LITMIR.BIZ

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be touched.

      With our stiff arms, our fists pressing into our jeans’ pockets, our leather jackets squashed against our chest, and ashen faced, Clive and I walked…

      “What’s more bourgeois than a treasure hunt?” I asked Clive, “To take part in a prize competition” Clive replied, as his words were swept away by the wind, sounding more like a howl.

      Clive’s paintings portrayed profane landscapes, and they were so full of color, like those of the best impressionists, but they were able to rise from the soul to the outer limits, meet reality, and then rebel against the matter. I had never seen something that could put expressionism and impressionism so finely together like Clive’s pictures. Yet, Clive refused the yoke of the bourgeois state, and at the end he gave in, “I decided to leave the game”, I knew what he meant. I watched him; my neck was so frozen and sore that I could barely keep looking to my right. He maintained, “I am left and six hundred pounds, I think it’s enough!”

      Clive was found next to the Olympia Theater, squatted down in a corner and rigid. He drank his life away. The religion of profit wasn’t unable to possess him, yet he couldn’t find the desired road to Utopia. In those years London was burning through the flames of decadence. However, apart those who died in that stake, nobody else saw the fire, nobody realized that soon it would have wrapped around the entire world.

      I went back to reading once again…

      — […] The war ended, as the memory of the dead climbed up in the sky, leaving the empty that everything can fill. Yet, the dead don’t speak, they’re gone, and belong to the ages. The conflict had burned everything it had to, so the Rule could restart itself, to accomplish its destiny and expand all over the world. Bertrand had become a physician, and in the caducity of the flesh he made out with all the weight of power, without ever letting himself be carried away by emotion, even when life flows like a rushing stream and takes children and fathers.

      -But if this society is violent, and it rests on violence, and it allows the dominant to dominate with excess, how can you tell me not to be violent if I want this cruel game to be over?

      -Because you have to overcome it, if you want to reach your human condition.

      -What is my human condition? And where can I find it?

      -I would start thinking where you can’t find it! […] —

      I thought of Clive again, in a few days it would be the anniversary of his death. He used to say that the Nazi dictator might as well been called Mayer, and that was not a superficial remark. And he added, “We’re all pushing to the same direction, right or wrong, we will make the same mountain taller”.

      Those who believed Clive as a miserable and desperate young man, could read his tombstone, life teaches that an envious man is a sad man, on that cold slab his image opened in a smile that could have contained the sky above.

      Those were the words he wrote on the back of his last painting, Hiems, winter. It was an exceptional picture. The snow going up from the ground, the starry sky of the twilight, the trees with orange and yellow hues, houses turquoise and violet, and people of all ages being busy, yet amusing themselves, playing and dancing, jumping and smiling.

      I kept reading becoming more involved, for me it was unexpected, an enthralling novel

      — […] You are as beautiful as the dawn. I still remember the first time I met the dawn, and all my bones still quiver.

      It was before my teens. I was traveling with my father on a boat; he woke me up at an hour I didn’t even know existed. I used to closing my eyes early at night, and opened them in the morning when the sun already bathed the earth leaving no shadow.

      That day my father called me, it was five a.m. of a summer morning, “Bertrand, wake up Bertrand. Look at the sunrise”. I went out with him on the deck, the air smelled with salt, wet and crisp enough to make me rattle and shrug. The sun was a circle rising up from the sea, orange and yellow. The horizon appeared veiled with cyan and speckled in white. I was gazing at a slice of water before me, which mirrored all those colors at once, as all around the darkness was melting away. […] —

      Abe had been Clive’s girlfriend, and she inherited all his pictures. She kept them in a room empty of other things; she looked after them as if they were children. Seven paintings that nobody could tell which one was the most beautiful.

      When telling accounts, Abe had the gift of involving and catching her listener, yet making them laugh at once. We were acquainted with Clive’s melissophobia, his atavist fear for bee stings. She told us that once she wore a t-shirt with a hive swarming with bees, and he was about to fall down on his knees, and he went in such a twitter that she had to soon go home and change her top. When she got back, he asked her what she did with the t-shirt, and she answered that she had thrown it in the wash, but he replied that it would have been more reassuring to burn it, “You never know, with all those bees, darling!”

      We burst out laughing, indeed, and we thought we heard Clive’s roaring laughter as well.

      Overcome with all my memories, I carried on reading that weird novel.

      — […] And came the day where Dieudonné appeared, martial and fierce on his horse, with his impeccable uniform, his stiff posture, he was like a knife piercing Yolène’s heart.

      They married in 1947, and it wouldn’t take too long before she found out all his hidden qualities.

      Dieudonné was a man of sward, ready to defend the law at any cost. He was blindly obtuse and servile, he hadn’t ideas, he had no doubt, no questions, and he would never take part in stirring the sea of life. He enjoyed many favors from among the powerful, the curias, and religious leaders, because his knee was always ready to bend, his head prepared to submit. No matter his nefariousness and his contempt for the last, authority was never questioned. His certainties were innate, among which “the soul of woman is created below”, was right on top of his convictions. […] —

      Except for classical Greek and Latin literature, and Shakespeare’s inestimable masterworks, I had never read contemporary novels narrating love stories.

      — […] She was prohibited to talk what she liked. Each word she mouthed had to be annoyingly prepared, as befitted an officer’s wife and honor. She had to be austere, quiet, and rigorously detached. She was his baby doll, one can see yet never touch, she can never be questioned […] —

      I turned, and then headed toward the window that looked south, I flexed my eyes framing my sight on the crescent that covered the side of the street on my left. There were three girls who seemed to dance slicing the night. Perhaps I was just dreaming. I heard the sound of a guitar coming from my right side, the rhythm grew, the melody was turning tough, and then a melancholic choir sang of a world running into its own end. I was probably dreaming.

      The book was lying on the sofa, cut by the light of the lamp; it looked like a weird acuminated weapon. It didn’t upset me; I felt instead a strange tension infusing a push on my nerves. I looked over again in the direction of the street, the lights were purple and everything under them were so still. Sit down, I thought, and read some more…

      — […] Now and then along the years, she happened to remember that music, that piano kindly playing so light like, the wings of an angel. Like the Spring when Nature awakes up again to cover the landscape with colors and sweet gentle touches, and a sound that lays down and renovates everything. Yet, she didn’t dare to find out who dwelled behind that window in Boulevard Haussmann, so she kept fancying about a bohémien musician who perhaps left to war and never got back […] —

      And those words kissed me goodnight.

      Chapter 2

      Well, that was one of my periods of transition. I had to look back at my past, to find out if I was a dinosaur. I was losing my ability to recognize possibilities in and amongst the breaks of history, the length of the long walk towards liberation. For a certain time, I had forgotten my younger intuitions,

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