DFor as long as I can remember, I have always lived out of sync. By this I mean that I have never coincided – or never felt that I coincided – with the age certified by the registry office. Whether I was 11, 16, 20 or 26, there were always two of us. The one who lived his days without worrying too much about time and his own age – and who I could call “I” with a certain honest ease – and then that other one, the one who wore the watch, the bureaucrat of official time.
That is, what others called by my name and surname, and who handcuffed me to the practices of living associated with his pedantry in specifying my date of birth. And whatever age “I” felt I was, it was the pedant who bore my name who stuck me in sixth grade, in the relevant sports category, in the vaccines that the doctor had to administer to me, in the asymptotes at school, in the driving school lessons, in the first university booklet.
In short, I have always lived with a perceived age which – even without explicitly telling me so – fluctuated back and forth on the time line, and a strange obstinate police state that forced me to line up for the mugshot and be registered together with my peers. If at nine years old I felt like I was on par with the skiers competing in the Olympicsand I felt that my body was nothing less than theirs, while every Sunday I pushed with poles on the snowy slopes with a number on my bib, then there was that sense of disappointment and profound injustice the next day, when they put a school bag on my shoulders, and I had to sit together with other boys and girls to damn myself about fractions or the French Revolution, wearing a little black apron.
Or at sixteenwhen I was walking with my first girlfriend under the arcades, and we held hands with the absolute certainty – in my chest and in my thoughts – that we were a married couple, that we had a house, that everyone around us not only perceived itbut that they knew it because it was true. And that at the end of our ten or twenty comings and goings we would then go, like everyone else, to get our parked car back, and on the way back we would stop at the supermarket to do some shopping for dinner. And then instead, when the two hours of time we had available had completely expired, here came the policeman of the time, and told me that the age I really was – sixteen years old – implied that I went back to mom and dad. And so he escorted me to the bus stop. He made me get in without saying a word, sit down if there was room, and then look out the window already exhausted with nostalgia for what I hadn’t yet experienced. And then he would throw me back into the house, subjected to the absolute power of two parents.
Like a shadow that follows us, our age assigns us specific tasks and labels. Illustration by Fred Benaglia
The point wasn’t necessarily just the desire for a leap forward. Even trying to look at it from here, now, writing, using writing as reconnaissance, it’s clear to me that it didn’t just have to do with feeling older than my actual age. Sometimes it was the opposite, it was the desire to go back a few handful of weeks, to before the end of the summer, to before an outburst, or a failure on a report card. In short, there was me, floating on the calendar of days, and then there was that other person who was constantly overtaking me or falling behind me. As if living were just this always chasing each other, or always having to wait. Like walking for kilometers at night under the streetlights, and seeing your shadow slipping away and running forward, or on the contrary suddenly braking, slipping away from you to look for different options somewhere behind you. And trudging, trying to ask for a lift to the present, knowing that the present isn’t there.
Andrea Bajani’s thirty years
And then there were the thirty years. I remember almost every detail of the day I did them, there in the middle of the wide open summer of 2005. Not because I was happy, because I wasn’t particularly happy, nor was I unhappy. But why did I wake up – in an apartment that wasn’t mine, after sleeping on a sofa bed with a woman with whom I had shared almost everything for at least two years – suddenly that other me, the policeman of the official time, had disappeared. I can’t report anything other than that perception of no longer having him under my feet, stalking me, taking off my handcuffs just to feed me, then putting them back on immediately afterwards, showing me the calendar and the photo on my identity card.
That breakfast, in such a foreign house, still stands out as a moment of absolute adherence. That impossible to account for – I only do it now, even a little hesitantly, when another twenty years have passed – except with a glance from behind the coffee cup. And that sentence, the only one I could pronounce without being misunderstood (“I finally got my twenties off my shoulders”) receiving in return only a slightly melancholy smile, with the forty years that she would soon reach. The rest of the day was then this walking around, so synchronic, in which everything happened only once, without echoes or regrets. With the clarity, and even the precision of an absolute gesture. It was I who held the reins of time.
I was thirty years old. There was even that sense, almost painful, that lo and behold, I had finally freed myself from the desperate need to write, which was connected to all this. Because it was a mixture of apologizing to the policeman of the time for not being able to live in sync, and that mixture of regret and ominous omen that only the words on the page could cure, even if only for the duration of a story. And if I am here now, typing this story on the keys, two decades after then, it means that that day – the day of my thirty years – was only a crest, the balancing act of a moment.
If I’m still here, over fifty, with an ocean between since thenan authorship that had begun twice in the meantime, means that that adherence was just a mistake. The next day it vanished, like a dream that wasn’t even strong enough to persist when I woke up. I woke up and the weather policeman was there, in the street, beyond the window, with his stupid car parked in front of the house. I pulled up the shutters and he was there again. To remind me that I was late, or that I was early, that I should have or that I could have.
Even now I happen to see it, from the rearview mirror or from the windowas he passes me in the fast lane. I would like to point this out to my children as I take them to school, but then I don’t. Why? I don’t know, maybe because I don’t want to confuse them. Or on the contrary because I like that complicity, that secret, that continuous struggle I have to spread it. Because perhaps on the day I turned thirty, which was one of the few in which I didn’t write a line, I missed him, I missed the freedom of being out of time. And so even now I still curl up in bed, the days when life beats the hardest, and I gather myself up fetal, child, I escape to a place that the policeman of the time says is no longer there. And I save myself for this, because I can tell him go fuck yourself, because I know how to get there, I still know how to make myself cry inconsolably. And I also know how to write it, even at fifty years old, even if I have children who are sleeping at the moment, and will soon wake up and ask me to console them.
The author
Andrea Bajani he lived between Turin and Paris, cities that are the backdrop to his novels. Today he lives in Houston, Texas, where he teaches Creative Writing at Rice University. He is the author of award-winning poems, novels and short stories translated into many languages, but also of reportages and theatrical works. With the thirteenth novel, The anniversary (Feltrinelli), in which he recounts a radical and touching gesture of personal liberation, won the 2025 Strega award.