Ciclo DLX

The hand trembles across the page, tracing the ghost of a name—Chnllocrocififloi—a fragment half-heard in the murmurs of the canal at dusk, where the water carries the scent of damp earth and the slow decay of the willows that lean over its banks like penitents. The letters dissolve into the evening air, yet something lingers: a memory not mine, or perhaps mine long before I was born, a weight of sorrow that is not mine to bear but must be written anyway. La nostra donna—the Virgin, perhaps, or the moon seen through the shutters of a Florence workshop—her face worn smooth by centuries of oil and candle-smoke, her hands folded in prayer or in the quiet of a mother’s farewell. The pestilence returns in the second association, a shadow that has followed me from Milan to Amboise, a whisper in the throat of every physician, every apothecary, every old woman selling rue in the market square. The Signoria of Florence, gone these thirty years, yet its decrees still echo in the coughs of beggars and the silence of the streets at noon. And then, a resolve—mi risolvetti con l’animo—not to turn away, but to find a way, a manner, a modo, so that she—whoever she is—might turn back, might be returned without the thousand wounds of history. The candle gutters. The canal waits. The walk ends where the water meets the sky, and the sky does not answer.