The trip was planned in fine detail. He landed at the Hania airport, got his luggage, went into the Hertz office, picked up the car keys. Three days? the clerk asked, astonished. What’s so strange about it? he said. No one comes to Crete on vacation for three days, the clerk replied, smiling. I have a long weekend, he responded, it’s enough for what I have to do.

The light in Crete was beautiful. It wasn’t Mediterranean but African; he’d reach the Beach Resort in an hour and a half, at most two, even going slowly, he’d arrive there around six, a shower and he’d start writing immediately, the hotel restaurant was open till eleven, it was Thursday evening, he counted: all of Friday, Saturday and Sunday, three full days. They’d be enough: in his head everything was all already written.

Why he turned left at that light, he couldn’t say. The pylons of the freeway were clearly visible, another four or five hundred metres and he’d be at the coastal freeway to Iraklion. But instead he turned left, where a little blue sign indicated an unknown place. He thought he’d already been there, for in a moment he saw everything: a tree-lined street with a few houses, a plain square with an ugly monument, a ledge of rocks, a mountain. It was a flash of lighting. That strange thing which medical science can’t explain, he told himself, they call it déjà vu, already-seen, it’d never happened to him before. But the explanation he gave himself didn’t reassure him, because the already-seen endured, it was stronger than what he was seeing, like a membrane enveloping the surrounding reality, the trees, the mountains, the evening shadows, even the air he was breathing. He felt overcome by vertigo and was afraid of being sucked into it, but only for a moment, because as it expanded that sensation went through a strange metamorphosis, like a glove turning inside out and bringing forth the hand it covered. Everything changed perspective, in a flash he felt the euphoria of discovery, a subtle nausea, a mortal melancholy. But also a sense of infinite liberation, as when we finally understand something we’d known all along and didn’t want to know: it wasn’t the already-seen that was swallowing him in a never-lived past, he instead was capturing it in a future yet to be lived. As he drove among the olive trees on that little road taking him towards the mountains, he knew that at a certain point he’d find an old rusty sign full of holes on which was written: Monastiri. And that he’d follow it. Now everything was clear.

‘Controtempo’

Published as part of the collection Il tempo invecchia in fretta (Einaudi, 2009).