#prosewritersclique

[kantkid]

“You loved me with a depth I wasn’t used to, and I started to fear you. To my eyes, you were the part of myself I didn’t have the courage to become. I was afraid of your judgement, of how pure you appeared in front of me: nothing to hide, your eyes so bright and conscious I could barely stand the look of it” he said, with a sore voice, once again avoiding eye contact. He was still terribly beautiful, in the sparse light of candles, but now more like the boy she had loved than the cruel god that haunted her dreams. He lit another cigarette and finally raised his pale eyes into hers: “you know, I never liked to feel vulnerable. It wasn’t meant to last”.

[starnymphs]

I was cute the other day.

[kantkid]

They were in love, I thought, and so was I perhaps. “It is so strange, to see you in love. It’s not like you at all” I told Isabella as she offered me a glass of wine. “I used to hate this word, ‘love’, so often heard from the mouths of priests” she told me with a harsh voice, and warmth on her cheeks (wine? Emotion?). I understood very well what she meant. Even after losing my faith in early adulthood, the pale hand of religion still had a firm grip on my shoulder, like the corpse of someone I had feared as a child. Devoid of all meaning, the old formulas of religious rituals were still fresh in my memory: Ave Maria, mater Dei, ora pro nobis. In a strange, inexplicable way that we’re all familiar with, what scared us in childhood brings us to how we think today of love. And love to me was this: kneeling, asking, grieving. Desire and absence, eros and prayer, ecstasy and guilt, still inseparable to my eye. Amor Dei; Remissio peccatorum. I walked by her side, observing the frescoes she was showing me. She stopped in front of the figure of a martyr: “Look- she said, nose upwards to the ceiling, hand guiding my stare- Isn’t it a bit gory? The similarity between holy scenes and horror movies always fascinated me; as it did the quiet formality of the pact between heaven and hell, that controls the destiny of human souls with the precise ineluctability of bureaucracy. Do you remember, the endless hours in religion class? Even in literature, Dante with his creepy description of sinners and his gloomy portraits of saints. My God, no wonder we were sad in high school.” Before I could say anything, Robin appeared from behind me asking for a lighter, and took Isabella’s hand in his. A pang of jealousy hit me as she smiled: I hated him, I envied his elegance and the charm he had over her. I watched them walking away on the open balcony, thinking about what she had just told me about the blood of saints. Their hands nonchalantly chained on the windowsill suddenly evoked the holy paintings I used to stare at in my boring Sunday mornings. How the blood on the hands of saints always reminded her of murder. And so was it to me, their love: rot and purity, purity and rot.

[kantkid]

After a few drinks, I usually became part of the fairy world of Robin’s guests: dames in white fur coats dancing on the balcony among clouds of smoke, elegant young men tangled to long-haired beauties on the hotel sofa, women who came and went between the rooms, talking about politics and art. And I frequently made love.

[kantkid]

And yet in Venice, before leaving it forever, I understood something most important about myself and my art, which is my only form of expression: we write about the things that haunt us, in an attempt to be free from what we loved too much, in an attempt to prevent it from destroying us.

[kantkid]

It was the first time I saw a girl half naked, and yet even in those enlightening circumstances I couldn’t think of Isabella’s strange beauty without thinking of her as I knew her: alert, reserved, ironic. I couldn’t think of her body without also seeing her put together way of moving it, her enquiring gaze, and the habit she had of lifting her chin a bit when she was looking at you.

[kantkid]

While apparently condemning her casual absenteeism from society, he secretly admired her independence from it. While he was so bound to what that restrict set of people said of him that he attended the parties and respected the rituals of the rich with the regularity of a full time job, he admired how carelessly she floated in and out polite society, remaining her usual charming self whether she was a part of it or not. In her times of reclusion, surrounded only by sloppy old friends and a bunch of grey haired academics, she maintained the same calm grace and the same carelessness of when every local newspaper had a gossip column dedicated to her. In her moments of disgrace, she seemed to never miss the status of society’s darling, and yet she was genuinely amused by it when she had it back. It was inexplicable both to the socialites and society’s detractors, but I think she simply avoided the one mistake both categories seemed to fall into: to overestimate the importance of such a frivolous thing, in one sense or the other. She regarded her social status as nothing more than a superficial source of amusement. Her life was elsewhere.

[kantkid]

What does it mean to be a woman? Loneliness. People laughing at you and no one reaching out in solidarity. But I discovered now a deeper quality of womanhood: something secret, unseen and unspoken. Beautiful, wild and impossible to seize with force. You can rip a woman open and drench your bare hands in her blood looking for it but you will not find it. It will only be seen if it’s given.