Upon The World

Lit Up — June’s Prompt: Lucky sentence

“Yes, but who will cure us from the deaf fire, from the fire without color that runs at dusk? No one will cure us of the muffled fire, of the fire without color that runs at dusk …”

— Julio Cortázar, in Hopscotch (Rayuela), 73 [Free Translation]

When I knew him, we were both college students, who seldom talked more than a hasty word to each other. All mysteriously began on that single day when our eyes met. Nothing more. We never had any actual date. Immediately his face was transfigured after that single exchange of glances, driving him to write short, interspersed verses.

Shortly after that afternoon, he pulled away abruptly, as someone who is able to see something like God, yet wants, needs or is forced to remain an atheist. He averted his eyes from mine, as if turning away from a noon’s bright sunshine.

A few days passed and just in front of my bedroom’s window, the building of a most exquisite bridge was begun. In a couple of days — and nobody has been able to understand how and why so quickly — it was finished: a medieval Florentine style catwalk crossing over that broad avenue.

Yes, a huge footbridge with frescoes by Giotto. Many architects rushed to examine it with their telescopes, since none would dare touch it, nor get any closer to such a wonderful masterpiece. International experts even pondered taking it to an international art exposition which would take place in the same Padova, the Venetian city where 800 years ago Giotto painted so many shining, expressive glances. I absolutely barred them from doing so.

We lost each other completely, following quite distant lives after graduation, through diverse mazes of searches for love, illusions, joys, children, times and places, hardly aware whether the other was still alive.

Only that blue catwalk reassured me every day we were both still on Earth. For such, it was enough for me to look at the frescoes’ figures eyes. I always knew, since the first night on which the catwalk was over there, it was meant only for me to cross that bridge, without anybody on my side, to walk towards him.

Actually, we never have been there, naked on a hot summer night, just a little before sunrise, above those thousands of passing cars. We never fucked there on our catwalk like noisy cats in heat, or like those dragonflies caught by a spiderweb, unable to stop copulation.

No, neither of us ever walked along it, despite being such the sole purpose of that masterpiece, so full of lustful glances. Despite our real lives, so trite, boring and empty, the catwalk was built for our secret dates, hidden amid night darkness, as those of so many lovers, be they humans, dogs, lions, horses, or other beasts. I hardly know where he is on afternoons, nor who is on his side during the twenty seven nights on which the Moon is not full. We are reborn under every full moon, as it happened on that May dawn of our first explosive desire.

We fuck as Pagan gods, but only here over this magnificent footbridge, where our naked bodies may be seen only by those people depicted on the frescoes, and their lovely shining eyes! My lover tells me that gorgeous woman on the central fresco is Beatrice, Dante’s muse, also stressing my eyes and hers are much more than extremely similar, they are indeed the same eyes.

No, we couldn’t keep living like these multitudes of automatized people, nothing more than mere, empty beings wandering adrift on this planet in lonely, and too short, Existence. That’s why, since our first moment, you and I have come from our opposite corners of the megalopolis to meeting together on the top of this walkway.

Under the full moon, both naked, he tenderly caresses my face and kisses me. He touches my breasts with his warm tongue and devours them. Touches my thighs and penetrates me tightly, as the male lion penetrates his female under a tree’s shade in the savannah. Hard as a rock, thick, soft and tender, he tells me that my eyes are indeed the sun, whose infinite energy enabled him to build this footbridge, where we have never been.

— Under broad daylight you were first seen, actually, crossing our walkway, having come in search of me. Naked, you stopped right there on top where, without ever being together, we used to make love under the frescoes’ characters’ glances. You were seeming to miss me. Scared with the idea of perhaps never finding me anymore, because that was your first night alone there, under a splendorous Moon, amidst the frescoes’ blue, waiting even if only for a single moment for my coming.

Naked, at noon this time, only your eyes could dare compete with the beauty of your thighs, of your hair, of your breasts, of your pussy, of your mouth, of your feet. For not finding me, just because indeed none of us have ever been there over the footbridge, you looked at those shining eyes in which Giotto has represented Beatrice, finally having understood.

You could see that truest lovers are eternal, never meet, and keep fucking hard under the moonlight during the warm nights of a perpetual summer, crossing catwalks over small obstacles, such as the real world. This sad world which humans are seeing and living only from within their cars. True lovers’ penetrate each other, yes, so intensely as do the roaring lions during their heat season, over a footbridge built only by the energy of their horny glances.

Thus, it was then under noon light that we have finally met here, on our catwalk upon the world, wholly possessed by the same intense lions’ heat.

No longer do I fear thy glance, as when I did compare them to the Sun god (admittedly, a pretty poor analogy).

I no longer fear thy eyes.

They are God.