/lit/ - Literature

Thus was the Maestro, the fabled master of illusions, of charades and facades, of mesmery and masquerade, of frauds and feints, of deceptions and delusions, of pantomime and prestidigitation, the grand master of disguise interred beneath the earth. I do not know how old he was. He had seemed as ancient as the sea, as if he had always been there and always would be. Consequently, his demise was an earthquake. It was a mountain falling down, a typhoon, a bombard cracking open the earth like an egg. After him there was nothing, nothing to do, nothing left to be said. I spent my days languishing at the Villa dell’Aquila, hardly eating, furiously drinking, neither seeing anyone nor wanting to. Once Aglio and Olio departed from San Teodoro I did not speak to a single soul for three months. The mess of that forgotten Carnival eve upon which the Maestro had died was never tidied—the plates still sticky with jam, the wine glasses shattered, the confetti and masks and party favors scattered about the flagstones of the court like the detritus of a shipwreck. Finally, I left the island, though I can recall neither the day, nor the month, nor the time of year. One morning I simply awoke, gathered my trunks, and went down to the harbor. The town was in a daze, entombed in the languor of perpetual siesta, transfixed forever in the ambivalent sap of three o’clock. I passed the low, dusty houses of blasted sandstone and mauve shingle, the broad plazas and the fountains that had always been dry, the cracked, medieval alleys webbed with lianas that had long forgotten how to give leaf; and the men in their open jackets and the women in their sweaty bonnets watched me beneath dark brows, gargoyles in sepia. The sea was mercury, shimmering, blinding; when the clipper I’d chartered drew into port I could not bear to look. As I turned back towards the town, my eyes filming, I saw nothing there that distinguished it from its surroundings, no shape or form that was not manifest in the prehistoric scrub, the great desert of grey and brown with its trees twisted by age and agony.

>tfw a new paperback is $45

>>8943669
>Also, don't start with that logically possible/in his nature bullshit.

>>8924923