Eva
It started with a sore hip and a limp, then soon after tiny liver spots began to sprout all over my face, the skin on the neck became wrinkly and loose. My eyesight had already gotten blurry the night before, in grim anticipation.
Early on that evening, my ears started failing me too. I had to lean in close to hear what she was saying and most of them time I could only catch fragments of the story among the intruding saxophone tunes, breathing her seemingly confessional voice in another direction. As the night carried us along, I tried to piece it all together, struggling to conceal that I constantly missed essential pieces of information.
She was a dancer, I learned, since the age of four, or was it five, started playing the piano about the same time. Something about her mother encouraging her to cultivate a variety of interests... no... insisting, was the word she used, I think. Her first teacher a positive influence in her young life, the second strict and demotivating, if I remember correct. Then it was her love for books... "I am a reader", she stated at one point, and my heart began to beat a little faster, temporarily forgetting how this story would obviously end.
Her hair was dark red, her lips had a strong red color. In fact, everything seemed red on her. Maybe a natural consequence of her deep inner life, her oddly mature being, in contrast with her ridiculously young age. Or perhaps it was only the dim light in that bar confusing my withering eyesight and playing games with my dwindling perception.
As the night went on, my soul still wide awake, I could feel my face slowly beginning to transform: Eyes heavy and swollen, a lazy tongue making my words slurry, as if I had suffered a small stroke. A string of hair fell painstakingly slow to the floor, the weight of the root making it swerve like Maple seeds, and I could swear it had a stark grey color, and not my northern blond.
Did she avoid looking straight at me when we talked? She must be noticing, I thought, and tried to find a way to end the night to avoid more embarrassment, but she seemed to want to prolong it. Perhaps she actually was an old soul, accustomed to nature's subtle quirks and unmemorable tragedies.
And there was nothing more I longed for but spending time in her presence, under the spotlight of those big eyes, open and calm, like her mind, with a spark of curiosity and admiration hiding in the shadows. Her smile so hard to explain, except that I could imagine it made people stare, transfixed, like I, upon this natural beauty displayed for everyone to see, wondering why she was sitting next to someone like me.
We drank wine. Glasses of red that kept mysteriously filling up after periods of evaporation. I could feel the buzz of alcohol steadily rising inside, but if you asked me now, I could have sworn I never took more than a few sips that night, insistent on staying as sober as possible to slow down the aging process.
When I first noticed the little wrinkle on the root of her nose, right when her laugh was particularly honest, I almost gave my unconditional surrender, waving the white flag as I capitulated to forbidden images of an older version of this girl, the woman of her, sitting next to me in bed on a future Sunday morning, a pair of reading glasses in delicate balance on the tip of that same nose, and an inner smile radiating through her calm eyes.
She's waiting patiently for me to wake up, and when detecting movement, she leans over and kisses me on my forehead saying "Hey, look who's up!" as if I were a child, and not her spouse, now old and frail, but still full of life, thanks to her youthful energy preserved, after all these years.
That same night, in the shadows of a chalk white moon, almost full, and so bright that it seemed more like an infinite hole, precisely cut into the vast surrounding blackness, I embraced my source of youth, but still aware that this particular kind would turn out to have the opposite effect.
Sometimes I pushed her away from me a little, keeping her at arms length for a moment to fully appreciate the harvest of my persistent spring, that forbidden flesh, so perfect and ripe, taunting me with its maiden offerings.
We sat under the stares of a million stars, some blinking their eyes at us in an attempt to share their lonely thoughts, their subdued urge to tell us something important about eternity, but we ignored their insisting whispering, pretending we didn't notice their alluring call. And we balanced on that barren roof, of an old house still standing like a reminder among the tall apartment buildings. The nightingales choir filling the mild air with its tropical tunes and for a while I forgot the state of me, and gave in to this miraculous illusion.
Dawn was approaching from the other side, and soon the Saturday market vendors would come with their trucks and rowdy behavior, singing their own brand of mating calls to attract the yawning neighborhood, people rubbing the sleep out of their eyes and making their way out onto the little paved street dressed in premature spring, where they joined the others and formed a slow moving parade among the makeshift tables, bulging with fruit and vegetables. A row of red parasols protecting them from the rising sun.
And I would still be laying in my bed, staring at the over-exposed ceiling and listening to the sounds of the day, so very different from those only a few hours before. The haunting melody of these nocturnal birds still echoing in my mind, accompaigned by the dimmed image of a red-haired girl staring into the night, as if she had already left me behind, as if she was searching for answers waiting for her in plain site, or hiding deeper inside, a lingering conclusion among her muted thoughts.
I longed to stay in that bed forever, but the old man's eagerness to get up into the uneventful day, made me rise. I put my tired feet into the slippers and slowly slid across the floor, barely noticing the familiar sounds of the house. My shadow pulling slightly from behind, as I limped into the brightly lit bathroom.
