Tours of the Black Clock

105

MY MEMORIES ARE WILLFULLY winged, capricious in flight. I lived in this room a long time before I knew where I was. For a large part of the last twenty years I own no memory. Sometimes I’m afraid to speak my own name, I’m afraid I’ll hear nothing. I don’t remember when I began to write for them again or why. For years I refused and then one day I was here at my small table writing. By then she was far away and it took a long time to call her back. I don’t know where she went all that time, or what she did. I hadn’t seen her since that night she called to me from the top of the stairs in our room on Dog Storm Street. When she returned she hadn’t changed at all, I’m sure. I don’t see her so clearly anymore but I’m sure she hasn’t aged a day. Though we’ve forgotten many things we used to do, we remember we were in love, the three of us. Assuming as I do when I feel the hair on my face, assuming as I do when I wake in the morning and find my feet grown arthritic and stiff, that I’m now more than fifty years old, then the year is at least 1967. The waves of the sea rock the room, they hum in the walls. I hear fishermen far away. I insist sometimes that I be allowed to see daylight. I only want to see and breathe it. It’s been just in the last several years I’ve come to understand I’m imprisoned in a sinking city in Italy. Except for my guards, I seem to be the only person living here; the city’s empty. The Germans have camouflaged it from the air, covering all the city’s passages and canals so that now it’s just one great maze with a blue roof. So as to fool the enemy. One big mazed boat that never disembarks. I tell my guards I insist on seeing the daylight, and they take me past empty bridges and houses and empty piazzas to a tower where I have five minutes to look out at the city’s massive blue tarpaulin which has been made to appear as if it’s the sea. It’s at this moment that it occurs to me I’m not the only person living in this city after all, it’s at this moment it occurs to me he’s here too. After five minutes in the tower they say, That’s enough.