AND YET I FIND MYSELF RESISTING telling you everything. A poor tenor who is afraid of his own story and of his own dreams, as if using words instead of lyrics, words that have not been dictated, invented phrases rather than repetitive written texts, learned, and memorized, had paralyzed his powerful voice, which up until now has only known the recitative style. I find it hard to speak without a libretto.
I was not an entirely free man then, and what I do not know and what I fear I will never know is why I lied about this to Dato that night in the hotel bar, when he enquired about my marital status. It wasn't one of his first questions, but it makes no difference: I could not have imagined then what he was going to propose without actually saying that he was proposing something. And if I had told the truth, he might not have proposed anything.
"Ah, so you're a singer. I should have guessed as much from that great chest of yours, and those shoulders, those pectorals, that virile appearance; you know, you look exactly as everyone imagines a singer should look. Now I don't know much about music, but I love it, all of it, I don't mind what it is, I can happily listen to music whatever I'm doing, really, anywhere, any time. Yours must be a fascinating life."
Up until the moment when I lied about my situation, I was telling him the truth, although, from the start, I found Dato's manner very hard to take and his comments utterly trivial, so much so that just as I was about to respond, I was seriously considering whether it was worth getting involved in a boring conversation of a kind I'd had thousands of times before and which was (as can be seen) tinged with the inevitable impertinence of the ignorant, and all for the sake of a little company in what had once been my own city. But, despite his manner and his opening remarks, the truth is there was something intriguing about the fellow (whom I no longer believed to be a traveling salesman: he was too relaxed, his voice and his gestures too languid, his clothes, on closer inspection, too expensive) and, at the same time, too, there was something about him that invited confidence. For all his worldly tone, his appearance and his expression still struck me as unreal or perhaps too real, like a Daumier caricature. He smiled constantly and easily, revealing those great, bulging gums that seemed about to burst at any moment, and gestured animatedly with his miniature hands.
"Well, I don't know about fascinating. It's varied and interesting, and all the moving around certainly keeps you on your toes. But, although it might not seem like it, it's a pretty hard, solitary existence. All that traveling is very unsettling." And I spoke to him briefly (though vehemently) about my sorrows and my discontents, about my partial or latent despair, and then asked him the obligatory question: "And what do you do?"