How I Left Myself Out of the Grave

[…]

One day we sat in front of Il Signore Galvani in his dying bed.

The bed, since the last time we remembered, had grown to fill the whole room. We could see nothing of Il Signore Galvani but his hands. The hands came out of nowhere, since the body of Il Signore Galvani had shrunk under the sheets that were vast and white as sails. The hands of Il Signore were blue, containing all the blood that Il Signore had left in his body.

I stood up from the chair, pretending I had to stretch my legs, since we had been sitting by Il Signore for several hours by then, and looked in the vastness of the ship-bed until I saw his head black and dried up of all its fluids, small like a chestnut.

The chairs were not made for sitting as long as we did, and soon caused pins and needles in our legs. Our legs asleep, we fell asleep too.

We woke up to the sound of a word that Il Signore Galvani was saying. We all stood up and looked at the chestnut-head to read its mouth because it was difficult to understand the word. The lips of Il Signore were not opening to release the word, so it came out like the sound of our chairs on the floor when we stood up. We discussed which word the sound could be and started to repeat some words that Il Signore Galvani was fond of saying. Some of these words we did not know the meaning of, and never asked Il Signore the meaning of, but repeated and became fond of, only because we learned how to pronounce them the exact way that Il Signore Galvani pronounced them.

None of these words matching the sound that was coming out of Il Signore Galvani, with insistence now, from his mouth or nose or ears, we discussed whether or not the sound was only the sound of dying, and decided that it was.

We sat back on our chairs and each time the sound came out of Il Signore, we would all say his name. In doing so, we made sure the name would never escape from our memories. We had witnessed in Il Signore Galvani himself, throughout the years, words escaping from his memory. It seemed to us that as many words entered him, as many escaped him. Il Signore told us to hold on to his name and we would be safe. He suggested we always finish our sentences, when talking to him, with his name. He suggested that before doing anything we talk to him and the reason was that he had done everything before we did and had done it well and the proof was that he had lived that long.

[…]

Published in The New York Tyrant, Volume 2 Number 4

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