Divieto di fermata3 North by Piera Mattei 3

It was early morning, wind still so cold, the street was so crowded, people going to work at the markets looking like wide quick streams.

Sick people are just round the corner assembled in the side street Buzzing, murmuring a litany maybe the same groan. Each of them takes up less room possible but doesn’t squeeze up to the other one.

I’m looking at them without mercy. Burning is lighting my skin. It’s fire. I’m groaning too. Unconsciously. About my own words I’m murmuring: “My God. my God!”

I’m getting place for me among them. I don’t know the reason why I’m doing that. But I’m sick too, and I’m groaning just the way they do. I groan and listen to the voices rising un in a unique vibration. That is making swing the tops of the street lamps still on. Rising my very dry eyes I can see it.

***

How much time did I stay with the street sick persons? More I stayed more I got sure I didn’t belong to them. I wasn’t really sick. the burning of my skin was just a reaction vaccinating against the disease. But I continued to stay.

I thought: why should we survive, just the two of us, Max and I? I didn’t’ want the salvation Max offered to me. I preferred to groan along with the others. My face on my knees. I had seen the sores on their bodies when they were in line waiting their turn at the public and compulsory shower. While they were waiting they could watch by mirrors on the walls the origin of their pain. Some of them used stratagems to stay shut in the bathrooms being pitiless to their own image at the mirror. I –don’t know how that happened– felt myself in and out of that collective tragedy. Though I meditated about sorrow I mainly watched.

***

Max. I had left him and couldn’t avoid to think of him. In the darkness, packed among those bodies consumed by the disease, I wondered when I’d have been got by the sense of a common destiny, nothing to do to the pleasure of being together. That pleasure came rarely, necessity was always there.

No, I didn’t think that, didn’t want to think to, it was because of privation pursuing me. I continued to live in the harmonious misery of the covered in sores. I received food and medical aid by volunteers dressed with aprons, overshoes and rubber gloves. By the touch that rubber rejected me like their mercy did. I wasn’t sick, any madness staying there? I wasn’t sick.

Among those groans suddenly I heard calling “Maaax!!! Maaax!!!” It’s shouting.

I’m running and stepping over those afflicted and lamenting bodies that squeezed up to push me away, to make me run. I’m running. After those bodies around me thinning away, I’m walking straight, my chin up.

I’m shivering a little. It’s cold.

***

I arrived. going securely upstairs two steps by two. At the door I realize I haven’t the key, I have to ring. Max is coming to open. He’s not saying anything. Though I waked him up.

I waked him up and he doesn’t say anything. He’s not asking me what I’ve done, where I’ve been.

***

After the crisis that brought me to the street, things have got better between Max and me. He got intrusive because he guessed my sake. Now he’s calm and discreet again, absent-minded as usual. I can hear him whistling in his room arranging his linen. Funny chap, Max.

And I’ve started to paint again.

Painting is like a foreign language. At certain moment you start speaking. By that moment you have to resolve some little problems about grammar or pronunciation.

I’m stretching the oilcloth on the floor, I’m dipping my paintbrush into the color, I’m marking out a circle, filling up the circle with the same color.

No, I’ve nearly marked out an ellipse. I can recognize the focuses and there I’m in stably balancing just an only picture, one for each extremity.

Sometimes I thought to put together the two pictures. I didn’t get it.

***

Today Max has waked up bad. He says he had a nightmare where everybody sat in circle was laughing at him, badly. Now, if a circle is a spatial idea that he can understand I wonder: what and how could be the face of this “everybody” laughing wickedly: who know what a blind can see in his dreams. I have never asked Max.

I prepared my breakfast. Black coffee and toasted bread. I brought the same to Max that turned his face to the wall.

***

Max is sick. I brought the epidemic home. Instead my persisting burnings didn’t get worse.

Poor Max, how can you cure a sick person afflicted by these sores? He will recover. He never touches his burnings. He doesn’t lament, he only asks for dinking. I put vitamins and minerals into his water.

***

I say to myself if everybody in the world were as Max disease would continue to exist but wouldn’t be extreme or disgusting.

He ate the soup I prepared for him. He thanked, smiling.

In the meanwhile I paint with good results. No more the colored ellipse, but birds. No swallows, that are black and white, as Max says, but birds by colored feathers.

Now birds are my favorite subject, in the morning I pay attention their singing. If I could identify them, if I could make agree any intonation, trill and whistle, with a name would I be more pleased to listen to them?

***

Today, counterfeit among a blackbird’s whistles, I recognized Max’s whistle. A nice teasing whistle. Vitality is back, as back is light in my pictures. Over Max’s disease my pictures had got a dead shade.

***

At long last. I had a lunch again. I don’t know what’s the magy of Max. Provisions are nearly finished, but he delighted my palate.

I watched him preparing, as he first time, I saw him. He moves secure and nimble among all the things on the kitchen table. He touches cooking utensils like a pianist touches his keyboard, but his touch is less linear, like a drummer on drums.

After lunch he uncorked a bottle of sweet wine and started to talk about our return. Nordic summer is ending, he said. Daytime is getting shorter, light won’t be sufficient to paint.

We got over disease. Though, in the city we are from there is a lot of talk about war now, and it’s the same here. I think, if the war should break out, we couldn’t ignore it. War destroys art, destroys colors. Everything gets black and white, the color of the burnt down substance.

***

I won’t carry with me the pictures I painted, I leave them here in this flat. Next people living here will decide to save or to throw away. I think I got a good technique, though I can’t realize about colorings. Max, even if he could see my pictures, no way for him to be impartial.

Without hurry, we wipied out our signs in the flat. Now we’re preparing a small luggage, only essential things to get on a train. We must stay close each other because safe or despairing better to stay together.

In the courtyard, leaves down from the branches moving up and around, while I’m carrying my small luggage from the main door to the taxi.

***

We are back, then. No more reason looking for salvation elsewhere.

But everything changed here, just like elsewhere, definitely changed, no sense in the exercises educating and improving my sight. 

Now we simply spend our days looking forward the news on the radio. I don’t know the reason why we do that. We have no reason, we don’t feel like going out in the street, we don’t want to leave again, but we hear the road news like any other breaking news.

Plague hasn’t been eliminated, say the news, but the way they refer to the dead is such as to let understand we don’t have to take the dead in account anymore. If anyone loses a lover or a son because of the plague he says that person settled down elsewhere, in another city.

According to the news leaked out, by a new law approved in the parliament without any discussion, who dares to call the end of life by its old name is condemned to stay forced residence. Who dies is because made a mistake. To cry for that is stupid or wasting. Now priority for people is to show they can be strong. Who falls is crushed underfoot and carried away.

We don’t want to get out anymore. They say that by the dozen suddenly beld their legs disappearing in the neighborhood of the undergrounds because of a new generation, strong and impatient, who crushes them underfoot.

Cruelty on their faces doesn’t look anymore as tragic. no more is cruelty, it is pragmatism. They are convinced death isn’t something concerning living persons and who dies is no more counting, can’t talk by the radio and can’t listen to.

Max and I could do without listening to that voice that makes us feel impotent, but we are like magnetized by that cynicism elaborating an only way of thinking.

We don’t discuss each other, we don’t quarrel anymore. Every now and then we call each other, by name, from one room to the other one, and when we sit side by side we do the same. Often, after pronouncing our names, we stay hugged to face fear invading us.

That unique way of thinking is becoming like an only big and omni pervading individual, not even human perhaps, who is always right, always repeating the same things. Maybe we don’t know, but we are no more in account, a death that hasn’t been announced and impossible to announce.