Author: Erri De Luca
Publishing house: Feltrinelli
Data di pubblicazione: 30-04-2024
“In faraway places we have shared nights with the crumbs of shooting stars, we have breathed in their dust ignited by friction with the air. In sleep we have felt the turning of the constellations with the North Star fixed at the center, in roulette pegs. We snatched certain nights like this from the life of days. Distant from candles, bulbs, lighthouses and watchtowers, we have fixed in our pupils the expanse of dots of light.” These are pages of restrained emotion, and for that reason all the more moving and vivid, these that Erri De Luca dedicates to his late friend, followed on climbs in the Himalayas, in Ecuador or in the Dolomites. In investigating the cause of his fall, in retracing the route where he died, searching for the precise point of his detachment from the rock, the author restores his body and voice, brings back pages from his notebooks and passages from the letters that over time they wrote to each other, drawing a concrete and poetic – “he called gift a bunch of other things that didn’t look like to me. The little dark cloud that in a clear weather precedes the storm, the flower in the crack of a cliff face, the encounter with an ibex: gifts. They are receive and that’s it, maybe with a thank you.” And at the same time he gives back, making us feel the rock under our fingers, the sound of the ibex’s hooves as it flees, the weight of the body on the handholds, the shared love of the mountain, the reason itself of climbing (Diego writes: “this climbing on the border between life and death pleases me and makes me feel intensely the life. At the top I love everything and everyone”) and to read. Friendship, mountains and books are intertwined in this Speech with gentleness, gratitude and sorrow, to go through grief and go beyond: “For me you remain Diego, for me you insist, carry on and I continue and follow you.”
A series of photographs follow the words step by step.