Franco Faggiani

> They whisper among the neon lights/under the canopy. They want/me to strain my ears/and recognize them one by one/as the night trains arrive/at the station of memory. Who are you?/Where do you come from? I would like to ask,/but my shadow swerves/on the platform of so many sudden/departures, my heart shrivels,/air runs short...: Is my wife with you?/Let me hear her voice once more/I plead, flinging my arms open/in a dream now extinguished (Stefano Simoncelli, from *Terza copia del gelo*, 2014). The protagonist/narrator is a reporter, perpetually abroad; and so he was when his wife Chiara died suddenly. > I wasn't there. I was far away, on an assignment. Photographs of Chiara are everywhere, almost as though he wanted her still present, yet he never speaks of her, > the pain has self-fertilized, has expanded. Burdened by loss and guilt because he was absent at the moment of his wife's death, he lets himself go, neglects his work, abandons friendships, feels like > a usurer of feelings. It is into this state of existential crisis that Martino bursts: an eight-year-old boy with Asperger's syndrome, one of the many forms of autism. His daughter Nina brings him to him, leaving the father to manage the child on his own. It is an unusual encounter: a man who let himself drift with the flow of existence, and a boy for whom it was enough to sit nearby, turn on a computer, without necessarily having to converse or get involved, > always without exchanging too many confidences, but also without distress. From this stems a slender story, in which an adult and a child help each other discover a bond that transcends the dimension of responsibility, solidarity, and sentiment. There is no striking, salvific ending, nothing that offers us a moral, a lesson: the story concludes with an embrace. > I would have liked to embrace him, raise my hand and then my arm, and finally gently take him by the shoulder and hold him tight. (...) "What are you thinking about?", he had asked me, just as my thought was about to be filed away in the drawer of resignation. "About the fact that I'd like to hug you." (...) He hadn't answered, keeping his lips pressed together for a while. Then he had leaned into me, burying his head under my armpit and starting to tap gently. And so the dead can return, > leaving behind only fragments that no longer have a place in memory. What gives us the strength to move forward is not remembrance, but caring for others: call it Love. The novel's title does not reflect the meaning of the story: rather than *maintenance of the senses*, it ought to be titled *discovery of the senses*—not those we habitually think of today: sex or romantic relationships (in truth, the protagonist stumbles into a few fleeting affairs); I refer to that physical bond that employs the entire spectrum of our senses without expecting anything in return, be it play or gratification. It is a pity that Faggiani addressed such an important topic, that of the discovery of the senses, by framing it within an escape from the city, in an exceptional setting such as the mountains. Which of us can afford to go and live in a chalet in the woods? And who can afford to live > as we wanted to live , free, watching > the Earth turn without hearing its noise?. It is not clear whether this is an autobiographical story; what is certain is that the context is too flimsy to give depth to the narrative, beyond some interesting, yet fragmentary and sporadic insights. The writing is the novel’s fundamental merit, even if the style is at times journalistic, with an overabundance of periods, gerunds, and verbless clauses. Take this example: > But he hadn't answered me (already Word's grammar checker would have marked as an error the "but > after the period), probably he was negotiating, reassuring, supporting someone. Someone else, instead of yours truly. Wasn't a comma sufficient before someone else"? And aren't three gerunds in a row too many? The narrative develops slowly, without twists; the characters remain suspended, without their inner turmoil ever truly being understood: so many feelings crowd in, yet always on the surface. Why not read it? Too fragile.