Depart

I grew up in a house with a large and diverse library, with

novels

, stories by inland authors, poetry, and

- from the entire James Bond saga to Wilbur Smith novels set in hot Africa. (in every sense).

The only criterion my parents followed with reading was immersion: if a book managed to kidnap us, it didn't matter if it was by Ray Bradbury or Ian Fleming.

The time would come, they said, to build their own criteria and distinguish qualities.

In that library there was a collection of Selected Editions with volumes allegedly anthropological, historical novels, travel books (I remember one called

about a raft journey made by the Frenchman Éric de Bisschop in 1956 from Polynesia to Chile, a reverse odyssey to that

of Thor Heyerdahl's

) and very few classics, such as

, by John Steinbeck, a jewel sadly renamed

, which was my father's favorite (which is why a novel about a run-down wealthy guy with a mediocre job, a despising wife and kids, and a suicide attempt was his My favorite is still a mystery to me, but I keep the echo of that reading in the form of a strong distrust of families that proclaim themselves “happy”). In the collection there was also a book called

, written by one James Ramsey Ullman, an American best known for being a mountaineer. It was a novel about the life of Arthur Rimbaud, which I read as if it were a biography of Arthur Rimbaud, which made me fall in love with Arthur Rimbaud. I secretly devoured it because, according to my parents, it was not "suitable for my age" (about 12 years?) And it took me, quickly, to

, two Rimbaud books that were in my house but on which there was no prohibition of reading (which shows that poetry is capable of anything, even bypassing parental control). I do not know what I understood at that age of such complex poems (the most transparent in them must be the verse "Every moon is atrocious and every sun bitter"), but in childhood one lives in a state of lysergia, without an instruction manual, and it can pick up the

of language more accurately than in adult life. Anyway, it was in that bad book,

, where I read a poster phrase: "Leaving eternally you will go everywhere." Or something similar. That aphorism traveled with me for all these years as a

without prestige. Every time I left a house, a city, a place, I thought about that phrase, what it means: you have to live in a starting state, the rest is a cage. This is how I left Banjarmasin, a city in Indonesia that I did not want to leave, leaving behind the howling of mosques and the silence that settled like dew among the water channels bursting with fireflies. That is how I left the Similan Islands where I slept in a room with an esparto mattress, filthy and happy, going down every night to dive in a sea of ​​fire corals. That's how I always left: thinking of the departure as a condition to arrive. To other things: people, cities, spaces. But the phrase barely covers the lie it contains. Many times the departure was only to leave to get nowhere. Because there is a beauty in stillness.While I continue to yearn for a detachment that makes leaving no matter, I surf the goodbyes with that idiotic phrase. All this to say that I am leaving: I leave this column and return every Wednesday to the last page of the newspaper, the place where I was before coming here. There are some lines by Robert Creeley: "Before the next house, the next town, / people start to know you if you leave it, / there is no safe place." I could say how nice, how ironic this Creeley. I say, instead, here I go. Waiting for it to happen I don't know what. Perhaps, as Anne Dufourmantelle wrote, that one day walking through a city will give rise, in an instant, the meaning of a lifetime. Only afterwards to forget it forever.I leave this column and return every Wednesday to the last page of the newspaper, the place where I was before coming here. There are some lines by Robert Creeley: "Before the next house, the next town, / people start to know you if you leave it, / there is no safe place." I could say how nice, how ironic this Creeley. I say, instead, here I go. Waiting for it to happen I don't know what. Perhaps, as Anne Dufourmantelle wrote, that one day walking through a city will give rise, in an instant, the meaning of a lifetime. Only afterwards to forget it forever.I leave this column and return every Wednesday to the last page of the newspaper, the place where I was before coming here. There are some lines by Robert Creeley: "Before the next house, the next town, / people start to know you if you leave it, / there is no safe place." I could say how nice, how ironic this Creeley. I say, instead, here I go. Waiting for it to happen I don't know what. Perhaps, as Anne Dufourmantelle wrote, that one day walking through a city will give rise, in an instant, the meaning of a lifetime. Only afterwards to forget it forever.I could say how nice, how ironic this Creeley. I say, instead, here I go. Waiting for it to happen I don't know what. Perhaps, as Anne Dufourmantelle wrote, that one day walking through a city will give rise, in an instant, the meaning of a lifetime. Only afterwards to forget it forever.I could say how nice, how ironic this Creeley. I say, instead, here I go. Waiting for it to happen I don't know what. Perhaps, as Anne Dufourmantelle wrote, that one day walking through a city will give rise, in an instant, the meaning of a lifetime. Only afterwards to forget it forever.