And along the many lands a precious beloved place takes the soul of man through his eyes and his hands as wholesome and as bloomed is this little tree only in this land it blooms better than in any other place as the wax is made of honey in the honeycomb and as great people live behind narrow fences so long as the masters make laws governed by logic to control the people’s wings and tie down their feet so long as in flowerless ravines and on rocks with no verdure in the orchards and in the faraway skies love is fed by hatred and by anger and by war and the Paradise is guarded by the sword or by the fire
VII You bloomed under the sun that will go down someday and I sustain myself under the sun that hasn’t risen yet. Darkness is taking the space between us. The sea still gesticulates in your chest time has been trapped in your lips twilight perches between your legs the wind fades away and rewrites your dress. Your negative mould petrified on our sandy space.
I, too, was part of the jungle. Our lovemaking grew into a world of dreams. Apacuana had the power to take me to a hitherto unknown God, beyond the Church, into an expanse of uncharted feelings as miraculous as any star-filled sky. Her body became a refuge, a place for revival, like an inexhaustible spring of healing waters. It was a gate past which I discovered a world where loneliness was banished. I was shocked to discover she was part of me, as much as Bartolomé was, perhaps more. When we lay in one another’s arms, I forgot to think before I spoke. I told her things that would have never have left my lips before I knew her. It astonished me that we could learn compassion from our own tenderness. This was not a lesson in a book, or a lecture from a priest, and it was certainly not everyone’s duty to learn it, but pleasure was natural to her, and she taught me that my tongue could talk to her in ways I had never imagined possible. And it was these conversations of pure touch, with our expanding vocabulary of caresses, that I yearned for, that I craved, as much as the need to satisfy my own desire. And so I came to value frankness as a form of kindness. She loved me for who I was, not for what I represented. The truth was simple with her. She began to trust me with her thoughts. She talked to me, and she told me how she feared for her future, for the future of her people, and especially for Matyba and Padumay. Apacuana was wise beyond her years, perhaps wise beyond her sex. Or were all women wiser than men and men were trained by other men not to see? That morning, at the base of that tree, as we lay staring at the sky, I suddenly asked myself what, in God’s name, was I doing with her? She must have read my mind, for she turned to me. “If my bleeding stops,” she said, “will you stay?”
Five days of hard drinking had passed since the killings, and I saw drunken people sleeping in the most unlikely places. I left the hut for bare necessities only, but Apacuana came to see me several times…
Barge The red barge rocks slowly its mind is not completely made up to the right of the light to the left of the light? The red barge full of wood chips on its way to the paper mill its mind dwells in ambivalence to the right or the left? Your eyes are like a storm tears and fulgurations from the left to the right or from the right to the left?
Manolis Aligizakis 