I was born old in this new flesh, I know it and I return to write in my notebook as if rubbing a lamp without a lamp and the city of my other life rises whole from the smoke of my mind; then I go back, I walk again through the tight streets that the wall keeps with the zeal of a sacred beast, and I speak a fable in a low voice so that time will obey me, for in that place the stone hears and remembers.
Imagine a city of broken bells and towers that watch like sentinels that never sleep, walls that allow no slit and no mercy, great doors that open with the patience of judges and close with the anger of kings; and inside, what my flesh knows, Gothic ruins lift black ribs against the sky as if the sky were an animal willing to be ridden by faith, what grace, and between those ribs the wind prays prayers that no one taught, prayers with teeth that bite and bite hard; all the rest is a restless dream that each night stands up and lies down in another bed, the alleys snarl with malice, the passages climb like serpents that learned to sing, houses appear with new windows and old names, patios are lost where a girl left a bucket of water and reappear later with that same water turned into a mirror.
I saw it and I cannot deny it, each dawn forces the feet to unlearn the map and the memory to feign innocence and when the sun falls the routes are forgotten, as the names of the guilty are forgotten; only the wall remains nailed into the viscera of the earth and only the broken churches hold their ground, anchors that desire not the sea but stillness; beyond, when the gates allow passage, the whole island breathes in fields of humble grain and at every stretch a Romanesque jewel flickers, some almost dust, others entire temples that, though tired, are all alive by the hands that light candles and by mouths that still beseech upon the same floor where the grandparents beseeched.
And I have seen how faith clings to its brick as moss clings to its shadow, how the peasant bows to the evening and the evening answers him; on the hills and on the plains another memory waits, older than those towers, stone ships beached forever, flanks woven from rounded stones that know the secret of invisible tides, vessels conceived to sail the other sea, the one that wants no water and drinks souls, sea that the old touch with the hand and then withdraw the hand with respect… I caressed them once and felt the pulse of the island enter my wrist without permission; I say that I remember all this because I was a neighbor of that shifting city, I was a woman of bread and nettles, I held the key to a door that no longer exists and the wall spoke to me with the voice of a stern lover.
My lover told me that whoever is born in his shadow is never freed, that is why I write and do not ask forgiveness, if tomorrow I wake and the labyrinth changes again, I will know it still belongs to me, for it was the dream that taught me to walk, and the dream claims me like a dog that finds its mistress in the snow and licks the guilt from her until it is clean.
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