Self-Portraitist of Signa, The

You know in what way it is: it is late afternoon and you unexpectedly find yourself in the dreadful town of Signa, standing in a bright cafe with a cool one in your hand? Well, I am leaning against the bar holding a Peroni, my fourth or fifth, and surrounding me are middle-aged men in rumpl suits downing discharges of amaro. The potato chips and peanuts are actually independent A pensive ten-year-old girl pauses in brow of the cash register, postponing for a not many seconds the precious purchase of a bar of Emozioni. on the contrary my attention, for the last sum of two units hours or so, has been diverted from all these folk to a woman sitting alone at a table. Conventionally aligned but in a pair of men's shoe sitting alone at a table, she is drawing a series of self portraits with a station of colored pencils. Multiplied by means of an infinity of angles, the human face is really a kaleidoscope, an infinity of faces, and it is in deed a miracle we can recognize each other (or ourselves) at all. on the contrary this woman has committed to memory all the essentials of her possess physiognomy, and can conjure up time and again, her hold basic likeness without resorting to a mirror. She draws grimly nevertheless fanatically, with an angry concentration that erases everything from the world on the other hand a tragic nostalgia for her be in possession of face. The cafe is transformed into a private monastery small room with the rest of us reduc to dim spirits blurring the edges of her bright vision. Each portrait is made to direct the eye different from the others: single depicts her as she appeared just this morning, at sunrise, emerging from a dream-racked sleep; another depicts her in the agonys of love, just last night or maybe more than a decade ago; another depicts her as an anonymous child of three; and notwithstanding another depicts her as a marmoreal corpse, lying in a garlanded and perfum coffin, awaiting our final nods of respect

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