Annalisa De Simone: “The day I felt late in life”

Then suddenly a sentence you’ve read so many times becomes
something bigger, deeper, something that stings you like
she hadn’t been able to do it before. This: “Soon it was late in my life”.
Marguerite Duras writes it in a novel, The lover, which for years
I continue to bring with me, to browse.
I remember the day when, I was wandering around the table, not
I could do nothing and took Duras’s book from the shelf.
The sentence was on page seven, underlined in red.

I don’t know if that happens to
all of feeling late on their own life. At the time I had
thirty-five years old and, for the first time, I suddenly collapsed
within this acceleration of time. As if there weren’t any
quite. I asked myself: is this the life you wanted? Getting older
without a child? Is it too late to change anything, everything?
Shortly after, I slipped from the pages of the same book
hands a yellowed photo. Mr. Gianni sitting with his legs apart in the back
the table, in shirt and apron. His eyes fixed on the clay he shapes
between the fingers. The black nails and the thumbs just inches from the shape.
There was a date behind the photo: March ’94. I was about to turn eleven
years. As a child, I was accompanied to Mr. Gianni’s house
to teach me how to model clay. That way of
to greet me when I appeared at the door: he always seemed to be in high spirits
and he always had a candy in his pocket. Baby eyes on that
old man’s face, bright, prehensile, they made me tenderness. Like his
radical good humor, while he worked the clay and sang.
On the table, in the foreground, you can see some of his
gear. The basin of water to melt the dough, the gauze for
filter it, toothpicks, shapes, brushes. I don’t remember who took the shot
this photo. Midday or early afternoon light, you can tell
from the reflection above the plane, the clean shadow of who is behind the lens.
Gianni took my hands in his and told me to move them with
slowness and when I got impatient he would say it again, with the tone
identical to before, and after ten seconds he repeated: trust you.
As I put the photo back between the pages of the book and the book on
shelf, I thought, it must be this: one day you think you have the
control, the next day you are clay in the hands of who knows what. Very
often, of a desire.
The protagonist I wrote about would swear to her husband
that the lack of a child would certainly not have destroyed the
their relationship. Was he lying? She didn’t want a child. Or it began
to wish it? Suddenly this woman would have lived the same
acceleration of the time in which, that day, I felt myself.
Every home is warmth, family, nest. Also sounding board of
own thoughts, and budgets. Duras always writes: «It is in the house that
we are alone. Not outside the home, but inside. In the park there are birds, cats.
Once: a squirrel, a ferret. You are not alone in the park. But in
home, we are so alone that we get lost».
In the silence of the house that day, I could not determine what the
wish for a child would have produced on my life. But in the
confusion of the moment I had her, the protagonist. Thanks to a book
that I started browsing, and thanks to the photo that was inside, the shadows are
they are made less gloomy and I didn’t feel alone at all, quite the contrary.
Looking at myself from the outside I would have said: a woman. With his fears, i
wishes, with his work. Aside from the acceleration of time, it does
I remember it as a beautiful day.

* Annalisa De Simone (L’Aquila, 1983) has a degree in Humanities and Philosophy. He made his debut with the novel One Way (Baldini & Castoldi 2013). With Marsilio he published Non ora, please (2016) and My reasons I told you (2017) and in the PassaParola series Jane’s friends. Surviving falling in love with Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. In 2017 she was president of the Teatro Stabile d’Abruzzo.

Opening photo: Dirk Vogel