TE17 Mysterious Montenegro

Three Texts by Franca Mancinelli Translated from Italian by John Taylor

A Very Risky Game

Nomatterhowmuch I looked intothings, nothingwouldhappen; I liked to rock sentences inside me, their beginnings, imagining in the continuing wake the not yet formulated developments. I liked halting where the road branches off, like a huge delta that widens until it merges with a marshy lake, a marina, a sea with a shallow sandy bottom, a sea. And in the meantime everything enveloped me: hardly even formed, the sentences would wind around my body, preventing me from moving. I couldn’t speak, couldn’t get the sentences to come out the instant they were born—sentences that would be present and immediately passed by, immediately ready to generate others and assemble what I wanted to say. I have always loved going away until my body has two tiny cracks left to peer through. Clinging with my entire self to those two portholes and leaning out, immersed in the dim light that is spreading, I witness events, what is happening. While remaining on that threshold, I sometimes see my trembling arm reappear, then half a leg up to my thigh, a pointed shoulder, a breast; my body materializes now and then, never entirely. I am so free from what is going on that sometimes, out of joy, I could begin to jump like a small bird learning to fly. Yet often while I was running about, with those see-through soles on my shoes, I would go back inside my sky-blue hut on the boundary, with my blood that was staining the ground in small dark circles, almost calling out to someone to follow my tracks, to find my refuge. I would often wound myself, crashing against the walls as if I had 125