It begins when loosing the smile... then the things around seem to loose reality, focus and accuracy…
It goes on.. colours, tones, feelings fade in the air..
Then, one day, you find yourself wondering where are all.. asking yourself: were they once?
For those of us who cant bear any kind of chains, invisible of real, any rope tiding our hands and our souls with the social rules, with the heavy duty of being “normal and civilized”..
For those of us who feel that the task is heavy and we will not survive,
For us, who cant live our whole life kicking all boards and feeling so tired while doing it..
He watched at my eyes when telling me those words, with a toothless smile... he was walking happily carrying his bag, as old and wrinkled as his dark skin. However, it was as if the rain was moistening and hydrating both, giving them new life.
Hot weather was nearly unbearable…the air difficult to breath… and the downpour falling, had offered all of us a relief for some minutes.
The sea had veered from the deep blue to the emerald and the clouds at sky had given new greenery to the palms of the Oceanic Avenue, at that magic city of Salvador de Bahia, Brazil. The fortress was outlined against the summer storm, now brightened by the coming sun and while observing it, I thought about many years ago. I imagined the eyes of other black men, as black as the one that had spoken to me.
They were arriving at the coast… and when seeing that fortress, they would surely had asked themselves what was waiting them at that land, so distant from theirs. They had been constrained to go on board of those ships… some of them came from far villages, where foreigners had arrived speaking with guns and terror…
They knew that they had lost their freedom but what they didn't know at that moment was that they would never recover it... neither them, nor their children nor their grandsons.
Because even the slavery would be abolished many years after, the chains would be others…. maybe concealed… maybe with different denominations…. but chains at last…
Cloudburst had finished, as fast as it had begun… and my heart was still wondering how would have been life for that old man there, at his faraway Africa.
I imagined him smiling to rain, and feeling gratitude… not to Saint Peter, but to who knows which protectress goddess… thanking the blessing for the arid soil…
Later I realized they were gazing, listening…
They knew something was going to happen.. and it did..
They sighed satisfied, they had succeeded this time...
She had left the train with sleepy eyes.
While walking along the platform carrying her two bags, she was thinking and wondering how would that city would look like … she had heard that it was easy there to obtain some euro, but she wasn’t sure...
So, she set out to the main street, full of tourists and residents....
While walking along , she was watching the pavement, whose tiles formed crazy waves, and the buildings, impossibly strange and fabulous… what a vast difference this was compared with those she had visited after leaving her far hometown, some years ago…
At once, she realized that she would not earn much money in that street, because there was a lot doing the same as she did. But she went on walking. Few people paid attention to her worn out trousers, boots, and her hair, dirtily punk.
By chance, she looked at her left and saw a square not so far. When she arrived there, she discovered a beautiful space surrounded by buildings, plenty of cafes with people seated at their tables, sharing the sky and that moon between the palms growing at that incredible place. She decided to try there…
At a side of the square, there was a row of people waiting to enter who knows where, so she thought : maybe I had better stay there. She stopped nearby, left one of her bags on the floor, opened the other, and took out her old, out-of-tune violin.
She knew well that the coins she got from people were more for pity, than for her art. However, she did not care. For a longtime now, there were few things she cared about. She was only interested to eat that day… hunger was strong.
When she was about to begin playing, she noticed a little girl standing in the front row of the people watching her. And her soul recognised with surprise that the kid had the same glance that she once had as a young child. Inquisitive, impish, plenty of desire to discover the world, the universe… a glance thirsty of life…
She asked herself when had she lost that glance… she asked herself why…
However, closing her eyes as she always did when playing, she began…
The notes that her fingers whispered, and the music that her heart bestrewed to pervade that square, lasted for many minutes… it was like all those years of containment had been finally liberated…. all that energy, all that eagerness to drink life until the last drop had appeared again.
She played and played, without realizing that people watching and listening all around her had silenced, and without noticing that all at the coffees’ tables had stopped to talk, at that Plaza Reial at Barcelona…
She played as if the night would never be finished, and as if that moon smiling among the palms would be enjoying that moment… she played for lost joys and for the inexhaustible pains, for the remembrance of a laugh and the taste of a chat…
Her fingers, suddenly, stopped. She came back to reality and opened her eyes hoping this time to find more coins in her cap lying on the ground in front of her.
But what she found, in addition to many, many coins, was people with teary eyes. People had not even been able to applaud because it seemed that their emotion had overcome their ability to react…
In front of them, was that little girl. Watching her with a smile, saying in silence that dreams and hopes are always there, within us… and that never, ever,
The fights among Gods and men have always delighted and interested me, firing my imagination. I imagine Mount Olympus as the scene of discussions and quarrels, and I often wondered how someone of that divine blood had sided at those skirmishes, as Homer tells us in the Iliad…
Now I was going to the very place where real blood had pored forth on the earth. Where thousands of men were killed where the only purpose was to save the honour of a king who had been robbed, who had lost his wife kidnapped by a poor shepherd.
When I was a girl, I was fascinated. As I got older, in addition to being fascinated by the epic, I started to wonder why history always looks for incredible reasons to chronicle real facts. And if a brilliant narrator recites those reasons and facts, then I need nothing more to fill my soul with emotion.
The way to Troy seemed to be a long way from Istanbul, after someone had told me it was quite close.
The communication by hand signs had not been detailed enough to let me know how long that trip would take and I managed to get a lift in a small bus. However, I didn’t mind… I was waiting for that moment, when all my excitement and eagerness would overcome me.
The van was full of local people, and it stopped at many different houses to gather a variety of objects which they had to carry between the seats. Huge pipes, casseroles, hens. It was like travelling in a mobile supermarket.
All of them were watching me… and I knew why! I was sure that no tourists had used this way to reach Troy, since the excursion coaches were more comfortable and they took them there more directly and much more quickly.
It was amongst the throng that I saw her. She was about 20 years old, maybe as young as 18… But her peculiar eyes were those of a baby, half surprised and half shy, and she was analysing detail by detail all that I did with furtive glances. My clothes.. my worn out little travelling bag…
I gave a sideway glance, because I did not want to make her feel uncomfortable, but I was really trying to discover what she was thinking about me.
As usual, my fertile imagination made me wonder how I would have felt, living in such a small town and then seeing an absolute stranger from a foreign land ……coming from who knows where … and I understood why she was watching me.
Suddenly I realized that the vehicle was continuing its way without stopping, I began to worry… I had previously planned to make the return journey on the other bus to arrive in time at the ferry port for my return to Istanbul…
Uffff… It seemed that to see Iliad I needed to live a small Odyssey, but Ulysses was Me, and I wasn’t able to return for many years….
I decided to ask how far away the city was, and of course, the one who was willing to communicate was the girl who was in front of me…
In English and with signs I tried to ask her about Troy, she repeated that shy gesture and lowered her eyes… then I remembered that it was something similar to Truva in Turkish, so I repeated that name.
At that moment, all changed. Her glance was not pensive, her face was enlightened by an amusing thought, almost triumphant… and with a condescending gesture, she lowered her hand a little as if to say to me: You need not worry, stay quiet…
I smiled. I was no longer that stranger bursting into her world. She knew something that I needed, and then she no longer had any type of fear. From there on, she went on observing me openly, and whenever she saw me looking at my watch (I was wondering how much time I would have to see the ruins and come back) she smiled.
Finally, I saw her standing. She looked at me for the last time and pointed down the road, as if saying: there is the city. The small vehicle stopped in order that she and others could alight. And when thanking her in Turkish, again that shy gesture returned, as if nothing had passed between us.
A few minutes later, the conductor also told me, and I got off the bus.
I paid the entrance fee and then I discovered that I had only 20 minutes to see Troy before the bus returned to pick me up and take me back.
I ran the 400 metres to where the ruins began… I was touched seeing the rest of that besieged city… and from there, far away, the sea, and the green fields where they had disembarked ready for fighting. I breathed there the smell of thousands of men and the spirit of the Gods of Mount Olympus, filling with discord the poor souls of those warriors…
I remained thinking and remembering that girl on the bus… the certainty of knowing something, that gives us that confidence that makes us lose any fear, or any shame… I imagined the Aequeus, the troops attacking, consulting the oracle or the fortune tellers, to have the certainty that they would win, made those interminable years of pain more bearable…
Moreover, I imagined Schliemann, the discoverer of Troy, with his innate certainty that he would find it, and I imagined him fighting against the mocking of his contemporaries, against the distrust of the Turkish government, losing fortunes to obtain his dream. He was also sure… he had the certainty that the city was there
I had travelled for 6 hours and I had another 6 hours to return. The reward had been those glorious 20 minutes… When I had decided to make that excursion, I did not know if I would arrive on time, if I would be able to see it, if the money I had taken with me would be sufficient…but, in fact, and let me be “arrogant” in this instance… I had the certainty that I would succeed.
I was walking along the narrow street, in that quiet French village.. night was coming, and the last breeze of the late sunset were escorting me all the time…
Suddenly, a white wonder made me stop.. it was there, in a big pot behind the bars of a balcony… a cactus flower, ready to open in all its beauty.
I stopped, watching it, and remembered the cactus in my garden, far away at home, and how I was always eager waiting for the day that it blossomed. Just one night, but deserving …
A voice brought me back to reality. A man was talking to me, from inside the open window of that balcony…
- Do you like the cactus?
- Sure, sir, I love them, as much as I love their flowers…
- Well, you are lucky then, this cactus offers me only one per year, and you are seeing it now.
- And it is so beautiful, -I added, still watching it- their ephemeral life makes them special. You can watch other flowers.. a glance, coz you know you will see them again the next day, and the following ones.. and there will be many of them ready to blossom when the others die.. but when you watch a cactus flower, you try to fill your soul all of a sudden.. You are intoxicated with its beauty… coz you know it will be brief.. and intense.. And it will have to last a whole year.
- Curious, he said- your eyes watching it, reminded me of another pair of eyes, a long time ago, waiting for this miracle.. and not knowing they would lose it, but gain a better one: to keep alive
His face was ready to bloom, as the flower.. his eyes bright, his voice somehow trembling… I didn’t dare to ask.. but I waited…
- The cactus was behind the window. – He began- my mother had told me it would be flowering for one day.. and each morning, she showed me the stem growing and the bud filling out … that morning she had told me it would open that same evening.
The man sighed.. a pause.. then he went on
-I remember.. that guy riding his bicycle fast while shouting; they arrive! they arrive! (“They” was for the Germans, the "Boche", the enemy)… and we saw smoke at the top of the roofs and we heard explosions in the distance… It was August 1944, young lady, two months after the landing at Normandy and all the German troops were going up north to reinforce the front line, and cross the area… But at Limousine, my place, the resistance, the “maquis” were very powerful and well organized and they attacked the enemy constantly. In the German army there was an armoured division ..very famous, and it was under orders of General Lamerding. They had left Provenza, and through the Languedoc they had devastated towns and villas… when arriving at Tulle, they had arrested all men they found, and had hung them throughout the avenue.
I was frightened.. the man smiled and told me
- It was the war.. for both sides. And they were the ones arriving at my town… I remember old veterans of the World War I, guns in hands, descending the hills… and civilians of the Resistance, with their bracelets red, white and blue, running in all directions, grenades on their waist… and us, escaping, following the course of a stream, and hiding from the shrapnel of the airplanes that flew overhead… finally, we arrived at a farm, on the hill from where we could see all of the valley. There were already lot of people there, who, like us, had left the town… we listened, far away, the explosions roared… we saw billowing black smoke rising, in the valley.
- The battle lasted two days, lady… - continued the man- adults occasionally watched the edge of the hill, to see if the smoke was still there, if they heard explosions… On the third day there was silence… and an old man arrived at the run to tell us that they had gone away… that morning of the third day, they had departed. Soon we found out that they had moved to South Oradour Glane and had set the population ablaze… the women and the children in the church, the men in the garages… but they never returned to Normandy… the Resistance overcame them, annihilating them all…
The man paused… his voice was trembling, and with it my soul.
- I ran to my home - he said – in a rush to see the cactus… but there was only a stem fallen, the dead flower… dried petals on the flowerpot…
And then I saw, in that man’s expression, the eyes of a disappointed boy, who, at that moment, had felt more saddened by a flower, than by the horrors surrounding him…
I watched the flower again, opened now… and its perfume smelled of war and death, but also of hopes and miracles …
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