They call me Silence because nobody listens to me anymore. My friends spend the whole day in the castle, busy with their studies of useless things and daily activities like food, clothing, gardening, and trading with neighboring villages and castles. I would rather tell stories about what I see, what I feel, and what I remember. And to be honest, I’d rather tell them, not to people who might be here listening without paying attention to what I might say or write, but to those who haven’t even begun to grow inside their mothers, the ones yet to come, if the world doesn’t end before that. And I’m not going to speak of these things for the nobles or kings who are busy sending their men off to war, nor for the ladies who, instead of paying close attention to the words on the pages of a book, sit around sighing, often out of boredom, then doze off and don’t awaken until the princes or knights who are madly in love with them appear at their bedroom windows, so they dream on about a prince or knight who will never love them because their love must be so perfect that it can only be for the most perfect woman, the one who doesn’t exist or who is like all the rest. Thus their sighs, rather than for love of a prince or because they are bored to death by a book, are always from being bored by love and with themselves, which is the worst that can happen to them, a foreboding of what will end up happening when, fat and tired of having children, they realize how worthless the illusion of happiness is.

But I’m not going to concern myself with them, although in fact they’re the ones I should be speaking to, because they’re the only ones living in the castles who have access to reading and can reread the few books they allow us to have, the few books some people are allowed to read, since they’re usually kept by the lords in their studies and there they sit, waiting and dusty, like us women, waiting for their owners to return from the hunt, or war, or their drunken sprees and chasing after girls in nearby fields. I’m not going to talk to these men either, but instead I’m going to start right off telling my story to the person who still doesn’t see or hear me.