To Piero

Padre carissimo,

The hand trembles when I write of the letter R, though it is a letter I have drawn more times than I can count — in the curve of a lip, in the hollow of a throat, in the twist of a rope, in the arc of a bridge that does not yet exist. You remember the house on Via Ghibellina, the one with the courtyard where the stone steps wore smooth under the feet of many sons but not mine. I sat there often, watching the masons shape the letters into the ledgers, their tools making the same shapes I would later make with chalk on the wall, my finger tracing the line from stem to bowl, the way the R leans into the world as if it would fall forward if not held by the next letter. You saw me do this. You did not stop me. For that I am still grateful.

In France, the scribes here write the R differently — more upright, less inclined, as if they fear the fall. I tell them no, the R must lean, it must almost stumble, because life leans, life stumbles, and the letter is the shape of that leaning. They do not understand. They have not lived in the shadow of towers that could topple, or in the draft of a door that will not close. The R is the letter of the hinge, the pivot, the place where the wall meets the floor and either stands or does not.

I have been thinking of the R because yesterday I saw a child in the market square with a stick, drawing in the dirt. He made his R like a child does — a line, a hump, another line, a little foot at the end, as if the letter were a man stepping forward. The sight of it made my chest ache. I did not approach him. I only watched. The R he made was not beautiful, not precise, but it was alive. It leaned. It was about to walk away.

The canal outside my window is quiet tonight. The water does not lean. It only waits. I have been watching it for weeks, noting how the ripples catch the light like the teeth of a saw. The R is also a saw — it cuts the line of the page in two, it divides the word from the silence around it. Without the R, caro would be cao, and padre would be pade. The world would be less sharp.

I do not know if this letter will reach you. The roads are long, and the hands that carry messages are fewer than they once were. If it does, know that when I draw the R, I think of you, of the ledgers you kept, of the way you held the quill between thumb and forefinger, the way your hand did not tremble when you wrote the names of legitimate sons. Mine did not tremble either, not then. Not when I was drawing the R in the dust of the courtyard, pretending it was the first letter of a name I was not allowed to claim.

The candle gutters. The ink is thick in the well of the pen. I will stop.

Vostro figlio affettuoso.