In a world of miracles, cannot everything
happen...?
In the nudie camp we had invited the non-nudies – I remember I was
sitting on a table with not too many others, joking about the weird stuff
that happened in the world.
Then other groups of people came and started sitting themselves
around the same elongated picnic table – a woman sat at my side – I
looked at her it seems at the same time that another of the fellows
already sitting down stared (perhaps too intently) at her – so she went
into a rage of sorts, ejaculating in high dudgeon: “What! What’s the
matter! Something wrong? Why the bloody pernickety stares?” –
all this glaring at me. I replied, with an apologetic smile: “Just a
roving eye; sorry.”
Then it started getting too crowded, the wine flowing, the sandwiches
jumping along the table; I felt trapped, so I got up and searched with
the eyes a route of escape – the best way was to get on top of the table
among the food and the drinks and the bouquets and the hands, and
run for it to the nearest corner in order to leap then to the floor, free;
only that when I got up, my underwear (the only item of clothing I wore)
got caught on a sliver of the bench and as soon as I got over the table I
had to hold and hide my balls (my shorts torn and hanging down to the
middle of my thigh) – so I said, laughing, especially to the lady at my
side, a non-nudie mighty interested now: “Just a wandering eye,
indeed,” but everybody was already making fun of me, so that I ran
to the end of the table and leaped to safety.
I went to the meadow to look at the sky with the others. The seals (so
you’d swear they were – same shape, same sheen, same impression of
ponderousness,) the seals in the air were still talking among
themselves. The sky was a spotless deep blue, the “seals” all black, with
fins that looked like rudimentary hands. It was utterly amazing.
How do they do it? How do they manage to... And they look so
intelligent, stoichiologically surmising and all... Balancing their words,
or thoughts... What..., what kind of uplifted animals or celestial beings
are those...? Mighty puzzled, we were asking all kinds of questions.
They had appeared in the sky a couple of days ago. That was the main
reason we had invited the non-nudies of the neighboring camp up to
our domain. To discuss and comment about the wonderful apparition
of the shiny magical beasts conversing by themselves up there, and
aloft. Such miraculous situations. But now lo...! At last the “seals”
seemed to have arrived to an understanding of sorts... No more weighty
conferences atop our wondering heads... They had started drifting
away, only that now there were millions of them drifting in the same
direction – opposite the sun that had started its slow descent... The
seals were “flying” (without wings) higher and higher and faster away;
only that now, come from all the corners of the firmament, there were
many, many of them, and their shapes were not identical to those we
had come to know; some of their shapes were a bit comical even, almost
cartoonish, grotesque... And yet, the whole, how imposing, daunting,
stirring... The wife of another fellow was at my side, we embraced while
we looked up... She was a beautiful woman, bronzed, strong, with short
hair... And now we embraced still tighter... The sky was changing into
astonishing shapes... The forms the sky was conceiving were now
mainly like enormous, heaven-encompassing peacock’s tails, with
chiefly brown and white rhomboids, but also rhomboids in other
iridescent tonalities... In a world of so many miracles, why should
anything, at the end of the day, be impossible...? I remember
commenting – and she holding me tighter.
Unfortunately a superannuated plane appeared now very low, licking
the trees, its motor making the sick noise of giving up its ghost... We
were afraid the plane – all black, and heavy, all of metal often rusted at
the seams – might fall upon us. But it fell a bit off the camp. We saw
immediately a thick plume of dark smoke. We rushed, she and me, only
that we were by now a bit far off. And then we saw two naked young
women get out of the plane, no too much the worse for wear, a few
scratches and bruises and stains of grease and coal – they were wobbly,
but who knows from what, if from fear, or shame, or too much of an
intoxicating substance brewing inside them... There was nobody else
inside the wreck. The women were both very embarrassed; nobody
bothered them much. There was no fuel left in the plane; it didn’t really
burn, but it looked like a pile of junk.
We walked, the other’s wife and I, deep into the fields; we sat down
among the rows of recently planted oats; we kissed; we decided that we
were part of the miracle – the seals in the sky, the odd images sketched
in the firmament by the conjunction of the elements, the planes that fell,
all those signs of life and of mystery hidden and manifest – who knows
what’s really (really!) true. Everything might be possible – the return of
our selves – the return of we as we really are under these disguises of
flesh... “We might see ourselves again in a world undreamed,”
we concurred. Nothing has been discovered as yet. So many
possibilities ahead...
And then she got up. She went, so marvelous, a goddess into the sunset.
At length I got up and went into the opposite direction. I found on a
lame chair a pair of trunks that I got into. I walked past the camp. I
gathered a few bottles of orange juice that were unopened; my intention
was to carry them to the fringes, I didn’t want that they should spoil, go
to waste. Only that, lost in thoughts, by and by I had walked into the
wrong camp. There were some steep steps in front of me, a stairs
difficult to climb. Also I saw that there was a mechanical ladder working
not far from the stairs. Loaded with the dozen bottles of orange juice, I
started climbing the stairs. A fellow was atop them, dressed all in
yellow, in a sort of military uniform, with a pumped up cap like those
worn by generals. He started shouting. Actually he was congratulating
me. “Magnificent work, citizen compatriot!”
Then he was talking (shouting) to somebody behind him. “Behold,
soldiers, a pure clean fellow, a legal local citizen, a man of our kind,
climbing the stairs!”
Now I saw that behind him he had a company assembled – about
twenty young fellows all dressed martially, in yellow, all of them I
noticed holding in their right hand, not a rifle or another weapon, but a
bottle of milk (milk, I assumed, for the liquid inside it was all pure
white, as the liquid inside my bottles was pure orange.)
I had stumbled into a camp for blossoming right-wingers – a camp that
I knew to be not too far from ours (about thirty miles, I reckoned – that
must have been the large stretch along which I had gotten stranded.)
The commanding nut was haranguing his troops: “Then they will say
that only the dirty bastards, the tainted immigrants employ the stairs –
that we real McCoys are too degenerate to climb stairs, that we consider
it beneath our station... No way! Here you have a hero! Not only a
properly hued person, build like a demigod, and loaded to the gills to
boot, but also a man of quality: observe how fine his hands, behold the
classical shape of his nose... He looks to me like a rare product of the
heavens... And he climbs the stairs like an immigrant...! He doesn’t take
the easy mechanical way. He takes the hard bitter heroic way! We are
able to be strong and earthy too, my dear purebred clean-blooded
fledglings! Not only them are able to endure; we can too!”
They were looming huger and huger, a gigantic yellow egg about to
burst. I was in the middle of the stairs and the general, after effetely
glancing and smirking my way, gave an order: “Let’s meet the hero
halfway!”
The yellow boys came to me as an avalanche. I feared for the bottles. I
put them down one by one. And now I had to be embraced by each of
the boys. The general, from the upper rung was paternally smiling; very
straight, and proud. Now he gave another clashing order. “Climb to
the bottom and up! Let’s show the hero that we also can!”
The yellow blob went down and up in an exhalation. A quaint
demonstration at once of bearable stamina and acceptable
coordination. Then they stood behind their “general,” in correct
formation. The boss told them to be at ease, and they started drinking
eagerly from their bottles – I noticed that their bottles carried now my
orange juice. I peered down at my bottles – they had been all violated,
they were almost empty, or filled with murky milk. I left them there.
Silently I retraced my steps..., headed back to our nudie camp...
The night fell while I was still lost in the fields. The stars were so
strange. The sky was a complete snake with many eyes, many refulgent
eyes – What am I but a possibility, I said, trudging along,
bombed.
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