Desideri del cuore

Desideri del cuore is the title of a spellbook whose words set the narrator’s desires in motion while obscuring what those desires will cost. At first she mistakes the title for the name of the spell she performs. Later, as the book’s sequence of incantations grants her power and changes her relationship with the man it summons, the phrase gathers a darker significance: wanting something does not make it harmless, or make another person merely an instrument of that want.

The Book’s Title and the First Spell

The narrator finds the book discarded behind a library shelf. It is not a conventionally bound volume but a bundle of photocopies stapled together, without a cover, a back-cover space for a library card, or a barcode. She rolls it up, slips it into her pocket, and leaves without alerting the librarian. The shabby, illicit object arrives in her life not as an imposing grimoire but as something she can easily carry away.

At home, she follows the opening instructions in the basement. She draws a circle of chalk on the floor, crushes basil and blackberries from her pantry, and adds a lock of her burned hair and a drop of fresh blood from a pinpricked thumb. She does not expect the ritual to grant her a heart’s desire; she is not even sure she has one. Her reason for trying it is more casual: a reader who finds a spell collection hidden in a neighborhood library ought to test at least one spell. The first attempt appears to fail. She browses the other promised gains—wealth, beauty, power, and love—and judges them redundant and overly New Age before preparing to leave for happy hour.

The apparent failure is not the end of the ritual. A naked man suddenly appears in the basement, his scraped and bleeding knees on the floor and his hands spread as if to break a fall. The contrast between the narrator’s ordinary errand and this abrupt arrival gives the spell its first concrete consequence. Yet the appearance supplies no explanation of who he is or what the ritual has done to him; the book’s title seems to offer a clue, but she has not yet understood what she is reading.

A Misread Title and a Sequence of Wants

When the narrator searches the open book for an explanation, she can make out the heading Desideri del cuore. She initially treats those words as the name of the spell. The mistake is consequential: the phrase is the book’s title, while the first incantation has no name. The summoned man, too, has no name. When she asks who he is, he cannot remember. The text thus links the nameless spell and the man’s missing identity without resolving them into an ordinary account of a person’s past.

The narrator’s next discovery turns the error into a practical problem. In the spell for wealth, among ingredients including silver, juniper, green candles, and rosemary, the instructions call for heart’s blood. She has already tested the spell on herself with another pinprick to her thumb, without result. Concluding that the required blood must come from the man, she cuts him to obtain it. The title’s suggestion of inward, personal longing is now entangled with a literal bodily cost: the narrator treats the summoned man’s body as material for the sequence of spells.

The spells bring gains, though not always in an immediate or predictable way. Wealth arrives through an inheritance from a distant relative, whose death leaves the narrator an heir she has never known; other workings take hours or days to unfold. After the spell for intelligence, she gains a new account of what she has done. She tells herself that the man is not really a person but an idea produced from herbs, blood, magic, and desire, brought to life by her mind and the book’s words. That explanation offers a defense of her actions, but it also exposes how thoroughly the book’s vocabulary has shaped her view of him: if desire made him, she reasons, then he is part of the spell rather than someone to whom she owes freedom.

Desire, Companionship, and the Promise of Release

The narrator’s changing fortunes alter the terms of her captivity as well as her own position. Intelligence helps her articulate her justification; strength and beauty follow among the gains she receives. She becomes relatively convinced that the man is unreal, yet his attention gives her pleasure, and she recognizes that she desires him. Her newfound beauty makes her feel able to lower her guard. The change does not end their unequal arrangement: she continues to keep him inside the Chalk Circle while spending more time with him in the basement.

Their contact develops within isolation and dependence. The narrator has no one else with whom to discuss the astonishing things happening to her; the man, after long days confined in a narrow, dark circle, longs for her company—or is very good at pretending to. One late night, more than tipsy, she promises that when she has reached the end of the book and completed its spells, she will release him and share everything with him. She knows she cannot trust him and expects he will not be able to forgive her without her help. Her desire for him therefore coexists with an expectation that his forgiveness, too, might be something she can arrange.

That promise is made under the shadow of the final spell, whose name is love. As the narrator continues, the man’s body deteriorates: his once-perfect muscles slacken, his skin turns corpse-pale, and fresh cuts still bleed through their bandages. She has stopped hacking at him and now tries to cut and bandage him more carefully, but the gentler treatment does not undo the harm. The book’s progression toward love is therefore accompanied not by an uncomplicated movement toward mutual intimacy but by worsening injury, guilt, and an increasingly strained promise of release.

The Final Reversal

At the climax, the incantation changes and demands something else from the narrator and the man. The alteration frustrates her expectation that the book will fulfill desire according to a stable sequence. She laughs at the possibility that one cannot have everything the heart wants, then looks back at the spell in hope that it will return to order. It does not. The book’s title has never guaranteed that desire can be satisfied without limit or consequence.

The narrator enters the Chalk Circle and drags the weakened man out. She recalls how, a year earlier, she screamed and hurried away from him because he was tall and frightening; now she has strength, while he is nearly weightless. She unfolds his limbs, removes his ragged shirt, straddles him, kisses his dry, cracked lips, and places the knife against his sternum. She decides she will find another love that truly matches her heart’s desire, relying on the promise she believes the book contains. Her final reassurance that he should not be afraid sits beside the blade and the prior history of cutting him. The expression thus closes not as a simple wish fulfilled, but as the name of a desire whose meaning remains bound to power, self-deception, and the unresolved danger of treating another being as something the self can make and possess.