Robert's Glory

Robert once told me that he was very much like D’Annunzio. He has readL’enfant de Volupté andLe Feu, but always refers toIl Piacere asIl Fuoco. He comes to see me in my attic, and speaks in melancholy tones of our foolishness and his glory. As I listen, I think of the character that I will base on him. Every now and then I smile: I picture a more complete Robert, altered, transfigured.

Then he becomes suspicious: ‘What is it, Doctor?’

I have to quickly come up with a clever response. For some time Robert has suspected that I’m concealing my real opinion of him. He both admires and despises me at the same time. He’s always complaining about his weaknesses, which prevent him from attaining real glory.

‘If glory were mine, women and money would come to me effortlessly...’

Whenever he talks about women, his face suddenly lights up. In my petulance, which is my usual way of dealing with him, I’ve caught him out more than once by accusing him of only knowing about women from books and films. He’s probably still a virgin. He’s an adolescent with no eyebrows, the lips of a peasant girl, a shiny chin, soft cheeks and a broad forehead. I tell everyone that Robert is a beautiful boy.

But I still haven’t written anything in the notebooks devoted to my novel. No one is forcing me to produce a detailed portrait of my friend. Even so, I now want to concentrate on Robert, because he’ll be an important character in the book, and I need to think about the conflict he’ll create.

A conflict between whom? That’s what’s preventing me from starting the first chapter. I don’t have a plot. All I know is that I’m the hero. Of course, the novel will revolve around a crisis at the end of my adolescence. I’ll portray and analyse myself in relation to my friends and classmates. But I still have to come up with aplot. And since there can’t be a plot until there’s a heroine, I’ll have to include my cousin. But I’ve tried that, and couldn’t manage a single page. I thought I should write in the way other novels are written: florid, exaggerated, with painstaking detail. Yet I soon realized that I was straying from what I was capable of saying, and repeating scenes I had read elsewhere. So once again I put off starting the chapter.

But what will be the subject of my novel? My great love for the heroine, who’s on holiday in the country? No. I’ve never been in love; none of my friends have ever been in love in the way that people fall in love in novels. I’m not sure anyone would be interested in reading about an emotion that the author has never experienced. Besides, I don’t think that love is the most interesting thing that can happen to an adolescent. All I know about is our adolescence. But do Ihave to write about that, and that alone? I’ve experienced far more interesting crises. As have some of my friends. I’ll have to find a crisis that links all the heroes and heroines of the novel. If I could find such a crisis, I’d be delighted. It would make my job so much easier.

Because then I could simply introduce the characters one by one; none of them older than seventeen. Without any effort, the central crisis would become crystal clear. And the novel would continue and end as it needed to. When...

But all this is just rambling. I haven’t thought of anything natural, or based on real life, that could transform my novel into one with a genuine plot. My friends say that I should write a novel based on the life of schoolboys... A little-known world, undervalued and misunderstood in literature. But I can’t describe it accurately. Without wanting to I always change things, exaggerate. Yet the most important thing is that the novel must be published, so I can move up a year at school. It should be a reflection of my soul, without being psychoanalytical; because I