Invisible ink
Gabriele Di Fronzo
In the fall of last year, I was a guest of the Lu Xun Academy in Beijing. One can say that exactly one year ago I was at the opening event of their writing residency along with other international authors: we each read a passage from our books. Some read in Italian, like me, others in Croatian, and some in Greek. It was my first time in China and even before not understanding Chinese, I didn’t understand those other languages, closer to me geographically but equally incomprehensible since I have never studied them.
I was a guest of the writing residency for one month and I lived near the subway station calledShilipu.
Apart from working on the novel I am still currently working on, I spent those thirty days discovering the city. So, I occupied my days acting like a flaneur in Jiaodaokou; strolling among the shops in Di’anmen; I spent many afternoons wandering around the shelves of the DuhuiHuantingbookstore, buying editions of books that I wouldn’t have been able to understand, but which I had already read in Italian (Camus, Zweig, Su Tong).
I was invited to intervene with my poor English at the Institute of Ethnical Culture and at the headquarters of People Literature inTuanjiehu, and that’s where, among others, I met a Chinese writer who, in the following months, was supposed to travel to Italy, specifically to Turin, which is my hometown and the city where I live. That same day I went to lunch at the Lebanese restaurantA thousand and one night inSanlitun.
At the University of Foreign Languages, I gave a lecture to Chinese students who were so good in speaking Italian that they even had regional inflections: I recall a boy who talked to me with the same aspirated “c” they use in Florence, under the Brunelleschi’s Dome.
I then visited Andingmenand the Confucius Temple with PatriziaLiberati, the Italian translator of writers such asYan Lianke andMo Yan.
I once tried to bargain with a seller in the huge Panjiayuan market, sitting on a chair next to him, but nonetheless at the end of the haggling, the price of the object I wanted was still too expensive for my pockets.Meanwhile, I was thinking about an AleksandarHemon’s quotation “All the lives we could live, all the people we will never know, never will be, they are everywhere. That is what the world is.”
I spent a whole day enjoying the grandeur of the Summer Palace, together with a university professor, who is specialized in Dante Alighieri and is also a Chinese translator. I spoke in Italian with her about the plants that grow in the water, the different regional cuisines in China and Italian literature.
With a minibus, together with other guests of the Lu Xun Academy, I went to the Great Wall in Hairouand I was lucky it was a sunny day, and the blue sky reminded me of the mountain valleys near where I live in Italy.
Then, just a few days later, a young writer was my guide for a visit to the Temple of Heaven, and meanwhile we tried to share opinions on Italian novelists that I like and Chinese authors that she enjoys reading.
InYuanmingyuan ParkI saw a peddler blowing sugar into a horse-shaped edible balloon and putting it on a stick and giving it to a young boy who was ready to eat it.
Wherever I went, I had with me two things. The mobile phone – during those days I often used the online translator to communicate with the people I was encountering – and a small book called Point it. This is an amazing tiny picture dictionary. It is less that seventy pages, with no words whatsoever, and it is a true “traveller’s language kit”.
All kinds of food, all kinds of vehicles, animals, flowers, tools, entertainments, clothing,… a compressed and miniaturized world of images not bigger than a fingernail. One thousand and three hundred items. No definitions or accents, pronunciations, singular or plural, masculine or feminine: just the act of pointing with your finger the word you need to know in that moment. Sufficient to be understood anywhere in the world.
I remember as if it happened yesterday that I spent a whole Sunday afternoon listening to a conference by Kong Yalei, who is the Chinese translator of Paul Auster among others, on James Salter, not understanding a single thing, but diligently seated among fifty Chinese people at the bookstore Sun Palace inXhibahe.
The night before, on the other hand, I understood almost all of the movie Project Gutenberg, which I saw in a movie theatre in Chaoyang. It was the usual thriller with forgers, flashbacks and a robbery that we could all understand in any language. I may only have lost a few details in the last scenes, full of plot twists.
In Honglingjin Park, at the end of October,while staring at the yellow leaves I suddenly understood all that was to be understood, and that is that the day after the residency was ending and I had to leave.
I think I have read on some of Lu Xun’swritings that he thought China would be understandable only to those who know how to read a non-existent alphabet, on a white sheet of paper written with invisible ink. I obviously did not understand anything about Beijing and China, but nonetheless I have seen and heard so many stories, and I have met so many people, that I feel like I lived in Beijing for years.
Alas, last year I indeed kept busy chasing Beijing, and soI am still working on the same novel I startedthere, it is still unfinished. It means that I will have to wake up earlier here in Shanghai.
While I am writing this brief speech, I am also organizing a short trop to Venice with my family. How do I intend to get readyfor the trip? I will read the Journal that Acheng kept in 1992 when he spent two months in Venice, and Watermark: an essay on VenicebyBrodskij.It is the stranger who always tells me what to do in a city that I am eager to know.