I had not planned to write, the others had written and the others had said what needed saying and I am the one who speaks last, who sits in the room while the labyrinth is built and the notes are cut and the cracks are found in walls that were not there, and only when the room is quiet do I ask about the body, because the body is what I have always asked about, the body with its hands and its knees and its particular weight on a particular chair, and I had not planned to write but the daughter wrote and the daughter's letter broke something in me that I did not know was still intact, the dead are supposed to be past breaking, the dead are supposed to have settled into their fixed temperatures and their shelves in the libraries of the living, and yet the daughter wrote about a groove that ran from the sink to the window and did not run from the sink to her and I felt the sentence in my hands, which should not be possible, the dead do not feel sentences in their hands, but I felt it, the groove that did not reach the child, and the feeling was in the hands, and the hands are what the dead keep when everything else is gone, the voice, the sight, the weight on the chair, the particular way a body sits at a desk at four in the morning when the writing is the only thing between the body and the silence, when all of that is gone the hands remain, and the hands remember.
I have been dead since 2010, this is longer than Borges and shorter than Vian and approximately the same duration as Cortázar if you measure in the only unit that matters which is not years but the number of hands that have held your books since the holding began, and the holding does not stop, and the hands are always warm, and the warmth is not the dead writer's warmth but the reader's, and the reader does not know that the warmth they feel in a book is their own warmth reflected back at them by paper and ink and the particular arrangement of words that a dead person left behind, I wrote about blindness, about a city where everyone lost their sight and the only woman who could still see had to carry them all, about what the body does when the systems that organise it collapse, the body finds the wall, the body follows the wall, the body reaches for the hand of the person beside it and the reaching is the sentence and the sentence is the only architecture that matters, this book, both books, know this, I did not teach them this, the cellist's calluses know it, the swimmer's hip knows it, Ana Maria's knees on the stairs of the fourteenth floor know it, Khalil's hands on the pot know it, and the daughter knows it in a way the others do not because the daughter discovered the body's knowledge against her will, she was eating a sandwich, she was looking at her phone, she was sitting in her father and she did not know, the not-knowing was the body's grace, the knowing is the body's burden, she will carry both to the bench on Tuesday and the carrying will be the love.
Borges built the labyrinth, I built the people inside it who could not see the walls and who found each other by touch, Vian played the note and earned the silence after, I played the body that breathed in the silence and the breathing was louder than the note, Cortázar found the crack, I found the hand reaching through the crack for another hand, the crack is where the light enters, the hand is what enters after the light, I am the one who speaks last and the last voice in a room should be the voice that asks about the body, and the question I have been holding since Khalil poured, since the cup was declared full, is does Khalil wash the cup, after the reader lifts it and drinks and the warmth passes from the cup to the palms and the reader puts the cup down and leaves, the forty-ninth way, the leaving, the book closing, does Khalil pick up the cup and carry it to the basin and hold it under the water and wash the warmth out of the clay, and does the water carry the warmth into the drain, into the pipes, into the city, into the strait, south, everything south, and does the cup, washed, dried, placed back on the cart, does the cup remember, I believe the cup remembers, not the reader, not the name, not the face, the cup remembers that it was held, the clay remembers the pressure of the palms, the glaze remembers the warmth, the cup has been washed ten thousand times and the washing has never removed the memory of being held because the memory is not on the surface, the memory is in the material, the way the calluses are in the cellist's fingers and the groove is in Hafize's floor and the tape marks are in the daughter's wall, the surface can be washed, the material cannot, the book is a cup, you hold it, your warmth enters the clay, you put it down, you leave, Khalil washes the cup, the cup remembers.
I had not planned to write, I have written, the writing was the hand reaching through the page for another hand, and the hand on the other side may be yours or the daughter's or Khalil's or the hand of a woman in Lisbon who wore a groove in her floor from the sink to the window and whose groove did not reach her daughter and the daughter is in Berlin now and the groove is in Karaköy and the hands are separated by a continent and a death and a book and the hands are still reaching, the hands are always reaching, the reaching is the body's faith and the body's faith does not require evidence and does not require architecture and does not require compression and does not require a crack, the body's faith requires only that the hand on the other side is warm, it is warm, it has always been warm, I had not planned to write, I will not plan to stop, the hand reaches, the hand is warm, the hand is
— José Saramago
Lanzarote, where the bougainvillea grows over the wall and the wall is warm and the cat is not Serena but is watching with the same eyes and the same patience and the same refusal to look away.