Everything is a color. Every emotion is a color. Silence is white. White is a color I can’t stand; it doesn’t have borders. To tell a white lie, to be a white elephant, to raise a white flag, to leave a page white, to have a white strand of hair … when white isn’t even a color. It is nothing, like silence: a nonentity, lacking words and music. To be silent is to be white. I cannot be in silence or alone—they’re the same thing. I get a pain in my gut. I’ve never understood it. It compels me to get on my scooter, which is now in bad shape, without brakes (when will I have it repaired?), and wander around aimlessly, gazing into the eyes of young girls who I happen to see so that I know I’m not alone. If one of them looks back at me, I exist.
Why am I like this anyway? I lose control. I am unable to be alone. I need … I don’t know what. What madness! To compensate, I have an iPod. Oh yeah! Because when you go out and you know that the day awaiting you has the flavor of dusty asphalt at school and a tunnel of boredom swamped by homework, parents, and a dog afterward, again and again until death do us part, only the right soundtrack can save you. You jam two earbuds in your ears and enter into a different dimension. You enter into the right color, the right emotion. If I need to fall in love: soft rock. If I need to recharge: heavy metal. If I need to get pumped up: rap with a crude array of profanity. That way, I’m not alone: white. There is someone to keep me company and give color to my day.
Not that I get bored. I have a thousand projects, ten thousand desires, a million dreams to realize, a billion things to initiate. But I can never start on them, because nobody is interested. And then I say to myself: Leo, why the fuck do you care? Let it go; enjoy what you have.
Life only comes around once, and when it becomes white, my computer is the best way to color it. I can always find someone to chat with (my screen name is ThePirate, like Johnny Depp.) I know how to listen to the others. It makes me feel good. Or maybe I take my brakeless scooter out and wander around aimlessly. If I don’t have anywhere to go, I stop by Niko’s and we play a couple of songs, he on bass and I on electric guitar. One day we’ll become famous, we’ll have our own band, we’ll call it The Cutthroats. Niko tells me that I should sing because I have a beautiful voice, but I’m embarrassed. With the guitar, the fingers sing, and fingers never blush. Nobody boos a guitarist, but a singer …
If Niko is busy, I meet up with some others at the bus stop. The stop is right in front of the school, where every kid in love has declared it to the whole world. You always find someone there, and at times, some girls. At times, even Beatrice, and I go there for her.
It’s strange: in the morning nobody wants to be in school, in the afternoon you find everybody there. The difference is that there are no vampires then, which is to say, no professors—the bloodsuckers that go back home and lock themselves in their sarcophagi, waiting for their next victims. Even though, contrary to the nature of vampires, the professors go out in the light of day.
But if Beatrice is in front of the school, it is another thing completely. Green eyes that, when opened wide, take up her whole face. Red hair that, when she lets it down, falls all over you. A few well-chosen words. If she were a film, you would have to invent a new genre. If she were perfume: sand early in the morning, when the beach is alone with the sea. What color? Beatrice is red. As love is red. A tempest. A hurricane that sweeps you away. An earthquake that shatters your body to pieces. That’s the way she makes me feel every time I see her. She doesn’t know it yet, but one of these days I will tell her.
Yes, one of these days I will tell her that she is the one for me and I am the one for her. And this way, there is no way out; when she realizes this, everything will be perfect, like in the movies. I only have to find the right moment and the right hairstyle. Because I think it comes down to a hair problem. Only if Beatrice would ask me to would I cut it. But then what if I lose my strength like that guy in history? No, the Pirate cannot cut his hair. A lion without a mane is not a lion. My name isn’t Leo for nothing.