It stopped at Norwich Station. When I stepped down onto the platform and looked up, I had the impression of being inside a whale. Under the translucent vaults of the iron and glass structure, the feeling of traversing the skeleton of a gigantic mammal to me seemed irrefutable. I walked all over its body and emerged through its mouth. Following the directions I’d been given, I crossed Lady Julian Bridge and obviously I halted: it was the first encounter with her beauty. Swans swimming on the Wensum river, accompanying each other as if in infinite conversation, were the first beings inhabiting the city. I remember thinking: ‘Clearly, the river belongs to them.’ Once fully across the bridge I came to the National Centre for Writing at Dragon Hall. The welcome from the team was marvellous. They showed me all over the house and I was dying to get writing. I settled in and immediately went out to follow the walk beside the river and get lost.

Fifteen days later.

Now I have the feeling of having lived no other life except this one, I can say that it is the best of all possible lives, with the exception of the sketcher of birds.

The alternation between sunny days, shining like a plate of freshly cut fruit, and the days of chilly, ticklish rain, has made reading more enjoyable from the start. The problem is that the beauty and contentment of Norwich have captivated me in such a way that my desire was to be together all the while, and starting to write seemed to me a betrayal of the time we shared. Because to write is to enter into the words and leave the city, and I only wanted to be with her, with her gardens, streets, churches and bookshops. Every day I would go to the market to stroll around or eat; the smell of fish and chips mixed with the scent of vibrantly spiced noodles. Every day I also visited the swans that would come to meet me like puppies wagging their tails. They like people and food, I suppose, even though I’ve felt flattered by some of our encounters. I hope they have too.

I’ve visited many buildings and gardens; caught up in the gloss of the past, I’ve gone all over rooms full of jewels, altarpieces, dresses and cloths, armour, sewing needles and a multitude of objects of an ancient technology which emanate knowledge and necessity: a thick, stable harmony. On one of these visits of overwhelming inspiration, I found what would be the key to my stay: the sketcher of birds. I saw him sitting in the room of stuffed birds, with a portable stool, a leather case full of colours, the kind that closes by being rolled up, and his sketch book. He was drawing a stuffed bird in an artificially recreated background; the scene was reminiscent of a Star Trek set. Observing the room and seeing that person drawing the bird, I felt something akin to envy and admiration. I wanted to be that person and, at the same time, I felt fortunate to have witnessed that moment.

So many things made sense in that instant; inhabiting a completely paused, frozen space and how, in the most arbitrary way, a drawing could give that scene the time it had lost. With his drawing, the person created a second temporality where the bird could exist. The attention of the sketcher of birds with his pencil is a form of loving. Every traced feather, every space in the memory occupied by a beak, a colour, blurs the relationship of ideas with ordinary reality.

Now everything is birds, and with my memory full of feathers and colours life is established in a new space of the conditions of existence. Now the sketcher of birds incorporates the bird into his being in the same way I’ve incorporated Norwich into mine. The reality of being together has made me regain a yearning that I’d forgotten, that I thought I’d never feel again. All three live within me: Norwich, the sketcher and the bird. I won’t ask whether I live within them, in the chipped wood of the bridge, in the brilliant hands of the sketcher, in the pupil of the stuffed bird. I’ll just pretend, as if the inhabitability of beings is requited.