The Chinese Astronomer

A Chinese astronomer sits opposite me
at a breakfast table in Florence.
He has come from a conference in Trieste.
For two years he has lived in Switzerland.
Something or someone sent him there
and will decide when he goes back
to his wife and his son
who is about to enter Beijing University.
Perhaps he'll return by the end of the year?
I tell him I have been to Padua
and seen an observatory there
that Galileo must have used.
So many stairs, so many stars…
Later that day, he stumbles towards me
in the street, lost and in panic.
"Can you help me?' he pleads,
as if to a stranger,
expecting not to be understood.
That evening across the table,
conversation is difficult,
because he has drunk much,
and I have drunk nothing…
We speak different varieties
of perfect English, mention cities
as if they were bubbles or stars:
Amsterdam. Venice. London. Madrid.
Towards midnight,
re-entering my room,
I turn and catch, from the corridor's end,
his fugitive glance
in which despair outstrips all desire,
as if I were the phantom of his wife
destined always to pause at a threshold
then disappear into an unknown room.
At the beginning of the day,
in one of the pauses that was the conversation,
he had said, clearly, brokenly,
It is too long.
Then his hands had knocked over the sugar bowl —
white glistening mounds on a white tablecloth
that must have seemed as meaningless
as a map of the earth, or of the heavens.