whole city a bonfire. His cloak, his burning cloak …
Aosta, June 30
My Friend,
Today I’ll tell you more about where I live.
It’s still possible to see remains of the old Roman road on the plain that stretches beyond my house. On that road Caecina led 30,000 men through deep snow across the Pennine Pass. In 774 Charlemagne also drove his soldiers over it. After him came the Saracens, the Normans, then pilgrims bound for Rome, Tuscan soldiers led by a man who was called, I don’t know why, the “White Hand.” So what am I to make of this benignity all around me, this mild wind through my pear trees, the careful glass cabinets in the library, Studer and Escher’s geological charts neatly arranged on the wooden table where I look up specimens-dark bluish-black striated with varied lighter veins, or those the color and sheen of agate or jasper—left by the former tenants?
But my friend, even as I write this, all of it feels wrong somehow, not in its facts, but in the question of where to start and where to go from there. As if there’s nowhere to set out from where I can speak plainly as I’ve wanted. And feelingly, as I also want. Everything tinged with a bitter, twisted distance, and I don’t know why. This air as if almost unreal. I can’t feel your presence as I usually do, or what I think of as the tender, complex texture of your absence. I feel, somehow, nothing, and yet I don’t want to stop with me coldly here and you coldly there.
So I must try to continue …
Maybe in my reference to the ruined road you’ll infer my own body, my skin, or the grotesque marring of my face which by now, as is often the case, may have become little more than one large scar. I don’t want to tell you if this is what I look like now. Here is my hood again, you see—right here in this letter. Do I ever take it off? If you came here would I even let you past the gate?
I speak of benignity, of this slight wind, my tended flowers, but when I think of that road, as I do several times each day, and of all the soldiers killed there, the calmness falls from me, the beauty of my garden falls—its quiet suddenly infiltrated, coarse, rubbed raw. Maybe it’s easier for me to feel this about the road than my own body. I walk through my garden painting whitewash onto troubled vines, trimming back others, tending to potted oleanders and asters, but even then there’s a violence inside me I cant name. Like the severe silhouettes on ancient coins, it’s all sharpness, force and will, and allows no tenderness for anything.
I didn’t speak, of this during the hours we spent together. You seemed to think me a gentle man. I believe you were moved by my suffering and the quiet way I carry it. By my interest in books and art and in my garden.
Today when I first sat down I meant to write to you of the frescoes at Issogne. I meant to write of gentle, beautiful things. I don’t know why I’ve written what I have. And on such a beautiful day. And in this light, this early warmth of summer.
I hope you’re well, and translating as you wanted to.
Your Friend,
Cao Xueqin, I spend every day translating your book. In the evenings I write to my friend in Aosta, letters that I’ll never send. Often I dream of you and this strange, elaborate world that came out of your mind and through your hands. No matter how much I translate I can never come close to you or know you. Your country will always be foreign to me even if I live here for the rest of my life. This I never doubt.
Still, there are so many things that draw me close even as I feel this unbridgeable gap. The practice of burning paper, for instance. When I was a boy I liked nothing more than to look at words on a page, their black curves, sharp edges or lithe, narrow spines. My father hated that I did this. But here, each morning the paper-collectors walk through the streets with large bamboo baskets, gathering any stray papers they can find. It’s believed one must preserve anything that’s written-on from being trampled underfoot: scraps with quotations from Confucius, maybe, or other classic texts. Even within households such