And so the person who knew this story imagined it continued like this, and so let’s accept that we’re in 2028, as the person who knew the story had wanted and had imagined it would continue.

And at this point, the person who imagined how the story would continue saw two young people, a guy and a girl wearing leather shorts and trekking boots, who were hiking in the mountains of Crete. The girl said to her companion: I think that old guide you found in your father’s library doesn’t make any sense, by now the monastery will be a pile of stones full of lizards, why don’t we head towards the sea? And the guy responded: I think you’re right. But just as he said this she replied: no, let’s keep on for a bit, you never know. And in fact it was enough to walk around the rugged red-stone hill that cut through the countryside and there it was, the monastery, or rather ruins of the monastery, and the two of them approached, a wind blew in from the canyons raising the dust, the monastery’s door had collapsed, wasps’ nests defended that empty cave, the two of them had already turned their backs on that gloom when they heard a voice. In the empty space of the door stood a man. He was very old, looked dreadful, with a long white beard to his chest and hair down to his shoulders. Oooh, called the voice. Nothing else. The couple stood still. The man asked: do you understand Italian? They didn’t respond. What happened in 2008? asked the old man. The two young people looked at each other, they didn’t have the courage to exchange a word. Do you have photographs? asked the old man, what happened in 2008? Then he gestured for them to go away, though perhaps he was brushing away the wasps that whirled under the portico, and he returned to the dark of his cave.

The man who knew this story was aware that it couldn’t finish in any other way. Before writing his stories, he loved telling them to himself. And he’d tell them to himself so perfectly, in such detail, word by word, that one might say they were written in his memory. He’d tell them to himself, preferably, late in the evening, in the solitude of that big empty house, or on those nights when he couldn’t sleep, those nights in which insomnia yielded nothing but imagination, not much, yet imagination gave him a reality so alive that it seemed more real than the reality he was living. But the most difficult thing wasn’t telling to himself his stories, that was the easy part, it was as though he’d see the words of the stories he told himself written on the dark screen of his room, when fantasy would keep his eyes wide open. And that one story, which he’d told himself in this way so many times, seemed to him an already printed book, one that was very easy to express mentally but very difficult to write with the letters of the alphabet necessary for thought to be made concrete and visible. It was as if he were lacking the principle of reality to write his story, and in order to live the effective reality of what was real within him, yet unable to become truly real, he’d chosen this place.