If a Traveler.

If a Traveler
by james bezerra



One Christmas vacation I was in New York City and I had received as a gift Italo Calvino’s novel If on a winter’s night a traveler which I had started reading Christmas morning but which I did not have with me on the subway two days later when I got on the Green line at 96th headed Downtown, which is when I saw a strikingly pretty young woman with curly jet-black hair wearing a gray wool skirt standing at one end of the car holding a pole with one hand while reading Italo Calvino’s novel If on a winter’s night a traveler.



My feeling of excitement was immediately replaced by a deeper feeling of sadness -- or perhaps of instantaneous loss – when I realized that here I had this connection to a complete stranger yet could in no way substantiate it or prove it or birth that connection into that cold urban Christmas. It was an incomplete circuit. What good ever is a potential connection to another human being?



She, The Reader, got off at 77th and I never saw her again and likely never will, given the size of the world.

Italo Calvino’s novel If on a winter’s night a traveler is a mishmash book made of chapters of several books, none of which are ever really completed or realized. In this way, The Reader and I probably did live out our relationship as fully as we could have.

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