Spring: -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-
XXXVI
THE DAYS are sinking deeper and deeper into shadow and contemplation. The sky is closed, barred, swelling with the ever darker steel of a storm, and silent, swirling oppressively. The scorched and patchy ground has stopped breathing. Only the gardens are growing, out of breath; their foliage spills over, drunken and oblivious, as they cover every available crevice with their cool, leafy substance. (The pimples of buds were sticky, like itchy, painful and festering eczema, but now they are healed by the cool greenery, scar over multifariously, leaf upon leaf, and are compensated a hundredfold by vigour — at the ready, beyond measure and without reckoning. Now they cover and stifle under their deep green the forlorn call of the cuckoo, hearing its distant and muffled voice only where it is sewn into deep viridariums, lost under an inundation of exultant blooming.)
How is it that the houses shine so in that darkened landscape? The more indistinct the roar of the parks becomes, the more intense grows the calcareous white of the houses, a torrid reflection of the scorched ground, shining without the sun’s aid, ever more brightly as if in a moment’s time it will become flyblown with the black smears of some bright and spotted sickness.
Dogs run about intoxicated, their noses in the air. Agitated and frantic, rummaging in the downy greenery, they have caught the scent of something.
Something wants to ferment in the congealed hum of those overcast days — something revelatory, something enormous beyond all measure.
I wonder what event could equal this negative sum of expectation, building up into an enormous charge of negative electricity — what could match this catastrophic barometric drop?
That shape, which in our fundamental being we have always reserved a space for, is growing and consolidating somewhere — that out of breath hiatus, which the parks could never fill with their intoxicating aroma of lilacs.
> -XXXVII- >