Free Listen to My Voice by Susanna Tamaro

addition to the wallet, there was a ballpoint pen with dried-up ink, a packet of cigarette papers, a little rolling machine, house keys, a synthetic-fabric scarf, a lipstick, some smokers’ sweets, and, hidden in an interior pocket, two letters. The first, addressed to my mother, had been sent from Padua a few months before I was born.
    The handwriting was tiny and regular, with a touch of angularity in the strokes.
    Dear Ilaria
,
    I’ve received your letter and I’m responding to it at once because I don’t want you to waste your time waiting in vain and I don’t want to encourage illusions that will only make you miserable
.
    If I were just a bit more hypocritical, if the times weren’t what they are – and naked-truth-telling therefore not so thoroughly de rigueur – I could lie to you and tell you I’m married and that I have no intention of endangering my marriage for the sake of a one-month affair
.
    Instead, I prefer to be honest and tell you clearly that I don’t want any children. Not any children, or any wives, or any fiancées, or anything that might limit my freedom in any way whatsoever. I don’t want any of that, because I lead a life of exploration, and explorers can’t travel with ballast
.
    I gather from your words – which are sometimes (pardon me) rather too saccharine – that you don’t feel that way, that you’re still harbouring grand illusions. Moreover, even though several years have passed since we first met, you’re still very young, and the distillate of bourgeois respectability (and sentimentality) that you absorbed in your formative years is still intact. Despite your progressive opinions, all you really aspire to is a popular-song vision of life – two hearts and a cabin – perhaps in its revolutionary version: ‘You and I and our offspring, marching into the bright future.’
    ‘We’ll build a different world,’ you write. ‘It’s up to us to give the example of a new kind of relationship, without oppression, without exploitation, without violence. Raising children creatively, living as a liberated couple.’
    In your opinion, in short, we should play at being young pioneers, and you’re convinced that in this way you’ll succeed – we’ll succeed – in freeing ourselves from the obtuse destiny of the bourgeois, from that long death agony which marriage has always been for everyone
.
    Only your guilelessness makes me feel indulgent towards you. Besides – why deny it? – it’s the part of you I’ve always liked the most, right from the first moment we met. For this reason, and by virtue of our brief time together, I feel it’s my duty to offer you a few points to reflect upon
.
    The word ‘love’ occurs several times in your text. Have you ever asked yourself what’s hiding behind that noun , so often used and so often abused? Has it ever occurred to you to consider that love may be a sort of scenery, a cardboard backdrop whose purpose is to give the performance some ambience? The chief characteristic of backdrops is that they change with every change of scene
.
    The essence of dramaturgy doesn’t lie in that painted cardboard – the visual illusion helps us to dream, to consider the pill a little less bitter – but if we’re honest with ourselves, we can’t deny that we’re face to face with a simple artifice, a fiction
.
    Love, which has so generously nourished your fantasies, is nothing but a subtle form of poison. It acts slowly but inexorably, and it’s capable of destroying any life with its invisible emanations
.
    You’ll get that lost look in your eyes and ask, ‘Why?’ Because in order to love a person, you must first know him. Can the complexity of one human being truly know the complexity of another? The answer is obviously, absolutely No. Therefore, really loving someone is impossible because really knowing him isn’t possible
.
    You’ve come to know a tiny fraction of me, just as I’ve been able to enter into contact with a tiny