The Gypsy

There was a winding road down a Valley.  The road was undermined by patches of deep wounds left by the torrential rains so frequent in the valley and by the stumps of dead trees rooted skyward like a prayer.  There was also a Monastery suspended somewhere between heaven and earth, protected by several mountains like true pyramids guarding a fortress.  Down the valley, suddenly, a caravan of nomadic gypsies entered from one end of the road.  Wagons with tarpaulin sheltered children and elderly, while young Gypsy girls with bloom red skirts walked haughtily behind the caravan. Amongst them, one gypsy woman would find a crying baby girl in town and nurse her before disappearing in a fog of spells and doomed destinies.

*

Today as I sit here waiting for the police to arrive, I can finally look beyond your Nôh facemask you wear in front of each man.  I stare at your motionless body and thoughtless face with the most pathetic expression in my eyes.  Before, I could distinguish you from a thousand women and just for that, alone I hated you. 

But with all this, with all the hatred and dirt, I waited for you every night in the same dark bar, in the same chair, at the same table with the same wine in my glass until you eventually came back.  When I saw you again, you were dancing with another man.  You proved to be the most awful human, a body with no soul.

I wanted you to die.  I wanted to see your dead body and mourn you.

I clearly saw beyond the horizon, beyond the reddish autumn sunset.  I could see now my burned thoughts left in total standby through the eyes of others gathered around your lifeless body.  Alcohol spoke for me in the end.

You lied to me!  You ended up being an illusion, an illusion I used as a guiding light but landed as fine sand in the desert of my desires.

My dreams were hardly ever reached, hardly desirable, hardly inspiring to you

People were talking sometimes and I had no doubt they were talking about you.  Your pagan being was marked from the beginning.  You were doomed to lie and cheat and I should have known your Scarlet red lips were lying.

They say that when you were about three months old you cried so hard it broke your mother’s heart.  Nothing soothed your suffering, not the lullabies, nor the gentle rocking.  Until one day when a convoy of nomadic gypsies stopped at the edge of the town.  In one of the tents was one woman named Orla.  Her little baby girl had perished immediately after birth and Orla’s tears never dried since.  One quiet night, while everybody was deep asleep, a baby’s cry reached Orla’s ears.  Is my little girl I hear crying?  She asked herself.  She started walking through the village until she heard the baby cry in front of a house: This is my child, she thought, and with quick steps she entered the home, opened the door to a room stopping in front of the cradle where you were fiercely and inconsolably crying.

“Lady, let me breastfeed the child!” the gypsy said to your perplexed mother. 

For three days, before sunrise, Orla, the gypsy, was in the house and soon you stopped crying while nursing at the gypsy’s bosom.  Her naked breast and face were turned towards the rising sun whispering-words known only to her.  Orla, the gypsy woman disappeared without a trace one day but left behind her gypsy spell on you.  You were to bring pain and desolation to anybody bold enough to love you.

When I first saw you in the bar, you looked wild and beautiful, lips painted with red lipstick, cheap defilement of any conceivable purity, hair loose, left back framing your face like black smoke; with red nails, unequal, with high heels, too high and uncomfortable.  The white shirt with rough collar, the skirt that jumped in my eyes the first time.  Disgusting skirt!  But you liked it.  You looked at me and put your glass down, got up and came closer to me.  You hit the dance floor and danced as if no one else was around.

Tears run dry now when I remember that night, as if it lasted a thousand years.

 You were incredible.  There was silence, a long silence, but I heard your beating heart.  I kissed you; I undressed you with slow and feral moves.

            You beautiful gypsy!

I felt your thin body, trembling body under my kisses.  I can feel your body even now when I close my eyes!

The next day I realized you were just a heap of body pleasures; I realized how miserable you could be.  Pathetic and cold.  You walked out and left behind only the lipstick stained sheets, your cheap perfume, and pain.

I knew one day I would kill you ... Pulling the trigger was the easiest part. Once my mind became the sheathed villain and once my conscience gave in to it, the plan was simple really.

There’s a criminal in each one of us.  Why don’t we release it?  Surprisingly not because of our conscience but because of fear.  Real criminals win over their fear, a monster bigger than conscience...  Was  Hitler remorseful of his actions or he was concerned someone might consider him a murderer. ?When the final colors , the ones  defining  you as a frail human invade and take over your well guarded white purity, you start crying every night  lying to yourself in the morning . You should be elsewhere. You look around, who is the master of your life?  Who are you in your life? 

After me pulling the trigger, you looked at me with surprised eyes, lifted your shoulders in shock, shocked and quizzical at what was happening .Your lips started moving looking for a questioning word but a quaint smile froze on your upper lip instead, trembling and dry.

There are hundreds of ways to die.  You can die while your heart still beats and the world continues to spin around you like I died. But you never thought that in the end things would happen this way. 

A smiling mask with which you used to hide the anger and betrayal will be the last thing I see. The old clock on the wall stopped for a moment, the whole world froze for a second. Then time began to run again and the wall mirror flew in thousands of glittering pieces, each bearing frozen looks, reflections of me passing through decomposed, crossing the line bordering the absurd as the sirens sounded closer and closer.

*

Memory is a strange voice in the back of my mind, with ups and downs, some slow, some abrupt. Sometimes the voice is deafening with painful screams that stab my soul, other times I am barely able to recognize it, weak and feeble as a breath of wind, echoing what passes almost unnoticed from one generation to another and remembered the following years.

Older memories are like Saturn's rings, surrounding a continuous layer, thickening with each memory of every life, flowing forever in history, layer after layer, like a carpet of dead leaves, fallen in late autumn.

I imagine memory as a huge mirror in which can be seen intact faces from the past, present and future.

Every morning I look in the mirror and see all that I fear staring me in the face. I start a new day, obsessed and desperate to see how time went around me.

I sometimes am paralyzed with fear failing any attempt for action. In those strange moments, I almost always go back in the past and start dreaming.

In adolescence, especially on vacations, I always meant to do a lot of things but every time I sat down on the carpet instead and began daydreaming, starting in the morning light, and ending when the last rays of sun covered the room in a bluish hue. When I awoke from my dream state, it looked like nothing around me was recognizable. In those moments, I thought that although the day had passed, the dream was more important than anything I have meant to do.

At some point, I gave up explaining them to others.

Small fragments snatched of a life lived intensely make up the memory. Shining fragments like shards of colored glass, some dark - evil – others like the windows of a church, with nameless angels, some brighter than others.

I look in the mirror now. There have been more than twenty years since I was a dreamy kid. Wrinkles outline my face and like a blind man, I try to convince myself that the mirror image is mine. My fingers with long bones, the eyes, mouth, hair, are all outlined in an unknown and frightening way while my mind refuses to recognize them.

When I was Sylvia Plath age, when she took her final decision it was difficult to look at myself as an old woman but I identified with her. I felt so close to her, her sensibility mysterious and painful. Back then, years felt passing like days, and days like seconds

I feel I survived middle age only through pages written at night when everybody was asleep.

I constantly cheated fatigue with a cup of tea, while the steam above the tea cup formed figures in the pale lamps light living only a brief second, as I wrote the long. awaited page and disappearing completely in the morning light that covered every movement, every atom of life around, taking their dark mist and last thought with which they woke my memory .

When I was a child, there was not a cloud in the sky...

I remember all the vacations and my parents; my only problem was my sweaty back sticking to the folding chair on the beach. I seem to have spent my eternity dreaming, absorbing the beach, and dreaming of roaming through far and unexplored lands.

I remember how I learned, impromptu and extremely premature, to ride the bike with no hands and feet-the bottom of the hill where I landed and the ride in the ambulance.

The pleasure I had joshing my grandmother who always enchanted us with her culinary experiments, outwardly offensive, but once you closed your eyes everything tasted fine.

Fighting with my dad and our afterwords bruised egos, finalizing outlandish plans under a sturdy and peculiar stream of consciousness ... my connection with books that kept me in the same place for hours.

Where are these days? Time is possibly an elastic band snapping back and forth.

Now I stare at my childhood house and it seems so small ... I wonder where the giant apple tree is. We always used the bad apples as weapons.

Where are the old times?

I want to find the cryogenic master and ask for the keys to unlock the time he froze...

The attic in my grandmother’s house

The narrow staircase ascending to the attic fascinated me throughout my entire childhood.  At the end of the stairs, there was a low door and the mere thought of what might be hidden behind it fed my imagination with mystery, fantasy, or spooky feelings.

After grandmother died, the house was empty for a while. It later sold at a ridiculously low price, making it easy for me to redeem it at an even sillier low price.

The cottage is hidden among the dunes, overseeing the sea.  The harsh weather , time and strong winds added to its wrinkles, just like an old sailor creased face.

At night, in the dark, by the window,I now often sit and watch the restless silver shuffle of the waves in the moonlight. I listen lost in thoughts and memories to the wind’s soft swing as the house creeks and aches .

The staircase leading to the little door to the attic still has the same spell over me as it did during my childhood.Today however, I decided to open the mysterious door, so, armed with a flashlight, I started climbing the old wooden ladder.  The narrow steps squeaked under my steps and my fingers touched timidly the key in the pocket of my skirt. When I reached the top of the stairs, I slipped the key in the old lock. The noise traveled through the whole house. I pushed the door with my foot and walked in gliding through the many threads of spider webs.

The attic seemed large, stretching over the entire top of the house.  The wood beams blackened by the passage of time made it look like a church tower.  At the end of it, I saw a round and dirty window through which light seemed to ineffectually attempt to take a curious look inside the dusty room. The entire space was full of old trunks, cabinets, an oval mirror about the height of a man, dusty and incomprehensible yellow magazines,a baby stroller with large wheels, and a gramophone with a disc under its twisted arm.  I churned its handle several times and the disc began to rotate.  From its blackfunnel, a somber voice broke the eerie silence - words I recognized : EdithPiaf, La Mer.

I lifted the bottom of my skirt dragging on the floor and tried to push a box towards the round window in the corner.  Without noticing, I tipped over a picture standing behind the trunk I was pushing. All my attention shifted now towards the fine portrait of a woman drawn in pencil.

 I was amazed ! The woman in the drawing, looking happy and full of anticipation, hereyes gazing somewhere in the distance, looked very much like me!  Underneath the obvious features however,there was a melancholic beauty. The eyes, the eyes looked filled with a certain knowledge of the ways of the world and maybe the life about to swallow her.

I looked feverishly in many of the wooden trunks in the hope of finding out more about the young woman in the drawing.

When I walked in front of the oval mirror,and I thought I saw a shadow silhouette similar to that in the painting.  It only took a couple of seconds before the woman lost its outlines and disappeared forever in the dusty light of the loft.

The room returned quick to its eerie cob webs invaded existence.

I looked down from the small round window at the wet sand below and I heard the waves breaking close by in what seemed like a whisper calling a name I could not understand....

I love the sea.  I love it as a place of exile.  Because it crosses any age.  It is part of any century and holds many memories.  There is something excruciatingly beautiful, able to intimidate the worst lucidity, in the clarity of the morning burned off by the sun.

Experts frown when faced with the predictability of human desires, but as Byron said: “any time is good when it becomes ancient.”

Back in his time, Aristotle was blamed for impiety.  The method used by the courts then was the same used often in our times: sentences taken out of context, in which irreverent meanings were found.

"I do not want Athens to be guilty for a crime against philosophy” said Aristotle while fleeing the city.

In the epitaph dictated, shortly before his death, and to be placed on his grave, Aeschylus said that the bushes at Marathon and the Persians knew him well.  Nothing else.  Not a word about his work as a playwright!

When Sophocles son, fearing his father would disown him in favor of a bastard brother, sued the playwright declaring him senile, the Greek bard thanked the judges, and asked them if he could read a scene off the tragedy he was working on, Oedipus at Colonus.  The judges not only dismissed the case but also accompanied him back home as a sign of respect.

I find this kind of modesty and excellence extinct today as the thirst for glory has embodied forms of dementia.

But, I would not want to be perceived as more naive than I really am.  I know that ancient time was no better than today.  The romantic, dramatic take on life or the inconsolable love, the same that caused at some point Don Juan’s laughter, had found no more respect in ancient times than it does today.

Mythology, as well as history, reveals areas of less than perfect love.  Adonis was born out of incest.  Ajax mounted Cassandra in the temple of the goddess of wisdom, Agamemnon was murdered by an adulterous wife, Helene ran back in Menelaus arms after having caused the disaster of Troy, Artemis, insensitive and frigid, punished those who tried approaching her.

It obsessed me throughout my life that while Ovid  initially refined Rome's elite in the "art of love" he learned in exile, the bitter taste of hate and perfidy, cajoling the emperor through hypocritical letters sent to friends, desperately hoping that his words will reach the ears of Augustus and draw  forgiveness.  It is not hard to imagine how Ovid, unlike me, looked with distaste at the waters of the Black Sea.  Especially in the winter.  While blizzards swept over the land, accompanied by the howling wolves, Ovid, most likely was dreaming, with a poisoned heart and crippling sadness, of the parties Rome spoiled him some time ago.

Twenty-five years spent among weird, bearded locals was certainly a long wait, interrupted from time to time, by despair and disappointment as none of the ships sailing in the harbor brought the news he wanted.

And he suffered, I think, more than cold as life continued flawless without him.

Should we still believe in love, modesty, excellence, and justice?  Simple.  Yes.

I look at it as I can choose from history only what I like, like in a library in which I keep only books that interest me.  My reveries are not required to support any neighborhood I dislike.  Perhaps they look like murky marshes formed after rain.

Whenever I look at the sea, I feel a lump in my throat at the thought that, someday, I will not understand it as well as I do now.

What does it take to make literature whole and the relationship writer-reader successful?

 First of all I believe the answer is exponentially  linked to the individual  inner power to communicate, to think and to the gift of using words in writing, thus creating  a dialog formula subtle and wonderful, one that both,  writer  and reader can use to explore inner powers.  It is also important to acknowledge that the world is, after all, a cluster of interactions on many levels.  Both, reader and writer control this game by understanding each other through  written words .

Everything else starts from here: work, hope, investigations, testing, chances, circumstances, luck, confidence and disappointment...

Myself, if I look back, I can say that I had some interesting cultural experiences on the way to declaring myself a writer.  As a result I sense and measure reality, regardless if a true or acceptable recognition, through an understanding of the literary state of affairs, ideas, cultural intersections, all part of today's dynamic world.  I believe it should be standard for every writer or creator of any kind to exchange views and to see things from multiple angles

Today’s world holds an unprecedented traffic of information, such that no art can remain locked in a bubble.  No more "ivory tower".  Artists must now, more than in any other socio-historical period, discuss, seek new artistic dimensions, and relate to others, because ultimately, the meaning and purpose of art is to convey a message and fulfill a role.

This way everything becomes part of a normal course and the relationship writer reader is a stable one, holding many coordinates.

“There are things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind.”  F. Dostoyevsky

Somebody commented once on my work as being “downward spiral of fleeting magnitude into discontent and sadness.”  It made me think and ultimately acknowledge the fact that whether it is fictional writing or biographical, crafting a story is an involved and demanding process.  Involved because it requires full attention and demanding because complete honesty and courage facing personal demons and dark places are essential in good, unforgettable writing.  It makes memorable literature and it places it on a visceral and undeniable emotional human scale.

Do I go in dark places when I write?  Absolutely.

Back when I was growing up, nobody dealt honestly with depression, and adding insult to injury, depression was perceived as a sign of weakness, failure and a step back on the evolution ladder .(In retrospect it looks like  the equivalent of a social  wedgies).  I am pondering now if this old school ofthought was failure proof. Today, many from my generation are great over achieved professionals, pillars of their communities, some even with potential political careers looming in their future.  Others entered middle age carrying a degree of bitterness, compulsion, denial, and addiction. .

Where is the balance ?

Kierkegaard was quoted saying:

“In addition to my other numerous acquaintances, I have one more intimate confidant.  My depression is the most faithful mistress I have known -- no wonder, then, that I return the love.”

If you saw someone carrying piles of fishing tools, backpack on his back, straw hat on his head and rubber boots on his feet, you would be willing to bet he had something to do with professional fishing. But you would be dead wrong and lose the bet in the case of our artist fisherman...

Our character could care less about fish. Instead, the unruffled waters of the lake at the edge of town were like a magnet attracting him every time. His raft followed always, careful not to create any ripples, the smooth surface of his thoughts.

His wife knew by now there will be no fish for dinner. First, she tried a rejoinder by attacking the absurdity of her man’s behavior.

“What kind of sound mind guides you, why do you need a bog if you do not catch any fish? You spent a lot of money on tinseled fishing poles and tools but instead they clutter my closet”...

The man gave his wife a long and puzzled look. He could not believe she failed to see the substance of his weekly departures.

“Dear,” he shook his hand in total annoyance,” but I do not want to catch fish. I throw the line just to get past the surface of my thoughts, thoughts swimming on the marshy bottom of my conscience.”

The woman shrugged her shoulders - So I had to marry an artist, I guess an engineer or a teacher wasn’t close by ! My mom was right!

She walked over and took a big fish from the freezer, to be ready when the fisher of thoughts came back, with the red sun behind him and without a spectacular catch.–

Invariably for our artist fisherman, coming back home after sailing his own waters was accompanied by a broad smile. After many hours spent in the shade of the same shaggy willow, pulling out of water thought after thought, the man felt weightless, free of burdens and fears as if his mind had been washed by an endless rain.

Paradoxically, so that everything was as real as possible, he learned all the tricks of fishing; He knew how to do everything just like an expert. So assuming he tried real fishing, he would have certainly had a fair chance at catching a lot of fish.

But instead he did not step over that barrier he self-imposed. Standing on the banks of the lake fishing thoughts was what he was after.

Once home, with a smile on his lips, he would kiss his woman on the cheek, take a sip of brandy, and disappear in his office.

Hunched over his laptop, he would cook his freshly caught thoughts in splattering sentences and glistening words.