A Eulogy for Love - Chapter 4

We are each of us angels with only one wing,

and we can only fly by embracing one another.

Luciano De Crescenzo

Evenings have now become synonymous with solitude in my lexicon. The silence slices through me like a double-edged knife. I want to talk, to scream, to wail but there's no one around to hear me. No, no one will hear my howls, no one will wipe away my tears. There'll be no silent comfort. The longing is, oh, so big and so small are we, the people that make up its parts.

How silly is our life and how fools are we to put up with it as it is! Silly and tragic. How does it change courses from one moment to the next, just like that? How does it break our dreams into pieces all at once? In a moment, in a single fateful moment I've lost everything, I've lost everyone. I've lost you and all our crazy friends; the poets of life, the prophets of doom. Almost everyone I ever loved have become pieces in the labyrinth of my memories: you, Maria, Kostas, William, Emily… You've all turned into ghosts and the sun no longer caresses my soul. We are but shadows of shadows, Kostas used to say, and he was absolutely right.

The weird thing is though that an untimely feeling of sanguineness seems to be currently running through my whole being. I feel that from now on everything will go well for me, but how? How? How can that happen since I've lost you, the most precious stone of my existence, the flame that burned my body and my heart? Am I finally going mad? I sit here, I look at the earth that cages your human body and somehow I feel optimist! How can it be?

This night is, like the ones that preceded it, deadly quiet. The heaven above is dressed in cloudy black and the stars, just like yesterday, are furnishing their light on some other skies. It's as if the elements can feel my pain and trying to silently stand by my side.

Water has started falling from above. A light drizzle. The tears of the clouds come cold and wash over me, and bring joy the grass, the handkerchief of the lord, according to Whitman.

Everything reminds me of you, all of you. And every single thing cries out to me: you are alone. The mask of sorrows has become one with my face but I know that one day I will expel it, I will get used to the new order of things and get on with my life, but, of course, I will never forget.

Eleni! Your name keeps running in circles in my mind, I can hear it whispered by the wind, sang by the birds, and I can see it written on this land by the raindrops.

I wonder if you've finally found salvation, my love. My love! How ironic, I've never called you that when you were still alive and yet here I am doing it now. The distances that tear us apart and bind us together. Everything can be said when no longer anyone has anything to lose.

I'm going to tell you something, something of old that was left unspoken, thus it's still new: I've always made dreams for Us. I would sit in a train, watching the scenery hurriedly passing by before my misty eyes, and think about you. I would fly towards distant lands, looking at the clouds beside me, the sea and the earth below, and think about you. I would walk in green fields and deserted beaches, I would climb up mountains and go down ravines, and think about you. I wanted us to share the same images, to live the same sunsets, to experience the same things, to rise together to the heights of our collective imagination. I've dreamed all that with my eyes open, but the moment I closed them, I could no longer see us together. Why? The answer to that arrived to me in the most cruel of ways, as you well know.

As I look back I now realize that our differences were big, but somehow we've learned to live with them. If we ever became a couple, probably they would be a problem, an obstacle that would pull as apart. Not becoming one is the thing that saved our friendship. As for our common interests they were few, but enough to keep us close: the poetry and the music, our readings and sporadic excursions to the islands or the countryside, the most simple yet beautiful things.

I close my eyes and I bring back to life in my head all that we and our friends have lived together. Our discussions without end, the fugs, the nonstop drinking and the singing in the hidden beaches of Paros, Emily's stories, Kosta's and Maria's silent eye to eye conversations, William's accompanying of our every word and thought with his guitar. I remember you shedding silent tears as Emily sang Imagine with her blues voice, Maria smiling almost inwardly with a knowledgeable look on her face, and the rest of us staying still, lost in the magic of the moment. I remember the sun rising like a red crocus through the sea, the birds waking and starting their morning chorus, the fire, the ecstasy in our gaze…

And the river of sweet memories continues to flow without a break, before it unavoidably spills into the stormy seas of my being.

To be continued.

The image was taken from here.

 

Book Review: The Golden Egg by Donna Leon

Donna Leon is one of the crime writers that don’t quite follow the rules. Even though she’s lived in Venice, Italy for more than 25 years, she doesn’t want her novels to be translated into Italian, while the main character in her novels Guido Brunetti is nothing but a hardcore cop.

The Golden Egg is the 22^nd Commissario Brunetti novel and within its pages one would think that nothing much happens. A young man is found dead, everyone is certain that it’s a suicide and yet the good inspector decides to investigate because his wife Paola asks him to. Now that would sound crazy to any crime fiction fan who doesn’t know Brunetti, and especially to those that are used to the western clichés of moody detectives, with personal lives that smell of disaster, and who always find themselves in dangerous situations.

Brunetti is not only a good and honest cop in a country where corruption rules, but he’s also a great husband and father, who enjoys drinking coffees with his colleagues and wine with his wife and who likes navigating his beloved city with his own GPS: Guido’s Personal System. And he’s also someone who always tries to help out his friends, has no big regrets, doesn’t carry a gun, and works hard to bring criminals to justice.

The author doesn’t seem very interested in dazzling the reader with nonstop action and a plot full of twists and turns; she rather wants to tell stories about a city, its people and its customs, and about the local laws of silence that most often than not stop a lot of truths of coming to surface. And it’s exactly this silence that Brunetti has to overcome here to discover the truth behind the dead man’s life. So he moves all over the city, meets people, asks a lot of questions and little by little he comes to realize that a crime has indeed been committed, though it was of a different nature.

As we follow Brunetti all over the city we get to meet a lot of interesting characters: Mafiosi, corrupt politicians, a cruel mother, lawyers with no morals, people who prefer to turn a blind eye on a crime instead of helping the police; and the most surprising thing is that the Commissario doesn’t blame them, since he knows that they are right to feel the way they do. In Venice, and in Italy in general, it all comes down to who you know to get things done; this seems to be the message. Brunetti is no angel either, but he only uses his connections for the benefit of others and not himself. So, he’s more interested in helping a good cop getting a promotion than helping his boss out, and when it comes to office politics, he just keeps his distance. His job is to solve crimes and keep the streets safe, and not to parade himself in front of this politician or the other.

If you’d ask me to compare Brunetti with some well-known fictional detectives, I’d say that Ian Rankin’s Rebus and Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch come to mind, but for no other reason that all three of them are stubborn and only interested in fighting the good battle. However, even though the latter two have been through a lot of trouble, their Italian counterpart seems to be serene, as if he’s sailing through his everyday life, enjoying all the little joys that it has to offer: whether that’s dinner with his wife, a secret chat with the brilliant Elettra Zorzi, one of his colleagues, or reading his beloved Lucretius. Books are to Brunetti what music is to Bosch and Rebus: his favourite, though thought-provoking, escape from reality.

The Walk of Life - Chapter 3

What surprised her the most was his calm manner that seemed to border to insensibility. But no, he wasn't insensible, and he's already proven that, he was just peaceful. And the peacefulness that ran through his whole being was so obvious that it could turn someone else mad. How could that be? How could he be like that? It was almost out-worldly the way he talked and acted. To her eyes he was wrapped in mystery, a mystery that she was eager to investigate.

They were walking in quiet for a long time that night. He asked her naught and he didn't even try to find an answer to the many questions that have started piling in his head since the moment he met her. Could it be that he wasn't that interested to know how she found herself on a Saturday night-Sunday morning, sitting at a park, alone and in tears? She asked him, without words, and so he didn't answer. At the moment she thought he didn't care, but as he would explain later he was simply letting her to decide whether she wanted to talk to him or not. He didn't want to blackmail her answers. Besides, he had already guessed the reason why, so all that remained were the details. The truth is that she wasn't willing to share those details with him at the moment because of her lack of faith in people. And if she couldn't talk to the people who knew her about it, how could she ever tell everything to a complete stranger?

So they kept silently walking their path towards nowhere in particular. They'd listen to each other's fade breaths once in a while and steal glimpses of each other's figures, but no more than that. It was as if they were walking in the forest and not the city streets. They hardly noticed the vehicles passing by, nor the voices of the other night walkers.

She doesn't know, she can't tell with a certainty since time stood still that night, how long that walk lasted, and she could never guess how much it would mean to her one day in the not so distant future. That simple walk would open for her the gates to a new life, a life full of tenderness and hard truths, clashes and reconciliations, love and repugnance.

Now she shuts her eyes forcefully and paints in a masterful way on the canvas of their inevitable past. She paints them as they walk, like friends and strangers at once, in the old city streets, listening to the sounds of the waking day and the dying night, and her inner sight is flooded with the colors of a rosy dawn and his warm unexpected presence.

No, that was not the happiest night-day of her life, but perhaps it was the most important of all. It was the beginning. The beginning that would be followed by many endings. The beginning of everything and nothing. Of the nothingness that now fills her life.

When I'm away I feel closer to you than ever, he once said, trying to find an excuse about his proclivity to leave every so often, for his need to visit new places, meet new people. If I don't miss you then I won't be able to love you the way I should, like my ideal you, he added, making her smile, in melancholy. Now she feels exactly like he describes, closer to him than ever, as he accompanies her from sleep to awakening, as he emerges so serene, and angry, and stubborn and tender out of her memories.

She regrets it. That she drove him away. That he left her. But she believes that things happened the way they were supposed to. Did they though? No, she's not sure about that, she could never be. He keeps insisting in his letters that everything happens for a reason, and that the pain of parting is far better than the daily death of life, and things like that, but she can't really follow his logic, agree with it.

Often enough she loses her head and then finds herself feeling like she hates him, she despises him, but not long after the mist clears from her delusional sky, and calmness, though unwelcome most of the time, returns and then she loves him again. She loves him with a lazy passion, almost drugged, because he have helped her find her own way in life, and then vanished like a passing shadow on an unending universe.

She's not kind to herself. She keeps asking him tough questions. She thinks that the answers can offer her an illusion of salvation. What would she do if she hadn't met him? Who would she be? Where would she go? These questions weigh in her thoughts and though she secretly knows the answers, they are softly killing her. She was saved by his love. He saved her from her own self and her false passions. He saved her from a self that wasn't hers to begin with. And she thanks the unknown gods of fortune for that, and she blames them, for the gift they give her, for the one they have taken away.

She feels strange. It is quite weird how someone like her, that makes her living through the art of word, cannot truly and clearly write on the blank page all that she wants, to put all the words in line and try to express how she feels. Perhaps, in the end, all her words were meant for him. But, maybe, she really doesn't know how she exactly feels at the moment, and thus she can't describe it.

Nevertheless, she is certain about one thing: that she is now poor; poor and rich at the same time. Poor in her day to day life. Rich in memories of the past one.

She's now wholly wrapped in a veil of sadness and she has no clue as to whether this self-imposed solitude could be the medicine that she needs. But, even if it isn't, that doesn't change anything. She wants to be all by herself. She's sick of people. People who have eyes that do not see, ears that do not listen. She's sick of them and they are sick of her, since none of them can any longer stand to be close to this great melancholic. No one can feel her, or even get her. And the truth is that she feels sorry. She's deeply sorry not for herself but for them. She no longer wishes to sacrifice her soul for their sake. She will not wear her fake happy face for them. But she's also sorry that she can find joy no more in the small and the unimportant, the ephemeral things in life. She's sorry that she can no longer give kisses in the air surrounding the ears, and exchange small compliments, extracts of lies, with the others, as the rules of social contact dictate.

And she's full of rage. A rage so fierce that seems to rule her every moment, destroy it, and which keeps her soul enslaved. It may one day calm down, weaken, and turn itself into something else, something completely different, but probably that's not going to happen any time soon. Unless, of course, he comes back to her. Or unless she meets someone like him, an exact replica, someone who will get to know her without asking her anything. The letter…

The image was taken from here.

 

Week 11

Some people say that I'm pretty. Am I? I know not. What I do know is that I like to laugh, a lot. My laughter lights the world, my mother says; but she's my mother after all, what else would she say?

In the picture above you can see me celebrating the Festival of Water or Loy Krathong, in Chiang Mai, Thailand. This festival marks the end of the dry season and the beginning of the rainy one.

For three days (and more, actually) we eat, drink, and participate in endless water fights and have tons of fun, placing for awhile all our troubles aside. The water, as it flows, plentiful, seems to wash everything clear, our bodies and souls. This is a thing of wonder and joy for me, and makes me smile wider still.

I Have No Tears by Maria Polydouri

No, for you I have no tears anymore

you lying night, with your jewelry

and with your electric eyes.

In your call I remain silent like a grave.

And my nostalgic songs

and my loves like a shredded thread are they.

I used to believe in your beauty once

and a heart I'd become full of pain.

From your loves both and your nails.

Now I see you with horror getting close.

Do not caress me so modestly,

my hatred is the only thing you raise.

Translated from Greek by yours truly.

The image was taken from here.