VOL V

This evening is different from the others, I feel strange, out of place.  By now it seems that I find myself writing only to express my inadequacy. 

I lay down in search of rest, and as my pupils adjusted to the dark, it seemed vividly to me that I saw a moth on my right hand.  I turned on the bedside lamp with my left hand but in those two seconds when I turned my gaze, reality was painted differently and the horrid patina that the soft light created reassured me with maternal affection.  Shortly thereafter I began to feel a tingling in my arm which covered my shoulders and head within an hour.  I felt very uncomfortable and at some point felt a primitive and necessary physical need to get up. I pushed the heavy blankets off my back and got up, but I stood for minutes contemplating the plaster that at times fell from these old walls. 

I was awake, active, hungry for any soft noise or movement as I searched for patterns in them like the rustle of water in pipes or the slow footsteps of my neighbor pouring milk to cats.  And the more I got lost in the details, which I often do, the more I noticed the insistent tingling on my shoulders that almost became pain as if new wings were forming from the bones.  I felt like I was rejected by the dense body of surrounding darkness, extremely out of place and uncomfortable.

Even now, as I write, I still seek peace in the subtle rustle of the water, as I am deeply shaken.  And the more existentialist I am, the more I frighten myself as a child of his own shadow. 

When the tingling passed, I felt extremely nostalgic, remembering the past day and recounting it by romanticizing its boring and decidedly not very poetic edges, hiding insecurity with a feeble third person since the narrating voice is not afraid to chat. Since I don't get too miserable, I prefer to stick my faults in other ink worlds. 

Today is Sunday, yesterday Saturday, a Saturday night like others.

The stairs, cold as the last time his hands caressed them, lay breathless and dying at the edges of that squalid film library embracing its walls and windows. Young rag dolls looked out of them wearing their lipstick like a carnival mask and flirting with the wind that was so strong that evening that it blew the cigarettes between their slender fingers.

He was an artist, he understood beauty, yet he was a fish out of water without that suffocating plastic around. A romantic dreamer perhaps, yet attracted by that squalor that he so liked to differentiate himself. That evening, however, he did not cross the threshold of the film library, but remained just outside it, observing the walls that rose as if to howl to the purple sky. Rather, he decided to turn around and walk at a leisurely pace stumbling and occasionally dancing in judicious yet complicit glances. Could it have been the Fedora he wore that day? Or perhaps the fine linen coat that he had just now noticed being ripped off his right shoulder?

He walked on the pebbles that framed the town rustically while the pearl moon adorned the sky that was the canvas of his steps. The low-class buildings reserve a desperately welcoming aspect to his eyes, seeing the lights of shacks and merchants along the roadside or simply the shadows of some bakery ovens filled his heart with childish joy.  The butcher's shack, which certainly did not try to hide its raw goods, was particularly busy at that time since the wages had been distributed shortly before due to the change in the hour of payments in the factories.  Hibiscus flowers capture a poetic gaze even in bad weather and decadence, but the opposite was certainly not common in his parts. Ours walked to a corner shop hoping for an edible meal - the entrance sign said "Ince Polish Shop". Inside it was a little less than an oven and a desk on which a wooden box was placed that acted as a cash box. A man in his 40's welcomed him with a smile halfway between sweetness and contempt and handed him a loaf in exchange for a few coins. The faint light of the street lamps and the cold that penetrated the heart whispered like a shiver icy words when ours broke away from the ebony wooden door of the bakery, which gave off the warmth of a hug that must be rejected. There was no one left among the cobbled streets and glass buildings, no accomplice and no embittered, no thief or child. 

Everything was silent except the wind. 

And in that cold that the darkness accentuated, the young man headed for his apartment well detached from that depressing reality. Climbing the cold but always shiny stairs that crowned the building in which he lived, he crossed the threshold of his room which, however, did not respond with warmth or affectionate kisses, but lay there as if dead. He walked over to his table and pulled out his metal plate ready to be engraved with a new thought. The acid that preceded the ink in that race towards the understanding of that thought spewed on the metal, and tore the inside like the cold that a short time before had gutted the bowels of the man.  But not even the work shone with emotions.

He took off his rag coat with a melancholy air, walked towards the balcony lighting a cigarette between his thin fingers and, without a smile, lay down on the stinging wood, blowing out the wind itself with his cold. 

The tingling has started again, it will be a long night.