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 and barred, swelling with the ever darker steel of a storm, silent and 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 the buds were sticky, like itchy, painful and festering eczema — now they are healed by the cool greenery, elaborately scarred over, leaf upon leaf, and compensated a hundredfold by their renewed vigour. Always at the ready, beyond measure and without reckoning, they now cover and stifle under their dark verdancy the forlorn call of the cuckoo, hearing its distant, 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 ominous the roar of the parks becomes, the more intense is the calcareous white of the houses, a torrid reflex of the scorched ground, shining without the aid of the sun, 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 from the congealed hum of those overcast days — something sensational, something enormous beyond all measure.
I ponder 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?
Somewhere, that shape for which we have always reserved a space in our fundamental being is growing and consolidating — that out of breath hiatus which the parks could never fill with their intoxicating aroma of lilacs.
> -XXXVII- >