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You’re sleeping, you’re not dead. I’m sure of this, you can’t die. In Jan
Toorop’s painting The vagabonds you’re sleeping under a willow. At the evening
twilight the sky was a dim glimmer under a cope of black clouds: it was going to
rain and you sheltered yourself under that willow, you sat on the moss. The moss
was so tender and the lullaby of the willow’s leafy branches so sweet that you
fell asleep. The moss was so green and the willow so luxuriant that you didn’t
realize you was falling asleep in a graveyard. At nightfall the vagabonds gone
out of their graves since they were unable to stand anymore the stench of their
dead souls. During the day they don’t pay attention to that stench, they have
something else in mind: making money over money. But at night their dead souls
torment them forcing them to crawl out of the graves and to rove seeking the
soul of someone else, to rove trying to buy or to steal the soul of someone
else. Now they’ve notice you asleep there, right in the middle of their
graveyard and they crave for your soul. But a woman watches over you: she wears
a cope black as the clouds but under that cope glimmers a dress candid as the
dawn’s light after a rainy night. She gazes at the vagabonds with her huge dark
eyes so that into the abyss of her eyes the horror shall fall and die. She has
placed on your hair a wonderful red thorn – less rose so that its scent should
prevent the stench of the vagabonds dead souls from poisoning you. She has
placed on your blue dress some white roses with long thorny stems: what has the
power of revivifying the soul costs sacrifice and the vagabonds are used to
regard at sacrifice as something worthless, they wouldn’t let those thorns wound
their hands. They tear to shreds your blue dress but the thorns of the white
roses prevent their rapacious hands from seizing your soul. At the morning
twilight the vagabonds will go back to their graves and the woman who watches
over you will dress you with a dress made of the same material of her own dress,
the touch of her tapering fingers will be so delicate that it will not rouse
you. At dawn the woman who has watched over you will fade into the candid light
and you will wake up wearing a lovely new dress, a candid dress with black
sleeves. But you won’t pay attention to your new candid dress since you won’t
remember your blue dress of the evening before, you won’t remember anything. You
will only know that you have to resume your path. You will be about to go up a
stairway when a scent will attract your attention. Yes, it will happen exactly
as in that Waterhouse’s painting, The shrine. The scent will come from a shrine
on the edge of the path, a shrine built to honour someone who has been made
sacred by sacrifice. But you will pay attention only to some roses into some
small blue vases, blue as that dress of yours which has been torn by the
vagabonds. But you won’t remember that blue dress, you won’t remember anything.
You will bend over the roses and you will know only that you love their scent,
you will know only that you are alive. You will resume your path and you will go
up the stairway looking at the glimmer of the sky through the trees. And your
black sleeves will be as the black branches of a willow during a rainy night,
and your candid dress will be as the dawn’s light after a rainy night. |
