it would be fine.

But it wasn't, and she got very angry. She stood right in front of me, crushing me with her huge shadow, her angrily clenched fists on her hips.

"You are impossible. I mean, first of all a gentleman would offer to walk home a lonely girl in the middle of the night. But you didn't even think about it in the remotest recess of your little brain, right? And then, you no longer asked me why I want to leave home. It's clear that you already forgot, and you're not interested. There is no other explanation. And above all..."

All in one breath, poor child, without pause or hesitation. She must have had a very straightforward anger in her head, blessed her.

"And above all you didn't even ask me if I'll come again."

I didn't understand why I should have asked. Then I looked at her clenched fists, her belt. The biscuits.

"Will you come again?"

"I don't know. Maybe. Maybe not. And certainly not for you."

I didn't see why she should be back for me.

"And if you really want to know, your haircut is ridiculous!" she shouted, rushing to the trapdoor. Then I stood up, chased her. I managed to grab her shoulders while her little feet, as white as cream, were diving down, finding support on the first steps, as dark as coffee, into the trapdoor. Mine wasn't a strong grip, but as soon as my hand touched her shoulders she froze, as if petrified.

Coal-black eyes stared at me with an expression that I couldn't decipher and didn't know. No one had ever looked at me like that, and I did not know what that meant. Perhaps she would get angry again, but what harm could come from trying? At worst, it would be the same as if I hadn't tried.

"Martina" I said to show that her name was a trophy. "Martina. You're wrong. I don't have a ridiculous hairdo. Also, could I have one more biscuit before you go?"

I soon realized my mistake, a big one. She frowned horribly, and squinted, forcing mountains of coal behind two imperceptible slits, what a waste! But, her hands trembling with anger, she undid the bag containing the precious booty, and threw it on the ground.

Why was she angry? I just didn't understand. If she wanted to keep the biscuits, she could have said so. Might that be one of those incomprehensible rules only known to the good society?

As I bent down to pick up the spice-scented bag, she and her childish anger had already dissolved in the dark.

"I have her bag" I thought. "She'll be back."

And I smiled.

### 3 - A ridiculous hairdo

Night came back, but still no trace of Martina. Perhaps she was still mad at me for something wrong I had said. Or maybe it was too risky to run away again. No, not run away. Making rehearsals, so to speak.

Perhaps, however, she had a list of possible shelters to check (because of pirates, or rather thieves and kidnappers) and she would not come back until she had examined them all. Perhaps, the night after her visit to the tower, she had gone somewhere in the woods, or in the basement of the church. Or she had climbed in a coach and run away somewhere. No, this really wasn't possible. First she had to return to take back her little bag of biscuits. Hadn't she left it here on purpose so she could come back? I believed so.

Every now and then my eyes went to the trapdoor, from which I maybe expected to see her black hair come out, but she didn't come. I tried to think of some verse, to the moon, remember?, but nothing came to my mind. So at some point I went to sleep, certain that I would wake up if I heard footsteps on the stairs.

A few days passed by, during which my looks to the trapdoor diminished.

Thus, when one night I suddenly saw her emerge from the dark square, I was almost surprised.

"Ah, still here! Don't you ever sleep?" she asked me as if the anger of the time before hadn't passed yet.

"You're back," I stated. "It's because of the bag of biscuits, I suppose," I suggested, disappointed, sure that she would take it away. But maybe she had something good to eat this time as well. My hope wasn't disappointed at all.

"Oh, yes. The bag. I'll have to remember to take it," she said as, like the first time, she came and sit next to me on the step. Again, she seemed to have forgotten her ankles. But she offered me, along with their vision, a small piece of apple pie, taken from a bigger container than the one she had left in my custody the previous time. That pie had a particular flavour.

"It's different from other pies. It tastes better."

"It must be because of the cinnamon. I put a bit of it. I made it myself, do you like it?"

I nodded as I happily bit the pie that she had offered me on a checked napkin. So she had prepared it.

"You are very good with sweets," I said just to say something. She evidently overestimated it as a great compliment.

"Thank you. In fact I like to make them. Just them, though. I don't like to cook, I just like to make sweets. You live alone?"

"Yes, alone."

"And you cook?"

"No. Let's say I get by."

"Don't you have a housekeeper? No one?"

"No. I live alone. I have nobody."

"We are a lot at home. I have four sisters and a brother and also my aunt lives with us. My older sister got married, though, so now we've been left without her. Soon my brother is going to get married too. And the others have boyfriends. I am the youngest."

"And are you engaged too?"

"No, I mean, yes, but against my will."

"Isn't your boyfriend sorry that you want to escape?"

"It's obvious that he doesn't know that I want to run away. What do you think?" she asked impatiently, without waiting for the answer. "Indeed, it is his fault if I want to."

Silence. A little hand digs into the scented bag, unwraps another slice of cake and hands it to me, hopefully. I am beginning to understand how it works.

"Thank you. Why do you say it is his fault?"

Martina cheers up, she wants to talk, she cannot wait.

"It's an absolute injustice. Being a woman sucks. You can never decide anything. It is always males who command. My parents made me engage, without even asking for my opinion, with a stupid and arrogant dandy I don't even like a little bit."

"Can't you complain?"

"Of course I complained! But they don't listen to me. He is the son of the banker, you know? He's rich. They say it's a good marriage. And he also owns the farm next to ours. But I don't want to marry him."

Her face was the oval shape of a child's, her little hands churned spicy sweets, her coal-black eyes were big and beautiful, dreamy eyes, playful eyes. Even the biscuits were a game for her. Even the pie. This was clear. The escape, a game.

"Aren't you too young to marry?"

"A lot of girls marry at my age. What do you think, that I am a baby?" she asked, clearly offended.

I didn't know what to answer, also because I didn't know whether she had more pie in her bag, which she could close at the first sign of a wrong reaction.

"A friend of mine married at my age, and she already has a child," she said firmly.

"But you don't want to marry and have a baby."

"What does it matter? Don't upset me! I don't want to marry, but I could if I wanted to. I could have a family, a husband, a house."

I smiled, imagining her in a tiny house, a dollhouse, with a grownup husband too big for the house, whose head burst out of the roof and whose arms and legs come out from the windows. And she, tiny, in a toy kitchen, bakes her delicious pies, but they are crumbs for him.

"Don't get mad. I am honest with you. You will be a beautiful woman. Really. But you must still grow a bit." I blushed, because my eyes had stopped on her cleavage, confirming the evidence that her forms were still completely immature. Could a man find her desirable? To me, she only inspired so much tenderness.

Now, since it's night and we have time, let's imagine the scene. I am the chosen, I enter the church in very elegant clothes, she is wearing a wedding dress, a toy as well, of course, and we walk to the altar. "Do you, etcetera, etcetera?"

Of course I do, otherwise why would I be here? I do not like to waste the time of people who work. I'm embarrassed, everybody looks at me. I can't wait to leave. After the banquet, a banquet made of sweets, only sweets, we go home. I bring her to the clock tower and we go to bed. What should I do now? She is wearing her nightgown, the one that even now badly comes out of her clothes, while I am imagining her as a bride and she is sitting next to me, ready to flee. I hug her, plant a light kiss on her lips, which is too much already. In fact, she blushes. And, holding her in my arms like a doll, I tell her a story to make her sleep. This should be her wedding. Not with me, I mean. But I believe that the son of the banker would not appreciate her premature beauty, he would not be content with her sleep. He would assault her like a bad wolf, the one of the fairy tales. This one, however, does not have a happy ending.

"I'm glad you want to escape," I said finally, after having imagined her as a bride. Maybe first I should have also imagined her as a runaway, but I didn't have that disposition. I knew she couldn't be a bride, at least not to someone who thought about her differently than I did, and apparently there were no alternatives.

"So you wouldn't tell anyone if I were to stay here for a while?"

"Would you cook some sweets for me, every now and then?"

"Of course I will. All the sweets you want. But you'll have to keep the secret."

"And what if anyone came to know? They would fire me. Where would I go? And then, what would you do?"

"Nobody will find out. If someone unfortunately finds me, I will say that I was hiding and that you didn't know anything. Then I'll decide what to do. For now, I haven't thought about that yet."

"All right. You can come here for a while. But if you are found, I didn't know anything, uh? Do you promise?"

"I promise. And while I'm here, I will not be a burden, believe me. I will take care of you. Looks like you need it" she said with a sidelong glance up and down at my figure, which could be distinguished.

She was returning my previous glance, it was clear. She had discovered, through my objectives eyes, that she was still a child, and I that I was unkempt, as unkempt as could be.

"First, though," she added "we must take care of your hair. The rest can wait, even if we will have to think about it, sooner or later. But that is really urgent."

"Hey, hey, what rest? What do you mean? And what do you want to do to my hair?"

"Don't get upset. Really. The fact is that you're pretty unwatchable. But, above all, what attracts more attention is your hair. You look like a savage, it's unruly, your curls overgrown, they look more like a basket than real hair. We need to fix them."

Maybe she was good at cooking sweets, but she said irritating things. What was wrong with my hair? They were thick and lush, honey-coloured. They could do a lot of things. For example? They caught the light and turned it into specks of gold, and if you tried to catch them they turned out to be mirages or dissolved into nothingness. Cool, huh?

"No, not at all. Stop acting like a poet, you know you're not good at it. We must thin them out and give them shape. Something a little more modern. No male has long hair anymore, today."

"But I like it!" I protested.

"Okay, okay, I just said we will thin them out. I never tried to cut hair, but it shouldn't be difficult. But we will need some light."

I sighed, resigned to undergo her whim, her scissors and her inexperience.

"And will you bring me another pie?"

"Do you only think about eating?"

"No, I compose verses too, as you know. For the moon, though. Just for it."

"I thought we had established that you are not that good as a poet. It's not like the moon makes such a good impression in your poems. Maybe you should switch subject," she suggested, blinking more than necessary. Was she trying to suggest me anything?

"I might try to compose something in honour of your sweets. The ginger biscuits resemble the moon. It might be a good idea. I could write poems to the moon and everything like that. Like biscuits."

"That is not what I meant..."

"..."

"... anyway, this is what you have to do: get a pair of sharp scissors, some light and maybe a mirror. So when I come back we can proceed. Then, after I move here, we'll do the rest."

What rest?

"All right. When are you coming back?"

"This time you asked. Very well, you're getting better. "

"If I don't know when you're coming back, I don't know when to bring the things you need" I explained.

"Ah. Then I take back everything. You're not improving at all. In fact, I should go away and leave you here alone with that impossible hairstyle."

Here we go again. And from what I heard through the grapevine, it seemed that all women were like that. You never knew what to say to make them happy. This miniature one, then, really seemed impossible to please. Were whims inversely proportional to age? Then I could hope she would improve. Meanwhile I could only undergo her experiment. When I objected that perhaps she wouldn't be able to make a decent cut, since she had never tried, she said: "It can't be worse than that, anyway..." Worse than what? Never mind, never mind. She should go, so not to be discovered. Otherwise her people would become suspicious and keep an eye out for her, preventing her from implementing her sensational escape, on which need we all agree now.

I didn't think she would really run away from home, that's why I went along. What the hell would she do, shut in the clock tower all day?

In the most unlikely scenario, if she really ran away, I knew that she would get tired quickly, and spontaneously return home, to her family, her comfort and her rich would-be husband. Someone with a trendy hairstyle.

"What sweet will you bring me?"

"I'll surprise you."

And she vanished, pouting again. When she disappeared through the trapdoor, it occurred to me what she had said the time before, about the fact that a gentleman should walk home a girl at night. Did she mean me, saying gentleman? And herself saying girl?

Trying to substitute the words, it seemed to work. Not great, but good enough.

Next time, I promised myself, I am going to ask her if she wants me to walk her home. I'll impress her. She will say I am a real gentleman. Then I went to the mirror, and found that my hair weren't ridiculous at all.

### 5 - Scissors, an escape plan, blueberries

She struggled greatly to spill the contents of the bag over the trapdoor from which she had sprung.

"You could even give me a hand, don't you think?"

We always start with the wrong foot.

I approached to help her carry the heavy bag toward the step.

"As I suspected. These scissors are absolutely inadequate: they don't cut well."

"But they are the only ones I have," I sighed.

"Don't worry. I was expecting that a little, so I brought a pair myself. They are my sister's, so don't break them. If I as much as scratch them she would notice. When I go back tonight I'll have to put them back where I got them, but when I leave I will bring them away with me. So we won't have to buy a pair. Actually, I brought some paper too, so you can help me make a list of things to remember. If you can't write don't worry, I will. An escape must be planned in every detail, leaving nothing to chance."

A pair of gleaming scissors were extracted from the bag, along with some paper that looked like letter paper and some strange things used to write. Some travelling uncle of hers had sent them from England. They were the latest discovery, even though it seemed to me that they were made for soiling, rather than writing: ink stains everywhere.

Before proceeding with the solemn haircut, it was absolutely necessary that she explained me her plan, to be really sure that it might work. It was like that: on the yellowy paper there was the drawing of a house, a bit tilted if we want to be picky: the builder hadn't done a good job. Suspended in midair, perhaps in the act of levitating or flying, there was also a line with some protrusions.

"Those are the arms and legs," she protested, "and it is clear that this is me! It just means that I will get out of the window, as I have done so far" she explained.

The flying line with arms and legs was carrying a sort of suitcase and had an arrow pointing the way, or at least that was the intention.

"The suitcase is needed. Clothing, things like that."

Since I did not have any women clothes, I was happy she had thought about that detail.

In the following picture there was a tower. And it didn't look like mine. For a moment I feared that she had changed her mind, but she insisted that it really was my tower.

"But there's no clock!" I complained.

"Do not be picky. It's the tower from behind. Behind there is no clock. Happy now?"

"If you say so..."

Here, a line with some protrusions (still her) was hovering in the air. The following pictures were more confusing, though: in one, the line with limbs was holding a record and was probably in a kitchen, which by the way didn't resemble mine at all. In the last one there was water.

"It means, blockhead that you are, that I'll stay here for a while, and cook some pies for you. Then, when they resign and stop looking for me, I'll go toward the sea."

I nodded. The drawings were pretty bad, but the plan wasn't, explained like that. Especially the part in the kitchen.

"What else did you bring me?" I could not stand it anymore. I smelled the sweet scent coming from the bag, but she showed no signs of wanting to talk about it and, even worse, extract it.

"If you don't tell me what you think about the plan, I won't let you taste today's sweet," she said haughtily, crossing her arms and raising her chin. Not only that, she turned her back to me disdainfully.

"The plan is fine. If you leave out the part where you levitate in the air."

"Don't joke!"

"I'm not joking. But tell me the truth. What will you do when you're at sea? You will become a pirate yourself maybe?"

"I don't know. I don't believe that women can do that. I want to go to the sea because I have an uncle there. The one who sent me the nibs and ink. He's old now. But he travelled a lot and eventually decided to settle in one place and find a home. He writes home every month. But only to me. He never writes to my sisters and my mother. He tells me about his travels, the adventures he lived and the wonderful things he has seen. He invited me to visit him one day. And that's exactly what I'm going to do. Now he has settled and he's responsible for the maintenance of a lighthouse. From the tower to the lighthouse. It sounds like a promotion. I could work with him. Not bad uh?"

I don't know. What maintenance is needed, for a lighthouse? For sure it is not like dealing with a clock and its gears. It is far less sophisticated. Stuff for sailors, mind you, soaked in the smell of seaweed and saltiness. Here it must be much nicer.

"But here I would become the wife of a terrible tyrant. It's disgusting. Really. Better the lighthouse."

"Meanwhile, though," she said, her smile widening, "try these!"

Circular cakes, six or seven inches in diameter, excessively leavened, with a mushroom-like bulge on top, covered with blueberries and chocolate.

The blueberries disappointed me a bit; for chocolate, however, I still have some enthusiasm.

"It's impossible that you don't like blueberries!"

"I do, I do, but..."

"But?"

"Have you ever looked into a blueberry?"

"Again? Stop it, for good! What's wrong inside the blueberries?"

"Nothing. Only that as a child I thought they were all so dark as they are outside. They taste so blue, so purple, that there should be a lot inside. Instead I found out that inside they have no colour. So you can't understand where all that blue and purple flavour comes from. That's it, that's what I had to do with the blueberries, there is nothing else. But I eat them, and I will eat your cakes too."

"What a fool you are! Colours have no taste. This is a special recipe. My uncle sent it. He says it's used in England, where he was. They are called muffins. Try them. Then we'll proceed with the haircut."

The scissors glittered smartly, comforting me a little. They looked like scissors that knew how to do their job. I was hoping they wouldn't disappoint my expectations like blueberries had done. Those in Martina cakes didn't taste so much of blue, maybe because they were baked along with dough and chocolate. And not even a trace of purple. Does it evaporate? "Come here," says the chocolate. Blueberries sometimes obey, sometimes don't. But when they do their taste is fabulous. I surrendered to the muffins completely. I also surrendered to the scissors and her inexperienced hands who didn't know how to untangle my hair, tugging them angrily.

She complained about the light, a couple of candles stuck in a six-armed candlestick. And about the mirror, too small. Luckily she had her own scissors, otherwise...

By the time I ate the fourth muffin, she was almost done. I savoured the muffins slowly, mind you. From a certain perspective – seen from below – they too looked like small round moons. I had always thought that there was nothing better than the moon. But Martina had made me discover the moon with blueberries and chocolate.

It took an eternity but finally she handed me the mirror, exulting satisfied: "That's it. Finished. Now it's much better."

The mirror was indeed small, so I could not see my new hairstyle from every angle. But I was sure that if I said that she would get angry, so again I tried with the smile tactics.

"You should not smile so often. It makes you look silly. And with that broken tooth..."

I smiled more. She had said often, not wide. The width of the smile had nothing to do with that. Meanwhile, I had had the chance to determine that if the bag she had brought with so much effort on top of the tower were full of muffins, there would be about three hundred twenty-five. Approximately eighty full haircuts and one left at a fourth for fatigue.

"No, obviously it's not full of muffins. There are my things inside. Some, let's say. You don't think I can take away all my stuff in one night, do you? I need clothes, nightgowns, cake pans and perfumed essences. Some books too. And then the music box of when I was little and my stuffed teddy bear, I cannot abandon it. And I think we should take a look at your kitchen, to see what we might need."

"If you take away all those things from home, won't they notice?"

"Oh, no. Impossible. No one is going to know if I remove some clothes and things from my drawers. A little at a time, of course. From what I see, we should also add candles to the list. And maybe a larger mirror. Some soap. And I don't think we need to look in your closet to figure out that you don't have a decent suit. I am going to steal one from dad, even though he is much bigger than you, in width I mean. Shorter too, now that I think of it. Never mind, I will fix it myself. We can always find some cloth. If I can, I will bring you a new hat too. In the bag, meanwhile, I have a couple of dresses, a rolling pin, cookie cutters and a hat, but that's mine. How late it is! I have to go immediately. Take care of my things and be warned: next time you have to show me your home. I need to know where I'm going to live, don't you think? And then I will start to arrange my things, so when I decide to move here they will be all settled. And your hair is so much better now," she concluded with a satisfied look.

Before I could formulate my idea, she had already dissolved in the dark.

Not even this time I had offered to walk her home: the tufts of hair on the floor drew my attention. I tried to imagine myself without that amount of hair, to determine if the image the mirror had sent me was right or not.

I had to buy a larger mirror. Tomorrow I'll go to the junk shop down the road, I promised myself, and buy a huge mirror. What a surprise for little Martina. If the mirror was big enough, and she small enough, perhaps she could be reflected entirely.

I thought it was very strange; when I am next to the moon, I always know how we look. I always look the same next to the moon, I don't even need to make sure of that.

But I wondered how I could look next to Martina. It wasn't like with the moon, not really.

There were no more muffins, anyway. Too bad.

### 7 - The scarecrow

Needless to bore you with the same scenario every time, I'd become monotonous; night, tower, Martina with a bag of meringues. It's incredible to think that they are just sugar and little more. It must be that little to make the difference. Like clouds.

"You can't eat clouds, silly! Although, knowing you, I wouldn't be surprised if you tried."

"One night I dreamed of it."

"And how were they?"

"Very good. I was on top of the tower, high above. Clouds surrounded it. There was one right at arm length. It really was as white as a meringue. So I pushed one hand inside, just to see what would happen, and I found out that clouds are so white because they are made of soft sugar. And full of ice inside. So I pulled out of the cloud long strips of sweet ice, sugar ice, caramel ice. How wonderful it would be if clouds were so close that you could eat them."

"You're so naive. You can't eat clouds, everybody knows. And then, inside there's rain, and it's clear it's not a sweet. Do you really need to have everything explained?"

"Meringues are better, then."

"In this bag I have other things to arrange in your house. Maybe it's time for me to see it. Not that I expect something, but I hope at least you're not one of those messy guys who leave everything scattered around. Like my brother, for instance. Except for that, don't worry. I expect something bad and sagging enough. It is unlikely that you can show me something worse than my expectations."

And was she willing to come and live in a place like that? With me, what's more. The son of the banker almost started to intrigue me.

I stood up to lead the way, but she did not move. She stood, frozen, looking at the bag on the floor beside her. What was wrong this time? Oh, right.

"I'll take it, don't worry. Even if it doesn't seem too heavy."

"It's not a matter of weight. A gentleman..."

"Okay, okay, I'll take the bag, regardless of the weight. Follow me and watch your steps". I lit the last stub of the candle I had with me and handed it to her: I already knew every step by heart, I didn't need it. It's the darkest place ever, remember? I could not live here if I hadn't learned to do without light, adapting my movements to the dark and the breath. The breath of the tower: the clock. Its regular breath and its hourly cough. But Martina still needed light.

We went down two flights of stairs and I opened the creaking door of my tower-house. Martina held her breath, so did I. The clock didn't. I tried to understand how much it met her meagre expectations. So did her. The clock, I don't know. I guess it was minding its own business, as usual. The only time the clock talked to me I had the feeling that it would never do that again. And so it was, because I left.

But now we are still in the tower, there's Martina with her disappointment at hand saying "I thought worse."

It's not quite so bleak, even though it feels more like a loft than a real house. I walked her through the entrance to the room with the fireplace and the table, then to the living room. Even the room above the kitchen ("more stairs!") was slightly above her expectations. The rest were empty rooms.

"But where will I stay?"

I had not really thought about that. I started scratching my new haircut, hoping that an idea would come out of it.

Nothing.

"There is a couch in the living room. I guess I'll have to find another bed."

"No you don't. I run away from home and you happen to go and buy a new bed. Are you having a guest, Mr. Warden of the Tower?" she mocked. "Cleverness is not one of your best qualities, uh? We mustn't draw attention, in any way."

"Then how do we do?"

"For example, you could offer to sleep on the couch and leave the comforts to your guest."

"But I'm too tall for the couch. My feet stick out, I cannot sleep there. Well, actually it depends on how long you're going to stay."

"Not long, I would say," she sighed mournfully, looking around. "But I'm not leaving before tidying this place up a bit. That's what's missing. A woman's touch. Clearly there is no woman in this house. Did you ever think about getting married?" Shrugging is the only way to fully express my feelings about this. "What do I know, a farmer would be fine. Or a maid, even better. She would know without a doubt how to manage the house, and she would be within your reach."

"I don't have a good effect on women. By now I am resigned."

"Haven't you ever had a girlfriend?"

"Yes, once I had one. Even if I don't know whether to really call her a girlfriend. It was when I was a kid and worked at the circus. It was the owner of the circus who took me off the road. You know, they needed a clown, but in the end it turned out that I wasn't really inclined. However I stayed with them for a while. I took care of various chores and sometimes they let me do my act, even though it never met the slightest success. When I left, she said I should be about eighteen, but nobody will ever know because I don't know when I was born. With foundlings it's like that, a bit at random. She, I mean the trapeze artist. I really loved when she hovered in the air. She looked like a real angel, I dreamed of her every night. I dreamed that while hovering in the air she changed, and when she came down from up there she was my mom. Of course I don't know how my mother looked like, but I recognized her instantly, I didn't need anything else. Dreams are like that. But she, the trapeze artist, was the owner of the circus. She never bothered to even look at me. Only when she rose up to the sky for her number, she looked at me. I don't know why. Then, once in the air, she forgot about me. And I dreamed her like this: from the moment she took her eyes off me to look up."

"Definitely she can't be defined as a girlfriend."

"But I didn't mean her. It was the wife of the tamer. She was a very charming girl. She had a certain determination, at least, although she was very young, maybe younger than me. She and her husband didn't go along well. The previous one had been mauled by a lion the day after the wedding, so she married his replacement, but he didn't trust to enter the cage with her and they were always arguing. One night she slipped into my tent and stayed until morning. It was nice, she smelled good. But I don't know what it meant, either for her or for me."

"And then?" she asked grimly.

"And then one day she no longer came to me. It seems she decided to start sneaking in the tent of the tightrope walker. Like that, you know? Out of the blue."

"And you didn't care?"

"No, I didn't care. I only cared about the woman who hovered in the air."

"Is that all?"

"Yes, that's all. Then, when I arrived in this town, I tried to leave the tower, but I didn't manage very well."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that at the beginning, and you probably were not even born, I went out every Sunday. I went to church, like everyone else. I put on my best suit, an elegant hat and went to church. Not that I cared about the sermon of the priest and all these things, but I was among other people. Back then I thought it would do me good, but I was wrong."

"In fact I've never seen you at the church, and I go there every Sunday."

Martina, at mass, did an impression. With a turquoise dress and flowers in her hair. The banker's son looked her down in an obscene manner, that made her shudder. As for me, she would find me ridiculous.

How do I know? Because if you take me away from the top of the tower in the middle of the night I am ridiculous. Haven't you realized it yet? Martina had. Martina would look down at me and laugh. She would elbow her friend to show her the attraction of the day. I mean me, helpless, without the night and the tower to delete the halo of ridicule surrounding me. Helpless in my velvet jacket with elbow patches, my curls raising a worn hat. No charm, no beauty, no mercy. Go back where you came from.

"I'm sorry. They were bad. I wouldn't have behaved that way."

Oh yes, you would.

"That's all. I'm used to it. You can be fine even alone. The fact is that everywhere I go I always seem out of place. Stranger, with a different look in the eyes, inappropriate clothes, the wrong thing always said at the wrong time. It's fate, that's what I am. And it's remarked by the fact that I couldn't even be a clown. People find me ridiculous, not funny."

"There must be some girl good for you. Even though I suspect that your problem is just a little shyness. Did you talk to the trapeze artist? Did she know that you dreamed of her? I find it very romantic."

"No, of course she didn't know. At first even I hoped there was a girl for me. Now I no longer believe it. Maybe, if I could never get off the tower. But it is so long that I don't think about it. When I worked in the circus I won a ring at cards. Apparently it was precious or something like that. I promised myself – now I see how significant where my unfounded weaknesses – that I would give it to my great love. The trapeze artist, I mean. But I never found the courage. I think I exchanged a few words with her during those years. Who knows, if I had declared my love..."

"And what happened to the ring?"

"I don't know," I admitted, almost surprised.

"You have meringue crumbs everywhere! Clean yourself, you look like a savage! And don't try to change the subject. I want to know where that ring is."

"I don't know, I told you. I have no clue."

"Come on, make an effort! I won't leave you alone until you tell me. Come on, come on, come on!"

I found that she wasn't joking. The clock struck the hour. Then half an hour. Meanwhile: come on, come on, come on, come on, etc. Come on, tell me, etc. Think about it, etc. And so on. For very, very long.

The last time I saw the ring, it was in my jacket pocket. The purple velvet jacket, the one with the funny patches on the elbows.

"And what happened?"

I don't remember. I don't have it anymore, anyway. I used it for something. What for?

Come on, come on, come on, tell me. Come on, come on, come on, come on, think about it. Come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on!

But of course! For the scarecrow! It was saved from the fire only because my straw friend needed a suit, even though it's ridiculous. What would he care? The field behind the tower was entrusted to the guardian. And each field has its respectable scarecrow. The ring might still be there if no one has robbed that man of straw. I am sure that if that happened, it would have left them, and then farewell to the ring. What a wimp, my friend scarecrow, to get ripped off like that. Blame him, not my fault.

"But why is it so important, anyway? Do you want to sell it? Do you need money for the escape?"

"I just want it. Why do you care? You don't want it anymore, right?"

"Right."

"Let's go."

When you put something in her head, there was no way to change her mind.

Wheat ears are tall. Taller than Martina, who must firmly hold my hand for me to guide her in this dark, unknown forest. I cultivated the field myself, I know the way and its only inhabitant, a man of straw. The advantage is that it never moves from there: you always know where to find it. This little certainty comforts me at times, because of its unexpected reliability. A lot of air passes through his lint body, so much that anyone would get sick. But it's nothing to it. It's always there and shows no sign of resignation, nor it wants to leave.

Has it taken care of his pockets, that Martina wants to loot? I hope it doesn't mind. The moon is beautiful from here, but less than from the tower. I don't know, it loses something in the descent.

"No," it says, "it's you who lose something, and you want to blame me."

May it be right?

I wonder how can there be poets without a tower. Perhaps there is someone who can imagine how it is to be up there. Perhaps my flaw is that I have no imagination.

"It must be so," she confirmed.

Even the smell of the wheat is a poem. I'd like to be able to write one about this night, but the smell of the wheat does not let me: it will not let me take his place. It stealthily infiltrated the folds of my clothes and Martina's hair. It slips between her little hands that are reading the wheat poem without her noticing.

Martina's hands are happy: they hold a ring that is now hers.

"Founders keepers. If it were for you it would still be forgotten in the midst of a field. You're lucky that it wasn't stolen. You must take better care of valuable things, it's not good this way."

Martina leaves my protests behind, abandoning them between the wheat ears, and I have to chase her or she will get lost and certainly blame me. So I leave the protests where they are, I don't have time to collect them.

The edge of the field slows down her eagerness for stairs; she will not go back up there again. The scarecrow, on the other hand, makes me sleepy.

The last thing I remember is pedantic recommendations. The subject: instructions to store her things in order, after taking them out of the bag she left in front of the fireplace.

I climb the stairs alone, tired. Before I go to bed I can finish the meringues: those left are still on the kitchen table. Maybe I'll dream again about clouds full of sugary ice. You never know.

While falling asleep I think: what will Martina dream?

But there's a thought that makes me uneasy.

That's what it is: I forgot again to walk her home.

### 9 - The Game

After a few trips – enough to move sufficient clothing, equipment and furnishings – Martina came to the tower with the firm intention of staying there.

So I had to face the obvious: this was not a joke. But a game, yes, it was. That I had understood at once. The fact is that Martina takes games very seriously.

Despite everything, I had something to argue. First, she hadn't even brought a cake. Nothing.

"Tomorrow morning I'm going to cook the most delicious cake you've ever eaten!" she promised.

All right, I believe her.

Also, my house was full of her belongings. If they come here – and they will – they will discover the deception immediately. I'll go to prison: I certainly kidnapped Martina. Why else should she come to live with me otherwise?

She looked at me sceptically, laying on the cushions scattered on the carpet as if she was exhausted.

"You really think I'm so naive? You haven't yet figured what stuff I'm made of? I thought of everything, don't worry. Now I'm tired, I don't want details. However, know that someone saw me last night on the last coach leaving for the city. And once there they'll lose track of me. Of course it wasn't me! I paid a little girl, a little ragamuffin to say the truth, to impersonate me. I had to clean her up and put my clothes on her. I paid her well, of course. Tomorrow morning, when they start looking for me, they'll discover that I left and won't find me anymore. Who would think that I am still here, right under their noses?"

She thought it was extremely smart and fun. I found it very dangerous. For me, that is. She would just get a couple of spanks and be sent to bed without dinner.

Without dinner.

"Are you sure you don't have anything? Not even a tiny weenie sweet?"

"Ugh, you are a big nuisance! You only think about eating! But since I owe you something for your hospitality, let's see how we can fix that."

She returned from the kitchen with a bowl in which she had broken an egg that she was beating with a whip, brought by her, of course. She must have added something, because it smelled sweet.

"Sugar and cocoa."

That's better.

"Besides," she added as she beat the egg cream "even if they came here looking for me, they wouldn't find me. You said it yourself: no one can get up here without you noticing. And there are several places where I could hide. It just takes putting my clothes in a place that is not visible. At the bottom of the cabinet, for example. Nobody would go rummaging inside it. Be reasonable: why should I be here? Moreover, everyone saw me run off to the city. Don't worry, everything will be fine. But I need a safe place to keep money for a while, until I leave. Do you have a secret trapdoor or something?"

I hoped that, in addition to the money, she had a reliable enough map to reach the sea. Not like her escape plan. What good would make her a scribbled drawing with a flying line going south?

"Of course I have a map. I'm not as naive as you. My uncle sent me, there are all the directions. Remember I told you I was invited to reach him?"

"Where did you get all that money?"

I had never seen so much, I swear. She took it out in handfuls, so many banknotes that they slipped from her small hands.

She smiled a satisfied smile. "I've always known where my sisters hid money, and my brother and my mother too. But I always pretended I didn't. It will be a nice surprise! Little Martina wasn't the worse fool of the family, eh? What's that face? My father is rich. What I took is nothing. And if he had had to pay my dowry he would have spent much more. This I why I took the jewellery too. When I am away I'll resell it. There's enough to live comfortably for the rest of my days. You didn't think that I would leave with nothing, did you? What would I do then? Ah, so naive! Of course, I'll give you something for your trouble."

No, I do not want money from Martina. Only her sweets. Those make me happy. Her money would ruin everything. Moreover, I have everything I need here. What would I do with it?

"That's it. Try it. It is very good." A little hand, on which a blue ring stands out, gives me the bowl.

"It's my ring..."

"No. Now it's mine. Remember? How do we do to sleep?" she asked.

I shrugged. The dessert was good, why think about anything else right now? But she insisted. And I knew that when she insisted I had to humour her, or she would go on forever.

So I went to lie down on the couch, to show that my legs dangled out from the knee down. It was impossible for me to sleep there. She, however, fit perfectly. Indeed, her little feet, so white even without moonlight, didn't even reach the arm. She shook them to show how much more I would have been appreciated if I had been shorter and could sleep on the couch, and I saw her ankles again. Nice as the first time she had climbed to the roof of the tower. I wanted to touch them, but of course I didn't.

"Why are you turning? Look at me! See, this is the right height. I can sleep anywhere. But of course I have no intention of spending the night on this old couch." She got up and walked around me, looking me up and down. "You do what you want. I sleep in the bed. "

And she went upstairs, leaving me with my doubts. Then she came back, leaning on the stairs: "Aren't you sleepy? Won't you come to sleep?" she addressed me.

Of course I was sleepy. Did she mean...

After all, what harm was there? She understood it too, I knew that it was a game. So be it.

When I got to the room she was already in bed, sitting with a pillow leaning against the backrest. She was staring at me and smiling strangely. She was wearing only her nightgown, the one she always had under her clothes. She only had to pull out the dress, I imagined, and she was ready to sleep. She was in the left side of the bed, near the window. But that was on the top floor of a tower. She could not put her dress on and get away from there.

I undressed and slipped under the blankets beside her. She sighed: "So I was right. Where you come from there are no rules. You think it's right to get undressed like that in front of a girl? And you sleep like that? With just that thing on? My father and my brother sleep with nightdresses..."

"I sleep like this. And I kept it on only because you're here. However, there's the couch downstairs..."

Sorry, she slipped under the covers. It was the first time she didn't insist on being right. It seemed strange to me.

"Good night."

I blew out the candle. I felt her move for a while. She could not sleep.

Then I got up and went down to the kitchen. I rummaged in her sack, not yet unpacked, finding what I was looking for. I had no doubt it was what was needed. I went back to bed and lay down beside her. Between us I laid her stuffed bear. She hugged it gratefully, instantly falling asleep. She must be tired, poor child.

The next day, at half day, I was in the kitchen eating lunch. I wanted to prepare something for her too, but I didn't know when she would wake up. When I saw her coming down the stairs – with her teddy bear dangling from one hand, the other rubbing her eyes – I got up to cook some food for her. A simple soup and some vegetables. Maybe she was accustomed to something else, I don't know. In fact she asked for milk and was annoyed to learn that she would not have either cake or biscuits.

"You always have breakfast like this?"

"But this is lunch."

"I slept so much? What time do you get up? "

"It depends. Sometimes at dawn. There are many things to do here. I have a small garden to care for. And a cow, for milk. There are chickens and I even have a horse. These are all things that must be maintained, it takes time and effort. This morning I picked the fruit from the trees, cut some firewood to store for winter, and attended to some errands. In winter there is less to do, on the other hand. You can stay in the tower almost all day. However, in town they are all in turmoil. It seems that they are seeking a fugitive..."

Her eyes widened. "And how do you know? Where have you been?"

"Don't worry, I only made a few purchases. I went at the baker's, bought a bun for lunch. Sometimes I go there, it's not unusual. Then I bought another from the wife of the farmer of the adjoining field. Two portions, today. It seems they believed the story of the escape to the city. They went there and they're looking for you. But eat now. You slept long and you must be hungry. If you don't like the soup take my bun. I told you that I can't cook very well."

"When can I see the animals? I absolutely love horses. At home I had one of my own. I called him Martin."

"Nobody ever comes here. I think it's fairly safe if you go out the back door, but don't go outside the boundaries of the field or you will be discovered. Today I'll show you the animals and vegetables if you want."

"It would be great! And tomorrow, I'll start thinking about the house."

"Which house?"

"This one, silly! Look at its state! It's dusty, dilapidated. We must clean it and fix it. Not to mention your clothes... Ah, you have to try on the ones I brought. Look! I just have to adjust their length a bit. I've stolen them from my brother. Isn't this hat a dream?"

It was the most elegant top hat I had ever seen.

The game was beginning to take shape. Just that the house was not the dollhouse, and I was the right size to play with her. Hadn't I given her the ring so the game could begin?

Martina began taking care of the house with unsurpassed dedication. She cleaned, cooked, mended my worn clothes, and in return she only wanted me to tell her some stories in the evening.

All summer, on top of the tower, under the stars. I sat on the step and she lied, her head resting on my legs. More than once I put her to bed, already asleep. She seemed tiny in my giant arms.

And when summer was over, among the leaves and the yellow, red, bare fields, autumn brought us premonitions of snow. It doesn't always arrive, around here. Winters are mild, we never suffer too much cold. But there are some evenings, by the fireplace, when it almost seems to be a Northern winter.

Autumn had slipped away as fast as running water, gushing full of leaves from a fountain. And then winter had driven into the sleeping ground with a certain arrogance, as it rarely happens. So I wasn't wrong: a snowy winter. Days full of fog and mist, fast rain, fireplace lit with darkness all around.

In the evenings, in front of the fire, Martina squatted on the couch and asked me a story. But I don't know any.

"Make an effort! You'd know at least one. And if you don't, make it up. Assuming you have a modicum of imagination, which I doubt..."

"Once upon a time..."

"Not a fairy tale, fool! A story. A beautiful story. I know, a legend or something like that."

"Why, a legend cannot start with once upon a time?"

"No it cannot. Otherwise, it automatically becomes a fairy tale. Nobody ever told you?"

"Okay, whatever. So..."

I wasn't bad. I could make up a different story every night. Something I improvised, but something I had learned at the circus. Stories of wanderers, acrobats, foundlings. Only when I tried to tell the story of a trapeze artist hovering in the air like an angel she did not want me to.

"I don't like this story."

"But you haven't heard it..."

"It's about a trapeze artist, right?"

"Yes."

"Then I don't want to hear it."

"All right. Then I will tell you of the time the elephant fled. In fact, it disappeared. One morning, the trainer gets up, goes to feed his animals and an elephant is missing. He counts them twice, for safety. He really misses one!"

"Better already. As long as the trapeze artist doesn't come in later. I don't want to hear about her."

"No, no trapeze artist. Just elephants and tamers. And the inhabitants of the country, of course."

"Alright then."

Then, at some point, she fell asleep. So I only had to make half effort. I never knew how any of the stories I told her ended.

Sometimes I was afraid I was boring, but she said no, when I asked.

"I've never been better."

It did not seem very believable to me. I could believe it in summer. But a whole winter with me, the scarecrow, the few animals to take care of and stories that always ended halfway before she fell asleep didn't seem so exciting. Who knows what she used to do when she was at her house.

"I was bored. The only thing that didn't bore me was playing the piano. Too bad you don't have one."

Then even the winter is over. Our winter full of snow, which we watched falling from the top of the tower.

"Here it arrives before than everywhere else!"

Martina, proud of our tower height. It reached me even before her. That's why she forced me to sit and climbed on a step to be taller.

Something had happened to her height too: I was under the impression that she had grown a bit. And then there was a certain dress that was now so tight she couldn't put it on anymore.

"Will you have to eat less sweets?"

"No, silly! I'm getting older. This is why some clothes don't fit anymore."

"You always look the same to me."

"It's because you see me every day. If you didn't see me for a while you'd see the difference."

When I asked her where exactly the dress was tight, she blushed and ordered me not to ask such questions.

Height aside, however, she seemed just the same to me. Until spring. Until a given day when I was working in the field and, wiping my sweat, I looked up from the ground, to the thin wheat. They cast shadow on my face, and out of the shadow the yellow sun shone on Martina, who advanced among the ears singing a nursery rhyme, making her way smiling. Then she seemed different. I did not recognize her immediately. Perhaps because her nearness had given me a little, small Martina, sheltered in my tower. Now I saw a distant Martina, resolved to continue her escape towards the sea.

Then I let go of the image of the almost big Martina going away. How could I stop her? Thus, the clear sun passing through things took her away, and I was free to see again the little Martina, who was like the snow. It comes suddenly then goes away. Who can feel nostalgia for it? It's just a beautiful memory, which can influence you for a little while, as you're sitting on top of a tower and writing poems for it, who always faithfully returns: the moon, that would not abandon me.

### 11 - Nocturne no. 5

So Martina adapted very quickly to her new life: she even got up with me at dawn, prepared breakfast and did the housework. She cooked very well, and not just sweets. Even if those were never missing. In particular, however, she liked to take care of the animals.

"I'll call you Martin" she said to my horse.

"But he already has a name."

"Go ahead."

"It's called Luppolo."

"What an absurd name! Do you really think that it is happy to be called that? I think it's really impossible. Martin's Better. It is more elegant. I'd be ashamed if my name were Luppolo. It is an apt name for a nag or a fat and clumsy horse. But this one is beautiful and deserves a good name. Martin."

"Luppolo."

"Martin."

Result: the horse had two names, and no one ever knew which one was his favourite. I think Luppolo, even though it did not mind Martin.

Days went by smoothly, quietly. At night, however, it was as if everything changed suddenly. We were two different people in a different place. During the day we took care of the animals, me of the field and she of the house. At night we were the guardians of the clock and this changed her spirit, somehow. After the sun went down I found her fleeting, I don't know. She had learned to look at night in a different way than in the day.

"Too bad you don't have a piano here. You know, I miss it a bit. If you had one, I could play something for you. I enjoy playing. Up here it's so dark. That must be why it came to my mind. My favourite songs are nocturnes. They are very fashionable, true. But that's not why I like them. My favourite is Nocturne No. 5 by Leybach. You know him?"

No, I don't.

"Even our neighbour loves it. She's always simpering, she thinks she's so important and that she plays better than anyone else. But when she plays Nocturne No. 5 you can feel she doesn't understand it. I don't know how to explain well. The fact is that playing Leybach's Nocturne makes you feel like standing on top of the clock tower in the dead of the night. As if it was all a joke and everything ceased to exist, but only for a while. Only until next morning. But that makes everything different."

I knew exactly what she meant; it's the effect of the tower.

In the evening she liked it very much. Sometimes she dragged me on the top of the tower to watch the sunset and see the moon appear. She took a cloth full of sweets and we talked at length about many things. When I stood up, after complaining just out of stubbornness, her eyes closing, she meekly let me lead her to the bedroom, where she had stopped reproaching me because I undressed without waiting for her to turn.

Sometimes she looked at me smiling and jeering: "Don't worry, Mr. Savage, do undress in front of a poor innocent girl! Indeed, why not take away what little is left? After all, etiquette is nothing in this No Man's Land."

Meanwhile, however, she didn't stop looking at me. So I think she didn't really mind. Then, when I slipped under the covers, she stopped protesting. Sometimes, I don't know how, in the morning I found her in my arms, curled up like a kitten. And the bear, deeply offended, was on the edge of the bed alone. "I'm leaving, uh!" it said.

I was afraid to touch her, she didn't. It was a game, remember?

"How nice is staying in bed. It's the most comfortable place ever, isn't it?" she asked one Sunday morning, when she liked to stay in bed until late.

"Yes, it's true. The bed is a comfortable place. Pity for the noise of the sheets, otherwise it would be perfect."

"What noise?"

Couldn't she hear it? The noise, I mean. The silence is perfect, it sinks into the comfort of the soft bed, sleep at your fingertips. And next to the ears the annoying rustle of the sheets begin. Have you ever noticed? Lie on the bed in the dark. Move the sheets around your ears. Don't you find that noise unbearable? Off-key, that's what it is. It's wrong. Sheets should be soundless. Once lying in bed, all noises should be banned altogether. Except for the voice of Martina, of course, and her breath, reminding me of the clock.

So, kidding, when she wanted to annoy me, she would move the sheets next to my ears to make herself unbearable, forcing me to do what I didn't want to: I had to grab her wrists and force her to let the sheets go, make her lay down as she laughed happily, holding her arms still over her hair spread on the pillow. I could immobilize her single-handedly and with no effort: I am a giant, she's just a child.

"You know it will be my birthday soon?"

"We must celebrate." Meanwhile I let her wrists go, hoping she will not approach again.

"Do you think they are still looking for me? Do you think it would be safe if I decided to leave?"

Martina made breakfast, she always put flowers on the table. When she laughed, Martina made me happy. Martina was also unbearable at times. She dragged me on the top of the tower to watch the sunset, she hit me on the head with funny little blows, with affection and a bit of anger, when I said something stupid. And when I was sitting, otherwise she couldn't reach it: me sitting and her standing were almost the same height. Martina who has the same breath of the clock. Martina, who soon will have to go. Finally, we will be alone again, the moon and me. I may start again to hope to become a poet. Since when she had arrived, I almost forgot.

"No, I think they aren't looking for you any longer. Besides, you can't stay here forever, can you? Perhaps it's better if you go, you're right. In fact, the sooner, the better."

"Are you angry? Are you sorry that I'm leaving? "

"No, I'm not angry. Why should I? And I'm not sorry. At last I'll get my bed back, I will no longer have to watch the sunset, you know I don't like it. And my horse will get back to be called only Luppolo."

"Speaking about the horse..."

"You need it to escape? Take it. I'll buy another."

"But I'll pay for it. You know I have some money."

"I don't want your money."

"But how are you going to buy another horse?"

"I have some money too. I don't need yours. And then, soon it will be your birthday. I give you Luppolo as a present. Take it."

"I was thinking of something else, for my birthday."

"What?"

"You'll see."

Martina had decided to celebrate her birthday with me.

"Thirteen, finally!"

And then, the same night, she would leave. She opted for light luggage, a few essential things. Some spare clothes, money and jewellery.

"I'll write. Then you can come see me if you want."

"I don't think I want."

"As you please."

For her birthday she had organized a kind of dinner on the top of the tower at dusk. We ate as the sun set and she demanded to drink wine, which I usually forbid her to.

"But now I am thirteen. And it's my birthday. I want to drink some wine too!"

"Okay, but only a glass."

I put a packet on the table.

"I thought the present was Martin."

"Yes, of course you can take Luppolo. This is a small thing. Open it."

She curiously unwrapped the packet. It was a ribbon. I has chosen a white one so it would fuse to the black of her hair like snow.

"So every now and then you'll remember me when you're away."

She raised her hand with my ring, which she never took off. She would always remember me, she said.

Then came the night. There was the moon, it was bright. Perhaps it was because of the wine which she wasn't accustomed to, or it was the thrill of thinking that she would not see me again. I don't know.

She stood up and approached me. "I want to thank you."

"There's no need."

"Yes, there is."

Hers wasn't a request. It sounded more like she was ordering me to accept her thanks, which was followed by her warm little hand caught in my curls. You can't look for the gold specks of the moon, Martina, you wouldn't find them.

Then something confusing happened. It was clear, she had forgotten it was a game. Should I remind her? Maybe later.

It wasn't a great kiss, though. I was taken by surprise, she liked the idea more than anything else, I guess. But she is stubborn; she seemed determined to keep trying until she was really pleased with the outcome. I let her to humour her more than anything else; it should have been her first kiss, so I wanted it to be fine. She sat on my lap, hugged me. I could feel her clock-breath on my neck. Isn't this the right time to leave, Martina?

She certainly felt that my hands held her like a capricious doll, not like a capricious woman. The game, remember?

So Martina, on top of a tower she would never see again, was sitting on my lap like on the mountains of coal she had in her eyes, to celebrate her thirteenth birthday pretending to be older already. It was a silent farewell, a greeting with the eyes only, with her fingers pressing on my back under the clothes, with her lips confounding our breaths, before the notched one of the clock dragged her away.

It's time.

### 13 - Gentleman, maybe

It was her birthday. We dined on the Tower, for the last time.

"Do you remember," she said, "when I came here?"

Of course I remembered her, as he popped up from the trapdoor. How much time had passed?

Really so much? I forced her apart. Why had she given me that kiss I didn't want, before leaving?

"It's time," I said with a quick look to her eyes, really too black.

She stared at me for a long time, as if she wanted to say something. Like at the beginning, when I always made her angry. But she said nothing and went downstairs to take her things.

This led me to feel the tower, the clock and the moon even more needed than before she came. How lucky I was, not having to leave them to go somewhere.

How could I leave the moon? I haven't written for it the poem I want yet, the one I've been searching and searching for so much time but I haven't yet found. Alone, on the tower, instinct put me back on the trail of other verses.

"Forget it. The girl is right. You are no good. Moreover, you're starting to bore me."

And with a yawn the moon disappeared behind a cloud.

"And you, clock? I took care of your hands, your gears, for so long! How could you work without me?"

"Do not be presumptuous. Time flows without maintenance. It's not the clock that needs you. It is you who need it! Didn't you know?"

"You mean that..."

"Dong!" the clock chimes.

Martina is at the door. I hold the reins of the horse as she mounts.

" Farewell Luppolo!"

"Martin," she insists. "So farewell, Viktor. Thanks for everything. I don't know what I would have done without you..."

She has a tremor in her voice. It's not like the voice of the moon or the clock: her voice sets a fire.

The coal, I mean. Behind the oblique openings – just eyes, really? – mountains of dark coal are set aflame. She's there, remember? I told you already. She's there and she doesn't know how to save herself: everything is burning.

I tighten the reins, I watch the fire blaze, take her away. And I say: "A gentleman would never allow a girl to go out alone at night."

The fire seems to be tamed, she smiles, the moon leaves the cloud, no longer annoyed.

Martina and I will leave together.

Am I really becoming a poet?

A poet I don't know, maybe a gentleman.

### 15 - The Lighthouse

I have overloaded and confused memories of the journey to the lighthouse: we travelled as many miles as our means of transportation allowed. At night, to prevent unpleasant encounters, we avoided to camp or sleep in the cold. Typically we sheltered at an inn, posing as a married couple on a journey.

Not my idea, I swear. It was all hers.

"It's more convincing. Why else should we travel together? No one would believe we are relatives, you're too tall and don't look like me a little bit. You're not even that smart. In short, we don't have anything in common. At worst, they will wonder why on Earth I married you. And they'll think you're a rich man or a landowner and leave us alone. After all we always slept together, we can keep doing it, what's the problem?"

So we travelled for over a month as a married couple. Exhausted, of course. In some dense tangled woods or in endless glades, the suspicion of being on the wrong road was always there. Once we even met it. It was disguised as an old, white-bearded man with a hat. It looked like a farmer, it was sitting in the shadow under a shade and chewed an ear of golden wheat.

"You most certainly took the wrong road, young married couple. You have to go back that way. Where do you think this shadowless clear can bring you?"

First of all, what was a farmer doing in a place like that? Furthermore, nobody ever understood that we were – pretending to be, of course – married.

"Let's go ahead" I had ordered.

"But that man said we must go back."

"No. I say we go ahead. And no whims this time."

The road was the right one after all, and Martina was, strangely, very docile.

I, of course, was afraid. I was a shadow detached from her figure, I couldn't stand by myself. Imagine that one day a scarecrow decides to leave its place. Do you think it will walk with firm and resolute steps? Not at all.

I had left the tower, and now I was at the mercy of a series of forces that where no doubt hostile towards me. I could tell from how innkeepers and their wives looked at me.

"Poor child!" they must be thinking. Also because Martina, as you know, is really fond of games. So she enjoyed to endear me and walk arm in arm with me so to make regrettable misunderstandings arise.

We had a reproachable look. The proof is that the only thing I remember clearly of the journey is the stare of the innkeepers. So alike that it could have been just a single, huge innkeeper in every place. She shakes her head, staring at me annoyed, then looks at Martina with infinite compassion.

Meanwhile, Martina enjoys it a lot.

"Come, darling, I'm so tired. Let's go to bed. "

The innkeeper shakes her head. I can only sigh and play along: I let her take my arm and lead me in the room, where she throws herself on the bed laughing. She's so tired that she falls asleep right there, still dressed. I undress her and put her to bed wearing almost nothing, a habit she took. I thought she would notice, I thought she would awake and protest. Instead she undoubtedly woke up, but without resistance, not saying anything. She let me take off her clothes with a smile, while I had time to look at her comfortably. And even to regret it a little.

She has not yet a fully adult form, but she's no longer the child she was a year ago. A middle ground, that's what. Nothing more. A middle ground that, as soon as I get into bed next to her, lies down on my body in turmoil, and falls asleep, serene at last, as if I were her destination and she could finally surrender to fatigue and rest.

I do not think it would have been sustainable to go on like that for long. Because of the single omnipresent innkeeper, of course. The one that amused Martina and distressed me. She looked at me like people look at me when I'm not on my tower. And I will never be on my tower again. I had some hope in the lighthouse, to be honest. They can't be so different, can they? Apart from humidity, saltiness and the sound of the waves.

I didn't expect that, not at all. When I thought about the sea, I only saw Martina's drawing, with small wavy lines that I imagined to be blue and her figure in the sky, but I did not think they made a sound.

"Look! A shell! We are close to the sea! There we are! See how beautiful it is. Put it against your ear. My uncle once wrote me that you can hear the sound of the waves, in certain shells. Try!"

I didn't hear anything, she claimed to hear the rustle of the sea.

"If it's like that of the sheets, I don't think I'll like it."

Can you imagine an irrepressible, eternal rustle of sheets in your ears for all eternity? Goodbye sleep.

"You will get used to it."

I'll get used to it.

The reception, however, was not the best. The lighthouse, from a distance, looked like a mirage. Could we get in, in flesh and bones, without having to dilute as some blurry pictures of boats on the horizon? Up close, then, it didn't seem more concrete: a circular height of windows and stairs, with a tiny weenie door, open no less. Was her uncle waiting for someone?

I had already learned how not to upset Martina, at least in certain circumstances: I climbed the steep stairs behind her, carrying all the baggage. Of her uncle, at least up to the large terrace near the top of the lighthouse, there was no trace.

Then, suddenly, there he was, amidst a carpet of white flowers, with a watering can in hand. I just didn't expect this. A red-haired woman next to him, with a thick fringe over her eyes, not at all surprised by our appearance, waved at us too, holding a lit cigarette in one hand (and a watering can in the other too).

First thing, her uncle understood immediately that we were not married, and he was glad about that. It seemed that he didn't like me at all. How could I blame him? Therefore he gave us separate rooms, stubbornly looking at me with hostility all the time. No, definitely lighthouses don't have the same effect as a nice, sturdy, solid tower. However, he promised Martina that he would not write home that she was there, but he convinced her to write a letter saying that she was well and asking her parents and sisters not to worry. Therefore, he was quite sympathetic concerning her escape. Much less about me.

One day, he took me aside and told me his concerns: "You see, Viktor, Martina is still very young, it's not time to make hasty decisions. On this you agree with me, don't you? And she is also very pretty and not without possessions, she could aspire to a good marriage, later on. Of course, if she didn't prove to be spoiled... well, apparently you two share a certain intimacy. The same bed, right? In that case..."

What?

Oh, right. No, I never touched her. After all I was a gentleman even before. Although Martina laughs and says that I'm still a savage.

"Very well. But the problem is not just that. How could she find a suitor if people knew that she is living with a man?"

I do not like to be insightful.

Martina's uncle wants me to leave: we cannot live together in the lighthouse. I would spoil her reputation, and since I had had the good sense of not taking advantage of her affection in other ways, her uncle was sure that I would humour his wishes. For the sake of Martina, of course.

And of course Martina went on a rampage. We were walking on a beach and I was trying to make her understand the situation without making her angry. She was gathering shells, and the task was impossible, you understand. Fortunately, this time she wasn't angry only with me.

"It's crazy. And what did you tell him? No, no, don't tell me anything. Knowing you, blockhead as you are, you even told him he was right. Of course, mister uncle, I'm leaving, sure!"

"But he says that in this country it's impossible to live as we do. It's a small place, people would not accept such a thing. And you would not be able to make a good marriage, if I remain in the lighthouse. Do you understand?"

I had never seen her so angry, really. She furiously threw the shells into the water, breaking it apart and trembling with anger because her bullets tore no wounds.

"I understand, you're the one who doesn't. Did you really leave your tower to bring me here to make a good marriage with someone else? You've never been that smart, I know, but this time try to make an effort, blockhead! OK, you never went to school, but the solution of this problem is really simple. Premise: we cannot live together in the Lighthouse if we're not married. What is the conclusion?"

The conclusion was clear: I had to leave.

"You're just impossible! You're thick! Will you make up your mind at once and ask me to marry you? And hurry up, because otherwise I may change my mind!"

Like every time when I felt confused and she got angry, I decided to humour her.

"Will you marry me?"

"Of course I want to marry you."

Problem solved. After all, I'm not such a blockhead.

### 17 - Marriage

Her uncle took the news of the marriage in the worst way. He grieved, poor man, he would not listen to reason.

Then Martina decided that the situation had to be solved by someone competent. By someone who could make a serious, adult, talk. And she went to talk to her uncle.

From what I heard as I tried to eavesdrop, Martina admitted everything her relative accused her of: I was much older than her – and it's not that I looked that good – I was not good at conversation and I was not educated, I had no money and furthermore there was something vague in me that made me unconvincing: I had something amiss. All this just because he didn't have the readiness to come up with the right word for his feelings: ridiculous. I no longer have the tower, remember?

So Martina took care of that. The conclusion of her speech was that she would marry me, ridiculous or not. And if he didn't accept it, we would go somewhere else. She had run away once and she could do it again.

Why did she insist on wanting to be my wife? Obviously her uncle asked that too, but I could not hear the answer from behind the door that isolated them – them, not me – from the sound of the waves. Luckily it's not like that of the sheet. This made me feel very relieved.

She must have been convincing, or maybe not. Maybe she was just stubborn and her uncle didn't know how to make her give up, however she had already set the wedding date, in a month.

Remember when, hanging out around the tower, we had the time and the indecency to imagine her as a bride? Doesn't it seem incredible, that all this is really happening?

I'll have ginger cookies for a lifetime, if she doesn't run away again, without me, I mean. And I wouldn't rule that out. But how could I stop her, if she decided to? After all, I didn't believe too much in this marriage. It was a whim, what else could it be? That's why I had humoured her.

I need not tell you how good Martina looked in her wedding dress. Pearly white, with a very long veil. She had wanted a bouquet of small sunflowers, even though every girl in the town had tried to dissuade her. They were horribly out of fashion. I liked them, they reminded me of our friend the scarecrow, to which we had not even had the time to say goodbye. I had invited it to the wedding, but it had not come. Was it still offended for our hasty departure? It would have been good as a best man, wouldn't it? It would only take putting a couple of wheels at the end of its legs to solve its problem with walking. Small ones, of course. Maybe they could have been covered with shoes, so not to make him uncomfortable in the midst of so many people with feet of their own. But he hadn't wanted to. Yet I really saw it as a very good best men. It would also have solved that problem, because of course I didn't have one. Who would have witnessed my loyalty to Martina and my intentions about her, if not it?

In the end Malera – we had seen her on the terrace with Martina's uncle the day of our arrival – offered to be my witness, although he had tried to dissuade her.

I must confess it, although with some reticence because this isn't really my kind of thing. When she marched down the church approaching the altar – instead of the wedding march, Nocturne No. 5 by Leybach was playing – I even got a little excited.

"So? Don't you answer? He's asking you a question: don't just stand there looking at me stupidly, or we'll never get over this!"

Oh, yes.

"Yes, I do."

Malera, who is no longer young, is wearing a tight dress and heavy makeup. To calm down, she tries to light a cigarette right next to the priest, in the place for witnesses, but the priest unleashes an aggressive altar boy who tries to stop her, somehow. The only evidence is that they are all very cheerful, even too much. Eventually, however, the altar boy goes away and Malera is shrouded in a cloud of smoke. She smiles again: she won. He smiles too, but no one knows why. The priest, however, doesn't smile at all.

And Martina? Martina smiles too. I can kiss the bride.

What else is she expecting? Certainly not what I had imagined. After the banquet, during which she exaggerated a bit – could I forbid her a few glasses of wine at her wedding party? – she crashes on the bed, a bit tipsy. Since we arrived at the lighthouse, a month ago, we no longer slept together. But she doesn't want to sleep: she is excited, it's her wedding after all, isn't it?

"Mine too" I stress.

"This has nothing to do with it."

"What now?" she asks.

"Now we sleep. You must be tired, I guess."

"Forget it."

"What do you want to do then?"

"I don't know. Shouldn't you be the one to know? "

"I only know that you're thirteen, that you drank too much and that now it's time to sleep."

Not a chance. She keeps me awake all night. It's good, staying up with Martina, albeit a little unnerving in the long run. She insists, I persist.

"Don't you know that a non-consummated marriage is invalid?"

"Then it will become valid later on. Meanwhile, no one will know."

"What are you waiting for?"

"For you to be a little older."

"But I already am."

"No, you're not. "

"And when will I be?"

"We'll talk again about this when you're at least fourteen. Then, if you want to be more it's fine, but less no way."

"But it's too much time! Ten months. We cannot wait that long!"

"If I can wait, you can too."

At first she pouted, then she decided to change tactics. I was adamant, of course, even if her nightgown, from the floor where she had thrown it in defiance, suggested me that maybe I could change my mind. Was I really sure? Yes, very. As for the fact that no one would know, I was wrong.

The next morning, at the breakfast table, her uncle looked at her for a long time to figure out what had happened, and I don't know how – he must have had a certain intuition for what concerned his niece – he realized that things had gone in a certain way. Would he despise me?

He rose from his chair, walking around the table and heading toward me. He stared openly at my face. He was looking for something deep in my eyes. But my eyes are buttons, not mines, there is nothing to dig out of them. Then he patted me on a shoulder.

"After all, you're a good man. Who would have imagined?"

And he left to attend to his affairs.

This is the only kind thing he ever said to me, so I had to appreciate it.

Martina spent the next ten months with the only clear purpose of tormenting me. She's like this: like every little whimsical girl, she desires with all her strength what she cannot have, and endeavours to obtain it.

The ten months that separated us from her birthday passed very quickly, and nothing changed in our daily lives.

When the time came, I congratulated myself. The determination – the first time in my life that I had a little of it – to stay firm in my purpose had undoubtedly positive effects: when she turned fourteen, she didn't look askance at me at all. She had so much desired that day to arrive, that it had seemed beautiful to her.

"The last two birthdays were definitely the most beautiful of my life. It's not fair that you don't have one. Why not choose a day to celebrate your birthday?"

"One day at random?"

"No, not a random day. A day that has some meaning. The day we met, for example."

Of course, I didn't remember which day it was.

"I thought so" she sighed. She remembered it perfectly, and pouted for my insensitivity, which she never failed to make me notice.

"And now, what are you doing?" she then asked in surprise.

"I am getting dressed."

"No way."

Martina had begun to enjoy my hair a bit long. Too bad they weren't smooth, she said, they would have suited me more. She liked that I didn't sport moustaches or beard. She liked my arms, that she caressed with admired passion when I was over her, my muscles tense. I could never lay down on her: she was too tiny to support my weight. She liked to sit with me on the seashore, even though it wasn't as good as at the tower. She always said that we had done well to move to the lighthouse. Moreover, she really loved the white flowers that her uncle kept on the large terrace, that sometimes I helped her watering. Their petals were the only snow we would ever see around here.

I suspect that she didn't like my broken incisor, and that a little more acumen wouldn't have been bad.

I need not tell you what I infinitely liked in Martina, right? You are not like me, you have a good memory, we have largely dealt with the topic of her eyes and what they contain: her and her mine. A cute black. And her ankles. Her biscuits too, of course.

All in all, even being the keeper of the lighthouse wasn't so bad.

The moon and I made peace. I will not be a poet: I no longer need to. Martina understands everything without explanations. The important things, that is. Those for which sometimes, before, I didn't seem to have the right words. Her presence is a good enough suggestion to renounce to some assonance and some wacky rhyme that just don't want to be found.

19 - Ropes and bridges

Martina and I had a whole floor of the lighthouse for us. Moving from a solid square tower to a circular lighthouse sprayed by the sea, perched on a strip of land that I could not praise for its stability – or at least the impression of stability it could give – was somehow, how to say it?, you had to get used to it. Train your eye. And all that water...

If I could swim? Certainly. The tamer taught me when I was travelling with the circus. He didn't seem upset for the nightly visits I received, which he ignored or pretended to ignore. I never felt that he cared particularly for his wife. Maybe he thought it was part of the job: go into the cage and marry the girl of the wild beasts. She lived near them. She spent all her time at the cage or even inside of them. Nothing ever happened to her. The idea that she had whispered something into the ear of the tiger before it tore her first husband to pieces is not so weird. I hope that her second husband is still alive: he was a good person. And now his teachings (not about how to hold stool and whip, but about how to overcome the natural force that pulls you at the bottom by opposing her some movements) would come in handy.

I swam pretty well. I mean, well enough to survive.

Martina swam very well. I mean, well enough to wish for a long swim in a sunny day. In spite of this, she had an unjustified terror of deep water. As soon as she reached a point where she couldn't touch the floor, she got HORRIBLY scared and wanted to go back. Of course I was very grateful. In addition to detesting deep water, she did not want me to mention the wife of the trainer. She hated it more than she hated not seeing the bottom of the sea, although on the top of the list of what she hated there was the trapeze artist, whom I had to be very careful never to mention. As for me, there was no one I should be jealous of: the only boy who ever tried to approach her had led her to run away from home. With me.

Sometimes I suspected that her idea of moving to the sea had not been too bright, because of our lacking attitudes about water. But all in all, that fragrant and liquid environment allowed many pleasures that couldn't be found anywhere else, like the warm sand or the feet of Martina, always bare, lapped by the waves. The irregular shore, the weather, a bit wet but definitely mild, the balsamic scent of the trees behind the beach. Even the fog that surrounds the lighthouse on certain winter nights, when the sea is rough.

Her uncle got a little used to me, but not completely. He stared grimly at me, and shook his head too. "Buttons," he used to say. He talked about my eyes, I suppose. They were so dull that you could not see anything in them.

"That's not true," Martina protested. "Transparent glass, bottle bottoms, if anything."

But her gruff uncle would understandably like to see her niece settled with a handsome young man in a trendy place, rather than with a shabby guardian (Lighthouse? Tower?).

Sometimes he saddened and sat on the rocking chair on the circular terrace, surrounded by his thick beard and white hair and even by the smoke of his pipe, watching the horizon. Malera often sat next to him, and then the thick cloud of smoke was doubled. All people leaving in such places develop the habit of observing the distances of the sea. They watch the horizon as if there really were something to look for. And if there were, who would care? How useless it is to look at the sea! However, the old uncle sat on the rocking chair and stared, smoke rising from his pipe. When he saw me, he sighed and pitied Martina. So when the two of them worked on the terrace, taking care of the white flowers her uncle loved so much, I never disturbed them. Furthermore, I didn't even like those flowers.

A terrace full of sunflowers, that wouldn't have been bad. But those anaemic little flowers inspired me no sympathy.

As usual, I hadn't been able to make any friend. Once a friend of her uncle insisted that we go to the pub with them. Then I was not invited again. Better so: I was bored all the time and felt uncomfortable. Probably I made them feel uncomfortable too. People has this effect on me: I cannot follow their speeches and I get bored. Then, when I say something, it's out of place or not clear. Our desires go in opposite directions and we never understand one another. Talking about weather, moreover, throws me into total despair, I don't know why. Maybe because it's tiresome: it is just to say something, and instead of hiding the abyss – this is why it is done, isn't it? To bridge the unbridgeable gap between people – it magnifies it.

You see? Every person, at least that's how it seems to me, stands in their own shelter. The others are all very far: it is absolutely impossible to reach them or even make themselves understood, from that distance. This embarrasses some, so they invented these fictitious bridges, as solid as mirages, and pretended to connect one island to another. The coarser bridge is that of brisk conversation.

"What a beautiful sunny day" or "it's cold, winter just arrived," and so on. There is an amazing monotone range of those.

Of course, you can try to build more and more refined bridges, without affecting their unreal transparency.

I'm not made for the landing. When someone tries to build his bridge, admiring its building and believing in its apparent solidity, I am only able to see the inconsistency of the mirage and nothing more. It makes me smile, even. That is why I am out of place: I never get up from the shore to try and cross. It would be useless. How to, when all we have are imaginary ropes?

This is why I can stay with Martina: she never tried to fool me with bridges and ropes. She sat on the shore, looking at me, throwing rocks into the deep sea, and only asking for a little attention. This I can understand. Some stone hurt me a bit at times, depending on where it hit me. But this is proof that something can go from one island to another. Stones, nothing more. But you cannot doubt of a well-thrown stone.

Not even Martina loves to have many people around. She can be friendly, if she wants to, but she doesn't really enjoy it. Her friendliness is a big misunderstanding, a laborious bluff.

The only person she has been getting by with since we are at the lighthouse is Malera (my best man, remember?), a woman in her forties and perhaps even more – no parties, teenage companies, friends, my strange Martina – that good people tend to avoid. They say she did a not-so-esteemed job when she was younger. And it is suspected that she still retains some very affectionate friend. Martina's uncle?

Martina, her uncle and her new friend sit together in the small garden next to the lighthouse and sometimes play cards. Malera has flaming red hair, very smooth, with a thick fringe, and a bright red mouth. I don't know about her eyes, I watch them and then forget them right away. She smokes long, thin cigarettes that, they say in town, increase her already strong vulgarity.

I don't mind: she's a good friend to Martina and sometimes she tells me funny stories when I wander around to steal some sweets from the tea tray.

It seems she even gained a certain amount of money by writing a book. Or rather, by dictating it to someone who knew how to write and was interested in her story. She quotes it all the time but I have never seen a copy. Apparently the title is Hours of Malera and it contains many of the funny anecdotes she also told us. I suspect she doesn't want to give it to Martina because of its content, which must be occasionally distinctly obscene, and that she censors it for the benefit of the ingenuous credulity of her friend.

Malera's visits and uncle's muttering are the only things we share with the rest of mankind, that almost can't seem to believe it. Malera says I'm a nice guy. Then she corrects herself. Maybe not a nice guy. But certainly the right one for Martina.

Neither Malera likes the white flowers that grow on the terrace and that Martina's uncle left us when, one morning, he continued undeterred to sleep in his bed despite our repeated calls. To be sure to spite me even after passing away, he drew up a will specifying that the sole and exclusive owner of all his property is Martina only. I cannot even dream about it.

The lawyer read the will in the old study. On the dark desk, some documents and an odd, dusty, battered, thick-paged manuscript. Martina and I sit in front of him. Malera too, of course. She has been left some object of some value. We look at the manuscript, the handwriting is exactly that of Martina's uncle, although it is all torn and missing half of it. It has a title that seems incomprehensible to me: Study on sleep .

"That's funny," Martina said.

"I didn't know that my uncle was writing a book. And how strange it is missing a part."

We immediately forgot the book and the missing part. Until Martina had to resort to the secret of the white flowers, seemingly innocuous, revealed in the first pages of that torn manuscript.

### 21 - Remedies for insomnia

For her fifteenth birthday I bought Martina a piano. I was able to introduce it in the lighthouse without her realizing it, and made her find it wrapped in an elegant purple cloth Malera gave me, with a big bow on top.

It seemed like a good idea: there was nothing more amazing that I could offer her by the sole use of my person.

Malera too liked the piano so much that she asked Martina to teach her to play a bit. So once a week she did her best to read the music sheets I had found her – without great success, anyway – and play a few notes on the instrument, which Martina, instead, played magnificently.

Between songs, she lit a cigarette and complained. Why couldn't the piano be played with one hand only? How was she going to smoke while playing? Martina laughed and invited me to listen to her progresses. Nonexistent, it is clear. But she was so pleased that I had no courage to refuse.

Malera's enthusiasm infected me. Maybe Martina could teach me to read a little. She thought it was a very good idea, but once we put it into practice she found that teaching unnerved her terribly.

"No! No! Look better! Can't you see that if you read it like that it doesn't mean anything? Try again. What word is that? No, you are impossible! Make some effort, for heaven's sake..."

I made efforts, but there was nothing to do. I would never become good at writing. A little bit I learned to read. But not too much. Martina, in the end, even wanted me to write a letter.

"Why should I write you a letter? You are not far away."

"Imagine that I am."

"And why should I?"

"So you'd miss me and write something nice to me. No poems, for heaven's sake, please. Just some thoughts. So I can read them again whenever I want."

"I can tell you, it's faster."

"But if you tell me, how can you imagine that I am far? You want me to leave?"

No, of course not. Stay here with me, Martina. Don't go away.

And so I committed to write her a letter. It wasn't a great success: my handwriting was shaky and my ideas too. How can you explain yourself well in writing? It's just impossible. All those letters inked on the paper make me uncomfortable. They stare at me and I don't know what to do with them.

"Is that all?" they ask me. "Can't you do any better?"

Then do it yourselves!

"Oh no, it's you who have to. It's your problem, now. We are here, waiting. Come on, what are you waiting for?"

There was nothing to do. I didn't like the t. I never thought before that that sound could also have a form, and such an unpleasant one. It seemed half dead of starvation, numb. The v gave me the impression that it was about to tip over, and anyway it was clear that it could not stand on its own for long. The o rolled everywhere: it ran here and there and I could not keep it together with the others. The s seemed unreliable. How could I put it close to the innocent a?

In short, it was really impossible to write. But I made an effort to please her.

The response? Here it is: "This letter really sucks."

But what can I do about it?

One day, during a lesson in which I struggled to recognize some words, Martina took a deep breath, sat on the old rocking chair of her uncle, and ordered me to sit next to her.

"I must tell you something."

I began to worry a bit. Because of her talking about leaving and stuff like that.

Her coal mines stared my button eyes. She parted her lips, shut them again, tight. She rocked a bit, stroking her belly with both hands, and her eyes became slots.

"We're having a baby."

I was silent for a while.

"Aren't you glad?"

Of course I am. But I'm afraid of saying the wrong thing, so I say nothing. I want to smile, but I'd hate to ruin this moment by showing my broken incisor.

"Of course I'll choose the name, otherwise, poor baby, who knows what you would pin on him. We have already seen with Luppolo..."

"Luppolo is a beautiful name."

Mine eyes stared at me sceptically.

"All right. All in all, I don't care about the name. And for sure I wasn't going to call him Luppolo."

"You don't look happy."

"I am."

"Then you should show it somehow, because you really don't seem to be."

Broken incisor then. I hugged her and held her close for a long time, wondering how the Baby could feel in that narrow little girl belly, and what name she would choose for him. It would undoubtedly be a boy, I felt it. Well, I already had one Martina and it was more than enough: I knew it was impossible for another one to arrive. I had to share her love with another male, but the fact that it would be our son comforted me and excluded more shadowy thoughts.

See her little belly grow frightened me a bit: at times I had wondered when she would stop being a child. That time had come.

And indeed something in her changed: first, it seemed that the Baby didn't let her sleep well. Maybe she just had to get used to her inhabited tummy, or he to having some shape, after having been nothing. Anyway the no-longer-child belly which grew day by day, damming the overflowed soul of the Baby within increasingly certain – and bulky – boundaries, didn't let her sleep.

So she thought about her uncle's book. The Study on sleep, remember?

After her uncle had left his book unattended, because of that regrettable incident that a peaceful sudden death is, Martina had read a few pages.

"That's why he cared so much for his flowers! Uncle's remedy for sleep is not a generic recipe: it's done with those. Can you believe it? Uncle suffered from a terrible insomnia and, in his laboratory, he was able to extract a substance to help him sleep, that he had discovered by himself. The book says that he imported these flowers from one of his long journeys. Australia, apparently. But you don't even know where it is, do you? There are instructions to prepare the compound. It would be fun to try. Maybe I could start to get some sleep if it worked. And it doesn't seem difficult at all. What do you say?"

Me, I never liked those pale flowers, I already said so, didn't I? Their petals where too thick and too white. Martina's uncle cared for them more than it was necessary. On the other hand, you can't blame a traveller, by now so far from the desires that had driven him for his whole life, for such a harmless pastime. But it did not seem suitable for Martina. I don't know why, instinct.

While I was trying to decide whether it was a good idea or not, Malera exclaimed: "It seems to me a very good solution. We'll try."

And I was left alone in the garden to finish two slices of otherwise abandoned cake, of course without waiting to hear my opinion.

"See I was right? Tonight I slept wonderfully! Although it was a strange sleep. I felt as if in a dark room where the air was pressing on me. I felt discomfort, but not too much. So I kept sleeping. And I didn't dream anything. Strange, isn't it? I always dream. Anyway, today I feel rested and well."

The fact that Martina had slept well made me happy: I felt a bit guilty. The child was business of us both, but while I slept very well, she struggled on long climbing stairs, out of breath, and in the morning her eyes were very black, as usual, but tired. The fact that her eyes hadn't changed made me happy: the baby was not taking away anything, to fill his child holes.

But her sensations made me uneasy.

After a week of deep sleep – not good, just deep – disturbing dreams started. It was a sleep in which she plunged keeping some part of her conscience. Not her conscience, mind you. Only some part. Her sleep was like an half-broken dam: through the cracks of the barrier, her liquid conscience crashed with force into the wall. Then it began to flow in spasms, and some shreds passed through. Others didn't. So she, so frayed that she could not stay inside the dammed part, slipped into the dream.

She woke up panting, full of terror.

Was it possible? We had a history of games, clear moon, scarecrow at worst. I couldn't bear to see her that way.

Here's the first dream: there was a woman in a room, she was about to give birth. The woman did not look like her at all, it certainly wasn't her. Yet, the dreamer, or at least the owner of the consciousness that was dreaming, knew there was an identity between them. So Martina knew she was the woman in the dream, but the woman in the dream didn't know she was Martina. It must be a time far away, long past. People wore strange clothes and spoke in an equally strange manner. Martina suffered the pain of childbirth, then held the baby in her arms. But not any child: the baby was me. Not that it looked like me, not at all. But she felt it, somehow. Her, the dreamer, while the woman in the dream didn't notice anything. She hadn't even ever known Viktor.

Martina was very agitated, she seemed out of her mind. But once she calmed down, after I had stroke her forehead and hair for some time and brought her breakfast in bed, she seemed relieved.

It was our first child (was she planning to make more? I wouldn't have minded) and she was scared. It was natural. Her dream must be totally normal for a woman in her condition. Malera too expressed her opinion, seconding that of Martina, although she had never had children herself.

"Now," she sighed, "it's too late." Sure, there had been a man, once, just once in her life, that had changed her in some way. A man who had given her the desire to feel a little being inside her, something that belonged to both. That was his – his – and hers – hers – forever. Because creating that life, that had instead remained sterile, would unite their lives in the great cycle of the Universe. And that unexpected mutation that was their joint life would change things forever. A matter of a few cells? Not at all. A matter of tasting a small eternity and inscribe themselves together in the flow of things. No longer alone. No longer cells that break down and reassemble in perfect solitude. But atoms, finally aggregated into something, which might even make no sense, but was very nice anyway. Then she looked at Martina's uncle (or at his picture, after the unpleasant event) and sighed. I felt sorry for her, for the baby she hadn't had. On the other hand, Martina's pregnancy, somehow, questioned the solid relationship I had had until then, with my certainties. The certainty that Martina was all for me. Selfish, isn't it? But I was just afraid that she could start loving the Baby and left me aside. Which, of course, didn't happen. Meanwhile, I was sorry for her sickness and her insomnia.

Sleep is a great thing, don't you think? Even a bit strange, if we think about it. When I lived alone in the tower, sleep came differently than now. Since when Martina popped up, with her nightshirt and her bag of biscuits, everything changed. No, not it. It's me who have changed my mind. I cannot explain how it is now, but I can try to describe how it was before. It's a sudden idea: I got dead tired of myself. Of my expressions, of the ceaseless thoughts, of the grain and the figure of the scarecrow seen through my eyes. Of the landscape of uneven houses, seen through my eyes. Of the moon seen through my eyes. Of my reflection in the mirror, seen through my eyes. Even of the way I felt myself moving, worrying, smiling, doing, seen through my eyes. I hated, in the long run, the consciousness of myself. In short, I got tired alone, me and the other consciousness living in something else that maybe wasn't me. Or maybe it was, but what does it matter? You have to live with it, somehow. This is a fact.

"That's enough, go somewhere else for a while, leave me alone."

"But where? I'm you, there's nothing I can do, nor you. Unnerving, isn't it? Don't think that it is better for me. Moreover, if I left, someone else would come and you'll get tired in the same way. Sorry, no way."

"Enough, enough. Leave me alone! I can't take it anymore! "

The only way I found to get rid of me – of that stranger who was me and whom I couldn't suffer any longer after a while – was sleeping. Exactly, that's it. I loved sleep because it freed me from myself for the time needed. Martina, like a conscious sleep or an unconscious wake, makes me forget about me, and I hardly need the freeing sleep anymore. For her, on the other hand, sleep was no longer a freedom, not even from fatigue.

The second dream came after a few days: Martina lived in a bright house, with a husband and many children. No, the husband wasn't me. This one too seemed a long time ago. Martina lived in a large house with a caring husband and children, but she wasn't happy. She also felt guilty for that. What more could she ask for? Unfortunately, she knew all too well: a new farmhand had just arrived in town, a tall one with tanned skin and an absentminded attitude. Since when that man had arrived, Martina lost her peace of mind. As the first time, her conscience, engaged in the dream experience, knew it was Viktor. But the woman in the dream didn't. The woman in the dream was lost and confused. The woman in the dream loved her husband and children, but knew that she couldn't resist him. "But it's Viktor!" the Martina-consciousness exclaimed. In the dream, however, she didn't notice anything. She suffered much, she missed her children. She loved her husband too. But she could not resist the attraction that, in a sunny morning, forced her to mount on his fast horse with him and never come back.

"You should write a book too," Malera remarked. But Martina had somehow lost her carefree smile.

The garden in front of the lighthouse. Sticky scent of saltiness, light and warm wind. A wrought iron table in the shadow under the pergola. Cups of tea and biscuits.

"I think you're just scared. Because of the pregnancy. There have always been just the two of you and now a stranger comes. Sure, it's not really a complete stranger. But you have to get used to it."

"I hope these nightmares will not go on until the birth of the baby. Fortunately, with uncle's remedy at least I can get some sleep."

"I'm glad. Who would have thought that he cultivated his beloved flowers to get a remedy for insomnia? And who knows why he never told anyone?"

"You knew him better than me. You know he was taciturn and didn't speak much about himself. But these flowers have been under our noses the whole time and it seems so strange that he never mentioned it."

"Yeah. Strange. But after all he was a very original man. What about the name for the Baby? Have you chosen it?"

"Yes, I have. He will undoubtedly be called Sebastian."

"What does Viktor think about it?"

"Viktor will not mind. I think he likes it. He wanted to give him a ridiculous name, of course. I don't know how it is possible, but he can only think about unlistenable names. He can't help it, it's stronger than him. Good there's me having some common sense."

"And how would he have called him?"

Malera is on tenterhooks. Since when Martina is hosting the Baby, she's been trying not to smoke in her presence, but she's having a hard time. When she really can't stand it any longer, she moves to the other side of the glass, if they are in the lighthouse, and tries to make herself heard from the terrace. Outdoor she walks away a bit, but she's sorry to leave her friend alone, even if in the end she can stand no more and goes away to smoke. So, to make herself heard, she screams from the end of the garden.

"He had chosen an absurd name. The name of a city, apparently. I don't know how he could think about it, but giving a child the name of a city makes no sense, does it? Cause you should know that he believes it is a boy. He doesn't even want to talk about a female. Well, the name Viktor chose was Austerlitz. Can you believe? Austerlitz. Absurd, isn't it? Ugly, awkward. Ridiculous."

I pretended not to notice, but I was a bit sorry. In my opinion, Austerlitz was a beautiful name. Luppolo was too.

"Sebastian." Malera weighed it. "Yes, it really is a nice name."

Austerlitz didn't seem bad either, to me. Next one, maybe?

"Don't even think about it! Forget it!"

That night, another dream: Martina slipped out of the bed, from the dark bed to the dark room. That the bed was dark it was sure, but without certainty she slips out and leaves the room. Martina is a teenage girl, she does not know her name, but she knows she is and is not herself. The actress in the dream ignores Martina. "You aren't me!" and she slips into the bed of her older brother, full of desire. Desire to be hugged, to be not alone. Desire to be someone else, a lover, not a sister. Not her. If she were Martina, she would hug her brother and call him Viktor. Instead she hugs him and says nothing. Confused scenes ensue. The next morning, at the breakfast table, they conceal embarrassment with their family. A girlfriend, a boyfriend. "They spend much time together, to be siblings." He is Viktor but she does not recognize him: it's only her brother. What will happen when they no longer live under the same roof? What will save the little sister Martina from the darkness of the bed and the embarrassment of sitting at the breakfast table?

When Martina wakes up, happy that Viktor is just Viktor and she's just Martina, she starts wondering why.

I try to dissuade her. Whys don't make people happy. Hows do. How well are we! Not – why are we well? We're like two starfish twisted together. Not – why does something drive us to make ourselves indispensable to each other? How strong and beautiful is night. And how delicate is the time when sunset begins. Not – why are we alive? Why is there darkness? How, how. How pink are the flowers on the tree outside. How could we be not happy now? Like an endless journey. Now is now. How? As if nothing else existed. And in fact, it doesn't exist. This is the dirty little secret. Dissolving in sleep, is the secret. Don't dream, is the secret. Don't expect to be someone else when you wake up, is the secret. Expect nothing, just nothing, is the secret. Don't ever ask why. That's no secret: simply, there is no explanation. It's easy to understand, don't you think? Even a blockhead like me can.

But Martina hasn't learned and she always asks why. I am mortified. I wish there were answers good for her. But there aren't. I can try to manufacture them, what do you think? Like the stories I made up in half before sleeping. This is not a bluff.

I try to find a reason which does good to Martina, she realizes it and believes that my attempts are something. Just that something that makes it necessary to ask why. But no, nothing like this, but I'll let her believe it all the same.

Why are we intertwined starfish? Martina asks. I make up a beautiful story that answers her question. Martina has faith, believes, and she's happy. Because there is an always, I tell her before sleep. This is obvious. And if there is an always, there must exist a where. A where in which things take shape, otherwise what kind of where would it be? But not only: in the when and in the where things would not have shape if there wasn't a will, which is consequently good and necessary. It shaped us, we are its followers and we must continue together.

Here, Martina. We are that will, it must be so, there is no other explanation. And its followers. The after, not the before. About the after having an after, and that we won't be there, I'm silent. Otherwise she'll want to know why again, and I like her to believe to my story of the starfish. In the after of the after, instead, there is nothing, not even a goldfish, not even a shell. Nothing. But now, an inexhaustible will holds matter close and shapes it. And because our will is a yellow will, a will of biscuit, a bit bright, crumbly, salty like the salt under your coal mines, then we got to the top of the tower, and from there to the lighthouse, to be starfish clinging to each other.

Starfish. My hows. Her whys.

Do not ask me about the after, Martina. There, there are only my hows and no whys.

23 - Dreams

More dreams.

Martina goes to church. Every Sunday, always. In the front pew she prays with fervour. She prays good God and the merciful Mother. She prays Jesus and the saints. Martina is not Martina, as in the previous dreams, and therefore she does not pray for herself but for that other one. The other that, in the dream, had the indecency to take her place. The one that recognizes me without realizing it, and loves, of a mad and impossible love, the man of God behind the altar.

Martina is a happy woman, with a happy home and a happy life. Martina feels a genuine affection for her father, who is the most important person in the world for her. He is always beside her. When he gets older, she looks after him until the end of his days, and cries, cries for her beloved father. There is no true love, as many understand it, for Martina the daughter.

Martina is now alone. Nobody would have said that a beautiful girl like her... She lives with her married sister, at home with her family, protecting the children she never had. She's their favourite aunt, of course. Especially for the little blond baby, who always wants to climb on her lap and be caressed. Auntie, Auntie! How he loves her. A nephew love, of course. Not that he is so much a nephew. What nonsense! thinks Aunt Martina, young and beautiful. Is it possible that there is nobody in the world whom she can love more than this?

Martina didn't tell me about these dreams. She kept them tight, all for herself. That's how she became aware of the effects of the flower. The flower she gave me shortly before the birth: I was so nervous that I unnerved her, and she slipped a few drops of sleep preparation in my tea. So, she said, she could give birth in peace.

The result was that while Martina was screaming in pain and clutching Malera's hand – the one in which she wasn't holding her cigarette – I slept and didn't see anything.

No, I lie. I was being born with the Baby.

Amazing, isn't it? While Martina gave birth to our child, I dreamed of being born. Being born of a woman I would then love all my life like no other woman can be loved. Me, who wasn't me. Me, who was a normal child who loves his mom and knows nothing about Viktor. "You are Viktor," I told him. But he didn't do anything. "And that is Martina." Nothing at all. But I didn't love her like I was loving her in my life as Viktor. I loved her as a child loves his mother. But more intensely, as if it could overcome everything else. If Martina had been my mother, why should I want anything else? A mother would be enough to make me happy for all my life. Then the child Viktor paced the dusty road travelled by carriage, while his mother bought him an ice cream. She praised him, admired him, from time to time she hugged him close to her. And how good she looked in that dress. Viktor, on the playground with her, was sure he would never need another woman. He would love and care for his mother for the rest of his days. And the other Viktor said, "Martina, what a bad prank. Why? Why have you chosen to be my mommy? I will have to love you in a different way, now." So mom Martina smiled and wiped melted ice cream from his collar, and Viktor looked at her and forgot the world.

When I woke up, the Baby had already become Sebastian.

"Forget about making another one," said Martina, who had bravely waited my awakening to inform me of her decision. Then she fell asleep, exhausted.

When I told her of the strange dream I had made, she darkened. Something was not convincing. She too remembered having dreamed something like that, when she had started taking her uncle's remedy for sleep. It couldn't be a coincidence.

So she decided to make an experiment. Unbeknownst to me, of course; she began to administer to me the extract of white flowers before I went to sleep, putting it in beverages or teas she convinced me to drink before going to bed. Upon awakening, she asked me how I felt and what I had dreamed.

She wrote down my dreams on a small notebook and fretted more and more: "How odd" I told her "I dreamed of being a farmhand, just arrived in a town, and you were married to someone else! But I brought you away with me. It was morning and there was plenty of light."

And then I told her of having been, in dreams, brother, confessor, father, nephew. Only after she got this irrefutable feedback, she let me read the account of the dreams she had transcribed time before, substantially identical to those that I had made. Only from a different point of view.

"What a strange coincidence," I stated. Then I went back to the garden to prune the roses.

Martina ran after me like a fury, she seemed out of her mind. I did not understand why she was so much agitated. Absurd coincidences happen all the time in every corner of the world. This time one had happened to us. It doesn't necessarily meant that it meant something.

"Oh yes. And I'm determined to find out what! "

She ran into her uncle's dusty old lab and turned it upside down to find the missing part of the manuscript from which she had learned how to make the remedy for sleep, hoping to find an explanation, or at least some feedback.

### 25 - The Study on Sleep

She searched everywhere, in drawers and closets, on shelves, under the desk, between the stills and the dusty objects of the laboratory, in the stuffing of the seats and under the weak boards of the floor, in the fireplace, up the chimney, tapping the walls, peeling wallpaper, looking for false bottoms in chests of drawers and rummaging even the fixtures. Next time I tell you everywhere, believe me, I mean everywhere. The remainder of the manuscript, however, was nowhere to be found.

However, one way or the other, the book was found. But didn't I say everywhere, with no result? Will we have to start over? Rest assured: the torn pages were in Malera's house. She told us herself, after finding her friend intent on gutting the room, that once Martina's uncle, in the grip of a strange crisis, delirious, with certainly not a bit of reason left, had torn those pages and tried to throw them into the fireplace. But Malera had managed to stop him and then offered to do it herself, failing to win the determination of the man of turning them to ashes. Then Martina's uncle had had a breakdown, and Malera had stolen the pages quickly, swearing blind then she had destroyed them in the fire.

But she couldn't read and never knew what was written in them. Why hadn't she asked someone to read them for her? First of all, she couldn't be sure that the person to whom she asked was honest. What if they contained the instructions to get to a treasure? To get rich? To find happiness? She could not let anyone take away the secret. So, first of all, she had to find someone reliable enough. At that moment she couldn't think of anyone, but you never know. For now let's keep them here. Then she had neatly forgotten.

She gave it to Martina: she trusted her enough to believe that, if the book contained important instructions to achieve wealth, Martina would leave them to their rightful owner. Or at least share.

I was still very slow to read, so Martina kept the half book with her, for a solitary reading. One afternoon she shut herself and little Sebastian in the study of her uncle and read the whole book, complete with all its pages at last, from beginning to end. When she emerged, in the evening, she seemed upset. Now incredulous, now moved. Now convinced, now reticent. And now I don't know. Did I want to know what it contained? Sure, I was dying with curiosity, of course. But she said she must first reflect and perhaps the next day she would tell me. Of course there was no valid reason to do it: simply the great amusement of seeing me wring my hands out of curiosity. She did this because childish pranks were rooted in her deepest instincts. But she had a smile on her face as usual. She didn't sleep that night, I heard her.

The day after she said that she would tell me about the book. Because, of course, her uncle had taken the same remedy and made certain dreams. And their strangeness had not gone unnoticed. So much so that, after careful study, he had drawn his conclusions.

I tried to think about it during the day, but I'm too easily distracted, and thoughts escape from under my eyes. Thus, in the evening, I hadn't imagined anything about it, I had no hypothesis.

Martina wanted us to go and sit on the terrace.

"My uncle was completely mad," she concluded.

Concluded, because she wasn't able to say anything else for a while.

After I walked back and forth on the terrace for a long time, she grew impatient because people who walk back and forth unnerve her. I sat down beside her and finally she decided to share with me the contents of the book.

That time I was sorry I couldn't read well.

"The first part tells of how uncle arrived to Australia and learned various arts regarding the extraction of substances from flowers and plants. In that place there are so many species that we don't know, and it seems that many are used as remedies for ailments and diseases, or to provide some benefit. Uncle often went to the forest with the natives to collect samples to use, and he enjoyed creating a herbarium to classify the new species he found, because he didn't only collect known species: often he also found flowers that he liked and had never seen before. So he picked up some roots to transplant. It went precisely this way, with the white flower.

"The strange thing was that none of the natives seemed to have ever seen it. Even those who knew local flora perfectly. Not even witch doctors and shamans. Never seen, unknown. Uncle, moreover, liked those wide, thick, snowy petals. So he took them to Europe on his return and began to plant them as ornamental flowers. One day, by chance, he tried to extract from the flower that substance that I used, and that he too used in his time, to induce sleep. Why? Because he knew the extraction techniques and had used them on all known flowers. Why not try it on that as well? He might find something interesting. Uncle was not just an explorer, but also a man of science.

"Then he had the substance he obtained analyzed, to rule out toxicity. And finally, in defiance of danger – that still could not be ruled out completely – in search of new things as he was accustomed to do during his travels, he took a drop, ready to jot down every little change in his physical and mental status. The result was that he fell asleep instantly and slept very well, feeling in good shape the next day. Needless to emphasize how this discovery excited him: he had found a new remedy to treat insomnia. And a very effective one. He felt very proud of himself, until he began to make a series of very strange dreams. No, not strange. Disturbing, yes. He kept dreaming the same woman all the time. No, he said at one point, not the same woman. Many different women, whom he knew to be the same woman. No idea who she was. Then he met Malera and recognized her. She was the steam woman, taking shape dream after dream.

"Initially, my uncle had counted his dreams – and Malera – among the mishaps that occur to very active people, with many thoughts in mind, and original ones at that, who have travelled a lot. He didn't understand, initially, that the cause of all that were the white flowers.

"Then, at some point, after giving the remedy to a friend who was struggling to sleep, he realized that the nature of the dreams of that man must be the same of his. He also dreamed of a woman, but he knew her. She was always changing shape, appearance, role. But it was her, he was really sure of that.

Could it be a coincidence? If so, it was a very weird one. It was so that the idea of the study on sleep came to his mind: he was determined to have some people use the remedy, then transcribe their dreams to understand more about their origin, their meaning. He wanted to know how the substance acted on our brains.

"He found the volunteers: friends, more than anything else, all intrigued by uncle's story. Positivist friends, sceptical about ghosts, rational. Convinced that our mind, if properly used, cannot trick us. Except that they didn't understand this: it is our mind that uses us, and not vice versa. Is it not true that we can do nothing against sleep? And when we surrender to it, are we masters of ourselves, of our thoughts? Can we clearly analyze our fears? Recognize all of our remote desires? Not at all: we are completely at their mercy. Sleep brilliantly demonstrates the weakness and failure of the human being as a rational creature. Well, all these men who would not scare so easily – and even women, wives of these men, also freed from superstition – amounted to about six and were subjected to the Sleep Remedy voluntarily. Uncle wrote in great detail all the dreams reported by the subjects and their dates. They were not very different from the ones we made. But one thing impressed him. Or better two things.

"The first is that two of the subjects, husband and wife, at some point began to make the same dreams from two different points of view. Uncle, of course, at first thought that it was a joke, but soon realized that it wasn't. And that's what happened to us.

"The second is that a patient, this is how he calls them, dreamed of a woman who was not his wife, and whom he recognized to be the new maid, just arrived from another town. He was sure that she was the woman he dreamed, and recognizing her he was unable to restrain his feelings: he run away with her, abandoning his wife. His wife hadn't dreamed of her husband either, but the man in question, the transmigrator of nocturnal dreams, didn't arrive.

"My uncle was convinced that if his patient had not dreamed the mysterious woman, he would not have recognized her in the waitress and would not have fled with her. So he started to think – no, not started, continued – that the flower was very dangerous. At that point he paused the experiments and decided to continue only on himself. He wanted to find out where he would arrive, if there was a conclusion to the transformation of the spirit of Malera, dream after dream.

"Then there are confused pages, uncle seems completely out of his mind, almost delirious. He says he doesn't want to take the flower anymore, then he continues and says even stranger, nuanced things. Identities no longer defined, confused, more and more ideal and less and less of flesh and bones. At one point he says that he has seen the future. The future, you see? That he has dreamed of a time to come, and Malera is still there but she has other shapes, other meanings.

Uncle is collapsing, the night visions terrify him. Worse than opium, he writes. Opium, in comparison, could be fed for breakfast to children. Incomprehensible things, a future time out of the reach of our understanding. And her, her, her again. Until when? To what extent? Because he realizes that it is a journey, not a driveway of randomness. But what is the end point?"

"How does the story end? Did he discover anything important?"

"Yes, he did, even if it is unbelievable. He took the flower almost till the end. Almost, he says, because if he wanted to see to the end he would not survive. But he comes close. Almost. I guess you want to know what it is."

"Of course I want to know. I'm dying of curiosity."

"My uncle says that Christian priests are wrong. Our soul is not destined to Paradise. Neither to Hell. For the time being. There are other passages first, and then nobody knows."

"Passages? I don't understand, what do you mean?"

"Other lives, Viktor. My uncle says that after each life there is another, in which we change shape, take on another body, have another story. The flower is able to bring back the memories of the transmigrated soul. Memories we wouldn't be able to recall clearly otherwise. And the common thread of all of our lives is another person. Just one, that changes and takes different shapes, in all lives."

"And how do you recognize them?"

"You can't. This is the point. Unless you have the flower. My uncle says it is part of the destiny and that it should not be forced. He says that there is a point of arrival but to get there you must live. Over and over again. The point of arrival, uncle writes, is the perfect realization. This realization means having lived in all ways, having loved our Koibito – uncle called it that but I don't know what it means exactly – in all possible ways. I think it's a term that defines the person intended for us, the only one we can truly love, the one who will complete us. It is a sort of guide, without which we would be lost in the immensity of time. It's what makes of our life a journey, not a walk in the desert.

"If we haven't loved it in all ways, as a father, brother, lover, husband, nephew, uncle, friend, in sickness and in health, in good times and in bad (but death will not do us part completely), in every possible form of love, how can we achieve complete love?

See, the purpose of all life is to complete the journey, achieve the perfect love, and the perfect love can only be achieved after we have been able to love the Koibito of every possible love."

"And what happens then?"

"Nobody knows. Once he reached his goal, not even uncle dared to look any farther. He feared that he would go completely insane, or even die. He arrived at the door, climbed the last step, but then he had to stop." She took the book and read: "When we reach the wholeness and completeness, what does it matter what happens? It may be a perpetual state of spiritual perfection, then eternity is desirable and may be the culmination of a circular route, starting again. From separation to unity, from the fragment – we are a fragment drifting in the infinite of the universe, the time, the eternity – to completeness, absence of motion, immobility of time. What is beyond that, it's unfathomable mystery. I am afraid we would go mad, certainly we would not understand. It's not for just one life, nor just one soul."

"Uncle" Martina continues, "explains then some phenomena, in the light of his discovery. We have always been accustomed to consider certain types of relationships legitimate and good, some not. For example, we deem unnatural that brother and sister love each other, that they want to be together as lovers. Yet there are cases of this kind of love. These people are... How does uncle call them? Enlightened, that's how. These are people who have a stronger submerged conscience and a thinner rational one, who perceive the truth, beyond the appearances of contingent life, with more clarity. People who have somehow recognized the Koibito and are in the condition of not being able to love it as they wish. They feel the blame of the people around them, the time, the society in which they live, but the link to the original soul, the one that already lived long and that only they recognize, is too strong.

"So a few loves happen that seem to be a total mistake, a horror, an accident that could maybe be prevented, surely a nonsense. Because their reason is deeper, less visible."

"And had your uncle seen the future? Did he know where and when, and in which shape, he would be reborn, and how Malera would come again?"

"Yes, he knew. He claims to have seen it but doesn't write anything about it. It is understandable that he thought it was an enormity, to sit down and write something like that. He kept it to himself. And Malera knows nothing, apparently, neither about the studio nor about what happened to uncle."

"Do you think we should tell her?"

"No, I don't think so."

"And what do we do with the flower?"

### 27 - Koibito

Martina had the idea that it was necessary to destroy the flower. I agreed with her, but she didn't seem truly convinced. There was something that held her back, that prevented her from truly wanting its extinction. After all, the flower was a possibility. Maybe right, maybe not. But destroying it meant depriving us of it completely, once and for all: no looking back.

What would you do, faced with the possibility of knowing how your past lives were and, most importantly, how future ones will be? I have no doubts: I give up. What purpose could it ever serve? When I am born again, I will not remember anything of today, of now. Not even that I peeked at the future. The only life it would effect would be this one, and it's not sure that it would be a positive effect. If I'll be happy, I rejoice. But if I'll be unhappy, I don't want to spoil these present days because of a future ghost.

I was afraid that Martina thought the same way but could not resist the temptation.

"This story of the flower is absolutely crazy. Absurd, improbable. Do you think it is all true? What if uncle made up everything? If it was a bad joke?" she asked doubtfully, in front of the terrace of flowers that we had before us and that would not survive much longer, at least in our intentions.

"If so, how do you explain our dreams?"

"I don't know. There could be many explanations, it must not necessarily be as uncle wrote. Maybe we don't know why it happens, but there is another explanation. We're simply not able to find it. He might have made everything up, right?"

"Yes, he might. It may be pure invention. A hallucinogen flower, nothing more."

"No, nothing more."

"But even then, we have to get rid of it. We cannot keep it here, don't you think?"

"Yes, you're right. We'll destroy it. And what if uncle hasn't made up anything, anyway? If it were all true?"

"If it were all true, it would be a weird thing. Really weird. Be reborn? What does it mean? In short, who would tell you that it is really you? I am not sold."

"It's like Paradise. Who tells you that the one going to Paradise is really you? You just know, right? What a question! As if there was a way to determine if a person is just herself. So how do you know that it will truly be you to wake up tomorrow in the bed where you fell asleep?"

There was something that did not convince me, but I didn't know what it was. Thinking tired me: following the thread, I reached a point where it was twisted and turned into an inextricable knot. This is why thinking wasn't the best thing I could do: when I came to the knot, hard as I tried to unravel it, there was nothing I could do. So I, almost two meters tall and with a large presence, stopped in front of a ball of thread that was impossible to disentangle, big or small that it was, and had to stop or go back.

"You're right," I admitted.

"As usual."

"As usual. But I think there is something incomprehensible in this story, that it isn't possible to clarify, try hard as we might."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that our head is made of only a small part of the matter in the universe, isn't it? Therefore inside there is only room for a small part of everything. Even understanding: we can understand only a small part, because we are made of small parts. It is useless to try to grab the rest."

"I'm not following you. For a change, you are extremely convoluted."

"I mean this: you know what the word infinity means, and eternal too, right?"

"Right."

"But when you try to imagine it, understand it, I mean really, fully understanding it, how this infinity is, you cannot. Universe is infinite? What does it mean? A vacuum that never ends? A full that never ends? And what does never mean? The truth is that time doesn't exist. And maybe not even space. Can there be a moment when it all started? But if it's a moment, there's a before. Then there was time before. And even before the before, ad infinitum. But what is infinity, we cannot understand it. And so eternity. If we want to be logical, it's all a terrible contradiction."

"My head is spinning! What crazy things you say!"

"Because our head is too small to hold all these things. Beyond our limits there is the truth. And perhaps, beyond that limit, not even the concept of truth makes sense. Because it would be everything and nothing simultaneously. What do you say? It's absurd? Yeah, it must be so. All terribly absurd. But never mind. Now we're here. Isn't it comforting? We have the lighthouse, the sea. Don't worry about what will be, it would do us no good. Being here and now, this is the secret of everything. At least, that's all we have."

"All we have."

And then we destroyed the white flower. Koibito.

But I believe that Martina salvaged one and kept looking. Looking ahead. I don't know if that made her happy, but I don't think so: future ghosts are somehow cartilage that is difficult to dissolve, as if it were pure spirit. It is easier to believe in their existence, and they are more difficult to banish.

29 - Twilight in the lighthouse

It is dusk. Here in the lighthouse sunset has been somehow sad for some time. Because of the sea in front of us or the time that we left behind.

Martina, by now, is always sad at sunset. How she loved sunsets once! But now she sits near the window and looks out. If I talk to her she doesn't hear me, or pretends not to hear. Then she asks me to go to her and holds my hands.

"Do you remember, Viktor, the book of my uncle?" she asks.

"Of course I remember."

"Do you think he was right? That he wasn't completely crazy? I mean, about what happens to us after we die. Do you really believe that soul is immortal and that we will be able to be reborn and recognize each other always, in every life?"

She had always been like that, she had never learned. To be happy, you only have to make a habit of not asking questions that will never be answered.

"I think so. I mean, why would he lie?" I reassured her.

"I don't know. Because it suited him. Because people make up stories not to be afraid. Because he was mad. For a lot of good reasons."

"But the dreams? How do you explain them?"

Martina wouldn't like to get old. Martina wanted to remain beautiful, as when we first met. No, maybe as a little later, when she was a bit less child. She will always hide her ankles, she will always remember to cover them with the hem of her long skirt. She doesn't want me to see them when they will no longer be like this.

"They will become ugly," she says.

I think they will always be beautiful: they are Martina's ankles. They are white and thin and I liked it when she forgot them under the light of the moon. Now I just want her to stay beside me. How would I have done without her?

But Martina is not satisfied with hows. She wants whys.

"Even if we were reborn, if you don't remember anything about your past life, it is as if it's not really you. I don't know, I am not sold. I don't like the idea that when I find you I will not remember anything about this. And about who knows how many other lives before. Yet who knows how many things have happened to you as a child that you don't remember. And yet you cannot say that you aren't yourself. But if we were reborn, would you still love me?"

"That's not a question that can be answered. How could I know what I would do if I were reborn and didn't remember anything about myself? I'd be another person and I cannot vouch for what another person would do."

"On the contrary, you would be you. You, you, always you. It was you, in all those dreams, in all of the lives we've lived. I've always recognized you. Tell me. If we were in a difficult situation, if you belonged to someone else or if circumstances wanted us apart, would you flee away with me? Or would you forsake me?"

"No, how could I?"

"Would you want me even if I were ugly, if I had thick ankles? Small eyes?"

"Well, thick ankles, I don't know..."

"Be serious!"

"I don't understand where you're going. It's simply absurd. They were only dreams that impressed you. And the theories of an old man full of imagination, which might be true or not. We'll never know. Don't think about it, forget it."

I was certain that she hadn't resisted the lure of the flower. How far had she looked? I had to find it and destroy it completely before it was too late, before she went too far. I had never seen her so upset before. I don't know why but I remember the night when she climbed to the top of the tower to find me. I tell her and we laugh together.

"I wasn't looking for you. I just wanted to run away from home."

"This is what you think. If you hadn't been there for me, you'd have just run away. But you came because I needed you, otherwise you'd be gone. Because I was alone and shabby, because I had a ridiculous hairdo. Why else?"

"And if there really are other lives, lives in which it will be hard to love me, will you try it, at least? Would you do crazy things for me?"

"Martina, honey, we've been together in this life. We have been well, happy. Isn't that enough?"

"No, not enough for me."

The Author

Viola Victor is the pseudonym of a young author born in Brescia and living in Bergamo (Italy). After graduating in modern literature she began to teach in middle and high schools. "Nocturne" is her debut novel.

www.violavictor.com

The Editor

Carmelo Massimo Tidona, employee, writer and translator in his spare time, has been reading and writing since as long as he can remember. Some of his short stories have been published in various anthologies.

For 0111edizioni Carmelo Massimo Tidona published:  
_"Trittico Oscuro"_ , collection of urban fantasy tales (2009, Italian).  
_"Riflessi d'Ombra"_ , urban fantasy novel (2009, Italian)

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