TE23 Double Feature

Tomas Espedal

The Year

voices and shouts they fell silent with the light with the morning and that dead silence was almost worse in an enclosed room. I must have dropped off for a few hours because when I tried to get up my hands and feet were red with countless bites they covered my entire body so many swellings and bites that I lay there feeling feverish and gradually fever did develop I’d become ill. I was ill but I was supposed to be in Avignon for the sixth of April it had been fixed. For over a year I’d read the songs Petrarch had written to Laura and now I wanted to see the place where Petrarch saw Laura for the first time and I wanted to visit 128

the house he’d built in the valley of Vaucluse: About thirty miles from Avignon I found a small secluded valley called Vaucluse where the loveliest of all springs the Sorgue rises. Entranced by the beauty of the place I settled here with my books. In this house where Petrarch lived alone with his dog the poet wrote his book about living a retired and solitary life De vita solitaria: As I approached my fortieth year and was yet in possession of my youthful strength and ardour I turned my back so entirely on my natural inclinations that I quenched even the memory of them and it was as if I had never seen a woman. If it was possible to live alone 129