Gypsy's spell

words 1007



What if love existed only as an illusion kept behind closed eyes always aware of all the absurd prohibitions ?



Today as I sit here waiting for the police to arrive, I can finally look beyond your Nôh facemask you wear in front of each man.  I stare at your motionless body and thoughtless face with the most pathetic expression in my eyes.  Before, I could distinguish you from a thousand women and just for that, alone I hated you. 

But with all this, with all the hatred and dirt, I waited for you every night in the same dark bar, in the same chair, at the same table with the same wine in my glass until you eventually came back.  When I saw you again, you were dancing with another man.  You proved to be the most awful human, a body with no soul.

I wanted you to die.  I wanted to see your dead body and mourn you.

I clearly saw beyond the horizon now, beyond the reddish autumn sunset.  I could see now my burned thoughts left in total standby through the eyes of others gathered around your lifeless body.  Alcohol spoke for me in the end.

You lied to me!  You ended up being an illusion, an illusion I used as a guiding light but landed as fine sand in the desert of my desires.

My dreams were hardly ever reached, hardly desirable, hardly inspiring to you

People were talking sometimes and I had no doubt they were talking about you.  Your pagan being was marked from the beginning.  You were doomed to lie and cheat and I should have known your Scarlet red lips were lying.

They say that when you were about three months old you cried so hard it broke your mother’s heart.  Nothing soothed your suffering, not the lullabies, nor the gentle rocking.  Until one day when a convoy of nomadic gypsies stopped at the edge of the town.  In one of the tents was one woman named Orla.  Her little baby girl had perished immediately after birth and Orla’s tears never dried since.  One quiet night, while everybody was deep asleep, a baby’s cry reached Orla’s ears.  Is my little girl I hear crying?  She asked herself.  She started walking through the village until she heard the baby cry in front of a house: this is my child, she thought, and with quick steps she entered the home, opened the door to a room, stopping in front of the cradle where you were fiercely and inconsolably crying. 

“Lady, let me breastfeed the child!” the gypsy said to your perplexed mother.  For three days, before sunrise, Orla, the gypsy was in the house and soon you stopped crying while nursing at the gypsy’s bosom.  Her naked breast and face were turned towards the rising sun whispering-words known only to her. 

Orla, the gypsy woman disappeared without a trace one day but left behind her gypsy spell on you.  You were to bring pain and desolation to anybody bold enough to love you.

When I first saw you in the bar, you looked wild and beautiful, lips painted with red lipstick, cheap defilement of any conceivable purity, hair loose, left back framing your face like black smoke, with red nails, unequal, with high heels, too high and uncomfortable.  The white shirt with rough collar, the skirt that jumped in my eyes the first time.  Disgusting skirt!  But you liked it.  You looked at me and put your glass down, got up and came closer to me.  You hit the dance floor and danced as if no one else was around.

Tears run dry now as I remember that night, as if it lasted a thousand years.

You were incredible.  There was silence, a long silence, but I heard your beating heart.  I kissed you; I undressed you with slow but feral moves.

You beautiful gypsy!

I felt your thin body, trembling body under my kisses.  I can feel your body even now when I close my eyes!

The next day I realized that you were just a heap of body pleasures; I realized how miserable you could be.  Pathetic and cold.  You walked out and left behind only the lipstick stained sheets, your cheap perfume, and pain.

I knew one day I would kill you ... There are hundreds of ways to die.  You can die while your heart still beats and the world continues to spin on around you like I died.

After me pulling the trigger, you looked at me with surprised eyes, lifted your shoulders in shock, surprised and quizzical at what was happening .Your lips started moving looking for a questioning word but a quaint smile froze on your upper lip instead, trembling and dry.

You never thought that in the end things would happen this way.  A smiling mask with which you used to hide the anger and betrayal will be the last thing I see.

The old clock on the wall stopped for a moment, the whole world froze for a second.

Then time began to run again and the wall mirror flew in thousands of glittering pieces, each bearing frozen looks, reflections of me passing through decomposed, crossing the line bordering the absurd as the sirens sounded closer and closer.

*

There was a winding road down a Valley.  The road was undermined by patches of deep wounds left by the torrential rains so frequent in the valley and by the stumps of dead trees rooted skyward like a prayer.  There was also a Monastery suspended somewhere between heaven and earth, protected by several mountains like true pyramids guarding a fortress.  Down the valley, suddenly, a caravan of nomadic gypsies entered from one end of the road.  Wagons with tarpaulin sheltered children and elderly, while young Gypsy girls with bloom red skirts walked haughtily behind the caravan.

Amongst them, one gypsy woman would find a crying baby girl in town and nurse her before disappearing in a fog of spells and doomed destinies.