Two
Two
Eva Forte
Two lives intersect every morning in a cafe. Two glances that say a lot more than words and that start together a 'non-affair' made of games and seduction, beyond the standard ways of seduction. Two main characters that allow us to enter their lives through the past and the five senses of the present.
Two
Eva Forte
Facebook: www.facebook.com/pages/Due/738756506137043
© 2018
www.laragnatelaeditore.it
Translated by: Giada Di Gioia
Publisher of the English edition: Tektime
To those who gave me the courageTo begin this new adventure
Preface
Everyone has several stories inside related to one’s own
background but also one’s own imagination. Stories ready to come out on paper, to come alive under the beat of fingers on the keyboard ‘Two’ is born this way and, just like in real life, took shape day after day, getting to know the main characters and their desire to play and know each other going beyond conventions and standard love affairs that follow well-defined paths.
The rediscovery of the five senses, the ability to recapture your own past even in the present, the capability to go further, and the solitude sought after for a long time.
A journey through the city, the countryside, and faraway places to know what love really is. It arises from a glance that, every morning, offers a safe harbour.
CHAPTER 1
The countryside
There is no such thing as waking up early when the city is still sleeping, and the silence of the night starts to break under the motion of the first sounds of the day. In wintertime, it still seems to be cradled by the moon, with that coldness that surrounds you as soon as you step out of bed, leaving the warmth of the night and the perfume of the fabric softener on the sheets.
The warmth of the duvet, with all its smoothness, gives way to little shivers that help me to wake up while I am walking through the still dark and silent house. After turning the coffee maker on, my morning rituals start to unfold one after the other. The shower turns on, with the strong warm stream that chases the foam away. My bathrobe is already prepared nearby, to prevent the coldness to become bothersome and bitter. With the first news of the day, I taste the hot steaming coffee, freshly made while I am still not dressed; the little things that put me in a good mood, even before leaving the house and facing everyday life. As every Monday, there is a lot of excitement in seeing her again after spending two days fantasizing about her life and about what she could be doing in every single moment of her day.
During the last few years I've lost the enthusiasm of having a lasting relationship with a woman, given the last affair, the break period after every relationship is having its benefits. Since I met her, the idea of feeling affection for another one vanished, at least for now. This new adventure made of platonic encounters and stolen glances becomes more and more exciting day after day, almost in the hope that all
remains on this level without any actual contact, without knowing who she is and what she is doing in her life.
I overhear my neighbour’s dog barking and, as regular as clockwork, he opens his door on the landing for his usual morning stroll in Villa Borghese. An old lady took the job of taking that little dog for a walk, being as loud as possible and making it impossible to believe it is actually that little. A nice woman, now alone and without any interests other than helping the engineer by taking a short walk with that tiny dog for which she has no further interest. Wrapped up in her big mat coat, she took the leash and went down the stairs, one step at a time, dragged by the tiny dog dying to reach fresh air after a long night indoors. Before leaving my home, I always wait until I can no longer hear barking. The nice old lady has a special affection for me and always feels obliged to brief me about all her health vicissitudes without taking a breath, and when this happens, I always risk missing my morning rendezvous with my charming stranger, something that generally puts me in a bad mood. So far, it has only happened a few times where we didn’t meet at the café, or at least on the route that takes her away from the café, for it is that eye contact that energises me for the whole day.
As soon as I hear the front door close I am ready by the door, jangling the keys and with my backpack on my shoulder and with my jacket well buttoned under my warm scarf, without which I would be lost during the coldest months. I chump at the thought of what will she be wearing today. I often try to imagine her and I make bets with myself to see if we are also in touch on these frivolous things. I also tried to guess at least the colour of her trousers or what she would
generally wear. A childish game that makes me smile when I realise that I have guessed something about her. I step up the pace on the road, this morning the old lady lingered with the engineer who gave her a piece of advice on where to take his ‘furry kid’, as he loves to call it.
In the threshold of the café, I see her with her usual breakfast mate, sitting at the small table near the fridge with the display cakes. Every day, our eyes meet and when she doesn’t break the eye contact the warmth of our smiles becomes one. Then it’s over, our non-affair stops there, even if I always try to look at her without her knowing, to see how she moves, how she teases her hair. One of the first times I had a seat just behind her, for the curiosity of smelling what perfume she had and to be able to remember her all day long by more than just an image in my head. During these three months, after our first meeting, I have never heard her name and this makes it all even more intriguing and mysterious. About her, I only know that she is a real morning person like me and that she can’t help starting the day without a cappuccino and a plain croissant.
Sometimes I hide behind the fridge, which allows me to look at her unnoticed through the glass, between the soft colourful cakes in it. A few days ago, her friend must have noticed me, given the way she looks at me every time we meet. So I abandoned my new hiding place to come back to my usual position on the side of the counter, between her and the exit, so that I would not lose a moment of our rendezvous.
When I dared to confess this platonic love to Stefano, I had to wait for five minutes for him to stop giggling. I must have entertained him a lot, especially the part about me hiding between cakes and pastries in
the café. Knowing me and my easiness in approaching the female sex, he was very surprised by the fact that in these months I didn’t step forward. He doesn’t understand that the beauty of my feeling lies in the fact that I have idealised her. Going any further would make everything come to an end, especially the vibe of the unknown, which fills this story with mystery.
After a week of ceaseless rain, today the sun has finally returned, so I took the chance of taking a day-off to go for a stroll in the countryside of Rome. Therefore, after half an hour I am already far away from the chaos of the city, from the crowded highways, and from the tall buildings that concealed the sky. In my car, I don’t even turn the radio on, for so much of her memory is on my mind. For a few seconds I even had the crazy idea of showing up and asking her to come with me. I would have taken her to one of the gorgeous parks on the Flaminia to finally tell her all about me, if only to know her name.
In the end, reason had notched up and I am about to arrive at my mum’s in a little village with four houses in a row that got stuck back in time. You can still breath the scent of freshly baked bread in a wood-fired oven and the cold blowing on your bones as soon as you enter the main street. The wind wraps you up and accompanies you while it whistles in your ear, almost whispering advice on your life. I often come here to wonder in this surreal setting of ancient times.
My mother also seems like a woman who didn’t accept the passing of the time. Always beautiful, despite the wrinkles that mark the years, with the rough and gnarled hands of someone who didn’t even spare a second in the fields or in the kitchen. Her only step forward has been forcefully accepting the mobile phone that I gave her as a gift last
Christmas. Since my dad is gone, knowing that she is alone and so far away from the city makes me feel restless, and being able to reach her, at least by the phone, makes me feel more peaceful. After her first reluctance, she learnt how to use it and sometimes she even sends me some pictures so that we feel closer, despite the distance.
Today I didn’t inform her of my arrival, I know how much she loves surprises and so I wanted to wait until the last moment to see the weather before getting to the street. Once I arrived at the main street, the first one to welcome me were two hens that had escaped from who knows which henhouse. These animals always make me laugh, always upright and unwieldy. As soon as their squawking goes away, I start to hear the smooth sound of shoes on the road with the light echoing between the empty and silent houses. The sun begins to warm walls and my gloveless hands. When I reach her house, at the bottom of the dark staircase without a front door, I overhear her voice in the distance and the sound of the rolling pin that hits the marble countertop. Today it must be the fresh pasta day, something that makes her very happy and so, between this and that rolled crust, she enjoys singing herself old songs and changing the words she doesn’t remember here and there. As I am coming up the stairs, trying not to make any noise, her voice becomes more and more warm and solid and replaces my café memories printed in my mind until that very moment. This place has the ability of making me forget everything else. A bit like becoming a child again, without big worries apart from having a bit of bread and freshly brewed gravy between this and that game. For a second I even had the will of going back to the street and chasing those two smug hens in their escape, to scare them a bit and to fulfil my ears with the
sound of their uncontrolled bickering.
Arrived at the front door, I stood for a moment in order to catch my breath after these steep and slippery stairs in the darkness that pulls the morning light away behind me. The door is open, as it is still a habit in the small villages, and behind a thin colourful plastic door curtain I discern her, inside with her apron on and her sleeves rolled up, going from one side to the other of the big kitchen in the hallway. What I love about her is that her smile is always ready to welcome you. I sneak into the room without making any noise whispering “Mum…”
as if it was a magical and untouchable word. While she suddenly turns, I see in her eyes a mix of surprise and endless joy, so we end up hugging as if we didn’t see each other for such a long time. As if I was still a child, she kisses my cheeks over and over again, in that soft embrace of hers from which I don’t want to loose. Curious about my arrival, she makes me sit down beside her while she starts to make coffee and puts on the table biscuits, a pie, and a bunt cake that has already be tasted, all of them rigorously hand-made by her. As she doesn’t receive a lot of visits, every time that I arrive she has to catch up with all that she has to offer me at home and I know perfectly well that even a slight refusal could be taken as an offence. So I started to eat a piece of pie with orange jam, my favourite one. While she tinkers with the small coffeepot for two, she starts to tell me all the gossip of the area: from the arrival of the new country priest, to the multiple births of the two foals on the next-door farm.
She has such tender manner of speaking that it seems like she is still singing, and I stay there, listening without blinking an eye, wrapped up in that atmosphere that is completely out of this world.
Today I feel in the mood for sharing, so I tell her about my mysterious café woman. She sits down and, placing her arm on the wooden table, listens to me as if I am telling a fairy tale. She doesn’t interrupt me and as soon as I stop talking she remains silent for a few seconds, undecided whether to comment on this absurd non-affair of mine or to remain silent. Then she stands up, smiles at me, and goes to the coffeepot that started to puff and to throw some spatters of coffee on the cheap white and spotless stove. After this endless silence she asks me if I was here for that reason and whether she had to tell me what she wanted me to do… Because in her opinion every love affair, even the crazy ones like mine, must take their own course without anyone putting their nose in, risking changing the right course of things. While she is pouring me some coffee in the china teacup that is so fine that it looks fake, I answer that I just wanted to share my life with her as I have always done, without wanting anything more. She caresses my face, smiles, and starts to tell me how she and dad had met. A story I was already so familiar with but that I love to hear from her. Her eyes glisten, for the first time since my dad died I see in her the melancholy of the solitude and the absence and I realise that I must treasure these moments together, to remember them forever, recording them in my memory, hoping that they can be played forever. After taking the package prepared with fresh hand-made pasta, a piece of every dessert and fresh eggs and vegetables from the garden, I step back on my way towards the car. The wind has now weakened and the higher sun warms my face.
You can begin to smell the first scents of lunch, in some house they are roasting pepperoni. From an open window you can smell the
perfume of a cake right out the oven, and the whole village participates with those scents that blend in such a beautiful way that only small villages can give as a gift to their visitors. I stop by the baker to buy white pizza, always warm and freshly baked. I already know that I am going to regret this purchase because anytime that I eat it I feel bad because it is well seasoned and slightly heavy. But if I don’t eat it, it doesn’t feel like I have been here, between the little mountains of Lazio. To break this blissfulness made of hands greasy with oil and of mouths satisfied with pizza and rock salt, there is the ringing of my mobile phone that makes me wince and breaks the spell. Next time I must remember to turn it off. Like an equilibrist, I manage to take it out of my pocket without dropping my pizza and I succeeded in not breaking the eggs wrapped in journal papers in my package. On the screen I see the picture of my ex-girlfriend Lucia but as soon as I answer the call, it stops ringing. I’ll call her later. I spent the most amazing years of my life with her, in a unique harmony that lasted six years, until she accepted a job abroad and I refused to follow her. It was then that I realised it wasn’t the major love that we thought, a mutual awareness that makes us still bounded today. During this time, she has come back to Italy, so we are more in touch, and not only with messages and e-mails. Seeing her again is always great, for a few seconds I even thought that letting her go has been a mistake but then I realise it was only a purely egoistic matter, and now I have accepted our long-distance friendship that gets stronger every day. Tonight, we are going to see each other again, finally alone, to tell each other face-to-face about this year spent apart.
I got into the car and after placing the package on the back seats I
drive towards the Capital with my lungs full of fresh air and my shoes dirty with soil. Today I would really like to see her but I perfectly know that I must wait until tomorrow morning for our usual eye contact. During the drive I call Lucia back and I tell her about my rural morning. We decide to meet in the evening and she says goodbye to me by telling me that she has some good news to give me. Her voice is full of enthusiasm, she looks like a child standing by a Christmas tree full of presents for her. Maybe she’ll come back to Italy? The idea bodes well for me and I start to get the idea of having her near me again, also work-wise. We are both free lance photographers or it is better to say that I am still one, while she works for a famous slick photographic magazine in France. Almost at the gates of Rome, I stop to take a few pictures of the bales of buckwheat well spread on the field all around the highway, taking advantage of a little rest area in which I could stop the car. It makes you want to gallop towards the fence and run around them, before throwing yourself to the ground to catch a bit of that sun that transforms that wheat into gold threads. It would be pleasant to lie with your back on the freshly cut grass and then sitting up with pieces of straw stuck between your hair. In the distance, two horses standing just before the sun allow some lively shots. It seems exactly like they are running in its beams, you are almost afraid they will get burnt and that their running back and forth could be a challenge to that fireball. Then they disappear in the horizon and the sun loses his aspect that strikes fear and it goes back to be just the background of a scenario between lovers. Lost in thousands of thoughts and with a few photos shot, I realise that I am running late and in spite of myself, I must go back to the big city in order to be
swallowed up by my evening commitments before reaching the long-awaited evening meeting.
CHAPTER 2
Glances at the bar
The alarm clock rings just like every morning when I have already been awake for at least fifteen minutes, basking in the bed and feeling the first cold of the morning sneaking in under the goose down duvet.
A little moment all for myself in order to think about how the day will go, even if in the last months the first thought is him. It is absurd to think that the first thing I think of is a perfect stranger who though is part of my everyday life. I am so taken by this person that every preparation is focussed on him, trying to understand what he may like and how to catch his eye. At the end of the day this is what I want, to catch the eye of the mysterious man, stalling it all to this first approach hoping that nothing is ever going to go further as it runs the risk of ruining this magic early morning moment. At our café where we see each other every day always at the same hour, I always sit at the same place towards the counter in order to see him properly. He knows that I am there and the first look as soon as he arrives is addressed to me.
I get up, barefoot and with my nightgown to the knees even in wintertime to feel the freshness of the sheets with the warmth of the duvet. Also the pillow, scrupulously perfumed with the fabric softener, must always be fresh. Therefore, until I fall asleep, I twist it as soon as it gets a bit warmer because of the warmth of my body to feel again that refreshing sensation that only coldness can give to my cheeks.
Before taking a shower, I warm my little bathroom, my own private room in which anyone but me enters. My little shelter, treated to the last detail, complete with music in wire broadcasting and shower with
colour therapy. I put my favourite playlist on, I turn the shower on, and I soak into the hot scented water. After a while I am already out, today I chump at the idea of seeing him again after a weekend spent outside Rome.
It's incredible how a simple thing like an eye contact could make my heart beat that fast. It is enough for me and it fills me with so much energy that I flee any next step. In this crazy affair I involved my flatmate Camilla too. We met when I was given a new project of pregnancy counsellors with her, and a great sympathy kicked in right away and quickly thereafter a great friendship too. Both single, we could easily manage to see each other at least once a week in order to go to the cinema or to see some little exhibitions throughout the centre.
She knows so many people that she always has an invitation to some event and we always enjoy it, whatever the style of the evening is.
Yesterday evening I’d already prepared what I would have worn this morning, jeans and a white lace blouse with a light sweater that envelopes my shapes in a firm dark purple. I wouldn’t be able to go to sleep if I had not prepared all the things for the day after. The kitchen must be tidy too, with the latte mug ready on the table, on the blue American-style place mat. It’s a way of not rushing in the morning looking for what I need before going out and also a way to have a perfectly tidy home in every minute of the day. Opening the windows, I notice that the sun is ready to warm this cold day and a smile pops up on my face. The fine winter days always put me in a good mood, the sun recharges me, and I just need to look outside the window to get through the tough moments. After a few minutes I am already on the road ready to catch the bus that takes me to work. I am lucky enough
to live not so far from my working place that I could even walk to it, but today I’m racing to enter the café before he arrives. I also want to catch up with Camilla, who has to tell me the latest news on her ‘boyfriend’ met a little more than a month ago at the gym she always attends during the lunch break. An affair more ordinary than mine and that I hope will be a success. Last Saturday they had their first date and I still need to know all the details about the evening. The happiness for her story is mixed with a bit of jealousy for my friend who I will have to share with the newcomer…
She is already waiting by our usual meeting place and from the smile that warms her face I can immediately tell the evening must have been better than expected. As soon as she sees me, she rushes over me risking falling in a pit on the sidewalk that wraps around her very high heels that she usually wears with great aplomb. In no time I feel myself surrounded by her tight embrace and her blonde and long hair is all over my face. I am imprisoned by her joy and for a moment I feel like I was living her same happiness. When she releases me from her embrace, I can tell she is so excited, her eyes sparkle like never before, and for a moment I felt like I am about to lose her. I blow my miserable thoughts away and I restore my usual cheerfulness to the extent that I grab her by the hand and I quickly make my way towards the café: ‘You must tell me everything!!!’ My friend’s evening has been performed by the book. He picked her up on his flaming motorbike, she got caught up in by the euphoria to rush towards the seaside of Lazio to spend an evening by the sea, in a little seafood restaurant that stays open during wintertime. Definitely romantic, it would have won any woman… Therefore, removed the helmet, a glass
of wine accompanied by a range of seafood delicacies while holding hands during the whole evening and during a stroll by the seaside he finally gave her the long-awaited kiss. So now it seems like they have been together since forever. They spent the day after telling each other their stories and tonight they’re going to meet again, surrounded by the magic moment of first dates. But our Wednesday meeting for our cinema night remains only for the two of us, so I feel more relieved.
While I’m relaxing at the thought that I didn’t lose my adventuring companion, here he comes, more casual than usual. He looks at me and smiles and then makes quickly his way to the counter in order to have his regular chat with the early morning costumers. As usual, there is the nice grandfather who has just left his nieces at school and who is ready to spend the morning around the city free from any commitment.
After a while, it comes the couple always all dressed up to have a coffee before leaving again in a hurry to reach the car parked nearby. It is not missing the girl who studies at university and who needs to take the metro to get to attend her classes, with her boyfriend who works at the supermarket around the corner. And then there’s us, always sitting at the same table that seems to be waiting for us every morning to hear about our new brief stories to tell in fifteen minutes before leaving again for our life. Hearing about Camilla’s new affair made me think about how much did I suffer for my latest affair with Carlo. We were a couple for ten long years and we get to nothing but boredom and distance even if we were always together. The final blow of our relationship has been moving in together and after two boring years we broke up realising that we were better as friends than as lovers.
Therefore, we met really often indeed and the time we spend together
is definitely funnier than it was before.
We got rid of the heaviness of a relationship that wasn’t tailor-made for any of us to discover ourselves under a new light more suitable for the two of us together. The first thing that comes to my mind is that I need to call him as soon as I got to the office in order to tell him about Camilla and her new love. Luckily, we have been smart enough not to be carried away by the events, being able to stop in time.
We even thought about getting married, getting until the choice of the Church to find ourselves in the main aisle, into the silence of this little but massive house of God with the scent of the incense floating into your bones with a stranger by our side. Both of us had this feeling. Ten years together to find ourselves strangers inside a Church, finally realising that we were going on only because of the habit and to simplify our life. All we had to do was looking ourselves in the eyes to burst out laughing and then like two children in tears we ended our story saying goodbye on the stairs where usually you would prefer to be thrown some rice on the wedding dress instead of receiving an embrace that dissolves everything for good. The first night in a now empty home was not easy and for the first time for me a sleepless night had a totally different meaning from the usual one. As I always say, sleeping steals time to life, but that night staying awake without sleeping a wink helped only to come to terms with myself, finding myself alone again but stronger than before. I came to terms with a ten years more mature woman, a baggage on the shoulders made of beautiful things but also of empty and wasted moments, finding myself with a few sand grains between the hands that was gradually vanishing between half-closed fingers. After a first period of solitude sought with
all my strength, here comes Camilla, who was able to bring me back to life… The social one, and in a little time I recovered what I had lost during the years spent with Carlo. In the meantime, he found a girlfriend and he is about to get married and this new affair allowed us to become great friends, abandoning the memories of a relationship built in the wrong way. In this latest period, changing the job, finding new friends, started a series of changes that made me discover myself as a person and not only as Carlo’s fiancé, his addendum.
I changed my haircut, I am more careful about my outfits, and I try to be always cleaned up even if I am going to do the shopping down the street. In other words, I love myself more than ever. I do it for me and now also for that morning look that waits for me in order to start the day together. Then we immediately separate to leave room for the mystery of such a special ‘non-affair’. Between me and my mysterious he it is the opposite. After the first eye contact and the awareness of a mutual interest, it all stopped to ‘nothing has to develop’. It almost seems to me that I am always going through the same day and on one side this gives me a great safety and peace of mind. I know that sooner or later it must stop and maybe it will also disappear the interest in a look that doesn’t lead to anything. But now I don’t want to think about that and I enjoy that something that gives me a thrill that gets me through my day with a smile on my face. Today we are leaving the café more charged than ever and tomorrow is going to be another morning full of tells to hear and of looks to wait for. Our day starts that way, even if all the enthusiasm for the good sunny day ends up in the usual cold and musty counselling centre room that we manage to get after many efforts, to be able to work on our laptops having at least a
chair and a table to lean on. Today is the birthing classes day, so at 9.00 AM the hallway is already crowded with women with gymnastic outfits and marked baby bumps. There are women who caress their belly and other who are looking for a place to sit down and relax after the first backpains. Most of them are handing a bottle of water in one hand and a towel in the other. Many of them already know each other and so there is a whisper made of tips and opinions, who is living more or less the same moments that are going to result in their biggest change, giving birth to a brand-new creature who will reflect them at least partly. Many of them have seen their body change, letting themselves go, while other seem ready to a maternity runaway with the latest fashion clothes and hair and nails always perfectly done. We get always across the room with a bit of distress, almost trying not to disturb the big group of pregnant women ready to listen to the midwifes who are there for them. Finally in our room, we close the door behind us with a sigh of relief, even if with a bit of bitterness and desire of staying in that room one day. It would be nice to have a baby simultaneously in order to face it all together. We hope so, even if it is not the most probable and easy thing of the world. Our office is gloomy and I miss that beam of sun that I left at the entrance. Every season is the same here and except for the great winter cold and the warmth of the summer, we could easily not be able to distinguish which period of the year it is. When we come out at 6.00 PM, it is terrible to enter with the light and then step outside when the dark has already set in. It almost seems like having lost a part of our lives between paperwork and statistics not so useful to our existence. After a while after our arrival, the silence falls on all the counselling centre: as
soon as the class begins, the future mums are completely taken by breathing exercises and birthing gymnastic in the room next to the entrance and in the distance you can overhear the dim voice of Anna, our favourite midwife who leads women in the most beautiful moment of their lives with her soft and gentle voice. Therefore, we can start to turn our laptops on and try to get some work done, as tomorrow there is going to be the meeting with the delegate of all the counselling centres of the area who wants to have all the login information completed with demographic statistics and names of who performed services in the last months. As soon as the laptop is turned on, the image on the desktop leads me inevitably to dream for a few minutes.
Out of the blue, any noise that adorn my life disappear and I only live in my mind with the memories relating to that picture. I took it, any character is on the scene, but I know who is behind the camera and this makes it even more special and unique, with a meaning that will be well-rounded only for me. You can see a beautiful valley almost as endless that its termination blends with the sky at twilight. Red leaves of trees and the meadow that starts to turn golden until that night light that shows the red sun and the moon on one side, which shyly embraces his hours of the day. Anyone, any animal, any noise, but a sense of peace and calmness that only such kind of pictures can give. I still feel my hands on the camera and the look lost in the lens for then going back to the other side and getting lost in the endless nature. The door that suddenly opens brings me brutally back to real life: a new face looks out and for a second we ask ourselves who could it be, until we discern a conspicuous belly and we understand that it was a straggler who entered the wrong room. I accompany her and I take the
opportunity to get some fresh air (I don’t know why, but today it feels like I can’t breathe) and to call Carlo, since in our room there’s no signal and make a call becomes an unedifying undertaking. A few minutes and I go back to the room, I want to have the job done to avoid being trapped here until late.
CHAPTER 3:
The daisy of Villa Borghese
Tired from the beautiful outdoor trip, I finally decide to come back home and work a little bit in the calmness of my four walls. I’ve got an awful number of emails in arrears and I want to work on the last photos shot for too long. I must also submit the work done a few weeks ago: collecting in a few shots the sea life after summer holydays. I’ve decided to develop all the pictures in black and white, colours that reflect a lot the mood you can be in when you find yourself in the sight of a big expanse of salt water when the good weather has stopped. Yet it gives me a lot of power to go to the seaside in wintertime. I’ve been there alone, leaving at early morning, catching the first lights of the day sneaking up on the sea. Armed with a blanket and a wool hat, I settled on the still wet sand that was creaking under my weight. I was the only one on the whole shore, me and it, in front of me so gigantic with its soft noise and its going back and forth on the shore. Therefore, I waited for the sun to rise, an unbelievable show that I would see more often if only I was leaving closer to the seaside. Sitting on my blanket with glows to avoid the risk of frozen hands at the moment of taking the first pictures, coldness on my cheeks, and red nose. In these moments you feel so little and at the same time the ruler of the world.
Then comes the sun in front of your eyes with all his beauty and the sea starts to colour and shine as ever, and the crispy air slowly goes out on the skin. In these moments me and the camera make a whole and I become eager to take pictures as I freeze every single instant because I know that anything can be repeated in the same way. While I was busy
with the first pictures, a medium-sized dog came forward. It came to the beach with an old man who stopped just at the beginning of the sand focused on the see with a grin that indicated a careless and peaceful mood. In the meantime, the dog ran wildly, always coming back to his feet, for then going back again to an excited run towards the tiny waves that were consuming the sand. In order to break the solitude that must have been his daily situation, the man slowly came closer to check on what I was doing. After the first polite words of welcome, we started to talk about that charming place and about the beauty that can be discerned only during winter. Left alone again, I started to appreciate that spot, a little melancholic but full of hues. The scents of trees started to be more distinct and, if you close your eyes, they can take you back in time in other places and situations. Sand, still cold between my hands, with which it fiddles without leaving any trace. The sea is always there with its constant pace and allows you to see some shells beneath and it seems to invite you to go through it to get in it and swim until the horizon. I am rattled only by the smell of the near restaurant that is starting to prepare lunch well in advance, probably because of some party or special event. All emotions that I rediscover a week later looking at my pictures, hoping that the commissioner of this job could deeply understand their value.
Browsing them on the computer just make me want to go back there and for the first time my desire is to go there with my mysterious coffee partner, without talking, tasting the same emotions together, maybe hand in hand, a contact between the two of us that we have never tried for now. I finish my work and I send it all via e-mail, then I close it quickly before throwing myself in the shower and preparing to
dine with Lucia. As usual, I reach the place of the appointment far in advance, so I step aside and enjoy looking at people passing by and hearing their little stories made of few stolen instants. A family with two little children passes by, everyone in a rush, looking forward to coming back home after a long day that everyone spent doing their own commitments. The mother tenderly embraces the youngest child, tired and sleepy between her arms, while the eldest is telling his father about the afternoon spent practicing who knows which sport. After a while, it comes the lady on a bicycle, all dressed up and with her purse placed behind in order not to lose her balance. No shortage of the boy who goes by totally immersed into his favourite music and the man who talks on the phone about his plans for the evening with fast pace.
Finally, she shows up. My dear friend pops up from behind the corner, always more beautiful and radiant. We haven’t seen each other in months but as soon as I found her in front of me it looks like we didn’t ever said goodbye at the airport, both hiding a tear and then losing ourselves in our daily life in two different countries.
A long embrace brings us back to the present and we immediately start to compete to see who starts first to tell the latest news while we are heading to our favourite restaurant in which you can have only pizza and arrosticini. It’s an informal place, wooden tables with paper tablecloths with white and red squares, typical Roman trattoria chairs, and the warm welcome of the historical owners who know us well by now. Facing a good brick-oven pizza and a pint of beer, Lucia’s face fell in prey of excitement. She longs to be the first to tell her news and I am there ready to celebrate her homecoming. When she starts to speak, I realise that my hopes are completely wrong. She met a man in
France, they fell in love at first sight, and now she is pregnant. So, out of the blue, I see my hope of having my friend back for good falling apart and I see her going away again, this time for good. She is in fact back to Rome to organize the moving out of her stuff and she is going to settle down in his place, a beautiful palace in the centre of Paris. It will be a good chance for me to go back to visit the most romantic capital of the world, but with a different mood, when the baby is born.
We celebrate the good news of the new life that is about to come, and Lucia keeps telling me about her beautiful French months between her rewarding job, her first photographic exhibition, and her edifying love story that galloped fast down to the unexpected but immediately well received pregnancy. All these tells make me realise that my life has stopped, I stand still and this concerns only me and annoys me a little.
I start to get lost in my thoughts and I don’t listen to anything that surrounds me, including Lucia, who is so focused on her life that doesn’t even feel the desire to know what’s happening to mine. I take my mind back to that morning, so peaceful and full of colours, and now I would only like to run away from the chaos of the now crowded restaurant soaked in the noise of people speaking and voraciously eating. Thinking about the fact that in a few hours I’ll be back to my café to reload myself with her smile gives me a way out and the restaurant goes back to the familiar features of when we have arrived, and the noise becomes a normal din made of laughs and chat between friends. Lucia is still talking when she takes out from her massive bag a tablet to show me the pictures of her exposition. This is one of my biggest dreams, to be able to expose in my own way the best picture taken in all these years. Even if it is not even remotely planned, I’ve
already started to choose a topic and to decide which photos are worthier of being printed in large size to catch the eye of the visitors. I already picture them, looking up, caught up in my shots and in my same emotions too, but related to their own lives. Because photography, just like poetry or even songs, can be wear like it was a dress. The same identical words conceal a lot of meanings and everyone can make them his own. In the same way, one photo can convey a lot of different sensations and what can be sad for someone can give strength and energy to someone else. I think back to the sea in winter: so sad and melancholic for the ones who loves it crowded and appreciate it more under the blazing sun; and healing in winter for who like me loves lonely places that show features outside conventional rules. Lucia’s exposition had been organized very well and in great details, in an open space with tall and candidly white walls. No furniture to break the pace of her photos, all exposed at the same height and in the same size along the three walls. A single table welcomed visitors with drinks and appetizers as a refreshment during the visit. The photos were all in black and white, with details in colour and the common thread was the presence of watercourses: angles of rivers, fountains with children who drink, details of different fountains, a lake at twilight… Water in all its dimensions, until it closes with a beautiful picture of a washtub where the women of the village go to do the laundry, showing all the taste of something old that still lasts in the present. Even one of the main Parisian journals wrote about her exposition, reserving her a good blurb that brought her a higher number of visitors after its publication. It seems that Lucia’s new man is a big shot who allowed her to emerge in the right manner and in the
way she deserves. I am happy for her, a lot… A little less for me, who will be back to hole up to send e-mails and messages at long distance with a friend who for me is like an actual sister, the one I’ve never had.
Her house is not far from the restaurant and therefore after dinner I accompany her until her old doorway. Now she shall sell the house and therefore another piece of my past is closing to make room for future news. It always feels a little weird to me when someone is moving, just like when I see shops close, especially if they are the historic ones of my childhood. Grown up always in the same district, I know everyone by now, or at least everyone who has not moved. The unfortunate period almost for everyone led to drastic choices whether the older traders, already tired of fighting against all the changes and the career crisis, whether families that look for cheapest houses and are turning away from the centre. After years spent always surrounded by the same people, I experienced these changes as an abandonment. Starting with my mother who decided to sell her house in the city centre to settle down in the village where she is reborn resuming possession of herself and of what she has always loved to do. As long as my father was alive, he worked in a public office here in Rome, running away from the city in every little occasion to head to their beloved little village where they break free from all the fatigue stored during the week. My mother never really loved the city life, she felt a little bit lost even if, despite herself, she has always been taking care of everything as a perfect housewife of a good neighbourhood. A fine lady, always dressed up and with an unfailing string of pearls on her neck. The same pearls she still wears, even if she prefers more comfortable outfits without caring about brands or fine fabrics. Under the big wooden
doorway, I say goodbye to my dear friend with the promise of seeing each other again before her final departure. I wait for her to enter and I walk towards my house caught up in a thousand thoughts and with the desire to go immediately to bed. I’m in such a great mood for the morning to come that I move the hands of the alarm clock one hour earlier and I run under the blankets. At the first ring I am on my feet, now I want to take a stroll down Villa Borghese before the usual morning ritual at the café, so I dress up quickly and I exit perkily the building heading to the park.
The Villa in the morning is enchanting: few people walking around, mainly old people during their healthy stroll and, given the possible insomnia, take advantage of the first hours of the day, when all is still closed and there is not much to do around the city. I found a message from Lucia on my phone, she is thanking me for the dinner and tells me that if her child is a boy, he will have my name. This way she manages to steal the first smile of the day from me while I am already immersed in trees and in their shadow. In this time, you can come into squirrels too, big and chubby, the only masters of the nature that expands under their stealthy hops almost careless of your presence. I arrive until the Pincio and there is where the city appears in all its majesty. Monuments, buildings, churches… All there, peacefully dozing while everyone is looking at them and both with sun and rain they don’t budge and nothing changes them. I pick up a daisy survived to the coldness and I bring it to the café with me. Today I feel different and I want to break the ritual of our meetings with a little gesture and therefore I lay the flower on the table where in a few minutes she is going to sit to have breakfast, hoping that anyone arrives before and
gets his hands on that gesture directed to her.
I quickly go to the counter and order my usual coffee, reversing the order of arrival and without looking at the entrance. After a few minutes I hear her coming. I recognize her voice by now and I also feel that, realising that I am already there (this is the first time since we ‘know’ each other, given that I always arrive when they have already started their breakfast), she stops for a few instants and then restarts approaching the table. I don’t have the courage to look at her face when she’ll find the flower and on the other side I don’t even want her to be certain that I’ve been the one who put it on her table. So I finish my coffee faster than the usual and going out I give her a look and she promptly looks right back, but this time hiding the doubt about that little flower that now she holds in her hand almost if she was waiting an additional step that I am not doing though. It all must stay this way and I walk away as fast as I can.
Chapter 4
Memories
A home night all for me is all I need. I return after a brief shopping and my home welcomes me with the warmth of the heating that is still turned on. I take off my coat and scarf, I take off my shoes that I remove while I am approaching the kitchen to put down the milk that I’ve just bought. Without even turning a light on, I reach the big bathroom and I turn on the hot water tap of the bath. There’s nothing else I would like to do in this moment except a good hot bath that gets out any spleen, any piece of tiredness left on me by this day. Before I enter the bath, I pour myself a glass of semi-sparkling wine, just the right amount of coldness, and I lay it on the sink while I take off my clothes before soaking in the foam. I tie my hair up, I pick up the glass, and I enter the bath now full and so hot that makes my skin turning red at the first impact. To be the perfect bath it only misses candlelight and background music, but this is fair enough for today. Closing my eyes with my head laid on the edge I start to think of a series of things conspiring in my mind. This year I would like to do so many things that at the end I’ll be barely up on anything. A trip abroad, join the gym, find the time to go to the library at least once a week… And go back to do jogging at Villa Borghese when you still overhear only the tiny steps of squirrels upon the gravel and the city seems an enchanted and surreal place, light years away from chaotic and busy streets. The kitchen clock rings the eight and so, a little reluctantly, I start to take the foam off my body opening the shower. The immediate cold water makes a shiver run over my back for then cuddling me again with the
hot water that comes out a little later. I would like to stay like this for hours. Wrapped up in the soft bathrobe, I finish the glass of wine and I start to think about what to cook for dinner. I quickly find some leftovers from last night’s dinner that I warm in the microwave and I eat in the living room while I’m watching a good movie in the dark of a room that is entirely for me.
When I’m home alone, I am not in the mood for cooking, so I sort it out with few simple things just for not going to bed on an empty stomach. I am so tired that I don’t even feel like getting lunch ready for the day after and so I promptly text my colleague to ask her to go out for lunch together tomorrow. From the outside I only overhear a car passing by every once in a while, the city is resting and recharging for the new day to come. An atmosphere so relaxed that when the phone emits a beep, I flinch. The message has been sent by Camilla who grabbed my proposal suggesting me to leave earlier in order to go shopping in the afternoon. With a quick ‘ok’ I settle the issue, now sunken in the couch with the blanket on my bare legs. A gunfight woke me up: it’s 2 a.m. I must have fallen asleep on the couch, and also pretty early since I don’t even remember the film I’ve chosen to watch.
Now on the TV there’s a cop movie, outside it’s pouring rain.
I turn off the TV and off to bed, but now I am awake and so I decide to listen to some music to help me fall asleep. The first song on my playlist is ‘Adagio’ by Lara Fabian. Every time I listen to that song, my heart skips a beat and I think back to my grandfather and to the strong bond I had with him. I’m an orphan since I was little and thus he took care of me, and so he did until a cancer took him away last year, leaving me with the house I’m actually living in and with a
big hole in my heart. It comes immediately to my mind his place in the mountains near Rome and the beautiful summer days spent together the meadows or taking care of his little orchard, or winter Sundays spent in front of the fire listening to his stories about war and ancient times. I own him most of my memories on my family, I remember so little about my mother and my father other than through his tales.
Therefore, I picture the dark room full of the objects collected through the years. The glass cabinet with the ceramics that belonged to my grandmother, the pictures of all my family on the hutch at the bottom of the room. The two of us used to sit on the old rocking chairs with the big red cushions and the soft carpet between us. The only light was coming from the burning fireplace, between the crackling of the wood and the warmth on the legs that was waning rising towards the face.
His voice will always be burnt in my memory, so powerful and so gravelly, telling for hours anecdotes and real stories in a hushed and velvety tone. I used to lose myself in his words, and I wandered in far and familiar places as if I was the one who had experienced those adventures that by now I knew by heart, but that I wanted to listen to as if it was the first time. I was often the one who requested this or that story, while other times we were led to them through the events that happened to us during the day, and that brought back past-life memories. I would like to remember him always this way, forgetting about the last months spent in the hospital where he went back to be as helpless as a child, but always strong and proud of his life. Even when he was there, he didn’t lose the wish to tell and to give me strength, until the day we both fell asleep in that cold room where he has been hospitalized for a really long time: the night before, he wanted to talk
to me, to tell me things that wanted to burn in my memory forever.
Despite the fatigue of a man who was old by then, we spent the whole night chatting until late. This time I told a lot about me too, and he gave me big suggestions from a man who learnt how to live thanks to all the experiences that leads our way. His eyes weighted down by medicines, but always with a smile on his face that was marked by the disease. A neat white beard and big hands laid on sheets. I woke up on the armchair next to him, but from that night he has never opened his eyes anymore.
The song is over, and I found myself with bulgy eyes full of tears that try to overcome his absence. I turn everything off, I remove my headphones, and I let the storm cradle me while it’s still raging outside the window blowing on the shutters howling at the wind. When I woke up I am still a little shocked, so I decided to stay in bed a little while, wallowing in the warmth of the night that has already gone. The only thing that gets me out of bed is thinking that I am going to see him again.
When we arrive at the bar, the first time I notice when I enter is that he is already there, and this surprises me a lot. For the first time he arrives before me and he doesn’t even turn to look at me, even if I am sure that he is aware of our loud arrival. I stop at the door, a little annoyed from the fact that he’s not noticing me, but when the barman welcomes me and asks if we’ll have “the usual”, we answer in the affirmative and we head to our table. I am about to sit when I see a little daisy just in front of my place and for the second time in a few minutes I stop perplexed and a little bewildered for a gesture that changed the normal way things are processing. That was definitely
him, but this must not happen. Why is he looking for a different approach from our every morning usual mysterious look? I found myself sitting down with that little flower between my fingers looking at his back while he is at the counter, when he whips around, gives me a look, and furtively runs away from the bar. Yes, it was definitely him the one who laid that flower on the table… On my table.
It leaves me speechless and excited at the same time, but also a little confused and not so sure he was the one who made it. My friend looks at me and starts giggling, being a witness of that childish scene of two adults lost in such an absurd story that it makes no sense to the rest of the world. I look at her and, after the barman brought us our breakfast, I realise that I am still holding the flower in my hand and I quickly put it down next to my cappuccino just as if it was a burning object that was bursting my skin. I start to feel different emotions in a totally racing alternation. First of all, I feel honoured by that little present, then I become reluctant and I ask myself if I’ve really got the point. And if, perhaps, it was for my friend? What if the mysterious looks-giver was attracted by her and not by me? But so why is he always looking at me? No, ok, I am the source of his interest… But if it was only an exchange of looks and some secret smile, what does this ‘present’ means? As if it was a relic, I pick up the flower again, and I put it inside my book, and then I make it fall back to the big and large bag. Camilla, who can’t control her laughing, tells me that now we are at the turning point of this absurd non-affair, and hearing this from her voice scares me, and I want to run away for not coming back to that place again. Then I think about how I feel when I don’t see him, I couldn’t ever give up on these ten minutes that we share, even if at
short distance.
When the breakfast is over, we immediately go to work, knowing that today the working day will be short and at lunch time we will be able to escape for a shopping afternoon together. Luckily, the night rain gave way to the sun, leaving behind only some spare clouds. At 1
p.m. we are out, like a clockwork, ready to take the car in order to spend the afternoon at the Outlet to do some shopping taking advantage on the sales. In the car we were blasting Claudio Baglioni, singing with the windows down like two teenagers free from any concern. At the first false note, we burst out laughing, while we discern in the distance the wheat fields with bales ordered in a row. They’re beautiful to see, I’ve always managed to picture me behind them, laid down in their shadow, looking at the sky, waiting for some plane passing by and leaving its white trail that cuts the blue. I would invent stories on its passengers and on the journeys which will take them far away, maybe in some exotic place or in an unknown city After a few silent minutes, Camilla goes back to seriousness and starts for the first time to take seriously my non-affair. ‘You’re the one who must make the next move, the game must go on in two. He gave you a signal, he wants to continue in a different manner, but without dive immediately into a real acquaintance. Now you’re the one who must keep leading the game in an equal romantic and mysterious way.
In short, not banal. It would be too easy to go there and thank him…’
She’s right, the little move of the flower is designed to change course, to choose which path to follow, and it must be done in a creative way in order to keep that veil of mystery that for quite some time makes us look at each other with passion but without going further, without
saying a single word. We don’t even know our names, and this has been enough until today. Now it needs to be decided if we want to go on in a different way or close the door. Maybe he’ll be the one to regret his move, today he ran away as ever. Maybe tomorrow he will not even show up. ‘You need to make a change into your life, maybe the mysterious watcher could be the man for you and if he’s not, you need to start living again and finding someone to share your life with.’
Camilla continues with her serious tone. A great desire to play comes alive in me, a desire to break the rules and to dare, even if this means losing everything. I start to laugh while the wind strongly enters from the window and throws my hair on my face: ‘Ok, let’s play’.
Arrived at the shopping magic world, this is how we like to name those massive haute couture low-cost outlets, we start to go around the various windows without much conviction, until we stop in a little bakery where we decided to eat something, given the fact that we didn’t even had lunch. A slice of chocolate cake and a coffee for me, while my friend limits itself to a whole wheat croissant and an orange juice, since she needs to keep the scale under control. Camilla is a beautiful woman who with her girth gives a sense of serenity and a pleasant sight when she goes by. Always all dressed up, without a hair out of place, she’s the type of woman who makes man turning in the street, despite a bit of extra weight well-proportioned on her harmonious body.
A new excitement involved the two of us in the play with the stranger, so we both start to think of my next move. Usually, he enters the bar, goes to the counter where he has breakfast standing, and then he immediately goes away. What could it be my next move to
concentrate in those few instants and without even have a precise spot in which take action, as he has been able to do with our table? The only thing that I know is that I want to leave him a tangible sign too, maybe linking to the daisy in order to make him understand that I am undoubtedly the sender. In the bakery I have an epiphany: I notice in the window a green chocolate box within there’s a beautiful white and yellow sketch of a daisy. Therefore, I add the box of chocolates to our bill and I start to think about how to have it delivered to him, maybe with the usual coffee that he orders every morning. I feel like a teenager, I went back to the high school times when the most beautiful side of a love story was exactly the one before the declaration. The nights spent with friends thinking of if this or that boy could be ‘in love’ with us or dreaming of the first kiss in front of a pizza and a glass of Coca Cola, when a simple ‘Hi’ started to assume three thousand meanings that we analysed one by one. Times when the heart was racing even when eyes met, and the excitement was about the idea of going together to the same party, standing by and hoping on his first move.
Almost forty years old, I am back to be an unexperienced teenager who discovers love for the first time, with a crazy desire to play. I feel like I’m reborn, I came back to life and I am no more afraid to feel something for someone. It seems absurd, but that little flower has been enough to shake me up so much to make me realise that have been wasting my time and that I had to go back to make my clock go round and round. I come back home that is already late, so I decide to stop to eat a slice of pizza at the pizza place down the street. When I enter the restaurant, there’s anyone, not even the owner who I overhear moving
in the kitchen, probably baking the last pizzas of the evening. The door points out my entering and few moments later I see him looking out onto the door in front of the still burning big ovens. We greet and shortly after we sit together at the colourful wooden tables, chatting while my pizza is firing. He offers me a beer and starts to make small talking about all the strange and funny customers who came to the restaurant during the day. It’s always amusing to hear him speak, because I know that he’s always prone to exaggerate his tales, enriching them by not exactly real details that make everything more colourful and interesting. Generally, he always has a comic base, so speaking with him always ends up in loud laughter that attract bystanders who overhear us from the street. I eat quickly, with a great desire to remove my shoes and soak my feel in hot water. We have been walking so much that, despite the cold of this day, my feet are so swollen that I can barely walk.
Once I got home and I throw away my shoes, I jump on the bed straight away with my trusted computer searching some information about my mysterious smiling friend. Maybe I can discover something about him linked to our café, a website, a Facebook page. I log in with my username and I start to search. Not a trace of him, it would have been too good to find a comment by him so that I could have finally discovered his name and snooping around his social networks home, at least on the public sections. Thinking about the fact that maybe he could have had the same idea, I start by pressing like on the café Fan Page and browsing numerous pictures, I comment a random one, just to leave a sign. Once it has been published, I look at the picture appearing next to my comment. A miserable close-up, loaded
haphazardly a long time ago. I immediately hurry up looking for a new photo where I look better, and I change my profile picture. Now I feel more relaxed and I childishly hope that he is online too and seeing me, could feel the desire of texting me.
For about ten minutes I stare off the screen, waiting for a sign that doesn’t come. I refresh the page over and over, I log in and out thinking that maybe the connections is not exactly perfect, and in the end I turn it off, but only after I have turned the Facebook notifications on my mobile phone, just in case the mysterious men chooses to look for me and texts me tonight. Before I was hoping that our non-affair could never change a thing, but now the idea of a connection became obsessive and irrational.
Tomorrow it’s going to be a great day for our game, so I try to fall asleep as fast as I can, but I am so nervous about how to advance our game that I can’t sleep a wink. At midnight I am still tossing and turning in the cold bed, when I decide to get up. Without turning any light on, helping myself only with the feeble street lighting that silently enters the window, I reach the kitchen. A good mug of milk and cookies is the only solution in these cases. Years ago, it was my grandfather who prepared me these night eating and to keep me company in front of a good mug of barely that he was heating in his steal pan, always until it boiled and often making it drop on the flame that started to creak and change its colour hit by the sudden liquid.
When he could start to drink it, I had almost finished my milk with cookies and so I was the one who kept him company until he didn’t finish to drink its hot mug. At night I’ve always been more talkative than in the morning, so I used to break free from a lot of discourses
and doubts about what was about to happen the day after. These nights together, usually, happened before university exams, so much it was the tension that I finished revising so late that a mug of milk was a great help in order to get some sleep and relax after the study day.
Sitting at the table, today, I still feel his strong absence, in a concrete way and not only as a hurt feeling, but just as a tangible lack. Now, in front of my cup of milk, I can’t talk to anyone, and the perfume of barely burning on the stove is missing too. One time, in order to relieve the pain, I prepared also the barely beside my milk in a steal pan, but this thing just made me feel worse, and so I promised myself that I would have tried to go on, pulling me off as much as possible from past behaviours without lose the memory of these beautiful moments with him.
CHAPTER 5
Away
After my escape from the café I keep walking away with definite steps without never looking back as if I’d committed some bad deeds.
Like a thief afraid to get caught and with the adrenaline for the last moves, I move away as fast as I can and I take the first bus that I step into without even knowing where it’s going to take me. I have a meeting in the centre at late morning and so I will be able to drain all this excitement for that little flower abandoned in her hands. Giving her a flower, how did it get into my mind? I try to imagine what is happening now at the café, maybe she threw away that little daisy that is already withering in, laughing out loud with her friend. Did I become the laughingstock of the day? But my hope is different, I wish I’d been able to break through her thoughts, where I can hide in a silent little corner ready to discover new things about her. I ran away afraid that our story made of looks could change, but deep down in my heart I may really hope this could happened. I would like to be a little fly, buzzing around their heads, looking into her eyes as blue as the sky and caught every small grimace of her face with all the thoughts that can come into her mind looking at every single white petal. I am almost tempted to go back but now I am too far and tired.
Luckily, the bus leads to the centre and even if I did it, she wouldn’t be there anymore. I found a seat and I sit down letting me cradle by the speed of the big means of transport. My fellow travellers are all silent and ready for a working or studying day, or even only for the morning stroll in order to kill the long days that you experience
when you reach a certain age. Many of them have a book opened between their hands, others are listening to music, others are lost in their thoughts. An old lady at the bottom of the bus draws my attention, dressed up in red with a big empty shopping trolley beside her. Her look is tired and she dangles at every curve. I got to thinking at how I will be when I’ll be old, and the first thought that I have is exactly that I don’t want to be alone, I want to reach that age with someone I can share everything with, even the little daisies picked up on the road. I go back to think of her while outside the window I see the majesty of the city and its impressing monuments that frame any adventure of my life.
When I got quickly off the bus at Vittoriano I suddenly woke up from this bliss reached between thoughts and the flowing of these beautiful places outside the window. The old lady gets off with me too, ready in front of the door holding with one hand her loyal shopping trolley while with the other she held for balance. We separate at the stop and I follow her with my eyes until she turns the corner at the bottom of the road, almost to check that anything bad happens to her and ready to help her if she needs anything. Sometimes it won’t take much to empathize with someone who will then disappear from your life forever as fast as he/she entered in it for a brief moment. I look at the watch: I am definitely too early for my meeting at the museum of Piazza Venezia and so I take advantage of taking some pictures at Fori in this beautiful day that deserves to be burnt in a visual memory. Just by coincidence, I see a little daisy popping up from the edge of the pavement and so I manage to take a close-up with the blurred monuments in the background that gives the illusion to be out of world
and time. I would love to send it straight away to my mysterious fellow traveller but I wouldn’t really know how to deliver it to her, not even knowing her name. Once home I’ll save it also on the phone, it will always be ready in case I manage to reach her through some more computerized way.
Strolling around the centre of Rome really takes you out the daily life and between the tourists you can even lose track of space and time.
A constant flowing of languages and colours between a lot of people armed with cameras and flashes smiles to fix entire days spent visiting the Eternal City. The gladiators at Colosseum are always ready to take part in the photographs under a very large reward and there are carriages that accompany the most willing to try new dimensions, because while in holydays schemes must change at least for half an hour, carried through the city in a chariot completed with horses. The hooves on cobblestones hide the noise of cars and the city seen from above tastes different, stepping back into the past. The queue in front of the Colosseum is already long despite the cold and the waiting times, ready to have a sight of one of the world most famous places to take back to their city photos and souvenirs to give to their friends and families. Later on, are going to arrive also the couples of newlyweds still dressed up for the usual photographs between the most amusing scenarios of the Capital, and so this place will acquire a new aspect and meaning for who choose it as his/her destination.
After spending the morning pretending to be a tourist, I come back with deliberate pace towards the not too far place of my meeting. I meet my interlocutor by chance at the base of the Vittoriano and so we decide to talk about my job open air without locking us up in his office
between paperwork and the dark of the room. They want to remake the fliers of the Monument and so they need new photographs, maybe taking advantage of the view of Rome that you have going up to its highest part, available only to chosen few. I’ve already worked for them a couple of time in occasion of particular exhibitions inside the ‘typewriter’, as the Altare della Pace is called in Rome. Since in 2000
they allowed the access of the staircase, once in a while I like to spend a few hours visiting the Vittoriano, seeing all its features dedicated to Italian cities and regions, and the part that I enjoy the most is the sacrarium of battle flags, countless artifacts ad sigils that taste like past between the texture of the consumed fabric. I am glad to accept the job and I immediately begin to take some pictures, taking advantage of the access to areas not granted to regular visitors. From up there, the city grabs you between marbles and ancient Medieval buildings until the luxury of the ancient Rome, all in the same view. It almost looks like you can touch the sun and immerge into the clear sky that blows cold blasts from time to time to awake you from this surreal and magic atmosphere.
I would like to stay there, curled up in some space between the columns and the endless staircase to see Rome and all that little ants that move back and forth through the streets below. I pick up my courage and I leave that place charged with so much history that it almost makes you hear the voices of everyone who was there before you, before that theatrical monument had been built. I decide to walk home, taking advantage of the day that spared us last night rain. I take a picture of the puddles that reflect the streets and in one there’s me, reflected with my blue jacket and blue jeans, black messy hair, and
sunglasses hidden behind the camera. I am there too, for a change, and as I see myself reflected in the little puddle I almost don’t recognize myself from how long I have not been thinking about myself and my actual life. A period spent only at work, without a lot of friends whom share something else with, and with few meaningless women whom spend some nights that don’t leave any emotion in me. A cold period, made more intimate by my photographs that however tell the life of other people and other places. There’s a bit of me in every shot, but it’s nothing compared to what a photographer can do if he puts his heart into it. I should start not to take commissioned pictures again, looking for myself inside of them, and maybe the daisy photograph is the first step to rediscover myself as changed and turning my life around, my life which now belongs only to others as a harlot that is only devoted to her job to please the others.
I cross Via del Corso for a little section for then throwing myself in the little back street that leads to the always crowded Pantheon. In that moment, Stefano phones me. He works in an office just behind Corso Vittorio Emanuele and knowing about my meeting, he called me to order for a quick lunch in his areas. In a few minutes we are already together, going through Campo de’ Fiori to eat one of the delicious express sandwiches made in a little place without chairs or tables. My favourite one is the eggplants and mozzarella one and so, lunch in hand, we continue our stroll until we stop on a bench in Piazza Navona. I start to tell my friend about my morning starting from the Vittoriano and then I confess about the daisy. As soon as I start to describe the moment at the café, he stops walking and eating and totally taken by my story, ‘Now is up to her’ says without reflecting
much on his words followed by endless silent minutes. ‘Finally, this absurd affair can work right, you should know each other and maybe you’ll find out that you have something true to share or simply that you don’t belong together. Leaving aside the morning look, you’ll start to think about building a life with a real woman who is not only a one-night stand’.
The idea that I might have idealised a woman that I don’t even know scares me, and if she wasn’t really as I believe? It would be like losing her forever without ever having had her. It often happened to me to think about her outside the café, I gave her many names and I have imagined her in a lot of different situations. I’ve imagined her by my side while we live the places that I love the most. In my dreams I took her to my mother’s village, we’ve climbed mountains and we’ve made long strolls by the seaside. We’ve even kissed in the shadow of ancient trees.
‘Are you listening to me? If she’s not going to make the next move, enough… You’ll go there, and you’ll introduce yourself and it all happens the way it has to, once and for all.’ Stefano goes on, now completely caught up in my story and willing to arrive to a conclusion, whether it’s positive or negative. I agree with him, now I’ve realised that we must move on, we’ve been standing at the entrance of this non-affair from too long. I don’t even know her name yet. I say goodbye to my loyal friend, I go back to my way home completely wrapped in my thoughts, as much that I arrive home without even notice the miles travelled on foot. I didn’t even notice people I stepped by on the road, cars speeding beside me, fountain that were constantly streaming water, and thoughtless birds in the sky. I came back to reality only at
the sight of my closed front door before my eyes like a silent and massive guard. In the distance, I discern the old lady with my neighbour’s dog, so I hurry up to enter, with not a great desire to remain stuck on the door chatting about medicines or about the dog potty spread in who knows what street of the district.
As soon as I close the door behind me, I breath a sign of relief and I continue moving silently not to be overheard from the outside and I jump on the bed. When I woke up I am in a pull of sweat and I’m still wearing my jacket. It’s 7 p.m. and I have been sleeping for almost all the afternoon abandoned in a deep sleep. After a swift shower and with my pyjama already on I turn my laptop on and I start to work on the photographs taken today. The most beautiful are the one of the daisy and the one of the paddle with me inside… I start to recognize myself in what I am doing, and this provides me with the right energy to find the courage to turn around the story with the girl in the café.
The day after, despite I’ve been awake until late to work on the computer, I woke up following my weekly routine so that I arrive at the café at the usual hour curious to see what she was going to do after my little gift of yesterday. When I enter, I see her already sitting at her table, as usual, prettier than ever. She gives me a look, blushing a little while she turns her farce towards her friends who stands still and stares at her. There’s something weird about their behaviour, they’re not immerged in the other mornings usual naturalness between their chats in a low tone. The counter is empty, so I sit at my usual corner waiting for the barman to come. I quickly glimpse at her again and as soon as she notices that I am looking at her, she turns away from me again.
With my arm I drop an envelope that was probably laid on the sugar can in the corner. I pick it up and I notice that there’s written ‘For…?’
and on the side there’s a little flower sketched. I stop for some moments without knowing what to do and then, caught up in curiosity, I open it, being the only one in the place. Inside of it there’s a little chocolate with a daisy sketched on it. The adrenaline is going, here’s her move, the envelope is just for me. I smile while I realise that there’s also a card inside, written in pen: ‘We have other senses beside the sight and today I’ll try to please the taste too. A.’ I read it three more times almost as if I wanted to learn by heart that sentence so short but meaningful to me. When I turn, I see that she’s gone as silent that I didn’t even notice. I start to unwrap the chocolate trying not to break the envelope that I store inside the wallet. I eat it as if I’ve never eaten chocolate in my whole life, tasting slowly the bitterness of cocoa and the sweetness of vanilla that wraps it up in its smoothness. I realise that I’ve closed my eyes totally caught up in its taste and only focused on the sense of taste, just as A wrote in her card that I read again for the fourth time almost looking for something between the lines. Then I store it in the pocket of my jacket where it’s ready to be read other more times, till death. The taste of chocolate is fixed in my mind and from now on I’ll never be able to eat something that has the same taste without thinking about this catching morning made of coffee and vanilla chocolate. With a dumb smile on my face, I say goodbye to the barman who in the meantime had offered me my usual coffee, and I go away a little bothered by the fact that I am not going to see my mysterious woman for the next two days, with the weekend just around the corner.
In the past, Saturday and Sunday have always been a blessing but since I met her they have become the two days to live as fast as possible, craving for the oxygen that her next Monday morning look will bring to me. This will be even longer and heavier, even if this way I’ll have the chance to think longer about my next move. The game has been decided, I must focus on the five senses and decide if I want to follow what she designed to be the second or go on to the next one. I still taste the strong flavour of chocolate in my mouth and I hope it will stay longer to fix it more powerfully in my memory. It immediately comes to my mind Proust’s Magdalene, what he remembered eating that by a distance of years and I start to understand his writings more and more and the strong feelings evoked by a little and simple childhood sweet. I wish I could have a lot more of these chocolates, so that I could eat one of them every time the memory starts to fade or any time I want to keep alive the thought I have about her even when she’s not here. A taste that by now is linked to two deep and piercing eyes, her beauty, and black straight hair on her shoulders. It’s linked to that hardly evident smile framed by pink lips and clear and shining skin. Today she had a forest green dress with black high heel boots glimpsed under the table when I arrived. It’s a pity that I didn’t have the chance to see her going out in order to detect some more details of her perfect body too often hidden under coats and scarfs during this season. But today the sense is taste, so I stop my thought at the chocolate that I’ve found in the envelope. I wonder if she had tasted it too, in order to share the velvet sensation of taste. Going out, I noticed on her table that she took a coffee instead of the usual cappuccino, maybe just to taste the same experience that I had. I almost feel like
I’ve kissed her, tasting the chocolate of her lips, tight in an embrace made of a wise mixture of perfumes and tastes. I take another picture of the card written in her beautiful tidy and full handwriting and I send it to Stefano. His answer is immediate: ‘The game has begun ’
CHAPRER 6
The chocolate of remembrance
Here we are, today Camilla came to pick me up so that we could revise our plan before entering the café. We try to arrive at least ten minutes earlier compared to the usual so that we could set everything before he arrives. Before going out, I wrote a card to explain my gift.
The little chocolate, in addition to the link of the same common thread of the daisy, must carry on our non-affair with the discovery of the senses, our senses, moving from sight to taste. I’ve decided not to sign the card but to put only the initial of my name, so that I would not reveal too much and I would not end too soon this game that is getting more intriguing, different from the usual flirting schemes. I write on the envelope ‘For…?’ since I don’t have a clue about what is name is, I put everything inside and I come down running towards my friend who has already buzzed from a few minutes.
Today I woke up earlier than the usual and it took me half an hour only to decide what to wear. In the end, I opted for a wool soft dress of my favourite colour, dark green, and my high heel boots. While I’m in the street, I can’t wait to arrive and I almost got hit by a car since I’m so head over hills that I didn’t even notice a red traffic light. Arrived safe and sounds at the café we laid the bags at the usual table and we wait at the counter. When it’s almost the time of his arrival, Camilla placed herself in front of the entrance and I made the barman get away towards the kitchen with an excuse. At this point, I placed the envelope in front of the sugar box on the side where he always stands to have a coffee. I know for sure that he’s going to take the sugar box and he’s
going to find the envelope in front of his eyes hoping that, realising that it’s for him, he would open it.
Camilla waves at me when he’s arriving and so we quickly sit pretending that nothing is happening despite a whisper of shortness of breath provoked by emotions and by the brief run towards the table. In order not to express my emotions, when he enters I look at him only for few instants. I am as excited as never before and I hope not to blush too much revealing my fake carelessness with regards to his arrival.
When he finally reaches the counter, we secretly spy on him, hoping that he hurries up and takes that envelope on display just before him.
He turns towards me in a blink and, feeling caught, I immediately look the other way. Today there’s not the usual harmony of our meeting: the last events left us more excited than the usual, he’s not the usual too. In order to break this awkward moment, he accidentally drops the envelope to the ground. When he picks it up, he gets slowly up looking at the mysterious addressee marked on the envelope with a little flower that I sketched while we were already on the road. It was to help him decoding the massage and to make him realise that he was exactly the one who had to open the envelope.
When we notice that he was opening it, we took the opportunity to go away secretly without making any noise, running away in the street.
The only thing that makes me sad is that I’m going to wait two days to see how our game will continue and I already know that it will be a very long weekend. Luckily, it matched a little trip that I had planned a long time before. Therefore, in the late afternoon I’ve already taken the train that will lead me to Venice to meet the baby of one of my five cousins who was born only a few months before. Her husband will be
outside the city in these days, so I grasped the opportunity to help her and to be together after a long time that we haven’t seen each other.
Today I finished work soon, taking advantage of some time off hours that I’ve previously asked in order not to have last minutes pranks. My pretty and little trolley awaits me home, packed with all the necessary things for these two days out of the city. I wear my comfy skinny jeans that I can fit into my boots with my hot and slim blue and brown sweater, unfailing during my winter trips. After a while I wear my coat again, with scarf and hat, ready to face Venice during this time of the year. I have been waiting for this trip for weeks and luckily it seems that the weather is going to help us providing us with two sunny days not even so cold with respect to the season. To avoid being late, a taxi that will take me to the train station is already waiting for me under my front door. As soon as I sit down and I close the door I already feel like I am on holyday. On the way I check a few last things and I prepare tickets and money to pay the ride. In ten minutes we’re already at the entrance of the station right on time for the departure. Arrived at the departures board, I look for my train and I receive the bad news of a delay of half an hour. On one hand, I thank heaven that this is the only delay and I take advantage to have a stroll between the shops renewed in the last years so that they create a real mall under the tracks, in a sort of underworld. There are all the trendiest brands especially for youngest girls and fast foods unfolded between scents and appealing colourful advertising that offer a good lunch at a few euros cost.
At this hour this area of the station is really crowded, who arrives, who is simply here to do some undisturbed and easy linked shopping. I
stop to buy a bottle of water in a shop entirely provided with automatic dispensers of every kind of water. Before I choose, I look at all of them: plain, still, sparkling, slightly sparkling, soda, not to mention the one containing more or less sodium and so on. Well, nowadays even choosing water becomes difficult. Just in case, I choose a brand that I know and I go back to my tour, looking at the watch now and then to avoid the risk of remaining in Rome. When my train finally arrives, I get on the coach displayed on the ticket and I have a seat. I connect my tablet to the station free Wi-Fi and I check the last messages, always hoping to find a contact from him. Disappointed from receiving only advertising e-mails and some answer to work messages, I turn everything off and I wait to hear the whistle that heralds the departure.
When the train starts to move I close my eyes, cradled by the increasing pace on the tracks that are slipping under my feet. That noise brings me back in the years, when I was a girl and I used to go to the mountains with the group of friends of my district. We always travelled by night and we almost never slept during the ride. There was always someone who brought the guitar and played in the couches with all the others pushed inside to sing. Someone stopped in the corridors, watching outside the windows the darkness lighted only by many street lamps along the way that moved away leaving behind a light trail. The rumour of the tracks, always identical like a chant that was a base for the choral voices and the sound of the guitar. Long trips that passed quickly in the euphoria of a holyday far from home, from families, from school… Ready to the adventure that only mountain experienced in tent can offer. The same train would have seen us again after ten days spent totally immersed in nature, between green trees and cold
streams that became source of water to bath and wash dishes. The same train that would have taken us home tired but as happy as ever with the backpack full of dirty clothes and with many adventures to tell. At that time there weren’t mobile phones or Internet to divert our attention from what surrounded us and the only contact with home was a single call made in the half of the week from a cabin far away from our camp. And we used to live so well…
When I open my eyes again, I am alone and outside the window it’s still day. I am enchanted by the landscape that surrounds me and it seems that it was eaten by the unbridled run of that long means of transport. Its sound is still the same of the one of a lot of years ago, its regular pace is always unaltered. I am the only one who changed, but with the usual smile that is finally came back to shine on my face tired and marked from the events of a lifetime. I enjoy taking some picture from the window. Luckily, my seat is just the window one and so I can admire undisturbed the scene that changes before my eyes. I enjoy modifying the photos that I’ve taken through some applications that are nowadays installed on every mobile phone and I post some of them on my profile. I check the mail, even if I see that there is any new message. Nothing, not a trace of my mysterious café friend who probably doesn’t even know where and how to find me.
In front of me sat a couple who will be more or less my same age.
Since he got on he has done nothing but calling with his latest fashion headphones and playing with his smartphone. She has a listless face and, without saying a single word since she sat down, she has her look lost in the central corridor glancing at who knows what inexistent spot before her. Then she took a bag of chips from her purse, hangs it to
him who shakes his head while continues typing quickly on his virtual keyboard. With the same mood showed until now, she starts to eat chips, slowly and almost coerced. There’s no emotion in her eyes, always abandoned in the void. Suddenly she stops, the vibration of her mobile phone notifies her a message that she reads quickly but with a light in her eyes that she had never had until that moment. While she puts her phone back, in the same speed she had taken it from her coat pocket, I detect a slight smile on her lips and a little tear on her face.
She swiped it immediately away with her hand while she turned in the opposite side with regard to where her husband is sitting. Then she continues eating her chips, coming back to her absent world and regardless of what is happening around her.
I start to imagine who could have texted her to make her resurrect from a trance and boredom state when I am also reached by a message that takes me back to reality. I start to look for my phone in my bag with such a fervour that I drop some of the things that were inside of it.
My fellow traveller immediately activates and helps me pick up what I’ve lost from the floor of the coach that is making my personal belongings swing back and forth as in an endless ballet. I thank her and we exchange a smile and I understand that hers is a strong solitude that she would like to break even with the first person who comes along.
I’ve finally found my phone: it’s my cousin from Venice who tells me that I’m going to find her outside the station waiting for me in her car.
I answer her writing about the slight delay and I put my phone back, this time in the pocket of the bag so that I’ll easily find it the next time.
As soon as my ‘new friend’ realises I’ve finished to fight with technology, she starts to speak to me: ‘I also always happen to drop
things from my bag’. At her first words, her husband jumps on his seat almost surprised to hear his wife’s voice coming out her vocal chords.
Then, in the same way, he goes back to play with his phone looking a little bothered by our chat. We continue to make small talk until our arrival in Venice without noticing that the sun has already given its place to darkness and we even exchange our contacts to see each other again, maybe for a pizza, once we’ll be back in Rome. They live not too far from me and, being childless, it could be funny to organize a ladies night, thing that she has never done since she married the love of her life five years ago. I don’t know if I’ll see her again but seeing her enthusiasm only at the idea of our pizza gave me hope about her taking her life into her hands again and leaving a too boring routine. And who knows who sent her that message so intriguing to make her cry. Maybe one day I’ll be able to ask her, satiating my endless curiosity. We say goodbye as we were great friends, with him only a cold ‘hi’ instead, and then we went separate ways.
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Eva Forte
Two lives intersect every morning in a cafe. Two glances that say a lot more than words and that start together a 'non-affair' made of games and seduction, beyond the standard ways of seduction. Two main characters that allow us to enter their lives through the past and the five senses of the present.
Two
Eva Forte
Facebook: www.facebook.com/pages/Due/738756506137043
© 2018
www.laragnatelaeditore.it
Translated by: Giada Di Gioia
Publisher of the English edition: Tektime
To those who gave me the courageTo begin this new adventure
Preface
Everyone has several stories inside related to one’s own
background but also one’s own imagination. Stories ready to come out on paper, to come alive under the beat of fingers on the keyboard ‘Two’ is born this way and, just like in real life, took shape day after day, getting to know the main characters and their desire to play and know each other going beyond conventions and standard love affairs that follow well-defined paths.
The rediscovery of the five senses, the ability to recapture your own past even in the present, the capability to go further, and the solitude sought after for a long time.
A journey through the city, the countryside, and faraway places to know what love really is. It arises from a glance that, every morning, offers a safe harbour.
CHAPTER 1
The countryside
There is no such thing as waking up early when the city is still sleeping, and the silence of the night starts to break under the motion of the first sounds of the day. In wintertime, it still seems to be cradled by the moon, with that coldness that surrounds you as soon as you step out of bed, leaving the warmth of the night and the perfume of the fabric softener on the sheets.
The warmth of the duvet, with all its smoothness, gives way to little shivers that help me to wake up while I am walking through the still dark and silent house. After turning the coffee maker on, my morning rituals start to unfold one after the other. The shower turns on, with the strong warm stream that chases the foam away. My bathrobe is already prepared nearby, to prevent the coldness to become bothersome and bitter. With the first news of the day, I taste the hot steaming coffee, freshly made while I am still not dressed; the little things that put me in a good mood, even before leaving the house and facing everyday life. As every Monday, there is a lot of excitement in seeing her again after spending two days fantasizing about her life and about what she could be doing in every single moment of her day.
During the last few years I've lost the enthusiasm of having a lasting relationship with a woman, given the last affair, the break period after every relationship is having its benefits. Since I met her, the idea of feeling affection for another one vanished, at least for now. This new adventure made of platonic encounters and stolen glances becomes more and more exciting day after day, almost in the hope that all
remains on this level without any actual contact, without knowing who she is and what she is doing in her life.
I overhear my neighbour’s dog barking and, as regular as clockwork, he opens his door on the landing for his usual morning stroll in Villa Borghese. An old lady took the job of taking that little dog for a walk, being as loud as possible and making it impossible to believe it is actually that little. A nice woman, now alone and without any interests other than helping the engineer by taking a short walk with that tiny dog for which she has no further interest. Wrapped up in her big mat coat, she took the leash and went down the stairs, one step at a time, dragged by the tiny dog dying to reach fresh air after a long night indoors. Before leaving my home, I always wait until I can no longer hear barking. The nice old lady has a special affection for me and always feels obliged to brief me about all her health vicissitudes without taking a breath, and when this happens, I always risk missing my morning rendezvous with my charming stranger, something that generally puts me in a bad mood. So far, it has only happened a few times where we didn’t meet at the café, or at least on the route that takes her away from the café, for it is that eye contact that energises me for the whole day.
As soon as I hear the front door close I am ready by the door, jangling the keys and with my backpack on my shoulder and with my jacket well buttoned under my warm scarf, without which I would be lost during the coldest months. I chump at the thought of what will she be wearing today. I often try to imagine her and I make bets with myself to see if we are also in touch on these frivolous things. I also tried to guess at least the colour of her trousers or what she would
generally wear. A childish game that makes me smile when I realise that I have guessed something about her. I step up the pace on the road, this morning the old lady lingered with the engineer who gave her a piece of advice on where to take his ‘furry kid’, as he loves to call it.
In the threshold of the café, I see her with her usual breakfast mate, sitting at the small table near the fridge with the display cakes. Every day, our eyes meet and when she doesn’t break the eye contact the warmth of our smiles becomes one. Then it’s over, our non-affair stops there, even if I always try to look at her without her knowing, to see how she moves, how she teases her hair. One of the first times I had a seat just behind her, for the curiosity of smelling what perfume she had and to be able to remember her all day long by more than just an image in my head. During these three months, after our first meeting, I have never heard her name and this makes it all even more intriguing and mysterious. About her, I only know that she is a real morning person like me and that she can’t help starting the day without a cappuccino and a plain croissant.
Sometimes I hide behind the fridge, which allows me to look at her unnoticed through the glass, between the soft colourful cakes in it. A few days ago, her friend must have noticed me, given the way she looks at me every time we meet. So I abandoned my new hiding place to come back to my usual position on the side of the counter, between her and the exit, so that I would not lose a moment of our rendezvous.
When I dared to confess this platonic love to Stefano, I had to wait for five minutes for him to stop giggling. I must have entertained him a lot, especially the part about me hiding between cakes and pastries in
the café. Knowing me and my easiness in approaching the female sex, he was very surprised by the fact that in these months I didn’t step forward. He doesn’t understand that the beauty of my feeling lies in the fact that I have idealised her. Going any further would make everything come to an end, especially the vibe of the unknown, which fills this story with mystery.
After a week of ceaseless rain, today the sun has finally returned, so I took the chance of taking a day-off to go for a stroll in the countryside of Rome. Therefore, after half an hour I am already far away from the chaos of the city, from the crowded highways, and from the tall buildings that concealed the sky. In my car, I don’t even turn the radio on, for so much of her memory is on my mind. For a few seconds I even had the crazy idea of showing up and asking her to come with me. I would have taken her to one of the gorgeous parks on the Flaminia to finally tell her all about me, if only to know her name.
In the end, reason had notched up and I am about to arrive at my mum’s in a little village with four houses in a row that got stuck back in time. You can still breath the scent of freshly baked bread in a wood-fired oven and the cold blowing on your bones as soon as you enter the main street. The wind wraps you up and accompanies you while it whistles in your ear, almost whispering advice on your life. I often come here to wonder in this surreal setting of ancient times.
My mother also seems like a woman who didn’t accept the passing of the time. Always beautiful, despite the wrinkles that mark the years, with the rough and gnarled hands of someone who didn’t even spare a second in the fields or in the kitchen. Her only step forward has been forcefully accepting the mobile phone that I gave her as a gift last
Christmas. Since my dad is gone, knowing that she is alone and so far away from the city makes me feel restless, and being able to reach her, at least by the phone, makes me feel more peaceful. After her first reluctance, she learnt how to use it and sometimes she even sends me some pictures so that we feel closer, despite the distance.
Today I didn’t inform her of my arrival, I know how much she loves surprises and so I wanted to wait until the last moment to see the weather before getting to the street. Once I arrived at the main street, the first one to welcome me were two hens that had escaped from who knows which henhouse. These animals always make me laugh, always upright and unwieldy. As soon as their squawking goes away, I start to hear the smooth sound of shoes on the road with the light echoing between the empty and silent houses. The sun begins to warm walls and my gloveless hands. When I reach her house, at the bottom of the dark staircase without a front door, I overhear her voice in the distance and the sound of the rolling pin that hits the marble countertop. Today it must be the fresh pasta day, something that makes her very happy and so, between this and that rolled crust, she enjoys singing herself old songs and changing the words she doesn’t remember here and there. As I am coming up the stairs, trying not to make any noise, her voice becomes more and more warm and solid and replaces my café memories printed in my mind until that very moment. This place has the ability of making me forget everything else. A bit like becoming a child again, without big worries apart from having a bit of bread and freshly brewed gravy between this and that game. For a second I even had the will of going back to the street and chasing those two smug hens in their escape, to scare them a bit and to fulfil my ears with the
sound of their uncontrolled bickering.
Arrived at the front door, I stood for a moment in order to catch my breath after these steep and slippery stairs in the darkness that pulls the morning light away behind me. The door is open, as it is still a habit in the small villages, and behind a thin colourful plastic door curtain I discern her, inside with her apron on and her sleeves rolled up, going from one side to the other of the big kitchen in the hallway. What I love about her is that her smile is always ready to welcome you. I sneak into the room without making any noise whispering “Mum…”
as if it was a magical and untouchable word. While she suddenly turns, I see in her eyes a mix of surprise and endless joy, so we end up hugging as if we didn’t see each other for such a long time. As if I was still a child, she kisses my cheeks over and over again, in that soft embrace of hers from which I don’t want to loose. Curious about my arrival, she makes me sit down beside her while she starts to make coffee and puts on the table biscuits, a pie, and a bunt cake that has already be tasted, all of them rigorously hand-made by her. As she doesn’t receive a lot of visits, every time that I arrive she has to catch up with all that she has to offer me at home and I know perfectly well that even a slight refusal could be taken as an offence. So I started to eat a piece of pie with orange jam, my favourite one. While she tinkers with the small coffeepot for two, she starts to tell me all the gossip of the area: from the arrival of the new country priest, to the multiple births of the two foals on the next-door farm.
She has such tender manner of speaking that it seems like she is still singing, and I stay there, listening without blinking an eye, wrapped up in that atmosphere that is completely out of this world.
Today I feel in the mood for sharing, so I tell her about my mysterious café woman. She sits down and, placing her arm on the wooden table, listens to me as if I am telling a fairy tale. She doesn’t interrupt me and as soon as I stop talking she remains silent for a few seconds, undecided whether to comment on this absurd non-affair of mine or to remain silent. Then she stands up, smiles at me, and goes to the coffeepot that started to puff and to throw some spatters of coffee on the cheap white and spotless stove. After this endless silence she asks me if I was here for that reason and whether she had to tell me what she wanted me to do… Because in her opinion every love affair, even the crazy ones like mine, must take their own course without anyone putting their nose in, risking changing the right course of things. While she is pouring me some coffee in the china teacup that is so fine that it looks fake, I answer that I just wanted to share my life with her as I have always done, without wanting anything more. She caresses my face, smiles, and starts to tell me how she and dad had met. A story I was already so familiar with but that I love to hear from her. Her eyes glisten, for the first time since my dad died I see in her the melancholy of the solitude and the absence and I realise that I must treasure these moments together, to remember them forever, recording them in my memory, hoping that they can be played forever. After taking the package prepared with fresh hand-made pasta, a piece of every dessert and fresh eggs and vegetables from the garden, I step back on my way towards the car. The wind has now weakened and the higher sun warms my face.
You can begin to smell the first scents of lunch, in some house they are roasting pepperoni. From an open window you can smell the
perfume of a cake right out the oven, and the whole village participates with those scents that blend in such a beautiful way that only small villages can give as a gift to their visitors. I stop by the baker to buy white pizza, always warm and freshly baked. I already know that I am going to regret this purchase because anytime that I eat it I feel bad because it is well seasoned and slightly heavy. But if I don’t eat it, it doesn’t feel like I have been here, between the little mountains of Lazio. To break this blissfulness made of hands greasy with oil and of mouths satisfied with pizza and rock salt, there is the ringing of my mobile phone that makes me wince and breaks the spell. Next time I must remember to turn it off. Like an equilibrist, I manage to take it out of my pocket without dropping my pizza and I succeeded in not breaking the eggs wrapped in journal papers in my package. On the screen I see the picture of my ex-girlfriend Lucia but as soon as I answer the call, it stops ringing. I’ll call her later. I spent the most amazing years of my life with her, in a unique harmony that lasted six years, until she accepted a job abroad and I refused to follow her. It was then that I realised it wasn’t the major love that we thought, a mutual awareness that makes us still bounded today. During this time, she has come back to Italy, so we are more in touch, and not only with messages and e-mails. Seeing her again is always great, for a few seconds I even thought that letting her go has been a mistake but then I realise it was only a purely egoistic matter, and now I have accepted our long-distance friendship that gets stronger every day. Tonight, we are going to see each other again, finally alone, to tell each other face-to-face about this year spent apart.
I got into the car and after placing the package on the back seats I
drive towards the Capital with my lungs full of fresh air and my shoes dirty with soil. Today I would really like to see her but I perfectly know that I must wait until tomorrow morning for our usual eye contact. During the drive I call Lucia back and I tell her about my rural morning. We decide to meet in the evening and she says goodbye to me by telling me that she has some good news to give me. Her voice is full of enthusiasm, she looks like a child standing by a Christmas tree full of presents for her. Maybe she’ll come back to Italy? The idea bodes well for me and I start to get the idea of having her near me again, also work-wise. We are both free lance photographers or it is better to say that I am still one, while she works for a famous slick photographic magazine in France. Almost at the gates of Rome, I stop to take a few pictures of the bales of buckwheat well spread on the field all around the highway, taking advantage of a little rest area in which I could stop the car. It makes you want to gallop towards the fence and run around them, before throwing yourself to the ground to catch a bit of that sun that transforms that wheat into gold threads. It would be pleasant to lie with your back on the freshly cut grass and then sitting up with pieces of straw stuck between your hair. In the distance, two horses standing just before the sun allow some lively shots. It seems exactly like they are running in its beams, you are almost afraid they will get burnt and that their running back and forth could be a challenge to that fireball. Then they disappear in the horizon and the sun loses his aspect that strikes fear and it goes back to be just the background of a scenario between lovers. Lost in thousands of thoughts and with a few photos shot, I realise that I am running late and in spite of myself, I must go back to the big city in order to be
swallowed up by my evening commitments before reaching the long-awaited evening meeting.
CHAPTER 2
Glances at the bar
The alarm clock rings just like every morning when I have already been awake for at least fifteen minutes, basking in the bed and feeling the first cold of the morning sneaking in under the goose down duvet.
A little moment all for myself in order to think about how the day will go, even if in the last months the first thought is him. It is absurd to think that the first thing I think of is a perfect stranger who though is part of my everyday life. I am so taken by this person that every preparation is focussed on him, trying to understand what he may like and how to catch his eye. At the end of the day this is what I want, to catch the eye of the mysterious man, stalling it all to this first approach hoping that nothing is ever going to go further as it runs the risk of ruining this magic early morning moment. At our café where we see each other every day always at the same hour, I always sit at the same place towards the counter in order to see him properly. He knows that I am there and the first look as soon as he arrives is addressed to me.
I get up, barefoot and with my nightgown to the knees even in wintertime to feel the freshness of the sheets with the warmth of the duvet. Also the pillow, scrupulously perfumed with the fabric softener, must always be fresh. Therefore, until I fall asleep, I twist it as soon as it gets a bit warmer because of the warmth of my body to feel again that refreshing sensation that only coldness can give to my cheeks.
Before taking a shower, I warm my little bathroom, my own private room in which anyone but me enters. My little shelter, treated to the last detail, complete with music in wire broadcasting and shower with
colour therapy. I put my favourite playlist on, I turn the shower on, and I soak into the hot scented water. After a while I am already out, today I chump at the idea of seeing him again after a weekend spent outside Rome.
It's incredible how a simple thing like an eye contact could make my heart beat that fast. It is enough for me and it fills me with so much energy that I flee any next step. In this crazy affair I involved my flatmate Camilla too. We met when I was given a new project of pregnancy counsellors with her, and a great sympathy kicked in right away and quickly thereafter a great friendship too. Both single, we could easily manage to see each other at least once a week in order to go to the cinema or to see some little exhibitions throughout the centre.
She knows so many people that she always has an invitation to some event and we always enjoy it, whatever the style of the evening is.
Yesterday evening I’d already prepared what I would have worn this morning, jeans and a white lace blouse with a light sweater that envelopes my shapes in a firm dark purple. I wouldn’t be able to go to sleep if I had not prepared all the things for the day after. The kitchen must be tidy too, with the latte mug ready on the table, on the blue American-style place mat. It’s a way of not rushing in the morning looking for what I need before going out and also a way to have a perfectly tidy home in every minute of the day. Opening the windows, I notice that the sun is ready to warm this cold day and a smile pops up on my face. The fine winter days always put me in a good mood, the sun recharges me, and I just need to look outside the window to get through the tough moments. After a few minutes I am already on the road ready to catch the bus that takes me to work. I am lucky enough
to live not so far from my working place that I could even walk to it, but today I’m racing to enter the café before he arrives. I also want to catch up with Camilla, who has to tell me the latest news on her ‘boyfriend’ met a little more than a month ago at the gym she always attends during the lunch break. An affair more ordinary than mine and that I hope will be a success. Last Saturday they had their first date and I still need to know all the details about the evening. The happiness for her story is mixed with a bit of jealousy for my friend who I will have to share with the newcomer…
She is already waiting by our usual meeting place and from the smile that warms her face I can immediately tell the evening must have been better than expected. As soon as she sees me, she rushes over me risking falling in a pit on the sidewalk that wraps around her very high heels that she usually wears with great aplomb. In no time I feel myself surrounded by her tight embrace and her blonde and long hair is all over my face. I am imprisoned by her joy and for a moment I feel like I was living her same happiness. When she releases me from her embrace, I can tell she is so excited, her eyes sparkle like never before, and for a moment I felt like I am about to lose her. I blow my miserable thoughts away and I restore my usual cheerfulness to the extent that I grab her by the hand and I quickly make my way towards the café: ‘You must tell me everything!!!’ My friend’s evening has been performed by the book. He picked her up on his flaming motorbike, she got caught up in by the euphoria to rush towards the seaside of Lazio to spend an evening by the sea, in a little seafood restaurant that stays open during wintertime. Definitely romantic, it would have won any woman… Therefore, removed the helmet, a glass
of wine accompanied by a range of seafood delicacies while holding hands during the whole evening and during a stroll by the seaside he finally gave her the long-awaited kiss. So now it seems like they have been together since forever. They spent the day after telling each other their stories and tonight they’re going to meet again, surrounded by the magic moment of first dates. But our Wednesday meeting for our cinema night remains only for the two of us, so I feel more relieved.
While I’m relaxing at the thought that I didn’t lose my adventuring companion, here he comes, more casual than usual. He looks at me and smiles and then makes quickly his way to the counter in order to have his regular chat with the early morning costumers. As usual, there is the nice grandfather who has just left his nieces at school and who is ready to spend the morning around the city free from any commitment.
After a while, it comes the couple always all dressed up to have a coffee before leaving again in a hurry to reach the car parked nearby. It is not missing the girl who studies at university and who needs to take the metro to get to attend her classes, with her boyfriend who works at the supermarket around the corner. And then there’s us, always sitting at the same table that seems to be waiting for us every morning to hear about our new brief stories to tell in fifteen minutes before leaving again for our life. Hearing about Camilla’s new affair made me think about how much did I suffer for my latest affair with Carlo. We were a couple for ten long years and we get to nothing but boredom and distance even if we were always together. The final blow of our relationship has been moving in together and after two boring years we broke up realising that we were better as friends than as lovers.
Therefore, we met really often indeed and the time we spend together
is definitely funnier than it was before.
We got rid of the heaviness of a relationship that wasn’t tailor-made for any of us to discover ourselves under a new light more suitable for the two of us together. The first thing that comes to my mind is that I need to call him as soon as I got to the office in order to tell him about Camilla and her new love. Luckily, we have been smart enough not to be carried away by the events, being able to stop in time.
We even thought about getting married, getting until the choice of the Church to find ourselves in the main aisle, into the silence of this little but massive house of God with the scent of the incense floating into your bones with a stranger by our side. Both of us had this feeling. Ten years together to find ourselves strangers inside a Church, finally realising that we were going on only because of the habit and to simplify our life. All we had to do was looking ourselves in the eyes to burst out laughing and then like two children in tears we ended our story saying goodbye on the stairs where usually you would prefer to be thrown some rice on the wedding dress instead of receiving an embrace that dissolves everything for good. The first night in a now empty home was not easy and for the first time for me a sleepless night had a totally different meaning from the usual one. As I always say, sleeping steals time to life, but that night staying awake without sleeping a wink helped only to come to terms with myself, finding myself alone again but stronger than before. I came to terms with a ten years more mature woman, a baggage on the shoulders made of beautiful things but also of empty and wasted moments, finding myself with a few sand grains between the hands that was gradually vanishing between half-closed fingers. After a first period of solitude sought with
all my strength, here comes Camilla, who was able to bring me back to life… The social one, and in a little time I recovered what I had lost during the years spent with Carlo. In the meantime, he found a girlfriend and he is about to get married and this new affair allowed us to become great friends, abandoning the memories of a relationship built in the wrong way. In this latest period, changing the job, finding new friends, started a series of changes that made me discover myself as a person and not only as Carlo’s fiancé, his addendum.
I changed my haircut, I am more careful about my outfits, and I try to be always cleaned up even if I am going to do the shopping down the street. In other words, I love myself more than ever. I do it for me and now also for that morning look that waits for me in order to start the day together. Then we immediately separate to leave room for the mystery of such a special ‘non-affair’. Between me and my mysterious he it is the opposite. After the first eye contact and the awareness of a mutual interest, it all stopped to ‘nothing has to develop’. It almost seems to me that I am always going through the same day and on one side this gives me a great safety and peace of mind. I know that sooner or later it must stop and maybe it will also disappear the interest in a look that doesn’t lead to anything. But now I don’t want to think about that and I enjoy that something that gives me a thrill that gets me through my day with a smile on my face. Today we are leaving the café more charged than ever and tomorrow is going to be another morning full of tells to hear and of looks to wait for. Our day starts that way, even if all the enthusiasm for the good sunny day ends up in the usual cold and musty counselling centre room that we manage to get after many efforts, to be able to work on our laptops having at least a
chair and a table to lean on. Today is the birthing classes day, so at 9.00 AM the hallway is already crowded with women with gymnastic outfits and marked baby bumps. There are women who caress their belly and other who are looking for a place to sit down and relax after the first backpains. Most of them are handing a bottle of water in one hand and a towel in the other. Many of them already know each other and so there is a whisper made of tips and opinions, who is living more or less the same moments that are going to result in their biggest change, giving birth to a brand-new creature who will reflect them at least partly. Many of them have seen their body change, letting themselves go, while other seem ready to a maternity runaway with the latest fashion clothes and hair and nails always perfectly done. We get always across the room with a bit of distress, almost trying not to disturb the big group of pregnant women ready to listen to the midwifes who are there for them. Finally in our room, we close the door behind us with a sigh of relief, even if with a bit of bitterness and desire of staying in that room one day. It would be nice to have a baby simultaneously in order to face it all together. We hope so, even if it is not the most probable and easy thing of the world. Our office is gloomy and I miss that beam of sun that I left at the entrance. Every season is the same here and except for the great winter cold and the warmth of the summer, we could easily not be able to distinguish which period of the year it is. When we come out at 6.00 PM, it is terrible to enter with the light and then step outside when the dark has already set in. It almost seems like having lost a part of our lives between paperwork and statistics not so useful to our existence. After a while after our arrival, the silence falls on all the counselling centre: as
soon as the class begins, the future mums are completely taken by breathing exercises and birthing gymnastic in the room next to the entrance and in the distance you can overhear the dim voice of Anna, our favourite midwife who leads women in the most beautiful moment of their lives with her soft and gentle voice. Therefore, we can start to turn our laptops on and try to get some work done, as tomorrow there is going to be the meeting with the delegate of all the counselling centres of the area who wants to have all the login information completed with demographic statistics and names of who performed services in the last months. As soon as the laptop is turned on, the image on the desktop leads me inevitably to dream for a few minutes.
Out of the blue, any noise that adorn my life disappear and I only live in my mind with the memories relating to that picture. I took it, any character is on the scene, but I know who is behind the camera and this makes it even more special and unique, with a meaning that will be well-rounded only for me. You can see a beautiful valley almost as endless that its termination blends with the sky at twilight. Red leaves of trees and the meadow that starts to turn golden until that night light that shows the red sun and the moon on one side, which shyly embraces his hours of the day. Anyone, any animal, any noise, but a sense of peace and calmness that only such kind of pictures can give. I still feel my hands on the camera and the look lost in the lens for then going back to the other side and getting lost in the endless nature. The door that suddenly opens brings me brutally back to real life: a new face looks out and for a second we ask ourselves who could it be, until we discern a conspicuous belly and we understand that it was a straggler who entered the wrong room. I accompany her and I take the
opportunity to get some fresh air (I don’t know why, but today it feels like I can’t breathe) and to call Carlo, since in our room there’s no signal and make a call becomes an unedifying undertaking. A few minutes and I go back to the room, I want to have the job done to avoid being trapped here until late.
CHAPTER 3:
The daisy of Villa Borghese
Tired from the beautiful outdoor trip, I finally decide to come back home and work a little bit in the calmness of my four walls. I’ve got an awful number of emails in arrears and I want to work on the last photos shot for too long. I must also submit the work done a few weeks ago: collecting in a few shots the sea life after summer holydays. I’ve decided to develop all the pictures in black and white, colours that reflect a lot the mood you can be in when you find yourself in the sight of a big expanse of salt water when the good weather has stopped. Yet it gives me a lot of power to go to the seaside in wintertime. I’ve been there alone, leaving at early morning, catching the first lights of the day sneaking up on the sea. Armed with a blanket and a wool hat, I settled on the still wet sand that was creaking under my weight. I was the only one on the whole shore, me and it, in front of me so gigantic with its soft noise and its going back and forth on the shore. Therefore, I waited for the sun to rise, an unbelievable show that I would see more often if only I was leaving closer to the seaside. Sitting on my blanket with glows to avoid the risk of frozen hands at the moment of taking the first pictures, coldness on my cheeks, and red nose. In these moments you feel so little and at the same time the ruler of the world.
Then comes the sun in front of your eyes with all his beauty and the sea starts to colour and shine as ever, and the crispy air slowly goes out on the skin. In these moments me and the camera make a whole and I become eager to take pictures as I freeze every single instant because I know that anything can be repeated in the same way. While I was busy
with the first pictures, a medium-sized dog came forward. It came to the beach with an old man who stopped just at the beginning of the sand focused on the see with a grin that indicated a careless and peaceful mood. In the meantime, the dog ran wildly, always coming back to his feet, for then going back again to an excited run towards the tiny waves that were consuming the sand. In order to break the solitude that must have been his daily situation, the man slowly came closer to check on what I was doing. After the first polite words of welcome, we started to talk about that charming place and about the beauty that can be discerned only during winter. Left alone again, I started to appreciate that spot, a little melancholic but full of hues. The scents of trees started to be more distinct and, if you close your eyes, they can take you back in time in other places and situations. Sand, still cold between my hands, with which it fiddles without leaving any trace. The sea is always there with its constant pace and allows you to see some shells beneath and it seems to invite you to go through it to get in it and swim until the horizon. I am rattled only by the smell of the near restaurant that is starting to prepare lunch well in advance, probably because of some party or special event. All emotions that I rediscover a week later looking at my pictures, hoping that the commissioner of this job could deeply understand their value.
Browsing them on the computer just make me want to go back there and for the first time my desire is to go there with my mysterious coffee partner, without talking, tasting the same emotions together, maybe hand in hand, a contact between the two of us that we have never tried for now. I finish my work and I send it all via e-mail, then I close it quickly before throwing myself in the shower and preparing to
dine with Lucia. As usual, I reach the place of the appointment far in advance, so I step aside and enjoy looking at people passing by and hearing their little stories made of few stolen instants. A family with two little children passes by, everyone in a rush, looking forward to coming back home after a long day that everyone spent doing their own commitments. The mother tenderly embraces the youngest child, tired and sleepy between her arms, while the eldest is telling his father about the afternoon spent practicing who knows which sport. After a while, it comes the lady on a bicycle, all dressed up and with her purse placed behind in order not to lose her balance. No shortage of the boy who goes by totally immersed into his favourite music and the man who talks on the phone about his plans for the evening with fast pace.
Finally, she shows up. My dear friend pops up from behind the corner, always more beautiful and radiant. We haven’t seen each other in months but as soon as I found her in front of me it looks like we didn’t ever said goodbye at the airport, both hiding a tear and then losing ourselves in our daily life in two different countries.
A long embrace brings us back to the present and we immediately start to compete to see who starts first to tell the latest news while we are heading to our favourite restaurant in which you can have only pizza and arrosticini. It’s an informal place, wooden tables with paper tablecloths with white and red squares, typical Roman trattoria chairs, and the warm welcome of the historical owners who know us well by now. Facing a good brick-oven pizza and a pint of beer, Lucia’s face fell in prey of excitement. She longs to be the first to tell her news and I am there ready to celebrate her homecoming. When she starts to speak, I realise that my hopes are completely wrong. She met a man in
France, they fell in love at first sight, and now she is pregnant. So, out of the blue, I see my hope of having my friend back for good falling apart and I see her going away again, this time for good. She is in fact back to Rome to organize the moving out of her stuff and she is going to settle down in his place, a beautiful palace in the centre of Paris. It will be a good chance for me to go back to visit the most romantic capital of the world, but with a different mood, when the baby is born.
We celebrate the good news of the new life that is about to come, and Lucia keeps telling me about her beautiful French months between her rewarding job, her first photographic exhibition, and her edifying love story that galloped fast down to the unexpected but immediately well received pregnancy. All these tells make me realise that my life has stopped, I stand still and this concerns only me and annoys me a little.
I start to get lost in my thoughts and I don’t listen to anything that surrounds me, including Lucia, who is so focused on her life that doesn’t even feel the desire to know what’s happening to mine. I take my mind back to that morning, so peaceful and full of colours, and now I would only like to run away from the chaos of the now crowded restaurant soaked in the noise of people speaking and voraciously eating. Thinking about the fact that in a few hours I’ll be back to my café to reload myself with her smile gives me a way out and the restaurant goes back to the familiar features of when we have arrived, and the noise becomes a normal din made of laughs and chat between friends. Lucia is still talking when she takes out from her massive bag a tablet to show me the pictures of her exposition. This is one of my biggest dreams, to be able to expose in my own way the best picture taken in all these years. Even if it is not even remotely planned, I’ve
already started to choose a topic and to decide which photos are worthier of being printed in large size to catch the eye of the visitors. I already picture them, looking up, caught up in my shots and in my same emotions too, but related to their own lives. Because photography, just like poetry or even songs, can be wear like it was a dress. The same identical words conceal a lot of meanings and everyone can make them his own. In the same way, one photo can convey a lot of different sensations and what can be sad for someone can give strength and energy to someone else. I think back to the sea in winter: so sad and melancholic for the ones who loves it crowded and appreciate it more under the blazing sun; and healing in winter for who like me loves lonely places that show features outside conventional rules. Lucia’s exposition had been organized very well and in great details, in an open space with tall and candidly white walls. No furniture to break the pace of her photos, all exposed at the same height and in the same size along the three walls. A single table welcomed visitors with drinks and appetizers as a refreshment during the visit. The photos were all in black and white, with details in colour and the common thread was the presence of watercourses: angles of rivers, fountains with children who drink, details of different fountains, a lake at twilight… Water in all its dimensions, until it closes with a beautiful picture of a washtub where the women of the village go to do the laundry, showing all the taste of something old that still lasts in the present. Even one of the main Parisian journals wrote about her exposition, reserving her a good blurb that brought her a higher number of visitors after its publication. It seems that Lucia’s new man is a big shot who allowed her to emerge in the right manner and in the
way she deserves. I am happy for her, a lot… A little less for me, who will be back to hole up to send e-mails and messages at long distance with a friend who for me is like an actual sister, the one I’ve never had.
Her house is not far from the restaurant and therefore after dinner I accompany her until her old doorway. Now she shall sell the house and therefore another piece of my past is closing to make room for future news. It always feels a little weird to me when someone is moving, just like when I see shops close, especially if they are the historic ones of my childhood. Grown up always in the same district, I know everyone by now, or at least everyone who has not moved. The unfortunate period almost for everyone led to drastic choices whether the older traders, already tired of fighting against all the changes and the career crisis, whether families that look for cheapest houses and are turning away from the centre. After years spent always surrounded by the same people, I experienced these changes as an abandonment. Starting with my mother who decided to sell her house in the city centre to settle down in the village where she is reborn resuming possession of herself and of what she has always loved to do. As long as my father was alive, he worked in a public office here in Rome, running away from the city in every little occasion to head to their beloved little village where they break free from all the fatigue stored during the week. My mother never really loved the city life, she felt a little bit lost even if, despite herself, she has always been taking care of everything as a perfect housewife of a good neighbourhood. A fine lady, always dressed up and with an unfailing string of pearls on her neck. The same pearls she still wears, even if she prefers more comfortable outfits without caring about brands or fine fabrics. Under the big wooden
doorway, I say goodbye to my dear friend with the promise of seeing each other again before her final departure. I wait for her to enter and I walk towards my house caught up in a thousand thoughts and with the desire to go immediately to bed. I’m in such a great mood for the morning to come that I move the hands of the alarm clock one hour earlier and I run under the blankets. At the first ring I am on my feet, now I want to take a stroll down Villa Borghese before the usual morning ritual at the café, so I dress up quickly and I exit perkily the building heading to the park.
The Villa in the morning is enchanting: few people walking around, mainly old people during their healthy stroll and, given the possible insomnia, take advantage of the first hours of the day, when all is still closed and there is not much to do around the city. I found a message from Lucia on my phone, she is thanking me for the dinner and tells me that if her child is a boy, he will have my name. This way she manages to steal the first smile of the day from me while I am already immersed in trees and in their shadow. In this time, you can come into squirrels too, big and chubby, the only masters of the nature that expands under their stealthy hops almost careless of your presence. I arrive until the Pincio and there is where the city appears in all its majesty. Monuments, buildings, churches… All there, peacefully dozing while everyone is looking at them and both with sun and rain they don’t budge and nothing changes them. I pick up a daisy survived to the coldness and I bring it to the café with me. Today I feel different and I want to break the ritual of our meetings with a little gesture and therefore I lay the flower on the table where in a few minutes she is going to sit to have breakfast, hoping that anyone arrives before and
gets his hands on that gesture directed to her.
I quickly go to the counter and order my usual coffee, reversing the order of arrival and without looking at the entrance. After a few minutes I hear her coming. I recognize her voice by now and I also feel that, realising that I am already there (this is the first time since we ‘know’ each other, given that I always arrive when they have already started their breakfast), she stops for a few instants and then restarts approaching the table. I don’t have the courage to look at her face when she’ll find the flower and on the other side I don’t even want her to be certain that I’ve been the one who put it on her table. So I finish my coffee faster than the usual and going out I give her a look and she promptly looks right back, but this time hiding the doubt about that little flower that now she holds in her hand almost if she was waiting an additional step that I am not doing though. It all must stay this way and I walk away as fast as I can.
Chapter 4
Memories
A home night all for me is all I need. I return after a brief shopping and my home welcomes me with the warmth of the heating that is still turned on. I take off my coat and scarf, I take off my shoes that I remove while I am approaching the kitchen to put down the milk that I’ve just bought. Without even turning a light on, I reach the big bathroom and I turn on the hot water tap of the bath. There’s nothing else I would like to do in this moment except a good hot bath that gets out any spleen, any piece of tiredness left on me by this day. Before I enter the bath, I pour myself a glass of semi-sparkling wine, just the right amount of coldness, and I lay it on the sink while I take off my clothes before soaking in the foam. I tie my hair up, I pick up the glass, and I enter the bath now full and so hot that makes my skin turning red at the first impact. To be the perfect bath it only misses candlelight and background music, but this is fair enough for today. Closing my eyes with my head laid on the edge I start to think of a series of things conspiring in my mind. This year I would like to do so many things that at the end I’ll be barely up on anything. A trip abroad, join the gym, find the time to go to the library at least once a week… And go back to do jogging at Villa Borghese when you still overhear only the tiny steps of squirrels upon the gravel and the city seems an enchanted and surreal place, light years away from chaotic and busy streets. The kitchen clock rings the eight and so, a little reluctantly, I start to take the foam off my body opening the shower. The immediate cold water makes a shiver run over my back for then cuddling me again with the
hot water that comes out a little later. I would like to stay like this for hours. Wrapped up in the soft bathrobe, I finish the glass of wine and I start to think about what to cook for dinner. I quickly find some leftovers from last night’s dinner that I warm in the microwave and I eat in the living room while I’m watching a good movie in the dark of a room that is entirely for me.
When I’m home alone, I am not in the mood for cooking, so I sort it out with few simple things just for not going to bed on an empty stomach. I am so tired that I don’t even feel like getting lunch ready for the day after and so I promptly text my colleague to ask her to go out for lunch together tomorrow. From the outside I only overhear a car passing by every once in a while, the city is resting and recharging for the new day to come. An atmosphere so relaxed that when the phone emits a beep, I flinch. The message has been sent by Camilla who grabbed my proposal suggesting me to leave earlier in order to go shopping in the afternoon. With a quick ‘ok’ I settle the issue, now sunken in the couch with the blanket on my bare legs. A gunfight woke me up: it’s 2 a.m. I must have fallen asleep on the couch, and also pretty early since I don’t even remember the film I’ve chosen to watch.
Now on the TV there’s a cop movie, outside it’s pouring rain.
I turn off the TV and off to bed, but now I am awake and so I decide to listen to some music to help me fall asleep. The first song on my playlist is ‘Adagio’ by Lara Fabian. Every time I listen to that song, my heart skips a beat and I think back to my grandfather and to the strong bond I had with him. I’m an orphan since I was little and thus he took care of me, and so he did until a cancer took him away last year, leaving me with the house I’m actually living in and with a
big hole in my heart. It comes immediately to my mind his place in the mountains near Rome and the beautiful summer days spent together the meadows or taking care of his little orchard, or winter Sundays spent in front of the fire listening to his stories about war and ancient times. I own him most of my memories on my family, I remember so little about my mother and my father other than through his tales.
Therefore, I picture the dark room full of the objects collected through the years. The glass cabinet with the ceramics that belonged to my grandmother, the pictures of all my family on the hutch at the bottom of the room. The two of us used to sit on the old rocking chairs with the big red cushions and the soft carpet between us. The only light was coming from the burning fireplace, between the crackling of the wood and the warmth on the legs that was waning rising towards the face.
His voice will always be burnt in my memory, so powerful and so gravelly, telling for hours anecdotes and real stories in a hushed and velvety tone. I used to lose myself in his words, and I wandered in far and familiar places as if I was the one who had experienced those adventures that by now I knew by heart, but that I wanted to listen to as if it was the first time. I was often the one who requested this or that story, while other times we were led to them through the events that happened to us during the day, and that brought back past-life memories. I would like to remember him always this way, forgetting about the last months spent in the hospital where he went back to be as helpless as a child, but always strong and proud of his life. Even when he was there, he didn’t lose the wish to tell and to give me strength, until the day we both fell asleep in that cold room where he has been hospitalized for a really long time: the night before, he wanted to talk
to me, to tell me things that wanted to burn in my memory forever.
Despite the fatigue of a man who was old by then, we spent the whole night chatting until late. This time I told a lot about me too, and he gave me big suggestions from a man who learnt how to live thanks to all the experiences that leads our way. His eyes weighted down by medicines, but always with a smile on his face that was marked by the disease. A neat white beard and big hands laid on sheets. I woke up on the armchair next to him, but from that night he has never opened his eyes anymore.
The song is over, and I found myself with bulgy eyes full of tears that try to overcome his absence. I turn everything off, I remove my headphones, and I let the storm cradle me while it’s still raging outside the window blowing on the shutters howling at the wind. When I woke up I am still a little shocked, so I decided to stay in bed a little while, wallowing in the warmth of the night that has already gone. The only thing that gets me out of bed is thinking that I am going to see him again.
When we arrive at the bar, the first time I notice when I enter is that he is already there, and this surprises me a lot. For the first time he arrives before me and he doesn’t even turn to look at me, even if I am sure that he is aware of our loud arrival. I stop at the door, a little annoyed from the fact that he’s not noticing me, but when the barman welcomes me and asks if we’ll have “the usual”, we answer in the affirmative and we head to our table. I am about to sit when I see a little daisy just in front of my place and for the second time in a few minutes I stop perplexed and a little bewildered for a gesture that changed the normal way things are processing. That was definitely
him, but this must not happen. Why is he looking for a different approach from our every morning usual mysterious look? I found myself sitting down with that little flower between my fingers looking at his back while he is at the counter, when he whips around, gives me a look, and furtively runs away from the bar. Yes, it was definitely him the one who laid that flower on the table… On my table.
It leaves me speechless and excited at the same time, but also a little confused and not so sure he was the one who made it. My friend looks at me and starts giggling, being a witness of that childish scene of two adults lost in such an absurd story that it makes no sense to the rest of the world. I look at her and, after the barman brought us our breakfast, I realise that I am still holding the flower in my hand and I quickly put it down next to my cappuccino just as if it was a burning object that was bursting my skin. I start to feel different emotions in a totally racing alternation. First of all, I feel honoured by that little present, then I become reluctant and I ask myself if I’ve really got the point. And if, perhaps, it was for my friend? What if the mysterious looks-giver was attracted by her and not by me? But so why is he always looking at me? No, ok, I am the source of his interest… But if it was only an exchange of looks and some secret smile, what does this ‘present’ means? As if it was a relic, I pick up the flower again, and I put it inside my book, and then I make it fall back to the big and large bag. Camilla, who can’t control her laughing, tells me that now we are at the turning point of this absurd non-affair, and hearing this from her voice scares me, and I want to run away for not coming back to that place again. Then I think about how I feel when I don’t see him, I couldn’t ever give up on these ten minutes that we share, even if at
short distance.
When the breakfast is over, we immediately go to work, knowing that today the working day will be short and at lunch time we will be able to escape for a shopping afternoon together. Luckily, the night rain gave way to the sun, leaving behind only some spare clouds. At 1
p.m. we are out, like a clockwork, ready to take the car in order to spend the afternoon at the Outlet to do some shopping taking advantage on the sales. In the car we were blasting Claudio Baglioni, singing with the windows down like two teenagers free from any concern. At the first false note, we burst out laughing, while we discern in the distance the wheat fields with bales ordered in a row. They’re beautiful to see, I’ve always managed to picture me behind them, laid down in their shadow, looking at the sky, waiting for some plane passing by and leaving its white trail that cuts the blue. I would invent stories on its passengers and on the journeys which will take them far away, maybe in some exotic place or in an unknown city After a few silent minutes, Camilla goes back to seriousness and starts for the first time to take seriously my non-affair. ‘You’re the one who must make the next move, the game must go on in two. He gave you a signal, he wants to continue in a different manner, but without dive immediately into a real acquaintance. Now you’re the one who must keep leading the game in an equal romantic and mysterious way.
In short, not banal. It would be too easy to go there and thank him…’
She’s right, the little move of the flower is designed to change course, to choose which path to follow, and it must be done in a creative way in order to keep that veil of mystery that for quite some time makes us look at each other with passion but without going further, without
saying a single word. We don’t even know our names, and this has been enough until today. Now it needs to be decided if we want to go on in a different way or close the door. Maybe he’ll be the one to regret his move, today he ran away as ever. Maybe tomorrow he will not even show up. ‘You need to make a change into your life, maybe the mysterious watcher could be the man for you and if he’s not, you need to start living again and finding someone to share your life with.’
Camilla continues with her serious tone. A great desire to play comes alive in me, a desire to break the rules and to dare, even if this means losing everything. I start to laugh while the wind strongly enters from the window and throws my hair on my face: ‘Ok, let’s play’.
Arrived at the shopping magic world, this is how we like to name those massive haute couture low-cost outlets, we start to go around the various windows without much conviction, until we stop in a little bakery where we decided to eat something, given the fact that we didn’t even had lunch. A slice of chocolate cake and a coffee for me, while my friend limits itself to a whole wheat croissant and an orange juice, since she needs to keep the scale under control. Camilla is a beautiful woman who with her girth gives a sense of serenity and a pleasant sight when she goes by. Always all dressed up, without a hair out of place, she’s the type of woman who makes man turning in the street, despite a bit of extra weight well-proportioned on her harmonious body.
A new excitement involved the two of us in the play with the stranger, so we both start to think of my next move. Usually, he enters the bar, goes to the counter where he has breakfast standing, and then he immediately goes away. What could it be my next move to
concentrate in those few instants and without even have a precise spot in which take action, as he has been able to do with our table? The only thing that I know is that I want to leave him a tangible sign too, maybe linking to the daisy in order to make him understand that I am undoubtedly the sender. In the bakery I have an epiphany: I notice in the window a green chocolate box within there’s a beautiful white and yellow sketch of a daisy. Therefore, I add the box of chocolates to our bill and I start to think about how to have it delivered to him, maybe with the usual coffee that he orders every morning. I feel like a teenager, I went back to the high school times when the most beautiful side of a love story was exactly the one before the declaration. The nights spent with friends thinking of if this or that boy could be ‘in love’ with us or dreaming of the first kiss in front of a pizza and a glass of Coca Cola, when a simple ‘Hi’ started to assume three thousand meanings that we analysed one by one. Times when the heart was racing even when eyes met, and the excitement was about the idea of going together to the same party, standing by and hoping on his first move.
Almost forty years old, I am back to be an unexperienced teenager who discovers love for the first time, with a crazy desire to play. I feel like I’m reborn, I came back to life and I am no more afraid to feel something for someone. It seems absurd, but that little flower has been enough to shake me up so much to make me realise that have been wasting my time and that I had to go back to make my clock go round and round. I come back home that is already late, so I decide to stop to eat a slice of pizza at the pizza place down the street. When I enter the restaurant, there’s anyone, not even the owner who I overhear moving
in the kitchen, probably baking the last pizzas of the evening. The door points out my entering and few moments later I see him looking out onto the door in front of the still burning big ovens. We greet and shortly after we sit together at the colourful wooden tables, chatting while my pizza is firing. He offers me a beer and starts to make small talking about all the strange and funny customers who came to the restaurant during the day. It’s always amusing to hear him speak, because I know that he’s always prone to exaggerate his tales, enriching them by not exactly real details that make everything more colourful and interesting. Generally, he always has a comic base, so speaking with him always ends up in loud laughter that attract bystanders who overhear us from the street. I eat quickly, with a great desire to remove my shoes and soak my feel in hot water. We have been walking so much that, despite the cold of this day, my feet are so swollen that I can barely walk.
Once I got home and I throw away my shoes, I jump on the bed straight away with my trusted computer searching some information about my mysterious smiling friend. Maybe I can discover something about him linked to our café, a website, a Facebook page. I log in with my username and I start to search. Not a trace of him, it would have been too good to find a comment by him so that I could have finally discovered his name and snooping around his social networks home, at least on the public sections. Thinking about the fact that maybe he could have had the same idea, I start by pressing like on the café Fan Page and browsing numerous pictures, I comment a random one, just to leave a sign. Once it has been published, I look at the picture appearing next to my comment. A miserable close-up, loaded
haphazardly a long time ago. I immediately hurry up looking for a new photo where I look better, and I change my profile picture. Now I feel more relaxed and I childishly hope that he is online too and seeing me, could feel the desire of texting me.
For about ten minutes I stare off the screen, waiting for a sign that doesn’t come. I refresh the page over and over, I log in and out thinking that maybe the connections is not exactly perfect, and in the end I turn it off, but only after I have turned the Facebook notifications on my mobile phone, just in case the mysterious men chooses to look for me and texts me tonight. Before I was hoping that our non-affair could never change a thing, but now the idea of a connection became obsessive and irrational.
Tomorrow it’s going to be a great day for our game, so I try to fall asleep as fast as I can, but I am so nervous about how to advance our game that I can’t sleep a wink. At midnight I am still tossing and turning in the cold bed, when I decide to get up. Without turning any light on, helping myself only with the feeble street lighting that silently enters the window, I reach the kitchen. A good mug of milk and cookies is the only solution in these cases. Years ago, it was my grandfather who prepared me these night eating and to keep me company in front of a good mug of barely that he was heating in his steal pan, always until it boiled and often making it drop on the flame that started to creak and change its colour hit by the sudden liquid.
When he could start to drink it, I had almost finished my milk with cookies and so I was the one who kept him company until he didn’t finish to drink its hot mug. At night I’ve always been more talkative than in the morning, so I used to break free from a lot of discourses
and doubts about what was about to happen the day after. These nights together, usually, happened before university exams, so much it was the tension that I finished revising so late that a mug of milk was a great help in order to get some sleep and relax after the study day.
Sitting at the table, today, I still feel his strong absence, in a concrete way and not only as a hurt feeling, but just as a tangible lack. Now, in front of my cup of milk, I can’t talk to anyone, and the perfume of barely burning on the stove is missing too. One time, in order to relieve the pain, I prepared also the barely beside my milk in a steal pan, but this thing just made me feel worse, and so I promised myself that I would have tried to go on, pulling me off as much as possible from past behaviours without lose the memory of these beautiful moments with him.
CHAPTER 5
Away
After my escape from the café I keep walking away with definite steps without never looking back as if I’d committed some bad deeds.
Like a thief afraid to get caught and with the adrenaline for the last moves, I move away as fast as I can and I take the first bus that I step into without even knowing where it’s going to take me. I have a meeting in the centre at late morning and so I will be able to drain all this excitement for that little flower abandoned in her hands. Giving her a flower, how did it get into my mind? I try to imagine what is happening now at the café, maybe she threw away that little daisy that is already withering in, laughing out loud with her friend. Did I become the laughingstock of the day? But my hope is different, I wish I’d been able to break through her thoughts, where I can hide in a silent little corner ready to discover new things about her. I ran away afraid that our story made of looks could change, but deep down in my heart I may really hope this could happened. I would like to be a little fly, buzzing around their heads, looking into her eyes as blue as the sky and caught every small grimace of her face with all the thoughts that can come into her mind looking at every single white petal. I am almost tempted to go back but now I am too far and tired.
Luckily, the bus leads to the centre and even if I did it, she wouldn’t be there anymore. I found a seat and I sit down letting me cradle by the speed of the big means of transport. My fellow travellers are all silent and ready for a working or studying day, or even only for the morning stroll in order to kill the long days that you experience
when you reach a certain age. Many of them have a book opened between their hands, others are listening to music, others are lost in their thoughts. An old lady at the bottom of the bus draws my attention, dressed up in red with a big empty shopping trolley beside her. Her look is tired and she dangles at every curve. I got to thinking at how I will be when I’ll be old, and the first thought that I have is exactly that I don’t want to be alone, I want to reach that age with someone I can share everything with, even the little daisies picked up on the road. I go back to think of her while outside the window I see the majesty of the city and its impressing monuments that frame any adventure of my life.
When I got quickly off the bus at Vittoriano I suddenly woke up from this bliss reached between thoughts and the flowing of these beautiful places outside the window. The old lady gets off with me too, ready in front of the door holding with one hand her loyal shopping trolley while with the other she held for balance. We separate at the stop and I follow her with my eyes until she turns the corner at the bottom of the road, almost to check that anything bad happens to her and ready to help her if she needs anything. Sometimes it won’t take much to empathize with someone who will then disappear from your life forever as fast as he/she entered in it for a brief moment. I look at the watch: I am definitely too early for my meeting at the museum of Piazza Venezia and so I take advantage of taking some pictures at Fori in this beautiful day that deserves to be burnt in a visual memory. Just by coincidence, I see a little daisy popping up from the edge of the pavement and so I manage to take a close-up with the blurred monuments in the background that gives the illusion to be out of world
and time. I would love to send it straight away to my mysterious fellow traveller but I wouldn’t really know how to deliver it to her, not even knowing her name. Once home I’ll save it also on the phone, it will always be ready in case I manage to reach her through some more computerized way.
Strolling around the centre of Rome really takes you out the daily life and between the tourists you can even lose track of space and time.
A constant flowing of languages and colours between a lot of people armed with cameras and flashes smiles to fix entire days spent visiting the Eternal City. The gladiators at Colosseum are always ready to take part in the photographs under a very large reward and there are carriages that accompany the most willing to try new dimensions, because while in holydays schemes must change at least for half an hour, carried through the city in a chariot completed with horses. The hooves on cobblestones hide the noise of cars and the city seen from above tastes different, stepping back into the past. The queue in front of the Colosseum is already long despite the cold and the waiting times, ready to have a sight of one of the world most famous places to take back to their city photos and souvenirs to give to their friends and families. Later on, are going to arrive also the couples of newlyweds still dressed up for the usual photographs between the most amusing scenarios of the Capital, and so this place will acquire a new aspect and meaning for who choose it as his/her destination.
After spending the morning pretending to be a tourist, I come back with deliberate pace towards the not too far place of my meeting. I meet my interlocutor by chance at the base of the Vittoriano and so we decide to talk about my job open air without locking us up in his office
between paperwork and the dark of the room. They want to remake the fliers of the Monument and so they need new photographs, maybe taking advantage of the view of Rome that you have going up to its highest part, available only to chosen few. I’ve already worked for them a couple of time in occasion of particular exhibitions inside the ‘typewriter’, as the Altare della Pace is called in Rome. Since in 2000
they allowed the access of the staircase, once in a while I like to spend a few hours visiting the Vittoriano, seeing all its features dedicated to Italian cities and regions, and the part that I enjoy the most is the sacrarium of battle flags, countless artifacts ad sigils that taste like past between the texture of the consumed fabric. I am glad to accept the job and I immediately begin to take some pictures, taking advantage of the access to areas not granted to regular visitors. From up there, the city grabs you between marbles and ancient Medieval buildings until the luxury of the ancient Rome, all in the same view. It almost looks like you can touch the sun and immerge into the clear sky that blows cold blasts from time to time to awake you from this surreal and magic atmosphere.
I would like to stay there, curled up in some space between the columns and the endless staircase to see Rome and all that little ants that move back and forth through the streets below. I pick up my courage and I leave that place charged with so much history that it almost makes you hear the voices of everyone who was there before you, before that theatrical monument had been built. I decide to walk home, taking advantage of the day that spared us last night rain. I take a picture of the puddles that reflect the streets and in one there’s me, reflected with my blue jacket and blue jeans, black messy hair, and
sunglasses hidden behind the camera. I am there too, for a change, and as I see myself reflected in the little puddle I almost don’t recognize myself from how long I have not been thinking about myself and my actual life. A period spent only at work, without a lot of friends whom share something else with, and with few meaningless women whom spend some nights that don’t leave any emotion in me. A cold period, made more intimate by my photographs that however tell the life of other people and other places. There’s a bit of me in every shot, but it’s nothing compared to what a photographer can do if he puts his heart into it. I should start not to take commissioned pictures again, looking for myself inside of them, and maybe the daisy photograph is the first step to rediscover myself as changed and turning my life around, my life which now belongs only to others as a harlot that is only devoted to her job to please the others.
I cross Via del Corso for a little section for then throwing myself in the little back street that leads to the always crowded Pantheon. In that moment, Stefano phones me. He works in an office just behind Corso Vittorio Emanuele and knowing about my meeting, he called me to order for a quick lunch in his areas. In a few minutes we are already together, going through Campo de’ Fiori to eat one of the delicious express sandwiches made in a little place without chairs or tables. My favourite one is the eggplants and mozzarella one and so, lunch in hand, we continue our stroll until we stop on a bench in Piazza Navona. I start to tell my friend about my morning starting from the Vittoriano and then I confess about the daisy. As soon as I start to describe the moment at the café, he stops walking and eating and totally taken by my story, ‘Now is up to her’ says without reflecting
much on his words followed by endless silent minutes. ‘Finally, this absurd affair can work right, you should know each other and maybe you’ll find out that you have something true to share or simply that you don’t belong together. Leaving aside the morning look, you’ll start to think about building a life with a real woman who is not only a one-night stand’.
The idea that I might have idealised a woman that I don’t even know scares me, and if she wasn’t really as I believe? It would be like losing her forever without ever having had her. It often happened to me to think about her outside the café, I gave her many names and I have imagined her in a lot of different situations. I’ve imagined her by my side while we live the places that I love the most. In my dreams I took her to my mother’s village, we’ve climbed mountains and we’ve made long strolls by the seaside. We’ve even kissed in the shadow of ancient trees.
‘Are you listening to me? If she’s not going to make the next move, enough… You’ll go there, and you’ll introduce yourself and it all happens the way it has to, once and for all.’ Stefano goes on, now completely caught up in my story and willing to arrive to a conclusion, whether it’s positive or negative. I agree with him, now I’ve realised that we must move on, we’ve been standing at the entrance of this non-affair from too long. I don’t even know her name yet. I say goodbye to my loyal friend, I go back to my way home completely wrapped in my thoughts, as much that I arrive home without even notice the miles travelled on foot. I didn’t even notice people I stepped by on the road, cars speeding beside me, fountain that were constantly streaming water, and thoughtless birds in the sky. I came back to reality only at
the sight of my closed front door before my eyes like a silent and massive guard. In the distance, I discern the old lady with my neighbour’s dog, so I hurry up to enter, with not a great desire to remain stuck on the door chatting about medicines or about the dog potty spread in who knows what street of the district.
As soon as I close the door behind me, I breath a sign of relief and I continue moving silently not to be overheard from the outside and I jump on the bed. When I woke up I am in a pull of sweat and I’m still wearing my jacket. It’s 7 p.m. and I have been sleeping for almost all the afternoon abandoned in a deep sleep. After a swift shower and with my pyjama already on I turn my laptop on and I start to work on the photographs taken today. The most beautiful are the one of the daisy and the one of the paddle with me inside… I start to recognize myself in what I am doing, and this provides me with the right energy to find the courage to turn around the story with the girl in the café.
The day after, despite I’ve been awake until late to work on the computer, I woke up following my weekly routine so that I arrive at the café at the usual hour curious to see what she was going to do after my little gift of yesterday. When I enter, I see her already sitting at her table, as usual, prettier than ever. She gives me a look, blushing a little while she turns her farce towards her friends who stands still and stares at her. There’s something weird about their behaviour, they’re not immerged in the other mornings usual naturalness between their chats in a low tone. The counter is empty, so I sit at my usual corner waiting for the barman to come. I quickly glimpse at her again and as soon as she notices that I am looking at her, she turns away from me again.
With my arm I drop an envelope that was probably laid on the sugar can in the corner. I pick it up and I notice that there’s written ‘For…?’
and on the side there’s a little flower sketched. I stop for some moments without knowing what to do and then, caught up in curiosity, I open it, being the only one in the place. Inside of it there’s a little chocolate with a daisy sketched on it. The adrenaline is going, here’s her move, the envelope is just for me. I smile while I realise that there’s also a card inside, written in pen: ‘We have other senses beside the sight and today I’ll try to please the taste too. A.’ I read it three more times almost as if I wanted to learn by heart that sentence so short but meaningful to me. When I turn, I see that she’s gone as silent that I didn’t even notice. I start to unwrap the chocolate trying not to break the envelope that I store inside the wallet. I eat it as if I’ve never eaten chocolate in my whole life, tasting slowly the bitterness of cocoa and the sweetness of vanilla that wraps it up in its smoothness. I realise that I’ve closed my eyes totally caught up in its taste and only focused on the sense of taste, just as A wrote in her card that I read again for the fourth time almost looking for something between the lines. Then I store it in the pocket of my jacket where it’s ready to be read other more times, till death. The taste of chocolate is fixed in my mind and from now on I’ll never be able to eat something that has the same taste without thinking about this catching morning made of coffee and vanilla chocolate. With a dumb smile on my face, I say goodbye to the barman who in the meantime had offered me my usual coffee, and I go away a little bothered by the fact that I am not going to see my mysterious woman for the next two days, with the weekend just around the corner.
In the past, Saturday and Sunday have always been a blessing but since I met her they have become the two days to live as fast as possible, craving for the oxygen that her next Monday morning look will bring to me. This will be even longer and heavier, even if this way I’ll have the chance to think longer about my next move. The game has been decided, I must focus on the five senses and decide if I want to follow what she designed to be the second or go on to the next one. I still taste the strong flavour of chocolate in my mouth and I hope it will stay longer to fix it more powerfully in my memory. It immediately comes to my mind Proust’s Magdalene, what he remembered eating that by a distance of years and I start to understand his writings more and more and the strong feelings evoked by a little and simple childhood sweet. I wish I could have a lot more of these chocolates, so that I could eat one of them every time the memory starts to fade or any time I want to keep alive the thought I have about her even when she’s not here. A taste that by now is linked to two deep and piercing eyes, her beauty, and black straight hair on her shoulders. It’s linked to that hardly evident smile framed by pink lips and clear and shining skin. Today she had a forest green dress with black high heel boots glimpsed under the table when I arrived. It’s a pity that I didn’t have the chance to see her going out in order to detect some more details of her perfect body too often hidden under coats and scarfs during this season. But today the sense is taste, so I stop my thought at the chocolate that I’ve found in the envelope. I wonder if she had tasted it too, in order to share the velvet sensation of taste. Going out, I noticed on her table that she took a coffee instead of the usual cappuccino, maybe just to taste the same experience that I had. I almost feel like
I’ve kissed her, tasting the chocolate of her lips, tight in an embrace made of a wise mixture of perfumes and tastes. I take another picture of the card written in her beautiful tidy and full handwriting and I send it to Stefano. His answer is immediate: ‘The game has begun ’
CHAPRER 6
The chocolate of remembrance
Here we are, today Camilla came to pick me up so that we could revise our plan before entering the café. We try to arrive at least ten minutes earlier compared to the usual so that we could set everything before he arrives. Before going out, I wrote a card to explain my gift.
The little chocolate, in addition to the link of the same common thread of the daisy, must carry on our non-affair with the discovery of the senses, our senses, moving from sight to taste. I’ve decided not to sign the card but to put only the initial of my name, so that I would not reveal too much and I would not end too soon this game that is getting more intriguing, different from the usual flirting schemes. I write on the envelope ‘For…?’ since I don’t have a clue about what is name is, I put everything inside and I come down running towards my friend who has already buzzed from a few minutes.
Today I woke up earlier than the usual and it took me half an hour only to decide what to wear. In the end, I opted for a wool soft dress of my favourite colour, dark green, and my high heel boots. While I’m in the street, I can’t wait to arrive and I almost got hit by a car since I’m so head over hills that I didn’t even notice a red traffic light. Arrived safe and sounds at the café we laid the bags at the usual table and we wait at the counter. When it’s almost the time of his arrival, Camilla placed herself in front of the entrance and I made the barman get away towards the kitchen with an excuse. At this point, I placed the envelope in front of the sugar box on the side where he always stands to have a coffee. I know for sure that he’s going to take the sugar box and he’s
going to find the envelope in front of his eyes hoping that, realising that it’s for him, he would open it.
Camilla waves at me when he’s arriving and so we quickly sit pretending that nothing is happening despite a whisper of shortness of breath provoked by emotions and by the brief run towards the table. In order not to express my emotions, when he enters I look at him only for few instants. I am as excited as never before and I hope not to blush too much revealing my fake carelessness with regards to his arrival.
When he finally reaches the counter, we secretly spy on him, hoping that he hurries up and takes that envelope on display just before him.
He turns towards me in a blink and, feeling caught, I immediately look the other way. Today there’s not the usual harmony of our meeting: the last events left us more excited than the usual, he’s not the usual too. In order to break this awkward moment, he accidentally drops the envelope to the ground. When he picks it up, he gets slowly up looking at the mysterious addressee marked on the envelope with a little flower that I sketched while we were already on the road. It was to help him decoding the massage and to make him realise that he was exactly the one who had to open the envelope.
When we notice that he was opening it, we took the opportunity to go away secretly without making any noise, running away in the street.
The only thing that makes me sad is that I’m going to wait two days to see how our game will continue and I already know that it will be a very long weekend. Luckily, it matched a little trip that I had planned a long time before. Therefore, in the late afternoon I’ve already taken the train that will lead me to Venice to meet the baby of one of my five cousins who was born only a few months before. Her husband will be
outside the city in these days, so I grasped the opportunity to help her and to be together after a long time that we haven’t seen each other.
Today I finished work soon, taking advantage of some time off hours that I’ve previously asked in order not to have last minutes pranks. My pretty and little trolley awaits me home, packed with all the necessary things for these two days out of the city. I wear my comfy skinny jeans that I can fit into my boots with my hot and slim blue and brown sweater, unfailing during my winter trips. After a while I wear my coat again, with scarf and hat, ready to face Venice during this time of the year. I have been waiting for this trip for weeks and luckily it seems that the weather is going to help us providing us with two sunny days not even so cold with respect to the season. To avoid being late, a taxi that will take me to the train station is already waiting for me under my front door. As soon as I sit down and I close the door I already feel like I am on holyday. On the way I check a few last things and I prepare tickets and money to pay the ride. In ten minutes we’re already at the entrance of the station right on time for the departure. Arrived at the departures board, I look for my train and I receive the bad news of a delay of half an hour. On one hand, I thank heaven that this is the only delay and I take advantage to have a stroll between the shops renewed in the last years so that they create a real mall under the tracks, in a sort of underworld. There are all the trendiest brands especially for youngest girls and fast foods unfolded between scents and appealing colourful advertising that offer a good lunch at a few euros cost.
At this hour this area of the station is really crowded, who arrives, who is simply here to do some undisturbed and easy linked shopping. I
stop to buy a bottle of water in a shop entirely provided with automatic dispensers of every kind of water. Before I choose, I look at all of them: plain, still, sparkling, slightly sparkling, soda, not to mention the one containing more or less sodium and so on. Well, nowadays even choosing water becomes difficult. Just in case, I choose a brand that I know and I go back to my tour, looking at the watch now and then to avoid the risk of remaining in Rome. When my train finally arrives, I get on the coach displayed on the ticket and I have a seat. I connect my tablet to the station free Wi-Fi and I check the last messages, always hoping to find a contact from him. Disappointed from receiving only advertising e-mails and some answer to work messages, I turn everything off and I wait to hear the whistle that heralds the departure.
When the train starts to move I close my eyes, cradled by the increasing pace on the tracks that are slipping under my feet. That noise brings me back in the years, when I was a girl and I used to go to the mountains with the group of friends of my district. We always travelled by night and we almost never slept during the ride. There was always someone who brought the guitar and played in the couches with all the others pushed inside to sing. Someone stopped in the corridors, watching outside the windows the darkness lighted only by many street lamps along the way that moved away leaving behind a light trail. The rumour of the tracks, always identical like a chant that was a base for the choral voices and the sound of the guitar. Long trips that passed quickly in the euphoria of a holyday far from home, from families, from school… Ready to the adventure that only mountain experienced in tent can offer. The same train would have seen us again after ten days spent totally immersed in nature, between green trees and cold
streams that became source of water to bath and wash dishes. The same train that would have taken us home tired but as happy as ever with the backpack full of dirty clothes and with many adventures to tell. At that time there weren’t mobile phones or Internet to divert our attention from what surrounded us and the only contact with home was a single call made in the half of the week from a cabin far away from our camp. And we used to live so well…
When I open my eyes again, I am alone and outside the window it’s still day. I am enchanted by the landscape that surrounds me and it seems that it was eaten by the unbridled run of that long means of transport. Its sound is still the same of the one of a lot of years ago, its regular pace is always unaltered. I am the only one who changed, but with the usual smile that is finally came back to shine on my face tired and marked from the events of a lifetime. I enjoy taking some picture from the window. Luckily, my seat is just the window one and so I can admire undisturbed the scene that changes before my eyes. I enjoy modifying the photos that I’ve taken through some applications that are nowadays installed on every mobile phone and I post some of them on my profile. I check the mail, even if I see that there is any new message. Nothing, not a trace of my mysterious café friend who probably doesn’t even know where and how to find me.
In front of me sat a couple who will be more or less my same age.
Since he got on he has done nothing but calling with his latest fashion headphones and playing with his smartphone. She has a listless face and, without saying a single word since she sat down, she has her look lost in the central corridor glancing at who knows what inexistent spot before her. Then she took a bag of chips from her purse, hangs it to
him who shakes his head while continues typing quickly on his virtual keyboard. With the same mood showed until now, she starts to eat chips, slowly and almost coerced. There’s no emotion in her eyes, always abandoned in the void. Suddenly she stops, the vibration of her mobile phone notifies her a message that she reads quickly but with a light in her eyes that she had never had until that moment. While she puts her phone back, in the same speed she had taken it from her coat pocket, I detect a slight smile on her lips and a little tear on her face.
She swiped it immediately away with her hand while she turned in the opposite side with regard to where her husband is sitting. Then she continues eating her chips, coming back to her absent world and regardless of what is happening around her.
I start to imagine who could have texted her to make her resurrect from a trance and boredom state when I am also reached by a message that takes me back to reality. I start to look for my phone in my bag with such a fervour that I drop some of the things that were inside of it.
My fellow traveller immediately activates and helps me pick up what I’ve lost from the floor of the coach that is making my personal belongings swing back and forth as in an endless ballet. I thank her and we exchange a smile and I understand that hers is a strong solitude that she would like to break even with the first person who comes along.
I’ve finally found my phone: it’s my cousin from Venice who tells me that I’m going to find her outside the station waiting for me in her car.
I answer her writing about the slight delay and I put my phone back, this time in the pocket of the bag so that I’ll easily find it the next time.
As soon as my ‘new friend’ realises I’ve finished to fight with technology, she starts to speak to me: ‘I also always happen to drop
things from my bag’. At her first words, her husband jumps on his seat almost surprised to hear his wife’s voice coming out her vocal chords.
Then, in the same way, he goes back to play with his phone looking a little bothered by our chat. We continue to make small talk until our arrival in Venice without noticing that the sun has already given its place to darkness and we even exchange our contacts to see each other again, maybe for a pizza, once we’ll be back in Rome. They live not too far from me and, being childless, it could be funny to organize a ladies night, thing that she has never done since she married the love of her life five years ago. I don’t know if I’ll see her again but seeing her enthusiasm only at the idea of our pizza gave me hope about her taking her life into her hands again and leaving a too boring routine. And who knows who sent her that message so intriguing to make her cry. Maybe one day I’ll be able to ask her, satiating my endless curiosity. We say goodbye as we were great friends, with him only a cold ‘hi’ instead, and then we went separate ways.
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Eva Forte
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: TEKTIME S.R.L.S. UNIPERSONALE
Дата публикации: 25.04.2024
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О книге: Two lives intersect every morning in a cafe. Two glances that say a lot more than words and that start together a ′non-affair′ made of games and seduction, beyond the standard ways of seduction. Two main characters that allow us to enter their lives through the past and the five senses of the present.