Il libro di magia

Il libro di magia is a hidden bundle of photocopied spells that begins as a curiosity and becomes the governing instrument of a year-long transformation. Its instructions appear to give the narrator what she wants, but the book also supplies the means by which she creates, confines, and slowly destroys the nameless man. As the spells accumulate, the volume’s promise of wish fulfillment becomes inseparable from the cost of obtaining it.

Physical Form and Discovery

The narrator finds the book discarded behind a shelf in her local library. It hardly looks like a book: there is no cover, only a stack of photocopied pages held together with a staple. Without a back cover, it has no space for a library card pocket or barcode. She rolls up the loose bundle, slips it into her pocket, and walks out past the librarian, treating the small theft as a private act of rebellion.

At home, she opens the first page and follows its directions in the basement. She draws a chalk circle on the floor and makes a mixture from basil and blackberries in her pantry, burned hair, and a fresh drop of blood pricked from her thumb. She performs the ritual less from belief than from the conviction that a hidden collection of spells deserves at least one trial. Her skepticism gives the book an initially casual place in her life: an eccentric experiment, rather than a source of authority.

Nothing happens at first. Disappointed but unsurprised, she leafs through the pages and sees spells promising wealth, beauty, power, and love. The categories seem redundant to her; several could plausibly count as wishes of the heart. Their New Age quality strikes her as faintly silly. She decides to leave for happy hour, thinking of summer cocktails, while the smell of burned hair lingers in the basement. The book’s first apparent failure is thus followed not by a dramatic revelation but by an ordinary decision to stop paying attention.

Instructions and Misreading

The volume’s language is difficult to read, and the narrator’s first encounter with its organization sets up a consequential mistake. When the summoned man appears, she later approaches the book with a knife and finds it open on a step below her. She searches the page for a key but can make out only the old-fashioned, blurred heading Desideri del cuore. She initially understands those words as the name of the spell she performed. Only later does she realize that they identify the book, while the first spell itself has no name—just as the man it called forth has no name.

The distinction matters because the book’s contents are not simply a sequence of clearly labeled wishes. The narrator has to interpret a page whose print is indistinct, and her reading determines what she believes the magic requires. In the next spell, Wealth, the long list of ingredients includes silver, juniper, green candles, and rosemary, as well as what she reads as heart’s blood. Having already tried the ritual on herself with a small puncture to her thumb, she concludes that the needed blood must come from the man. The book therefore becomes not only a set of instructions but also an object whose partial legibility leaves room for her assumptions—and for harm.

Spells and Transformation

The narrator’s experiment with the Wealth spell appears to succeed through an inheritance. While the man remains in the circle and eats breakfast, she performs the ritual; when no money appears, she is about to call the police to report a deranged squatter who has entered her house. Instead, a call from an unknown number tells her she is a laughing heir: a legal term for someone inheriting from a relative so distant that the heir did not know the relative well enough to grieve. The spell’s result is not a visible shower of cash but an unexpected change in her circumstances.

As she proceeds, the spells give her wealth, success, luck, intelligence, strength, and beauty. The changes do not always arrive immediately. Sometimes their logic unfolds over hours or days and leads to an inheritance or a remarkably rapid promotion to chief executive; sometimes she wakes simply different. The book’s effects thus combine delayed, legible outcomes with transformations that have no visible chain of events beyond the narrator’s altered capacities.

After completing the spell for intelligence, she develops a way to defend what she has done. She reasons that the man, without a name or history and made to fit her desires, is not quite a real person: his melodious accent, too, seems to have come from the depths of her dreams. In her account, the herbs, blood, magic, and desire have made him an idea given life by her mind and the words on the page, rather than a person in the full sense. This interpretation helps her live with his confinement, but it does not undo the physical consequences of the rituals. The book’s gifts to her and the man’s suffering develop together.

The Man, the Ingredients, and the Final Spell

The narrator continues to use the book even as the man’s condition worsens. At first, she cuts his arms to obtain what she believes the Wealth spell requires. Later she handles him more carefully, passing the knife over his back and bandaging the cuts. The wounds heal into fine pink lines that fade toward silver. She feels the pain of his fear and loneliness, and spending time in the basement becomes a form of companionship for them both; she is isolated, and he longs for her company after long days inside the cramped, dark circle.

She promises that when she reaches the end of the book and has performed every spell, she will free him and share everything with him, since the magic belongs to him as much as to her. Yet she knows she cannot trust him to forgive her without her help, and she has already begun to think about the final spell, Love. The promise and the plan coexist uneasily: she wants his affection, but also expects to use the book to secure it. Meanwhile, her growing abundance makes desire self-perpetuating. After a year of collecting his tears as ingredients, she has everything she wanted—or thought she wanted—and invents new wants in order to satisfy them.

When she reaches the last page, she brings down herbs from the farmers’ market and odds and ends from a dollar store bazaar. The man lies curled on the floor, pale, silent, and scarcely able to speak; his body is covered in a network of silver scars. She hopes the final spell might erase them and return him to her restored. She opens the book to the last page, already imagining that they will burn it together once all the spells are complete. Then the instructions blur and change beneath her eyes, demanding something different from both of them. Rather than weep, she laughs at the reversal and at the idea that a heart could have everything it desires.

The book’s final alteration breaks the narrator’s imagined ending but does not stop her from acting. She enters the circle and drags the man out, recalling that a year earlier she had fled from him because he seemed tall and frightening; now she has strength and he is nearly weightless. She straightens his limbs, removes his torn shirt, straddles him, kisses his cracked lips, and lays the knife against his sternum. She decides she will find another love that truly matches her wish. The book has supplied both the promise that desire can be fulfilled and the changing instructions that frustrate any simple fulfillment; at the end, its power remains bound to the narrator’s choice to seek another answer rather than release the man.