Unsent Letters #36

Parallelisms

Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash, rendered black & white by me

Dear A.,

I woke again at four forty-four last night. Time is parallel, a voice was saying to me, and on those three words, I felt something delicate over my eyes, like a light blow or the caress of a feather, inviting me to open them gently, not abruptly, as usually happens when you step out of a dream, and look at the clock. Then, in a state of unexpected calm, my heartbeat regular, I stared at the ceiling, where the blue lights of Cinema delle Rose, on all night even though their last showing is at ten o’clock, form a curious circular pattern.

It was already dark out when my reunion with Maurizio came to an end, after two hours of life updates and anecdotes, old photographs and reminiscences, and it had started raining. We had arranged to meet the day before yesterday, more than twenty years after our last time, at Il Flauto Magico, a tea room Maurizio had opened decades ago as a side gig while working at Dad’s company. A tea room, something our little hometown lacked back then, between the late seventies and early eighties. There has always been a deep mutual respect between Maurizio and me, not only because he was one of Dad’s closest and most trusted collaborators but also because I thought he was smart, easy to talk to, unafraid to speak his mind, well-read and intellectually stimulating -- an all-around good person. Over the years, I came to learn that he thought the same of me, though early on it was hard to tell whether that was because I was his boss’s son or a sincere appreciation. His father, Cleto, was an artist. He painted ceramics but also created other works, including portraits. Many of his pieces were in our home, as Dad never shied away from helping out emerging artists (or non-emerging ones, for that matter). In Cleto’s case, though, I don’t think it was about helping out; his creations were truly beautiful and sought after. Dad even commissioned several pieces specifically for our big red house in the countryside when we moved there almost forty years ago.

I asked him to tell me again the story of Dad going to find him one Sunday afternoon at his newly opened tea room, where he was busy waiting tables. The next day, Maurizio was supposed to travel to Paris to negotiate an important contract, and Dad wanted to make absolutely sure he had all the key points straight in his head. It was the early eighties, and there was this surreal scene: Maurizio was behind the counter, slicing cakes and boiling water for tea, while Dad was advising him to start the negotiation from a lower base than they had previously discussed -- say, X instead of Y -- in order to try and secure the deal on more favorable terms. Maurizio, sweating as his tea room bustled with customers and juggling multiple orders at once, assured Dad he had it covered and not to worry. Dad left but, after a couple of minutes, popped his head back in through the entrance door and called out, “Remember, X and not Y!” -- a bit like Lieutenant Columbo, who always returned with one last question mere instants after everyone thought he was done.

Walking back to the car in the rain, I pulled up my hood and tucked the things Maurizio had given me inside my jacket -- between sweater and jacket -- holding onto them with hands in pockets. He had given me two books and a few old photographs of Dad, one of which included me -- a clumsy seventeen-year-old awkwardly posing among others, dressed in terrible clothes. These, plus a thick Bolaño I already carried, made me look like I had a big belly. The car was parked quite a bit away from the tea place, as rain wasn’t in the cards and I enjoy walking. Crossing the whole town under the rain with no one around, in a spectral silence, made so many memories resurface, memories of my childhood and adolescence, when life was still a blank book waiting to be written. On the same paved street lined with a balustrade that I was walking on, the one that runs along the edge of the pine forest, where the red clay of the local tennis club’s courts can be seen in contrast to its green expanse, Mom used to take me for walks when I was a child, and as a teenager, I would meet my friends in the afternoons to talk about how much we all longed to escape, eager to leave for university in a big city, where our lives would finally take the shape we desired. It was a time with no internet and cell phones, that feels like eons ago.

And I had this thought, one that recurs whenever I find myself at, or walk past, a spot where I have a vivid memory of having been before, so vivid that I recall every physical and emotional detail of a certain moment lived there years, even decades, earlier: did child-me or adolescent-me have any idea, in those moments, that present-day me would one day walk past that exact spot and remember so clearly what happened there, as if able to see and touch those past versions of myself in a layering of temporal dimensions? It’s as if memory moved forward instead of only backward. Like the idea of a future memory -- not that one day in the future I will remember something I cannot yet know, but that I now hold a memory of something that will happen. And it isn’t a premonition; it’s something else. This probably doesn’t make any sense to you, but it does to me, and I’m sure my attempt to explain it doesn’t do the idea justice.

Exactly as Maurizio pointed his finger at the entrance door of Il Flauto Magico when he recalled that exchange with Dad on a Sunday afternoon some forty-five years ago, as if he were reliving the scene in every detail the very moment he (re)told me the story. And when Dad popped his head back in through the door to give Maurizio that last crucial recommendation à la Lieutenant Columbo, it’s as if, right then and there, he could already see the table where Maurizio and I would sit and remember that scene, forty-five years later, in a superimposition of two different time dimensions. As if time ran parallel, and every single moment lived on perpetually alongside every other, while we merely experienced one of these infinite sequences.

Time is parallel, said that voice an instant before four forty-four last night. A female voice. This time has recurred so often in my life that I feel compelled to look up whether waking at four forty-four holds any meaning, if a meaning exists at all. Dad passed on April 4th, and maybe this date has some meaning, but I remember it happening even when he was still around, many times. It’s funny, I’d always think when looking at the glowing clock in the dark, half-asleep, my vision blurred -- I keep waking at this time, or maybe I’m only dreaming that I wake at this time. Who knows. Maybe it’s the moment when the veil between all those parallel time dimensions is at its thinnest, when we can glimpse, perhaps even touch, if we stretch out an arm, a scene from another time layer, reliving it as mere observers, as if we were the ghosts of our past or future selves.

The idea of a reality composed of infinite time layers running parallel to one another, accessible by tearing through a translucent membrane that reveals itself only at certain points in our timeline, is something about which, for now, I only have the courage to write to you.

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"Unsent Letters" is a series released every other week. These are imaginary letters to fictitious or real individuals who may or may not have influenced my life, not always mirroring actual events.

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