When I was 11, London was a sequence of vignettes in a textbook, a collection of drawings of double-deckers and police caps, a mantra: Oxford, Trafalgar and Piccadilly Circus, a delightful vibration in the red lips of Miss A. London was gentle and mysterious, more alive in fiction than in reality. The country was a doodle of a handful of arrows over the head of William the Conqueror. Again, gentle and magic, like a Harry Potter stuff before Harry Potter. The landladies were fat and quite smokers, Mary was gorgeous and the main character of the course, a guy, a total failure. English was a set of dreadful drills and the audition of the forecast, the very top of the test. There was a dozen ways for naming the rain; Shakespeare was a man strangled in a neck clothe, always holding a quill pen, always bald, always wearing a goatee. The time was said in sharps and o'clocks; the verbs, eat-ate-eaten. Pronunciation, a deep impossibility. The whole language of songs and streets bore little resemblance with the studied lessons.
What I now see daily used to belong to a distant realm, to an unreachable, mysterious land. London boiled in my imagination and so far and unapproachable it looked like that I was content with contemplating it sparkling through the glass, as the thoughts were not indeed mine or could not ever be seized or fastened.
I don't know why from time to time I come to think about this. I guess I miss things being this way. I wish I could relish again the mystery of those virginal days, only for a quick second. (That should be plainly enough, in the same way you don't need more than that to gather a score of memories from the wake of a smell). If you look straight into the eyes of life, and you are in the proper mood, you shall not find more than a pair of black, tiny pin-heads (shark's eyes), full of delusion.
No comments:
Post a Comment