Etruscan swan song
Page 13
CHAPTER 12
Suddenly the water in my pool muddied and then shattered like glass… all the visions disappeared, everything around me was silence, the raging storm like waves crashing on the shore had gone as had the snow and the mist, the thunder, the wind and Thetia’s white lion. Thetia, who had returned to fly over imaginary trees for me, was gone for good.
I was left with a terrible feeling of nostalgia, that fatal sentiment that those who arrive too early or too late for a vital appointment feel, but one day she and I will meet again, no, one night, at a given hour in a moment divided by endless centuries, when her tragic countenance will have visited my dreams, our footprints will walk together once more. Our spirits will meet in that empty space between one thought and another. Her light whisper will reach me between the last instant of the day and the first moment of the night, in that empty field which is not part of the earthly realm, where the immense door of mystery ever gapes open. There on that cosmic, unreal, field will I await Thetia.
And on that same field will I await you, my reader. You’ll recognise me immediately because I’ll be holding the Songs of Solomon in one hand and my hair will be braided with old man’s beard. I will await you, and if you do not come I will await you for ever more. We have ridden the moon on a moonless night, we have fought fierce warriors of mist plunging our daggers into the stars, we have filled our baskets and aprons with ripe cherries, I swear we will meet again, on a rainy day, on a street corner, in the mother-of-pearl eyes of a vagabond, in the claw-like hand of a beggar, in the rambling tales of an old man sitting in the shade of a tower, in a haystack built by a barefoot child under the blazing sun. I await you there, near the angels’ harps, and we’ll drink from the same wooden cup, and we’ll offer other cups to other lips, and drinking again we will listen to the beating of the hooves of time in our breasts. And now, my friend, who has followed the poet patiently in this voyage, you must do one more thing: beneath the bramble bush where the black serpent observes us in silence, is a tiny rose with a drop of dew on it. Pick it and throw it over the cliff in front of Thetia’s cave, so that when the sun comes up, a rainbow will appear magically to signal the end of our journey.
Don’t you want to grasp it? Are you afraid? You mustn’t be because you are in a dream, nothing can happen to you, it is like looking at a picture, nobody is frightened of a snake in a painting. But if you are still afraid we will pick it together and together we will throw it into Thetia’s cave…
Thus we have seized life itself. In a book I have read that life is a drop of dew on a flower’s stamen.
This is the drop our rainbow will be born from. Imagine how beautiful it will be, how it will sparkle on the wet stone, light up the mountainside, the trees, the leaves the nests and how it will awaken the angels and queens who lie in rest here. Their moss-filled eyes will open again, their curls will fly loose in the sunshine and a warm tremor will bring them back to life again... But we will not be there to see them because it is time for us to go, come quickly, jump onto our restless two-tailed steed. Before the sun shines from the gates of orient and its light blinds all the stars, long before our rainbow appears and the cock crows, we will ride through the sacred chestnut forest in the dark of the night, fly over rivers, ferns, lilies and reeds, and follow a narrow secret path without looking back until sooner than you think, I swear my friend, I’ll have you home safe and sound.
The time will come, on a summer’s evening, when the birds come and sing at your window and man’s fatigue is soothed in sleep’s arms, when the just and the unjust, the good and the bad all sleep, when the reaper with his scythe lying next to him sleeps in the fields and the flocks are all at rest, you will tell the sons of your sons how we flew as free as migrating birds over the terrible scarlet-crested Cimina Mountains seeking the cuckoo’s nest.