To Piero

Padre carissimo,

M. It is the humblest of letters, the one that does not announce itself like A with its open mouth or S with its serpent’s hiss. M is the letter of the mouth closed, of the lips meeting lightly as a moth at dusk, of the murmur that does not shout. It is the letter of the mother who soothed you when the fever burned, of the man who kneels in the cathedral and feels the marble cool against his forehead though he does not speak. It is the letter that holds the silence inside it like a kernel in a shell.

Here, in Amboise, the river Loire moves slow as a man thinking. The water is thick with green reflections that do not break. When I walk along the canal at evening, the air is full of the scent of earth turned by the spades of the gardeners, and the word that comes to me is materia—matter before it is shaped, the clay that does not yet know it will be a hand or a wing. The m in materia is the same m in madre, in memoria. It is the letter that does not rush. It is the letter that waits.

I have been drawing the muscles of the neck again, the way they coil like wet rope beneath the skin. Each fiber is a question without an answer. The m of muscolo is the same m that hums in the throat when a man is afraid. Fear tightens the throat; the m cannot escape. I have known that silence.

The king’s physician asked me once why I still draw after all these years. I told him that drawing is the only prayer I know that does not require words. He did not understand. He is a man who believes in remedies and doses. I am a man who believes in the slow revelation of form beneath the hand. The m is in mano—hand. The hand that trembles now, but still draws. The hand that was once steady enough to make a wing that could almost fly.

I have been thinking of the house on Via Ghibellina, the one with the courtyard where the lemon trees grew in pots. You would sit in the shade and read your papers while I sketched the cats that slept in the sun. The m in micio—cat—is the same m in morte. The cat stretches, the cat dies. The letter does not flinch.

The candle gutters. Tomorrow, perhaps, I will try to draw the curve of the Loire where it bends near the château. The water will be the color of old silver, and the m will be in the ripples that do not speak.

vostro figlio affettuoso