Esercizi di memoria

Every morning at seven o’clock, washed, shaved, fully dressed, I sit at my study table and write. I am a very disciplined man, a perfect employee of writing. Maybe with a few vices, because while I write I smoke, a lot, and drink beer. And I write, I always write. This is Camilleri. Then at ninety years old comes the darkness. And just as he was not terrified of the blank page, he also fights the darkness of blindness and begins to dictate. His literary output finds in orality a new way to tell his stories. But if strong was his discipline before, it is even more so now that he can rely solely on his memory. And so it is necessary to keep it in practice: to observe in detail memories, to represent scenes in the mind. The ones published here, as he says, are homework for the summer: 23 stories thought up in 23 days, telling like sharp snapshots his unique life and, in the background, that of our country. Memory here is never weighed down by either melancholy or regret. That is why Camilleri has asked those who speak through colors, shapes and volumes to make his exercise more enjoyable, lighter, more spectacular. The ideal of my writing is to make it a game of lightness, an aerial interweaving of sounds and words. I would like it to resemble the exercises of an acrobat flying from one trapeze to another doing perhaps a triple somersault, always with a smile on her face, without showing the fatigue, the daily commitment, the presence of risk that made those evolutions possible. If the trapeze artist showed the effort to achieve that grace, the spectator would certainly not enjoy the show.