Little Snails
A friend of mine said that in this life we only get to see the film previews and I agreed.
“I’m falling apart.”
“Ah, come on.”
“She’s going to leave me.”
“You’ve been saying that for the past two years.”
“I can read it in her eyes.”
“Hey, what do you read in my eyes?”
“I wouldn’t know. I can only read her eyes.”
“That’s your problem. Don’t you realize that today is New Year’s Eve and the only thing I want to do is drink a toast to the end of this shitty year, take a calendar and burn it. Understand?”
“I understand, I understand. Maybe we can talk about it tomorrow when it’s 2013. Ok?”
What could he say? That my desire to talk about it on 1 January 2013 would have only constituted the first horrible element of continuity with the old year? It was useless. Therefore he threw back at me the same foreign vowel and consonant.
“Ok.”
It was New Year’s Eve. But it was also a time when I was seeing everything through cracked glass. A time of such distant prospects that I wasn’t even thinking about how 2013 would be, I was already projected into the year after that. I wanted to make progress in finding a job, use the new year like a bare corridor to walk through barefoot even at the risk of hurting myself.
A friend of mine said that in this life we only get to see the film previews and I agreed.
I was totally in agreement.
But I had faith in 2014. The year 2014 would have brought about great changes. You only needed to be patient for another year. Odd numbered years are dreadful my grandmother would repeat to me before going to bed. It was her Golden Rule.
Certainly without Judith everything will seem even more difficult. I’ll have to get used to it. I see her dancing just a few meters from me and there’s such a big difference between how things should be and how they actually are. I’ll have to buy myself a dog, that’s an old strategy, buying dogs to fill the human emptiness inside. It was the Richard Method. A few years ago the father of this friend of mine passed away and in order to get his mind off things he’d gone to the dog kennel and picked out Spino, a mixed breed dog with salt and pepper fur who didn’t like to be petted. Then Fulvio — a huge bulldog with a heart of gold — substituted for his mother who had died and finally Gervaso had tried to help Richard get over Spino, who in the meantime had exhaled its last fetid nauseating breath.
Basically, therefore, if everybody adopted the Richard Method, dog kennels would practically be empty. However, unfortunately that’s not the case.
Meanwhile the DJ continued to play phoney esoteric music with a look on his face which, if compared to Enrico Fermi’s while he was finetuning the atomic bomb in Chicago, is the expression of an obese person slumped on the couch watching Masterchef while eating a kebab. Every now and then, pretending to be hip and in touch with the rest of the world that lives not quite but almost on this planet, he would put on a more popular song (but always of a few years back, let’s not exaggerate).
That’s the way it was. Now for a short break: I’m going to write something, it’s very obvious — more so than the rest of this — but I can’t resist. It always has to do with that dammed New Year’s Eve. Here it is: the beauty of these country houses is that the lights from the city make room for the stars, an overwhelming quantity of shinning stars, so beautiful and so alive that they make me forget how much of that marvel is just delayed light from stars already dead.
Here I am back again. Sorry.
As I was saying, there were more people here than at any other New Year’s Eve party organized in the past. Judith was dancing two metres away from me. But they weren’t terrestrial metres, it was more like a distance that answers to other powerful rules of measure unknown to us. I felt as lonely as in November on one of those streets in Florence at night.
Although the premise was completely different, and despite the fact that everybody was laughing and hugging each other, it had become a haiku evening like:
Night train.
Snowy expanses.
Solitude.
Or (this one sounds more metropolitan):
inevitable
the car horns on the walls of
grey cement
A second later I noticed the host’s dog slipping out the gate. While I was walking around looking for it I thought that at least it wouldn’t have asked me what I plan to do now that I’ve graduated or what I intend to do after the university or which bank I’ll choose between Conto Arancio and Chebanca and the infamous Banco di Napoli or how do I like my blue Ford, is the clutch reliable , things like that. Therefore, all in all looking for that dog wasn’t so bad.
I walked and walked, headed I think towards the sea but without being able to see it. It was two in the morning and you couldn’t even hear the sound of the waves, like it had been put on hold by someone for the occasion.
It was as if the dog, diving into it, had absorbed it all like a giant sponge.
By now, technically speaking I could say that the year 2012 had ended, but at the same time I couldn’t say that 2013 had arrived. Too soon. It wasn’t dawn yet. I could see only stars several billion metres above my head and an enormous dark emptiness all around.
The house behind me was getting smaller and smaller and I felt as lonely as I had at the party. Like a tennis ball on its third or fourth bounce.
While I was bouncing ahead I could feel that the ground under my feet didn’t have the same consistency as before.
I bent down to see better, expecting to find the classic southern soil that gives birth to olive trees and tomatoes. But instead I found a smooth black surface, like the monolith of 2001 A Space Odyssey so to speak (it’s important to me that you understand well).
Stone smooth to the touch like Judith’s skin, smoothed by years of creams and by my caresses.
I got the urge to knock on it like on an enormous horizontal door that maybe would have opened up and taken me to the Middle East or in Ohio.
How could it have happened?
I tried to turn back. I ran desperately towards that confusion that I despised but I only felt that smooth black surface under my feet. I couldn’t see anything, neither on the sides nor in front of me, only enormous stars that shone in the sky and resembled the lapel pins stuck on my jacket and her dazzling teeth when she smiles happily at me, and how I miss those teeth, without them I feel like I’m in a dark and slick black corridor. No wrinkles on the surface, no light on the horizon. Only her dazzling teeth above me and that strange sort of silence that has since fallen in disuse and been replaced by digital recordings, may God bless them. It was the silence of when I’d go walking alone in the countryside without a phone on Sunday afternoons, no way to communicate, unless gathering snails is in some way a form of interaction between man and animals. It was the silence of when the LP is over and the turntable doesn’t know it yet. The silence of the 20th century resounding against these times that are so profoundly odd.
Let’s hope that my grandmother’s Golden Rule doesn’t apply to centuries too.
