They left it here before they left. It’s an old tablecloth. Since I opened it to put it on the table, I can’t understand cooking without it. It has lists of various colors, of different widths; it seems that the color wears off where they meet. Green, black, yellow and white. I move it away a little where I decide to work —from time to time the writing may appear—, without closing it completely. Sometimes I imagine it as a memory map: if I look closely I could find ancient gestures, names from the past, ghosts, recipes, hungry days, a small shared banquet, some stain with history.
Since I’ve lived here, the heart of the house is this, and I, a mere beginner who only listens and wants to learn. Until a few weeks ago I didn’t know how to light a wood stove, how to feed it, how to separate the ashes, what is the best way to maintain the temperature, how to touch without burning myself. Now I roast apples, warm my clothes before bed, think about the next meal. This is the silence in which I like to work: one that is maintained with a pot on the fire, with the smell given off by pine cones and branches when lighting the fire. Outside the song of the cuckoo does not stop repeating itself. In the same place, every morning, from above, a scribe sings. Often, a quail hidden in the grass is intuited. At night, the other neighbors, the ones I can’t see, but who continue their rituals in search of food: a badger, a fox, a roe deer.
Something tells me, from this little corner, that the world is also made of all these conversations. Perhaps I notice them because I live a few days without an imposed clock, out of immediacy and urgency. I can’t stop thinking about my friends: I want this calm and this kitchen for them too. That the time a pot needs is the same as a poem, a job, a meeting, a job; the same imagination Have time. And that the echo that leads to other echoes can appear in it, the question, the threads that weave ideas, everything that disrupts and moves us, that which we share with others, as if nothing had happened.
I want this stillness to spread, not to be left alone here, in this house. The discourses that impose and quarrel drive me away, those that blame and only create discomfort, that point and do not shake hands to think and find together other ways, other recipes, other knowledge. I am also hurt by the processes and formulas that operate in the same way and with the same times as this voracious system of endless precarious bodies against which they fight and criticize so much.
For new tablecloths to come on which to eat and celebrate, perhaps we can use remnants and fragments on which we rest and in which we collected the crumbs of yesterday. If I cook now it’s because I’m outside, I have some time, I’m calm. If I am part of the conversation in this place, it is because I was finally able to notice it, open my ears to not only listen to it, but also understand it. What will be left? What is it that survives me? When only issues surround me, I remember, I remember, I think of all those from which I come. Thus begins the poem that we do not stop writing together.
