The following morning … the sneakers, the backpack, and there you are, walking beneath the implacable sun. How much time will pass before you see them again? A dark mood comes over you: maybe half a year, maybe a year, maybe more. But, as you go on walking, your disillusion gradually vanishes. The choir of singing crickets makes you optimistic. The next time, when you come back, then you really will dedicate yourself to the monograph you planned to write about her. Today you will whisper this into her ear in the stillness of her studio. And after having told her … afterward … in your head an orchestra booms, playing Beethoven’s Dadadadaaaa! Dadadadaaaa! because … because after, you will embrace her, yes, today, yes! In your mind’s eye you can see her hair, teeth, lips … But also Radhika, wrapped in a little orange towel that barely covers anything, that Indian goddess with a body like a stretching leopard. You will embrace one of them and out of the corner of your eye you will watch the other as she takes off her white lace panties and hangs them, together with the towel, in the bathroom, so that your trembling fingers will meet no obstacles when they decide to discover everything that a short time ago was timidly hidden beneath the orange towel … God! You wipe your hand across your forehead.
On the path, before you can see the white house, you sit under a tree. You want to rest for a while, rest quietly in the shade and admire the vineyards bathed in the apricot-colored light … You still feel the palm of Patricia’s hand on your cheek. It is for you that she has changed, it is for you that she has stopped living imprisoned in the armor-plating and mask of a successful painter. What more can she offer you?
What more can she still give you? you say to yourself with a smile of well-being and you stretch yourself under an olive tree, resting your head on your backpack. Patricia. She gave you your journey, your path. The path that leads nowhere, like the tracks through the fields, like the trails made by woodcutters, that, when you least expect it, vanish into the trees. And, suddenly, you know you will never write the book. Why? You don’t want to make a career for yourself, you don’t long for success. You don’t want what happened to your grandfather to happen to you. Only tall trees are cut down, the short ones, which don’t have much wood, are not useful. You don’t want what happened to your father to happen to you. You want to dream. Nothing else. Isn’t that enough?
You could spend the rest of your life under this tree, alone, happy to be in the world, listening to the clicking of the crickets and the chirping of the cicadas and the whisper of the leaves in the olive trees. Who knows what might happen to you today at the house of the cypresses. You tremble. Again, you see the two laughing masks and the four rows of white teeth, hahahahahahahha! Two terrible goddesses of mockery.
And if … if you don’t go?
You make yourself comfortable under the tree. With your head sunk back on the backpack, with your eyes focused on the tapestry of dark leaves embroidered on a turquoise background, you recall Patricia’s hair. And her eyes with the tulip pistils, which are able to float across space. Have you conquered that woman … But, what are you talking about? Was there really some kind of struggle involved … ? You have conquered her, what more can she offer you? No, there is no need for you to go and see her.
You make yourself comfortable under the tree. But you don’t stop seeing the laughing masks, the four rows of white teeth, the goddesses of mockery, more horrifying than the Furies themselves. And, in the tapestry of dark leaves embroidered on a turquoise background, something begins to take shape … and, all at once, the color orange gives a shout, yes, it is an orange towel opening slowly, very slowly, like a curtain rising in an opera house, and what is behind the curtain, what is on the stage, is a gift for your eyes only. But the orange color gradually fades and the stage disappears under the mist of the summer heat.
And then, you feel another kind of heat, a more direct kind: Patricia’s fingers. With her palm on your cheek, you go to sleep while the sea breeze spreads your hair, playfully, the way her fingers did the other day. You smile, sleepily … and a dragonfly rests comfortably on a blade of grass.