Time Ages in a Hurry Read Online Free PDF Page B

first order, no doubt, but a novel, when are you going to write us a real novel? Everyone’s fixed on the novel, so I was fixed on it too, and if you’re going to write the novel everyone wants from you, which will be your masterpiece, you realize you need the right atmosphere, and the right place, and you need to search for the right place God knows where, because where you are is never the right place, and so I went into hiding to look for the right place to write my masterpiece, am I making myself clear? Hand hand square and there passed a crazy hare. Ingrid is in Göteborg, she went to see our daughter, I don’t know if you know but she got married in Göteborg, she went back to her maternal roots, besides, she’s better off there than here around someone dying, but I’ll explain that later, no, I’ll explain right now, I’m in my usual haunts, at the city hospital, no, no, I’m reallyfine, sure I’d like to see you, I’m coming to the point, because my call is nothing but an SOS from a radio operator who turned off his radio, but it’s not that there was a storm around me, if anything a dead calm, without even any shadow lines to cross, they had been crossed a long time ago, there was a sandbar instead on which the boat ran aground. Hand hand square and there passed a crazy hare. My aunt is dying, said en passant. Mine, not yours, we each have a mother, and our father didn’t have sisters, so it’s my aunt, though that’s not really why I’m calling, it’s that actually I wanted to read you a passage from the novel I’ve been working on these past three years of silence so you’ll have some idea of the effort I’ve put into it, I’m sure you’ll understand why I didn’t show up earlier, you ready? It goes like this: and what if I went to Honduras? And what if I danced the Viennese waltz? And what if I went to the moon and ate Cain’s fritters? And what if Cain hadn’t made his fritters? And what if I left with the ship? And what if the ship had already left? And what if at a whistle it would turn back? And what if Betta got married? And what if the Maltese cat played the piano while singing in French? It cost me more than the Serchio River cost the people of Lucca, you like it?

    He sat there, with the coins in hand, staring at the phone booth, there’s a world of difference between saying and doing, and doing was saying: listen, I’m back, I’m here at the hospital, no, I’m totally fine, well, nottotally, the fact is these three years have heaped up one on top of the other as though they were all just one day, actually just one night, I know I’m not making myself clear, I’ll try to be clearer, think of plastic bottles, the ones for mineral water, the bottle makes sense as long as it’s full of water, but when you’ve drunk it you can scrunch it up and throw it out, that’s what happened to me, my time has scrunched up, and my vertebrae too, if I can put it that way, I know I’m jumping around but I can’t express myself any better, be patient. And while he was thinking of what he’d come up with, he noticed a nurse in white pushing a wheelchair coming out of the low pavilion not far from the coffee bar, its glass door opened from the inside. And on the door closing behind them was a yellow sign with three blades, like a fan. The nurse was moving forward slowly because the path from the pavilion to the coffee shop rose slightly, and in the wheelchair was a boy, or at least from a distance it seemed a boy because he had no hair, but gradually as they approached he realized it was a girl. The features of the face, even though it was a childish face, weren’t male, because the difference is already clear at ten or twelve, which seemed roughly the age of that boy, which is to say, that girl, and also the voice was already female, since at that age the vocal cords are well differentiated, and she talked with the old nurse pushing the wheelchair, although from there he couldn’t make out