Last night the field was so still the cold seemed like cloth stretched over the furrows, and yet in the barn something breathed with impatience, as if the air had a pulse… I write to you from here, person I do not know, with the kerosene lamp trembling in my hand and the smell of damp hay carrying me back to a time I cannot date, a time that perhaps never existed outside my stubbornness, and I must say, I have fallen, that is the first thing, I have fallen until I touched bottom and there there was no water and no mud but an old silencing, a crust of unsaid words that stuck to my tongue, and in the dark I saw figures that spoke and repeated something that refers to me, I do not understand what, I never understand, no one would understand, because they are the figures I drew on the wall with charcoal when I still believed the privilege of drawing was its beautiful stillness, its patience of stone, but now, for a reason that escapes me and humiliates me, they dance and they sing, they have decided to change their nature, if nature exists, if change, if decision, if that way of lifting a painted arm and making it air; and today I look at them and feel my own hand, the one that traced them, no longer belongs to me, as if the bone were a tool lent by someone who never signs.
Last night I moved toward the wall with the caution with which one approaches a wounded animal, and they received me without looking at me, surrendered to a music that came from no instrument, only from the rub of their outlines against the limewash, from the white dust that fell like household snow and clung to my eyelashes… then what hurts me most began, voices in my bones, not a metaphor but a real murmur in the shinbone, in the ribs, a kind of chorus that tunes itself to pain and speaks me without naming me, and beside those voices the visions of written words that move, that fight, that dance, that bleed, then I watch them walk with crutches, in rags, a court of miracles from A to Z, an alphabet of miseries, an alphabet of cruelties. Now I see it, perhaps that is why I write to you, because no one here wants to hear what does not fit into the tally of tasks, the milk, the wire, the latch on the gate, and I too have been taught to keep quiet, not to give terror a chair at the table, but at night the field becomes an enormous room with no roof, and one hears too much, one hears the distant hum of the power line, the bark of a dog that dreams, one even hears silence like glass cooling.
I also saw among the figures the one who should have sung, I recognize her by the shape of her neck, by the curve of a back I drew with tenderness, and now she arches in silence, while in her fingers something is whispered, in her heart something is murmured, in her skin a lament does not cease, and I came closer, I felt the smell of damp hay mix with the sourness of my sweat, and I wanted to impose my old authority as a rural maker, as if charcoal were a law, but the wall did not obey, or perhaps I was the one who stopped obeying myself. I thought of the phone I sometimes turn on in secret to look at the news, that rectangle where letters run without a body, where tragedy slides under a finger, and I understood with a bitter clarity that there too the words have decided to change their nature, they move, they quarrel for my attention, they bleed in headlines, later they appear on crutches, they beg on the screen, and I, who believed myself safe behind the barn and my ignorance of the world, am reached all the same. There is something cruel in the fact that what is written does not remain, in the fact that memory is a fair of shadows that buy and sell their form, and there is also something necessary, because without that trembling perhaps there would be no truth, only a museum of frozen gestures.
I know it is necessary to know that place of metamorphosis to understand why I grieve in such a complicated way, why my body becomes a field within the field, full of furrows that cannot be seen and where sorrow sows its black grain, so I left the barn and walked to the well, frost crackled under my boots, I lifted a bucket and the iron burned me with cold, and in the water I saw pass, as in a tired mirror, the same words that earlier hurled themselves against the wall, now still but not calm, wounded things pretending to sleep. I thought of you, stranger, of the possibility that there is someone for whom these things do not seem an illness but a kind of lucidity, a way of looking without pretending the world is stable. I believe one falls to learn the texture of the bottom, its roughness, its faithfulness, and from there to watch how even the dearest figures betray the stillness we grant them out of fear, not out of love… I returned to the house with white dust on my fingers, as if I had touched a snowfall from years ago, and before turning off the lamp I saw on the inner wall a shadow that was not mine, a letter without an alphabet, a figure I have not yet drawn and it already calls me, and I understood that the night of the field does not end when morning comes, it only changes places inside you.
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