(I) -II- -III-
The Stamp Album: -IV- -V- -VI- -VII- -VIII- -IX- -X- -XI- -XII-
In the Municipal Park: -XIII- -XIV- -XV- -XVI-
Springtime Twilight: -XVII-
The Villa: -XVIII- -XIX- -XX- -XXI- -XXII- -XXIII- -XXIV- -XXV- -XXVI- -XXVII-
Bianka’s Lineage: -XXVIII- -XXIX- -XXX- -XXXI- -XXXII- -XXXIII-
Hiatus: -XXXIV- -XXXV- -XXXVI- -XXXVII-
Finale: -XXXVIII- -XXXIX- -XL-
Spring
I
THIS IS the story of a certain spring, a spring that was more real, more vivid and more dazzling than the other springs, a spring that simply took seriously its literal text, that inspired manifesto written in the brightest of festival reds — the red of a wax seal or the red of a page from the calendar, the red of a coloured pencil or the red of enthusiasm — an amaranth of timely telegrams from far away...
All springs begin in this way, from those enormous and astounding horoscopes, beyond the scale of a single season of the year. And in each of them — be it nevermore said, let me say it here — there is everything: endless processions and manifestations, revolutions and barricades. And through them all at a certain moment the hot wind of remembrance blows — that boundlessness of sadness and intoxication, searching in vain for the adequate in reality.
But then, those exaggerations and those culminations, those accruals and those ecstasies come into bloom — they enter whole into the fluttering of cool leafage, into springtime gardens stirred by the night, and those sounds absorb them. Thus do all springs betray themselves, one by one, submerged in the breathless rustle of the blossoming parks, in their swelling and their suffusion. They forget about their promises; they let fall leaf after leaf from their testament.
This one spring had the courage to persevere, to remain faithful and to endure all. After so many unsuccessful attempts, ascents and incantations, it wanted to be really constituted at last, to explode upon the world as the universal, and now definitive spring.
That gale of events, that hurricane of calamities: the happy coup d’état, those exalted, lofty and triumphal days! If only the pace of my story might capture their ravishing and inspired cadence, adopt the heroic tone of that epopee, keep time with its march, to the rhythm of that springtime Marseillaise!
Spring’s horoscope is so measureless! Who can take it amiss that it is read in any one of a hundred different ways, contriving blindly and syllabising in all directions, lucky if anything at all can be deciphered amid the misleading chatter of the birds? Spring reads its horoscope forwards and backwards. It loses the meaning and starts again at the beginning, in all of its versions, its thousand alternatives, its trills and its twitters. For spring’s text is full of meaning in its implications and insinuations, ellipses dotted without letters in the empty blue. And in the vacant gaps between the syllables, the birds capriciously insert their own guesses and suppositions. This story, therefore, following the example of that text, will be drawn along many branching tracks, and thoroughly intertwined with springtime dashes, sighs, and dots.
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