The old man was sitting on the bench, sparrows around him were making out a five-inch-diameter circle within which there would be no seeds to eat, the early fog of a winterly town day was lying in wet, velvety layers, slurring over the slippery steps of the little church dimly shaped by such misty motions. All the sounds of the waking town were concelaled in the wet, velvety layers of the early fog ; some hundred yards underneath, the city lay its unending arms crumpling the country in its sharp-edged fingers. The waking city lay as the waking hand of a nineteen-year-old boy which lilifies the world it cups into itself and shows up to the eyes of the outsided passers-by, while the old man was expecting the homecoming of a long-lost afore-dreamt body that was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen in his life, though his eyes were shut at that time.

« The coming of all soul, such was love in those days », it was the first sentence of my story. And then I met, the flame quivered, the juvenile cigarette resting on an ashtray, a finger copper-hued by tobacco, red lips tightened behind that butt, a slowly moving face with fightened quicksilver in the eyes and a now beseeching now entreating voice from the delicate mouth. The outcast had left his pipe and was presently trying and repelling remembrances of a never setting sun and recollecting visions of never ending rain over the slimy northern streams.  ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………… and then I met, I was writing the story of ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………… the man was forgotten in the leading path to the deep down forbidden maze. He stood beside a green railing-bridge while dark blue sands were slowly approaching him, causing the frail leaves of an old castle to brustle the black-gowned nighty trees looming above him. He crossed the bridge beneath the quiet shadowy light displayed by an old ragged sail bulging with its sunburnt memory of, and followed the silent waves furrowed by long flying birds.

« The coming of all soul, such was love in those days. Girls would wander about the lonesome streets and make men a present of their idleness spending hours and hours in smoky bars telling dull tales about their way(s) of life, fancying a kind of tiresome paradise where they would lie naked under the whip of a richly dressed forty-year-old nymphomaniac and fornicate with one of their understanding girlfriends ; fancy them, each playing the distressful mature woman adjusted wrong, holding as many cigs as the stars of the fifties did and being just as boring as they thought they no longer were.

Hundreds of concrete piles were chewing the sky nobody had ever dared to touch before. Below, life was going on in hurrying lines of cars, in greyish rainy harbours promising days of ocean-steaming, in the switched-off eyes of old and young united beyond ages by the same oblivion, the same neglect their sons and fathers had for them. And on dirty pavements, she could pass by youngsters lying like some poured junk of prayers. I was reading the story of » my sadness and I chose not fright.

She was like a waking lily, her flesh was as fresh as a dewdrop upon the waking hand of a nineteen-year-old boy. He’s the one who’d come through the misty bushes of the early morning, when July was displaying its blue heat over fragrant hills covered with larkspurs opening their bodies to the crystal seeds of dew sweating a coital strain with the powers of nature, and in the dark-blue lawns of the desert heath he had laid his limbs, warm and weighed down by an unceasing flight from the days of shut windows and hurting sheets, and there, drinking the cool sparkling light of the moon, as he was sobbing with distress he took his clothes off and turned his body unto the earth, like he remembered beyond ages the first incestuous act of love between man and his all-protecting mother.

Closing his eyes, he heard a dog howl at the moon. Years before, he had been told to take his way and by way of a guide he would listen to the advice his dream gave, his ever-coming dream of a white fair-haired figure gliding down a healthy hill. He had just found that place, after years’ searching and sufferings, at the top of a cliff sloping down to the ancient wealthy sea. He heard a dog howl at the moon and he felt the earth cleaving under the weight of his body.

Upon the kitchen panes, rain spots were blurring the long road leading from white, glaring buildings to the old town that a circular wall had set as a crown upon the rocky summit of a gray-skied mount, a spectator of human works, struggles and fights, of slumbering vegetal lives for centuries. And of the few people running along the pavements none resembled the blue-capped white-coated son. The man and the woman inside the room were staring at each other as they used to be alone every evening, since the morning their blue-capped white-coated son had left, had left them, holding the little red satchel they had offered him the previous Christmas, and having such a stare in his eyes as to freeze in his memory the furniture, the small life-rich family objects and their faces to whom he bade farewell. And their days had started giving way to a real slumber, a vegetable life without any worldly surrender, a mere look at the road every evening at five fifteen.

I was writing the story of and I felt I must write. A kind of obsessional whirl of world images and voices was deepening its way into my own self, a physiological gloom was walled in the silent room of my youth, I was starving to write and, by and by, memories and visions would help me to ascend from my mere existence, to detach myself from that « mortal coil » of mine and have the immeasurable pleasure of a day filled with the purity of my unknown birth. A scarce sunlight on the town forgotten in the prime roots of Winter taught me the absurd death we are doomed to. Only with writing would it cure me from my sickness and I would have to love her and hold her naked body tight in my arms, hold her legs, her breast, shoulders, thighs and I would not be an absurd subject any more …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. and then I met ……………………………………………….. beauty, blue, nakedness, and « the writer » only could be a help for him, the ultimate help … in the mirror, the oval mirror of his approaching death.

                                                                                             _________________

                                                                                                                                     (to be continued. Dec. 2022)

Jerome Smith-Collier

jer_smith-collier.auteur@laposte.net

Pict.:https://encryptedtbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcS6HI6Og8Rm2MJPJnhZURBa8C_JkrJVSPw-yg&usqp=CAU