letter number four.

You don't know Doriano, he's from after you left, Chiara, let me therefore describe him to you; he's no tall man, but he's finely built, delicate all the way out into his outermost features, the corners of his mouth and the tip of his nose, the tips of his fingers, his voice is calm, but slightly grating and somewhat hoarse, he sounds like a washboard musician, Chiarina once declared, from children and drunks, people like to assure each other, do we get the whole truth. He loves me and my daughter loves him and he plays his old jazz records to us long into the evening, when the sun hangs on a thinly vibrating string above the horizon and the chill of the night creeps out from its mice-size holes beneath the rest.

Doriano knows nothing of the fire in the mountains or the dangers of the deep, but he knows into infinity about drums and his starting point is located lengths within the music. Rarely do I say much when he talks for hours on end, I would rather be the listening party and he assumes my silence is an expression of fascination, which I don't see any reason to correct him about. He is a true friendliness and friendlinesses you always come across by accident, they are little treasures, they are amber bits and gold nuggets and diamond dust, yes. The gemstone that Doriano looks like blackens at the edge of my vision, you have to understand, his hair is the same color as soot, as my sorrow-filled vases. His hair is worth being fascinated by.

Don't worry, Chiara, I don't love Doriano, but I take him to bed, because my bed is cold and because it resonates like nunnery bells when you are gone. Certain distances can't be crossed, not even in dreams and that kind of distance has grown forth between you and me, we can't blame Naples only, although Naples does lie far from my native soil, it is instead because of the silence that exists in this previously mentioned vacuum. Between the place where you are and the point where I'm standing. Now. I have a view of a brick wall with clothes lines hanging in horizontals from the bottom edges of the windows, it's Giulietta's and Camilla's and Teresina's laundry hanging there in the shape of flapping curtains and I ask myself, what is waiting on the other side? More ocean and more volcanos where have the summits gone that won't explode beneath my feet?

The love I don't feel is explosive enough in itself.