Fresco: A Vignette
I thought of his youth, when there was no shortage of beautiful men to run their fingers over his smooth skin
The sun of the morning on the tender garden walls; he stands beneath the beckoning leaves of the tree, the sound of calmness in the world. The sky which is turquoise and the emerald which is grass. He is entranced. His red and white robe, the lifting of his chin into the sky. And the beckoning of the cool shade at the feet of the walls. “My mistake was disregarding that other world, not the one cast in light, but the one in shadow, the one of decay.” He said it to me one day, quoting Wilde, before he was too feeble to speak; it was when he had just entered that gray and constraining establishment, itself deteriorating into rubble, as if it meant to emulate its inhabitants. He was standing in the emerald grass looking at the leaves, the rubble encroaching on his heels. His death was slow, across enfeebling years. “I should have,” he said, his long and bony fingers reaching for my sleeve, “I should have used up all of myself before now. Like a strip of magnesium, burned quickly and brightly.” His hands trembled. I thought of his youth, when there was no shortage of beautiful men to run their fingers over his smooth skin. There was a winter morning stirring, a veneer of ice and gray over everything. He lit the candles, his back to me, extinguishing the match with a flick of his wrist. “You never come to see me anymore,” he complained. I loved him, his aged body, as much as I had when we had first met, and my lips kissed the whole of his body. He told me of a childhood memory: a religious holiday, he didn’t know which, the congregation lining up between the pews of the church to kiss a small statue of the baby Jesus, held in a woman’s arms, and someone standing beside with a small handkerchief to wipe the babe’s forehead after each kiss. I was the congregation and he was the babe. Where was the person with the handkerchief, he asked. I laughed. Some months later, there was the smell of burnt wood. In the nightmare that came intermittently, he was at a table with his young lovers, and they were all dead and no longer beautiful, and as he cried a woman came and pushed a ruby into the root of his tongue until he bled. I took him into my arms and said, though he could not hear me, “Don’t worry: All that you have acquired means nothing; everything is nothing, after all.” The plaster of the fresco was cracking, revealing the dull stone behind.
