The Notary
I am John. A Notary of Souls. And I dwell in purgatory.
My work begins when what came before has ended. When time halts. When the soul comes loose from the body like a shadow poorly fastened. That is when I appear, to attend that last narrative act - which is sometimes the first, or at least the first sincere one.
I have listened to everyone, and to everything. People have told me things they would not, or could not, confess to anyone, not even to their own mother... and others they perhaps never dared so much as to think. I have heard tales born in caves, in empires, in villages and slums, in leafy suburbs and in favelas. I have listened to those who died without knowing how to read, and to those who mastered more than fifteen tongues. My questions, when there are any, are elementary. And the answer, when it touches what is essential, is never in the figure. It is in the tremor of the voice. In the silence that comes after.
Faith - all faith - is a form of language. And what matters, in the end, is that the tongue should find what it means to say.
Why, then, do I call it "purgatory"? Why Purgatory and not Bardo, Naraka, Asphodel, or Gehenna? Why is my name John and not Siddhartha, Tenoch, Diogenes, Al-Ghazali, or Sun Tzu? Perhaps this book ought not to exist. Perhaps it is a seepage from the other side. A failure of containment. An editorial accident between planes.
Perhaps every reader, on opening this book, rewrites it without knowing, adapts it to their own consciousness, as souls do with their settings.
Perhaps you yourself, in reading this, are reconfiguring the names, the forms, the meanings. Perhaps this book was not written for you. Or perhaps it was.
And that is precisely why it bears this title, and why I am called as I am.
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