The Return Read Free Page A

Today I know: a chicken is so alive it moves even in a picture. Compared to the chicken, everything else looks dead. For me, my father’s face can’t begin to move without my mother’s voice.

The Right Moment
    This moment always comes.
    When it’s time to leave.
    We can always hang around a little,
    say useless goodbyes and gather up
    things we’ll abandon along the way.
    The moment stares at us
    and we know it won’t back down.
    The moment of departure awaits us by the door.
    Like something whose presence we feel
    but can’t touch.
    In reality, it takes on the form of a suitcase.
    Time spent anywhere else than
    in our native village
    is time that cannot be measured.
    Time out of time written
    in our genes.
    Only a mother can keep that sort of count.
    For thirty-three years
    on an Esso calendar
    mine drew a cross over each day
    spent without seeing me.
    If I meet my neighbor on the sidewalk
    he never fails to invite me in
    to taste the wine he makes in his basement.
    We spend the afternoon discussing Juventus
    back in the days when Juventus was Juventus.
    He personally knows all the players
    though most have been dead for some time.
    I ask Garibaldi (I call him that because he worships Garibaldi) why he doesn’t go back to his country. Mine, I say, is so devastated that it hurts just thinking about seeing it again. But you, just to go back to the stadium to watch Juventus play. He takes the time to go and shut off the television then returns to sit near me. He looks me in the eye and tells me he goes back to Italy every night.
    Garibaldi invites me to his place one evening. We go down to the basement. The same ritual. I have to drink his homemade wine. I feel he has something important to tell me. I wait. He gets up, wipes the dust off his books, then produces a signed portrait of D’Annunzio that the writer dedicated to his father. I’m afraid he’s going to entrust me with some scandalous confession. But he just needed to tell me that he’s always hated Juventus, and that his team is Torino FC . Since no one knows that team here and everyone knows Juventus, he says Juventus thinking of Torino. That’s the tragedy of his life. Not a day goes by when he doesn’t think of that betrayal. If one day he ever returns to Italy he isn’t sure he’ll be able to look his old friends in the eye.
    I bring back to the country
    without a farewell ceremony
    these gods who accompanied me
    on this long journey
    and kept me from losing my mind.
    If you don’t know voodoo,
    voodoo knows you.
    The faces I once loved disappear
    with the days of our burned memory.
    The sheer fact of not recognizing
    even those who were close to us.
    The grass grows in, after the fire,
    to camouflage all trace of the disaster.
    In fact, the real opposition is not
    between countries, no matter how different they are,
    but between those who have had to learn
    to live at other latitudes
    (even in inferior conditions)
    and those who have never had to face
    a culture other than their own.
    Only a journey without a return ticket
    can save us from family, blood
    and small-town thinking.
    Those who have never left their village
    live unchanging lives
    that can prove, with time,
    dangerous for their personality.
    For three-quarters of the people on this planet
    only one type of travel is possible
    and that’s to find themselves without papers
    in a country whose language and customs
    they know nothing of.
    There’s no sense accusing them
    of wanting to change
    other people’s lives
    when they have
    no control
    over their own.
    If we really want to leave we have to forget
    the very idea of the suitcase.
    Things don’t belong to us.
    We accumulate them out of the simple need for comfort.
    A comfort we have to question
    before walking out the door.
    We have to understand that the minimum level of comfort
    needed to live here in winter
    is a dream come true back there.
    When I came here, I had