The Memory of the Flask.

From the belly of that oval flask, as ages of vintage and sacred oils, an amber mixture dances a dance emerged from the greatest masters’ glorious heads of the will and the contempt. Sanctuary of sorrows, of lights, of deaths… of lives. Just few drops are enough to cry out for the forgotten crying, for the one who left with the evening’s blood, when it covered the beaches of that coast to the east of the sea.
There are no hopes appearing from that little flask’s belly purchased in a bid of the dreams and of the properties of those who did not know how to keep themselves with the open eyes, with the enough strength to cauterize a dagger’s profuse wound called memory.
Who am I to martyrize saints that, involved in their fatuous life’s sins, prefer to uproot their sadness with fickleness? Nobody, that is me, nobody, by name and surname. It is really unimportant to change at this time what has been given to me in front of a cement font and of supposed waters. It is better to be the wind trespassing the open windows’ crevices of a rusty and fetid pavilion of the old classrooms that protect the wanderers. It is better to be the stream that washes a lady’s feet emaciated because of her fleeing, looking at her dress ripped up by the assaults of those who walk around looking for a forgiveness in the abysses and in the precipices. It is better to be what I am not, since in order to do that it would be enough to summon the one with the bright smile, the one of the rooted pulpit, the immortal, because she does not know about death but her own craft.
Those men and women that desist when confronting pain; those that abandoned this flask that is sitting on my palms, imploring my caresses when confronting the lack of rescue in their owners’ hands, are the main characters of the fortune that now marks me and follows me; they are who make my story.
But I should not talk about them; they are merely shadows on the streets, lighted by an unwilling street-lamp that undresses its fires on the covered backs of women that walk around with their tied umbrellas, enslaved to their waists. I must talk about the flask and myself, about my life, about my sorrow, about my ghost.
There are stories, legends, myths, fantasies that emerge from the glorious and corrupted bowels of different contents that hesitate on their masters’ pulse. All are beautiful, some are sad, other are melancholic, these are bitter, those are happy, but all of them have something in common, a word that links them and threads them forming a woven mural, depending on the dirty and ingrained feet of the travelers of forgotten baggage. Life and recollections! Memories and customs! To open such contains, ages’ treasures that have left in their pace their inane and charismatic odour, is to turn around over your own footprints so as to reach the bow from where the first arrow has appeared. To survive from such sword without bleeding is a heroes’ feat, an immortal’s feat; yet, to these poor and worldly humans, to this pathetic and forgotten lover, it is to flee from the cloistered existence.
Enough! I have talked enough and I have told just a few.
I opened the narrowed-neck flask, hoping to see appearing, among crafts and spells, an old fairy’s image or a strange goblin, that would swear before the heavens, or before their hells, to make me immortal or just an ill-bred child. Yet it did not, it did not emerge from that abysmal bottom’s bottle the silhouette of a winged being or of an ill-fated entity. Only perfume, only the forgotten essence that a lady showed off some day in the neck, feeling the gallant noise of a lover who passed by her side. One more adornment on an overloaded nature, fearful and shy as the time goes by. It is worthless to say that I was disappointed and left the bottle on the table among vain writings and simple verses, embittered by an attempt to emulate what one day was shaped. There the bottle remained, with its broad form in the abysm, pleasant and thin in the top, as if it was trying to tell me that in order to reach the dictated fierceness’s abysms, one just has to arrive, there is sufficient space. But, at the same time, in order to reach the limits that the angels and archangels, virgins and saints, protect, one has to exert oneself instead of choosing an easy life.
Alas, those angels doodled on the cathedrals’ vaults, with their narrow smiles and their curls tightening the winds’ caresses! Alas, those archangels with their sheathed swords, fierce warriors and guardians, offensive and defensive, who will lend their arms immediately before everything ends with a second coming! Alas, those uncovered-bosom’s virgins inviting us to be pure in the middle of the heaven’s fierce agony! Alas, those saints of accumulated names in the calendar are always disposed to arrive when they are called to the duel! None of them has felt the life, since in order to acquire their services and occupations, it was only one more step to climb and then to exist; life is nothing else but an irony placed on a chessboard. All of them were happy because they had as a certainty their lack of suffering.
I could imagine those mythical beings greeting with the palm of their open right hand; holding unknown bodies; pleading that their lives were not natural but acquired, that anybody can obtain it, but only if their souls are disposed to. Disposed to? Bah, in dispositions the world succumbs in front of their adorations. Those who have never felt their chests trembling at the vision of their lovers’ image discovering their own bodies among caresses and blind sights must open their arms and be disposed. That who has seen the dawn as something generous and faithful, without thinking that it is the farthest moment before the new farewell, must laugh. Every being that has never spread blood in form of pearly drops before the last bed that will hold its lover, a bed that only admits an alone character, must be happy. Coin tosses, dices, cards… whatever… The Fortune! We call these modern times the age of the lights. Lights that go beyond the bright of a diurnal star, which walk with its golden cloak, with its provincial entourage following a festive cortège that will end at the sepulcher; but it is only an age of darkness, of wise and cultured insolence, where we are happy about knowing that we do not know anything at all. Yes, those angels fluttered before my eyes, but a phantom with body and arms existed behind me.
I turned my sight, shocked, sceptical, frightened. Conscience has a weak point and it is precisely its pride of knowing itself a knowing being. There she was, just as I had seen her in the bed of marble and stone. With her white dress, she never wore other; with her golden necklace holding my silver ring around her neck; with her earrings; with her sandals instead of her stiletto heel, which gave her, by merely dignity, the gift of the height and of pride. If only she had known that she possessed the perfect stature to reach the truth of my heartbeats, she would not prefer those needles that intimidated the wild flowers at the hill; but I never told her anything about it, there was never an opportunity to think about the future. What is the Future? It is the possibility of going on with the pantomime.
Her hair, scratched by a butterfly comb, danced with the whisper’s specter that held itself absorbed and with its mouth sealed. A golden breeze; filaments of a virgin and her dresses. Her eyes were exactly as I had known them, but they were closed, even so I believed them opened, looking at me… loving me. She was completely herself, she was everything she had been, at least what I remembered she had been.
She did not open her lips or her eyes; she approached to my body, just a few steps, just a proud smile of distance. She walked blindly, but she did not stumble on my adult life’s toys; there were no more swords, only paint-brushes; there were no more wooden horses, only chairs and rickety old beds; there were no more scattered illusions on the floor, disposed in a chaotic order, ready to be chosen in the needed moment, now there was only a black-legged spider with its eyes covered by penumbra which crossed my hopes’ emptiness.
Startled, the fear mixed with eagerness produces a strange mixture, I raised myself from the chair that contained my body from my waist to the beginning of my dreams. I staggered, I was almost about to caress the floor with my entire body and with my white and sick head. Yet, I did not fall; my eyes reached her face’s closed eye-sockets, looking frightened the opposite wall to her back. There was no body, but figure indeed; she was not tangible, yet she was there. I started to desire her sight’s curse, game of witchcraft and spells that transforms the peace in free will, in suspicious choices that battle against the happy and playful Fates, with their skinny hands, holding an old scissor of silver and obsidian. She did not open her eyes, but she stopped herself before me, as if my raising were a command that forced her feet and her legs.
There was no sign of wrinkles, loyal bearers of the years, on her face; it was exactly as I had remembered it, if to the memory is bestowed some credulity.
There was a competition between her face and her dress. An affable struggle to rule over the whiteness. Her dress was sliding on her back, on her bosom and on her waist, falling on vague slopes until it caressed her sandals, coveting the peace of her figure, of her cheeks, in other times filled with tenderness and fire, of her forehead, a guardian of stories that were never told. Why did I have to be the one who broke such a sublime commandment? I want to believe that it was the Solitude who compelled me to reveal everything that was relied on me one day.
With her eyes closed, I do not know what I would do if she had spread them on me, she extended her arm to touch my chest, right before my heartbeats, and she stopped exactly where the senses demand to know the difference between the reality and the dreams. As an answer, I extended my arms, opening their hands, trying to reach her head and to caress her skin, trying to steal a few of reality from the dream’s intoxication.
She made the first movement… there were no sensations. Only the wind knows what it is to caress without crying out for attentions.
She was there! I swear it on my soul. An oath, if you want it. She was there!
Her hand, commanded by an instinct of preservation, went to the bottle, to that open flask, which inundated her conscience with melancholic fragrances.
She wanted to disappear, to cover herself with oblivion, to abandon me again! No, I would not allow it!
I turned to the table and hold, with a drastic movement, the flask that paled in my hands. My attempt was a success. She did not reach it, and she will never do it.
Then she opened her eyes for the last time, and from her lips, with a voice that was only a remembrance of what it used to be, emerged a question: why?
The recollections talk, the memories sing, but the longings cry and moan.
There was no answer to her question, and it will never exist as long as the vital substance keeps emerging from this flask, a mixture that restrains the Death from my life, from her presence, from the one who departed in Her arms, fatuous moon!, from the one who dared to return to my hands.
The phantom continues in this place, with her golden and variable hair, standing before the open flask as long as my will decides to keep it in that way.
Why?