Trafika Europe 14 - Italian Piazza

Nicola Lagioia

Further on, beyond the wide-open bathroom door, the magnifying mirror fastened to the wall was flooded with the moon. Reduced by half up in the sky, it still appeared full in the concavity of the reflective surface—a silvery puddle that emerged from the past, at the bottom of which he seemed to find her again. The small opaque patch took form, drawing closer. Orazio realized once and for all that she was beautiful. He realized that she was in her death throes. He realized, with a shiver, that sheer will couldn’t have kept anyone on their feet like that, which meant there had been something else making her place one foot in front of the other. Movement itself, more than that from which the movement physically derived. A quicksand, a dead swelling beneath the summer rain. He understood, above all, that he’d swerved not to avoid her but to save himself, because everything about her was a magnet and an absence of will, the hypnotic call that, once followed, makes everything identical and perfect, so that we cease to exist.

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