A MAN WHO DOES NOT SLEEP

by PETER ABRAMI

The churches are closed when the sun goes down, as if by closing they were pushing the sacredness of this place of prayer out, making the churchyard, the square, the whole city, a temple wrapped in the dark blanket of night. The city has a finger in front of its mouth, it becomes silent, shy, dormant.

This is how Gorizia appears from my room, via Rastello 19, 00.53 am. The thick walls of ancient stone isolate me, exclude me from the street, from life. Often the best things are the simplest. It is therefore enough to open a window to open wide to the world. Hearing, now, takes over sight. During the day, continuous rustling, tourists from the north walk distracted by the guide who interrupts their wandering thoughts, who now climb the gutters, now throw themselves through deep manholes. At night, muffled, even a pin that falls becomes an anvil.

I should sleep, of course, but even that has now become a skill to be perfected. I squint my ears. Outside there is a shout. The city is alive. At least somewhere. Who knows if in some bar that is still open, if on the benches-olive groves of Piazza Vittoria, if on the improbable walls of some building, on the shutter surmounted by a sign that has seen better days, young people are perched, tooth and nail, resisting, so as not to find themselves like me, alone, inside, writing about them, together, outside.

Inside and outside they can suddenly become frighteningly concrete concepts.

I am seized, then, by the strong temptation to violate this inviolable opposition, this biblical binarism, to do like Perec and throw myself into the streets of the city, OF the cities and to become a city myself, so much so that I can describe myself, radio commentary in the second person.

I’m not Perec. I stay, I write. After all, he too lost himself, for hours, days, endless weeks looking at the stains in the ceiling.

If I look at the white, cracked ceiling, what ceiling do my opposite counterparts look at, down there, on the pavement? Below, in front of their noses, the darkness is defeated, nibbled by neon signs, street lamps, car lights that look out like cats’ eyes. Then you also put the real eyes of the city, those illuminated, illuminating windows. Devoured, people within them cannot, or do not want to, succumb to sleep, salvific, redeeming temporary death. But what is the ceiling of Gorizia, the ceiling of the cities?

The sky today is particularly distant, bony, empty. Perhaps a thread of fog denies me the vision of the firmament. We have to settle, then, for lower, more textured ceilings, pebbles, tiles and onions. Certainly, another day… Another day the wind will blow away the fog, uncovering this roof in favor of a higher, more distant, but at the same time closer one. Cities by the dozens, hundreds, thousands of kilometers, cities in tiles, marble, parquet, millenary cities and young cities, cities with armies of cranes and cities razed to the ground by builders of death, cities flooded and burned, lived and disappeared, different for five walls, united by the same ceiling of points in the dark.

Georges Perec, before leaving us to read the brilliant A Sleeping Man, in the preface he relies on Kafka, who says “You don’t need to leave the house. Stay at your table and listen. Don’t even listen, just wait. Don’t even wait, he remains there all alone and in absolute silence. The world will come to offer itself to you so that you can unmask it, it cannot do otherwise, it will turn ecstatically at your feet”. So here I am, voluntarily trapped, between table, bed, chair and window. I haven’t gone out, I don’t listen, I don’t wait. Silence. In the cities, tens, hundreds, thousands of miles from me, God only knows how many are doing the same, under the same points in the sky. An entire city of arms that, like seismographs, record small, ridiculous earthquakes, faint lines in the urban electrocardiogram.

I haven’t gone out, I don’t listen, I don’t wait. Silence.
Here, outside, far away,
A woman laughs
A man coughs
The last night passes on the street
Here, outside, farther away
The sun rises
Churches open