What Is Talking

Translated from the Persian original.

Apart from the linguistic definition, which is the most general of them and settles for the production of sounds to convey meanings, talking is so vast a subject that sometimes it even happens without sound, through the eyes. I'll start from a scene I remember, where someone was saying to their badly wounded loved one, darling, talk; they only wanted to know whether the other was alive or not. You've surely heard something about the fast of silence that some schools practice as an exercise for seeing better and purifying the soul, which, well, suggests to you that not talking must be so hard that they've named it a fast, and you're surely well acquainted with words like drivel or yammering or chattiness. When I was a child I would talk even to people in the street; little by little they taught me to speak only when necessary. During my schooling a place called a classroom was added, in the presence of a person called a teacher, where all you have to do is listen. Then suddenly I grew up and went to a place called a party, and I had to force myself to talk and learn to socialize, and in the end I learned the skill of talking at the right moment. Then it was time for me to learn, in what I said, to tell secrets apart from ordinary information, and besides that not to give other people scattered and superfluous information, and of course I soon mastered all these complexities and talked with ease. Years passed and I thought I talked well enough, and again the story began right there: you arrived, and I had to talk to you in a different way. All the rules changed, and I was somewhat confused, but excited. Then I talked and talked and talked so much that I was emptied out, but the world didn't so much as ripple; it was only as if something had gone out of me bucket by bucket. At first I thought that thing's share had run out and, like everything else in the body, it would come back after sleep and rest. A few days passed and nothing changed. I couldn't talk to anyone; briefly, as far as yes and no, and sometimes with great difficulty, after a lot of thinking, a few things came to my tongue. In company, in response to people's talk, I got by with nods and smiles and I'm-listening looks. I had so few words that I could hear the sound of my thoughts that hadn't come out of my head and hadn't turned into words, but I couldn't do anything for them. Gradually people noticed; some thought I had nothing to say, some thought I was indifferent or had some particular mental syndrome, and some thought I was putting on airs with them. Little by little I forgot that the problem was with me and thought people had gone deaf, and I communicated with them out of pity. You came back, and I wanted to tell you what I'd been through while you were gone, but suddenly, as if magic were at work, my tongue came loose again and I said and said and said. Never, when it's time for you to go, does the joy of talking leave me room to say that when you go I turn mute, and the world won't let me get as far as telling you to come back soon, or just to stay, and I never understood why the spring of my speech has become a geography inside you. I know only one thing, and that is that it's my soul that speaks to you, and I pour it into the soul of your ears so it goes with you wherever you go, and telling you things from my soul gives me a pleasure that talking, anywhere in the world, is never defined or known by.

Soon someone will slap my face, talk, talk. They just want to know I'm alive.

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