Rome

If you ever go to Rome, just tell her how much I miss her.

Tell her I miss her ochre walls as if they were the tanned back of a man.

Tell her I miss walking in her narrow alleys as if I were slipping my fingers on the spine of my lover.

Tell her I miss the soft swing of her leaves and its colors enlivened by the sun in a summer afternoon.

Tell her  I miss her statues made of still beauty and the shadows they cast among my footsteps.

Tell her I miss the accent coming from her lips.

Tell her I miss swallowing her taste.

Tell her I miss her men and the soft laugh coming from their mouths.

Tell her I miss the dim lights flickering on her nights.

Tell her I miss the river that runs on her body.  

Please, just tell her how much I miss her sunsets. 

I am reading once more one of my favorite love stories, The English Patient, by Michael Ondaatje 🙂 

Happy Valentine´s day, everyone 🙂 

two pictures in a box

In the closet of my rented beach house, I found a wood box. There were brownish palms and a yellowish shore drawn on the top of it under a layer of dust.

 When I opened it, a smell of sea came from the inside. There were two pictures in there.

 One of the pictures was black and white and featured a couple. It was their wedding day and they were smiling at me, their unknown faces enlivened by the light that was coming from the tall window behind them. The countryside could be seen beyond the window. The dark shades of the trees invaded the sky fading to gray.

The fishtail of her dress was spreading on the floor, in front of her, like a thin layer of ice. 

 He was wearing a well-cut tuxedo and the light coming from the window seemed to bring sheer to the cloth. His eyes penetrated mine as if he knew who I was. Her eyes looked a bit aloof.  Her hands were gripping the bouquet tightly, the petals so well- cared that they seemed to be made of wax.  

 The other picture was colored and featured a woman in her twenties; her eyes were hidden behind big sunglasses which design dated back from the seventies. She was at a balcony. She was wearing a red bikini and a pink scarf on her head. The sunlight behind her gave some nostalgic look to the brown locks of her hair and to the washed-out colors of the cars parked in front of the beach.

 I stayed there, staring at the pictures, overwhelmed by the smell of salt and old paper. I wanted to write those people stories, knew who they were and what was made of them. But there were no names, no words written behind the pictures. It was only me and three characters.  

 And then, I decided to let my imagination fly. I just looked at the shore and listened to stories told by the sea.   

The fisherman

The fisherman felt his feet sink into the sand. He looked at the sea. He did not see any color, only darkness.  The sound of salt water. The smell of open sky. The feeling of ordinariness.

He looked at the shapeless shore, the curves of nobody. He then turned his eyes to his house, watched his wife through the window pane.

He knew that a few minutes later she would go to bed, the aflame eyes watching the darkness, her half open lips faking a smile. They would stay in bed, their bodies contorted by  insane moves of love.   

There was the smell of her skin in the air.

Their house was devoid of traces of intimacy. For him, the intolerable distance between them seemed more vivid than the eroticism lurking beneath the sheets. For her, everything was trivial, she acted with youthful impetuousness, even when her eyes seemed a bit aloof and endless seconds passed between each blink. Endless seconds of pleasure or fully realization they would never belong to each other.

 When morning came, repressing the putative happiness he had felt the night before,   he looked at the sheets, still wrinkled. She was not there anymore. She had never been, she was only the mermaid of his dreams.

 He laid his head on the pillow where her curls should have slept. He put his face down in it. There was a strange smell of sea. 

 

the painter

He was sitting at the park in a summer afternoon. He was a blind painter whose brushes ran over a canvas like ballerina shoes looking for a corner on the stage.

He couldn´t see the moves of his brushes but he could hear the sound of the tints, hues and shades swirling, interlacing their distorted edges, like lovers among sheets.

Night was coming.   There was no one to guide him home. The queens-of-the night were spreading over the grass, by his feet.   He decided to stay there, led to be seduced by the smell of the petals standing out in the dim light of the park.

Books, j'adore

Oh, for those empty, unguided days of January! I wish for them well now that the year has really and truly begun! It seems as if all of my work projects and plans for travel have sprung to life at once, and where, even a week ago I felt completely undirected, I’m plenty busy now…

One of the writing projects I’m working on at the moment deals with the relationship between Katerina and Petruchio (the “shrew” and her suitor) in The Taming of the Shrew, so I’ve been reading all the copies I can get my hands on. This particular version, a graphic novel intended for middle school children, was lent to me by my father, a huge Shakespeare buff. He collects all sorts of strange versions of the plays, as well as histories, films, and modern interpretations; he’s been doing this for as long as I can remember. We…

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Venetian night

One night, Felipe could not sleep. He stared at the high ceiling, a chill sliding down the walls until it reached his spine. He had the sensation that the room was filled with mist, gelid clouds slipping down his body. The curtains waved in the wind like the cupped hands of a woman offering him a taste of night. But there was no woman there. He shivered under the heavy blanket, his sweat was as chilly as the blind water from a deep well. He got up, his feet were stiff, his legs moved with difficulty until they could adapt themselves to the heat that slowly reached their muscles. He shut the window still watching, from the pane of glass, the drunk on the sidewalk, shrouded in the mist that was gradually disappearing; his pale chest, his stony expression. Nothing moved in that man’s body or face, only his eyes pointed at upwards, at the emptiness. And the old window seemed to frame the statue of a saint. But he was not a saint. Sometimes, he took the bottle, drank a sip of wine, and Felipe could sense the alcohol reddening the man’s face. But the drunk remained pale, gazing at the mist, waiting for the ghost woman to come into view.

 Felipe went out, passed by the drunk, the anguished expression on the man’s face opressed the night. In the air, not a perfume, just the smell of the stones and the canal waters; in the gloom, not a colour, just the wet gray, variation of the black.

 “She went that way!”, the man cried, pointing at an arch in front that led to the Piazza San Marco. Felipe did not even look at him, just hid his face in his coat and continued walking, only his own footsteps sounding in the empty street. The drunk stood silent now. Felipe did not turn to look back, he was afraid of what he could see, but he knew there was nobody behind him, not a shadow on the bridge.

 He stepped in the arch, where not even the mist penetrated. It was the night bed. He could hear the sound of water leaking but those stones released no sound. He just felt them cold when he touched them. And he was afraid that he had entered his own tomb from which he would never get away. Then, he saw a light gleaming at the end of the arch, lost in the mist. It moved slowly, leading him to a state of hypnosis. And around the fluctuating halo, the mist was coming and going, and a woman’s brown hair stood out, in plaits that curled over the nape of her slender neck. She turned towards him, but he could not discern her features, only an outline of her face, suggesting an exceptional beauty. And, next, she disappeared in the darkness.

 

He gazed out of the window. In the room facing his, he saw the woman with yellowish eyes. They were yellowish like amber, the shades inside them creating erotic designs. There was a white and thin curtain at her window. When the light was on, the cloth looked orange and a perfume would come from the night as if it was coming from her glassy, colored eyes.

He would  wait for her to look at him, with those eyes composed with liquids. She finally turned to him, her look tinging the rain that has started to fall.

He opened the window. He wanted to ask for her name. But she turned off the light and disappeared into the darkness of her room.

There was now only the damp smell of concrete brought by the wind filling the void between them while her eyes remained yellowish for a stranger.  

   

She was sitting at the garden. The grass was still. A smell of summer in the air. A boy and  a girl were playing hide and seek around a white marblestone crafted fountain. The girl was wearing a pink T shirt matching her sneakers. The boy was all dressed in navy blue. The girl seemed upset because she had fell down. The boy was staring at her with clueless eyes and half- open lips. She could hear their muffled voices and the soft sound of the water against the marblestone. 

She was bored with the ordinariness of life in the countryside. She would like to be on the beach. She closed her eyes and framed this moment. The sand was still. A smell of summer  in the air.  There was a boy and a girl playing hide and seek around a sand castle. The girl was upset because she had fell down. She could hear their muffled voices and the soft sound of the waves against the shore. 

She opened her eyes, lit a cigarette. She was smiling now, listening to the soft sound of the water against the marblestone,  watching a boy and a girl play hide and seek and a black and yellow butterfly flutter around them.

the ghost of himself

Even shadows can walk, he thought, when he heard footsteps outside the house. He got up and reached the window. A woman was walking away, her black dress wrapping her as the fuzz of a nocturnal bird. He recognized his neighbor´s figure. In the darkness, the grayish trees coexisted with the autumnal decayed green already dead by the chill. The branches were howling in front of the window like delicate forms of ballerinas dancing in a dim light. But they were no more than faceless shapes in the night. And when he approached the candle to the window pane, he could only see the sight of his face reflected in it – an observed man, he thought, imagining that, perhaps, he had found the ghost of himself. And nothing from outside could touch him. He touched the glass, it was warmless and the outline of his face was only a transparent, cold and flat surface, with no bones to support it. Still, he existed. And now, the ghost of a living man was blurring his vision so that he could not see what was happening outside or what the woman was doing. His reflection mixed up with her shadow walking among the trees. And everything blended in indistinct, colorless and nocturnal images. He thought about the way those images overlapped and pictured that he and that woman could be making love in a clearing nearby without him tasting her lips or sensing the smell of her skin. And the ghost of himself could be in that room, staring at him, and at the same time, taking another shape whatever to lie down with that woman. But when he extinguished the candle, the ghost of himself vanished, entered his body, abandoning that irrational act of love.