The director who remembers every moment

What a dream I had last night. The first image was a 1:100 scale map of my childhood home in Milan. A detailed floor plan, with measurements and load-bearing walls. Then I saw the house – in the shadows. The details: the patterns on the wallpaper in the living room, the ribbing of the large walnut wardrobe in front of my parents’ bed. Even – incredibly – the rail of the cot where I slept when I was two or three years old. The director of the dream had delved deep, into places inaccessible to me. And so there were these perfect details, as if captured in a slow zoom. The washbasin in the bathroom, which I still couldn’t reach. The view from the sixth floor over the Varesine Luna Park, where the Porta Nuova skyscrapers now stand, and where there used to be fairground rides: in the morning, in the fog, they looked ghostly. And my father’s study, where the fog was actually the smoke from his Nazionali cigarettes, and on the table stood the Olivetti 32 with its red and black ribbon.

After this very slow zoom, I realised that my mother, who was very elderly, still lived there, alone, but had gone out. I walked into the living room; it was silent and dark. I wanted to raise the shutters, but they – old and rickety – remained motionless. The light wouldn’t come on. Perhaps the main switch had been turned off? But I couldn’t reach it – it was too high for me, now that I’d become a child again. My mother wasn’t coming. And everything was so dark, and everyone had gone: my father, my brother, my sister. My sister had really gone, at the age of fourteen, just a few months ago. Her schoolbooks remained on a bookshelf: the Greek and Latin dictionaries she hadn’t had time to open.

The zoom continued, relentless. The bluish glow of the telly through the living room’s glass door. But now the telly was off. And the house, so shadowy and silent, smelled of dust, and of a life that had ended. I woke up at dawn in Gallura: everything was so dazzling. I was dazed, as if after a CT scan that tells you what’s really inside you. But I know: the director is in my head, remembering every moment, dredging it up from the depths of my sea, and never forgetting. And never forgiving.