Category: Literature

Something missing

If I lay here on the high grass Carla can’t see me. I like this grass. It surrounds me and I can’t see her. She is there playing with the forks and spoons at the edge of the field and under that tree.  The sky shines cloudless and green and two long black birds circle, spiralling upwards and upwards directly on top of me.

I close my eyes. The sun hits my pupils and the world goes orange. It is warm and it smells of grass and dirt. There is barely any sound; the wind licks the back of my hands, and the exposed skin of my face.

I hear some steps and I think of Carla, but the sound of broken twigs passes behind my head and goes away.  I open my eyes and look at the birdless sky.  There are no clouds, no big black shadows, no noises, no wind, and there is only a constant patch of a greenish blue.

We biked from the city. We took a long and winding road that not many know about. It goes through a placid meadow filled with the sweet stems of spring grass before it passes through a forest, coiling under the shadow of big and muscular trees until it reaches the park.

The sky has a very slight green hue, green memory of the prehistoric sea dwelling under our feet. When they were digging the lake, the excavator would spit out piles of sand and sea shells. I can’t help but think that the nights of the past are still shinning under me. Silvery skeletons of stars are shining under the grass over water now long gone.

There is something missing, missing from this placid day, missing up there in the heights of a clear sky. I look up into the blue and look inside myself and I can’t find it. I can’t find it.

There is always something missing. I have never known what it is. Robert drinks, and I drink with him, and we keep drinking until the street lights are all yellow, and distant, and the buildings turn into hallucinating creatures of a thousand eyes and mouths and I can’t find it.

Carla whispers something to my ear. And the night surrounds us as we kiss and move and our naked bodies fuse into one, and then it comes, the horrid realization that not even an instant of oblivion, not even an instant of death can fill it. I can’t find it. I know it is there, there in the yellow lights, somewhere in the middle of a nameless orgasm, lost in the starry memories of that prehistoric sea. Maybe we should take all the sand and shells out from the womb of this park, maybe if we dig enough we will find the reflection of the night.

I don’t know why I think these things. Carla laughs when I talk about them and sometimes she looks at me with her big eyes and says nothing.  And then I say nothing and we keep quiet. It is a placid day and the grass is high around me. Carla is playing with the forks and spoons; I can hear their metallic clapping mixed with the sound of her laughter.

Flying kites

The door closes. The street is silent. Sundays are slow days. The cherry trees are blossoming. We walk and laugh. We walk and laugh again. Up that hill they are flying kites. “I want to get one” I whisper to  her ear. It is windy and I can see the carcases of my words go away. They are floating around us, threaded to our kissing mouths only by the silence that lingers between us. The hill is steep and the city shines beyond the park.

 

Longings

The trees cast a long shadow over the road. It is a tiny road that curves along the quiet facades of old houses and ancient walls, hops over the arch of a bridge and plunges into the yellow night and into the trees. The night is yellow, yellow as the gas lights that pour their jelly of gold, and tinge the intimacy of night with a dust of old.
We walked a few steps over the bridge and stopped as we reached the middle of its hunch. There was a swift kiss. One. Two. Our lips pressing tight against each other and the arch of our backs bending in an untied knot.
It all smells of old. The lazy arch of the river coils around the same turn that it has seen for centuries, and the faces of these walls wet their noses into the black water as they have always done.
There is something fiery about the noises that escape from the hidden corners of the night. The untamed past shouts from the pavement stones. The echoes of gone steps fill the empty space that stretches beyond the intimacy of our play. The past with its tentacles of foam and its vast shores of pebbles dwells out there. It is alive in the murmur of the trees. It lives in the yellow lights of the gas lamps. It whispers with the echo of a long gone cart, rolling slowly through the street, leaving behind it the clapping of a horse’s shoes. It is there, reverberating with the sound of cannon voices and the fading shouts of a commander to his battalion of iron suits. The past and its stories of love and death, flesh, bones, and dust, swirls around us as the taste of our mouths fuse.
What am I searching for when I kiss your lips? What are we searching for in the hidden shores of our skin? What are we looking for in this colliding, this implosion of our bodies if not only a tiny relief from the looming presence of death? It is in the past, deep in the night of the world and the big blanket that surrounds it all and stretches around us like a cocoon where we exist. Inside it there is only the two of us, our bodies, our kisses, and nothing else.
Over there the contours of light raging in a craze of colour invite us to unravel the ribbon of our kiss. The music pours from the tents and crosses the night in swift flight.
The purple liquid pours from a vast cup and a fountain of black lava flows down into a pond of chocolate. The lamps shine on top of us, and their yellow lights pulse in front of the black of a starry night.
When we look up, a few nightly flies hover around the lights’ golden nape and beyond them, the moon looks down upon us with its immovable and pallid gaze.

A portrait of the distance

The table is empty.

The window is open. There is a patch of blue.

An open book lies besides a glass of wine on a side shelf.

A golden light pours out from a door. A candle burns in another room.

The air is clean. The sails inflate and deflate with the breathing of the breeze.

The sea is cold, and its waters shine clean and blue under the sail boats.

Her body sits, straight on the chair. She wears a white hat and a blue dress. Her lips are half open as if a smile had just flown away from her mouth.

A seagull cuts the air with its silvery wings. It flies away slowly, and its distant cries fade as its wings take it far away.

My fins

I jumped into the river and swam to the other shore.

When I left the water a pair of fins had emerged on my back.

The pedestrians looked at me with fear. I didn’t know where to go, where to walk. I fainted. ‘

When I woke up, there was a light on top of me, and I could see nothing but its bright rays of white.

I touched my back with my left arm. There was a long scar running down my spine.

The hospital sheets where white, but the room had blue curtains dividing me from the others.

I went by the water. The wind was calm, and the river flowed down its course with a steady stream of green liquid.

I jumped.

Some note

Why do I write? The act of writing, is that of leaving a mark of ink on the page. The page that glitters, white and empty, gets filled with the images, the emotions, the colours, the ideas that populate my imagination and give shape to the landscapes of my inside.

I write to forget, to empty the vessel of my soul of the ghosts of its memories. I write because I feel. And I feel. I write, I shout, I feel. There are lips and sights, and eyes that looked at me with a smile and those who looked at me with a faraway glance. And I write to capture them all, to lock them on the white of the blank page. And when I succeed, when the letters carve a prison of words, I am free. I am free.

The dirt. The grass that moves, in tiny inflections of its shape with the soft movement of the breeze. The landscape is wide. A few trees scattered in the distance move from one side to the other. Their colour is dark green, and they form a circle of deeper greens that surrounds the fields.

I call my name. The sound bounces on the walls of the grotto and bounces again and again on the walls of the cave. I hear my name repeated, magnified, amplified and finally scattered into pieces reaching back to me. The water is cold. The cold permeates through my skin.

The dirt falls on my head. I have been lying in this coffin for a few days, and the leakage lets pass a constant flow of sand into my box. I can’t move. The sand doesn’t let me move my head. I try to shout, but my throat says nothing, and my lungs, dead, cannot pump the little air that stands between me and the ceiling of my crypt.

A spade breaks the seal. I cannot move. The sand has covered with a thin layer of silica the enamel of my bones.

Public death

They killed him.

The bullet pierced his forehead and he fell from the podium and into the mass of people that cheered below.

There was a silence. The crowd kept quiet.

And the TV monitors spat, to the dense air of a summer evening, the news of the assassination.

An acid cry escaped my throat. The TV shop was cluttered with people revolving around the few monitors that were turned on. I believed in him. I believed in his words and his speech. I believed, I cried, and someone pat my back.

He was a man. For his forehead bled, and his lungs stopped breathing. I thought, while walking out of the store; I thought he would bring change, and from thinking about it again and again, I thought he was change itself. I thought many things. I realized everyone thought many things. Then I remembered the bullet, the improbable bullet that pierced Keneddy’s skull in Dallas, and I felt scared. How was it possible that HE was killed. How could it be possible?

We all felt cold. We felt a big wave of chilled wind flow through the city. The next morning they brought the newspaper and his face was there, bleeding on the asphalt. He died instantaneously. I looked at the picture for a scarce second. “They caught one of the assassins” read the footnote. I felt my stomach turn around. The morning was bright outside. The street was full of the sound of cars moving slowly through the congested avenue. I took my briefcase and left for work.

Some note

Why do I write? The act of writing, is that of leaving a mark of ink on the page. The page that glitters, white and empty, gets filled with the images, the emotions, the colours, the ideas that populate my imagination and give shape to the landscapes of my inside.

I write to forget, to empty the vessel of my soul of the ghosts of its memories. I write because I feel. And I feel. I write, I shout, I feel. There are lips and sights, and eyes that looked at me with a smile and those who looked at me with a faraway glance. And I write to capture them all, to lock them on the white of the blank page. And when I succeed, when the letters carve a prison of words, I am free. I am free.

The dirt. The grass that moves, in tiny inflections of its shape with the soft movement of the breeze. The landscape is wide. A few trees scattered in the distance move from one side to the other. Their colour is dark green, and they form a circle of deeper greens that surrounds the fields.

I call my name. The sound bounces on the walls of the grotto and bounces again and again on the walls of the cave. I hear my name repeated, magnified, amplified and finally scattered into pieces reaching back to me. The water is cold. The cold permeates through my skin.

The dirt falls on my head. I have been lying in this coffin for a few days, and the leakage lets pass a constant flow of sand into my box. I can’t move. The sand doesn’t let me move my head. I try to shout, but my throat says nothing, and my lungs, dead, cannot pump the little air that stands between me and the ceiling of my crypt.

A spade breaks the seal. I cannot move. The sand has covered with a thin layer of silica the enamel of my bones.

A heart of storm

The sound of a rapid buzz of bug wings left his ear and dissipated in the distance. Its chaotic flight moved in a drunken wave from petal to petal until its body disappeared among the many other bees that feasted on the nectar of the garden roses.
 
She kissed his forehead with a quick movement of her lips. Up there, the arms of the tree barely moved and its leaves reacted with lazy yawns to the morning breeze. It was a fine day of summer. The sky was clear and the burning eye of the sun poured its cold heat over them.
 
“Karol” he whispered to her ear, and she looked back at him with watery eyes and an open mouth. The kiss was soft, like an engulfing embrace of warm water after a winter day. What did he feel inside his chest? There was a song, a distant song that grew progressively louder and louder and with it the shout of a pulsating, throbbing rage that permeated through his body, slowly taking over the undulating movements of his tongue, fogging his brain and escaping with the hunger of his kiss.
 
The minarets’ reflection wavered on the still water of the lake and the light breeze of a chilly London day carried on its wings the clicking sounds of their play. There was something irremediably elusive of a kiss, and an embrace, and the feeling of that thirst burning with such rage, so far, so many miles away.
 
“Away”. He murmured. “Away” he sighed. Why can’t we fly away, to an undying sea of nothingness and calm. Why can’t we fly and forget, and live, and not live, and be and not be, and sing and be quiet, feeling our feet burn in the sand, and float in the salt, cold and warm, warm and sweet.
 
There was a burst that night, and little Karol woke up, feeling the pulsating sting of a lightning jolt crawling through her spine. As the bombs fell and the sky raged, and the stink of fear and smoke filled the city’s streets, the night dissolved and the murmur of her tears, fatigued, and broken sank her into a fragile sleep. It was a train, or a bus, or a car, or the trunk of a van, which pierced through the back of the forest on her way north.
 
Her eyes were closed, and her lips shut. Sleepy, sleepy twigs of hair fell on her forehead in the depth of a peaceful sleep. He bent to murmur sweet syllables of air and stroke the threads of her dyed hair.
 
“You fell asleep.”
 
That morning the hums of the monitor filled the room. There was a shot, and another, and then silence reigned as a pair of men covered in black masks walked up the stairs. Marco stood there, watching up in awe to the frame of light until the sight of a flag, and a multitude of black took over the roof and the view from the helicopter drifted away, and away, to the mountains, and the news studio, and the concerned face of a reporter that burst in a diatribe of unintelligible words and explanations. The camera blinked and there was a shout again, and a shot, and the TV showed the dismembered bodies of men, young men drying under the sun, with their old fusils laying bare in their tombs of bone and flesh. He blinked again and he was there, in front of the water and under the minarets.
 
“I didn’t know how to speak in German until I was ten” and she laughed. “I went to school and didn’t know anything. I don’t know what they thought. They probably thought many things” and she laughed again as he threw the folded arch of a leaf of grass into the water. It sprang back into its original shape and turned and turned like a broken clock.
 
“I liked the cuckoo clock we had in my house. The little bird would go out and chirp every hour and every quarter hour. When the hour hit, it would chirp a few times, depending on the time. It would only go out once every quarter hour. You had to turn it off at night unless you wanted to listen it singing and singing when everything went still. It is so silent up there you can hear the earth breath. It is a storm of quietness, so thick that it is made of glass.”