Cesare had a goiter that was the wonder of all Sestri: slender and plump hips at the same time, like a beautiful, appetizing woman; teak wood for the planking, blue dunnage.
I launched it in the poignant morning. Sestri, we know how delicately it is drawn: like the thin-hipped Segeste that once was and of which we still sense, petrified, the dramatic struggle in anxiety and love, heartbeat and desperation, the feverish longing for the sea which has always been his, condemnation and intolerable prison but also love and dream and vocation.
Today the distracted traveler finds it a little fat, the haughty loins definitely weighed down, but generously, or out of lazy indulgence, he doesn’t pay too much attention to it.
But, believe me, this has little or nothing to do with the awful protrusions covering the land far-removed from Segeste’s tragic heart, unimaginable, horrible wasteland made up of dreadful, ever multiplying and intertwining fragments of tasteless, impersonal towns, debris of human abomination identical to any other kind of debris, similar to all the other bits and pieces of towns, to each and everyone of us ever ferociously unknown and hostile – such atrocity might have undoubtedly hurt us, just like an infection would do. But it never belonged to Sestri, not a single inhabitant of Sestri ever perceived it as anything but an unfamiliar, sick lie, being this a feeling catching fire to protect something within ourselves and within the old soul of Segeste. And yet it was us (and this is the biggest fault and shame I secretly hold in my heart, which makes me shed heart-felt tears and blush, me!, a man who never shed a tear, who never blushed), not the blurry, neutral time, but us, brutal, immoral heirs worn away by time passing by, who blindly insulted and indecently outraged her with our irreparable stupidity. But this was never just about outrage.