So I left my hotel and moved into her apartment, a modern penthouse that overlooked the Tiber. Federico was delighted when he heard, because that, he explained, was precisely why he had put us in touch with each other. He knew that we would get along well. Ursula’s penthouse was split-level. I lived upstairs and she lived downstairs. Our love was abundant. She would help me, she would tell me not to worry about a thing, she was there to support me, she wanted me to write even if I didn’t earn a single penny.
But, gradually, I felt her presence weighing me down.
She wanted to enter my life more and more deeply. On top of that, I found it tiring that we did not speak the same language. For me, my language was the sea. And a fish can’t live on land. And so, one day when she was away in Florence, I packed my bags, I took my little transistor radio, my typewriter, my books, my manuscripts, my two changes of underwear, and disappeared from her house and her life, leaving her a poignant letter: “In order to write, Ursula, you have to keep your doors shut to the invaders from the outside world. You have to stop existing as I, as a separate individual, and become the intermediary of others.
Remember what it says in the Gospeclass="underline" if the seed does not fall onto good ground, it shall die; if it does not die it will bear fruit and bring forth a hundredfold. One’s personal problems are nobody else’s business. They cannot be made into art. They can only be got out of one’s system. And the world has suffered enough from that kind of release. Nowadays, we all want to express something that is more collective, we are all concerned about the nuclear disarmament of this small planet.
That is why, in order to write, you have to isolate yourself, you have to shut your doors to others, to exist within a sphere of the absolute, alone with your writing table and the universe.”
And I returned here to my base, to my island that had been devastated by the summer fires. I am cultivating my garden. I am sowing clover dreams, dreams of corn that become popcorn in dream theaters, pumpkin dreams that my fishermen friends use to make the buoys for their nets. And, as the War of Independence hero Kolokotronis wrote in his diary,
“As far as I could, I did my duty to literature. ” I decided to go to an orchard I had outside Nafplion. I went there, and stayed, and spent my time growing things. It pleased me to watch the small dream trees I had planted flourish. I draw water from my well, trying as much as possible to avoid artificial irrigation that would resemble Kolokotronis’s “embalmed dreams
that are preserved as long as ancient aqueducts in the valleys that are now being irrigated mechanically, with palm trees of water spurting to the rhythm of a pace maker. ” The water keeps flowing, watering my tomato plants.
Friends from the past come to see me every now and then. Sometimes even journalists come, to interview the writer who became a farmer. They talk to me of culture. I talk to them of agriculture. A few days ago, Rosa arrived on a yacht, traveling with some weird characters. But I liked the captain, because he was worried about the west wind. I found Rosa to be in great shape. She was happy now. She was expecting a child. Elias, her husband, was the owner of the yacht. I told her how lucky she had been to extricate herself from me in time. Don Pacifico and Doña Rosita….
I am waiting for the spring. The almond trees will blossom this year.
— 7-
Now this notebook is finished. The third one. If I had failed with the other two, I knew from the start that I would succeed with this one. The quality of the paper did not allow the pencil to catch because it was smooth, shiny, expensive of course (twelve thousand lire); I knew it would lead me to the end. I have told my story, fictitious like all stories, since the act of writing is the manifestation of the imaginary with the help of real means: pencil and paper. This third notebook, now approaching its end, determines by the number of its pages the length of my story. What I have written has nothing to do with me as an individual. However, I have managed to express the difficulty of expression in a world that keeps changing.
And all ends well, since life is but a dream.