TORTOISESHELL

I have never been honest with myself. It’s an attribute that has always disturbed me.

- Domenico Starnone

I can't accept even the most basic truths. What I am good at is coming up with excuses; it’s easy for me to invent excuses. And Giuseppe Trevisani, wonderful guy, is my favorite excuse of all. Many years ago, Trevisani, a translator, wrote an ending to a short story that, when I read it at the age of sixteen, led me to believe that the evil I felt inside me might actually be the mark of an exceptional character.

I'm saying this now, today, to set things straight, but I honestly know nothing about Trevisani: if he’s dead or alive; if he was born in Treviso, as his last name would suggest, or in some southern city like Molfetta; if, when he wrote the line that proved so fundamental to me, he had a mustache or a beard or was clean-shaven; if he worked at night or during the day, and where, in which city, on what street, in which building, on what floor.

On the other hand, my ignorance is irrelevant: I have no use now, nor have I ever, for the true Trevisani. The Trevisani in question here is a figure I invent each time I mention his name: a young man from Lecce, who worked, during the period of interest to me—the postwar boom years—in Turin. This Trevisani has a bushy black mustache, an olive complexion, and a broad forehead. His shirt collar is frayed, and there's a hole in the right elbow of his sweater. He speaks English perfectly, one of the privileges of being a young man of around twenty. He sits at a worm-eaten desk in a freezing-cold garret on Via Ormea, not far from the central train station, smoking one Nazionale after the other, saying the lines out loud, softly, with a slight Pugliese accent: She held a . . . cat . . . against her body.