TE17 Mysterious Montenegro

Franca Mancinelli

place where the little dead animals I had fed were sleeping, the seeds that could not grow. And basically the boundaries between what is real and what we have imagined are so fragile that I might have let them be blurred by the water and the wind. Perhaps nothing had happened. Perhaps that sealed case was empty. That was the first time I wrote. I wrote within myself, on my body so deeply that ever since, I have taken the road on which I now walk, the one which, in time, would have appeared to me more clearly. If I had brought that sentence to my mouth, today I would be another person. The part of my life that I have spent up to nowwould have been different. This is why, for me, everything continues to be staked on words. With words I have an unsettled account. I have yielded my words so many times in my life that I have often become one of the ghosts, those presences who wander around, lightly touching things and other people, as if serving a sentence. In my early adolescence, I knew inch by inch the floor of the bus that would transport my group of friends from school to home. I was always at the edge of the circle, always on the threshold of not being there. I felt so estranged that I would console myself at the thought that a big pine tree stood next to the bar where my friends and I would get together, and that I would be protected by its crown all the time. In those years, I began to speak within the silence of writing. A very thin handwriting slowly filled notebook pages: I would draw with words what I saw from the window, note down what happened to me. But life was so strong, so deeply engraved inme, that it made me feel howweightless my signs were on paper: those notebooks could have been left in the wind and rain without causing a loss for me. They just contained 132