Invisible. Jonathan Buckley
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words on a screen. My thoughts, with no objectionable tone, I hope.
The first fact, Claudia, is that I love you. You should not question this. It is the truth. I love you, but I do not need you. This also is the truth. I should not have said it, but it is true. I do not need you and I do not want to be in need of you, because that would be a diminution of my love for you. You say that you need me, but is that true? I don’t think that you need me, and I wouldn’t want you to need me. Your self-sufficiency is one of the qualities – one of the many, many qualities – I love in you. And it is important for me to remain as self-sufficient as I can. In London, at home, I can do that. In my rooms I know where everything is, precisely, and when I go outside I know where I am. It’s so many steps to one junction, so many steps to another. I can get to the park without anyone’s help; I know where the gates are, where to find the benches, which way the paths go. When I walk along the streets near my house, I know which voices I can expect to hear and where I can expect to hear them. I know which people are likely to talk to me, and I know something about them. I have friends here as well, of course, and these friends are especially valuable to me, because it’s hard to make new friendships: the blind can never choose whom to meet, only whom to pursue, as I did with you. On unfamiliar terrain, every step requires attention. But I am never entirely lost in England, even in places I have never been before, because I know what the sounds that surround me signify, and the most significant of these is the sound of people talking, of people speaking English. Overhearing the exchanges of strangers, I can generally understand what they are talking about – by which I mean that I understand the references they make, the allusions, the assumptions. I know that so-and-so plays football for Arsenal or that so-and-so is a disgraced MP. Every aspect of their speech makes sense to me. I can tell where they come from, I can infer relationships between the people speaking, can distinguish between the goodbye of close friends and the goodbye of acquaintances or of people who don’t much care for each other. It’s not much information, very little sometimes, but it gives me a degree of engagement with what’s outside me. It gives me material with which to construct a world for myself. In Italy I would be profoundly a stranger, knowing nobody but you, having to learn my environment by heart – an environment in a foreign language. In time I’ll learn it, you may say: we’ll make a home for ourselves, a place with which I’ll be as comfortable as I am in my London flat. I’ll learn the streets, sooner or later. I’ll make friends, I’ll understand what’s happening. Yes, I reply, the anxiety will lessen. But it will take a long time, I fear, and I will always be a far more remote outsider in Italy than I am in England. I comprehend several thousand Italian words, but I will never be Italian. With Leopardi I slog away for days at a single page. It’s a struggle, and I know that I am still missing undertones that would be obvious to any Italian schoolchild. Even if I spend the rest of my life pestering people for explanations, subtexts will always elude me. You have to understand that when I try to envisage this new life what I see is a condition of greater passivity and dependency, and I’m concerned – extremely concerned – that such a condition would not be good for us. You see? It’s not that I have any doubts about us as we are. I have none at all. If I did, the dilemma would not be as acute as it is. I love you. Which is where I started, so I’ll move on.
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