Mora
Mora: (Spanish) fem. noun. 1. Fruit of the moral, of oval figure composed of fleshy, soft, sweet and sour bubbles of red-purple colour// 4. Woman name.
Roma: (Spanish) fem. noun. 4. Capital of Italy.
Amor: (Spanish) fem. Noun. 1. A feeling of warm personal attachment or deep affection.// 4. a person toward whom love is felt.
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A thing of beauty is a joy forever:
its loveliness increases;
it will never pass into nothingness.
John KeatsI had almost fallen asleep opposite to the Barcaccia fountain with a personal translation of “After Reading Dante's Episode of Paolo and Francesca, A Dream” in my hands when, opening my eyes, I saw her for the first time. It was strange to note, firstly, the delicacy of her hands slicing the air with caution and symmetrical movements. Her smooth skin dressed her soft thin and elongated pair of hands, which, like trees in spring, were crowned with intense red fruits at the end of its flowering branches, nails neatly painted red at her fingertips.
A pair of green patches in the brown linen open jacket and the silky skin like morning in lakes, pure, unthinkably virginal when it becomes present every day, were the other two perfections that my eyes, still bothered by the glare, could not ignore. I was not unaware of the fact that there were no throngs of tourists disturbing me and interrupting my connection with the flows of water that fell from the sides and front of the fountain with rhythmic cadence. Her long legs in dark blue marched in front of the fountain by the opposite strda. When she reached the corner, caught by that perpetual need that every person has to feel the always elusive romance (as she confessed to me much later), she turned her head to the left and set her eyes at the famous steps. Not seeming to mind having to use thin-heeled shoes on the street of small irregular cobblestones. It was as she finished crossing the street and tried to restore sight to her usual front that our eyes met. The depth of her green eyes abducted men to a different dimension. I, as a mere mortal, mesmerized by the unknown, followed her, for a second, into the unknown, into the nook where the green turned black and the trap turned into magic. She, having noticed, having found me submerged into the depth of her eyes, walked around the fountain, and sat by my side.
A considerable time went by until she, taking the book gently from my hands, looked at it and said with care <<Keats is the personification of the perfect man, someone like him will never (again) exist>>. When she had finished whispering her words, I knew that what I had seen in the background of those green eyes could be shared by us wherever we were, probably for ever. We talked of Keats and Mills, of the films of Godard and the brilliance of Walt Disney, of the dichotomy Bernini-Borromini; we talked of Arden, Dior, Gandhi, Lennon and Maradona, the Punic wars, AIDS, the Queen of England and of the origin of dulce de leche. When we failed to agree on how to interpret the Shylock character, we decided to walk. Shakespeare had set us on our way.
On this side of the Tevere (the Tiber for me) she took me on a quite walk, in which only silence, me, her and the mild roar of the river accompanied each other, always calm, always absent, but always tangible. She made me contemplate the pale Fabrizio bridge while, across the river, she kept shaking her hands trying to de-focalize me of the scripture in Latin, which, at first sight, I could never understand. In Via del Templo we run in the depth of the streets, as poachers, between the pastel coloured buildings which, slightly darkened by the effect of a hiding sun behind a passing cloud, transformed themselves into some kind of difused.yellow.ocher.polen objects, which could only be appreciated deeply by the blurring eyes of a blind man. We sat on minimal chairs in a small table in the street and had that wounded heart black dark coffee which can be found anywhere in the world, but only tastes in such way in the marrow of this Mediterranean country. It would be a mortal sin to try to reduce to a description in words the food that accompanied our stay. None of those ‘plates’ should bear a name. Calling them anything would mean, somehow, to destroy the perfection of its essence, with the imperfection of syllables put together. The time and the roads and the indescribably shocking palaces and churches and buildings and stairways passed under our noses with the unparalleled speed of the always remaining ephemeral.
At a given instant, we sat in front of the Palazzo Cisterna. Via Giulia, perhaps, or the very long walk, had left me breathless. As the perfect silence came to us again, someone appeared to ask us about the name of the Church by which we were sitting. I probably returned a confused look. I never saw her face, but I am sure she gave me a complice wink before answering, in rusty English, that we spoke no Italian. The ride was marvelous. The Farnasse Square, had, minutes before, gifted us a passing rain, artifice of wind and fountain, which had moved her to dance alla Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face. I have no memory of having opened the corners of my lips so wide to smile as I did at that time. Roma granted me happiness and I, as its guest of honor, with open arms, received it.
On the Via Fori Imperiali, as the afternoon started to fall, we walked towards the Coliseum. It never crossed my mind to ask her where she was going that morning before we met. My eyes had dived into hers and ever since then, nothing other than what we did together was, to me, of any importance. We stopped at a very high figure opposite the Vittorino and she tirelessly amused me with stories on Trajan, Hadrian, Caesar and Nero. I thought I was in love when she understood, with empathic tuning, my obsession with Cicero and his democratic precocity. While I was returning from that trip to the Rome of the emperors, I found myself accidentally (or not), sitting, watching a show of force, drums and fire, at the Coliseum. It was while hearing that fabulous display of art and sensing the penultimate effort of the sun filtering between the cracks of one of the hundreds of ancient giant arches that I finally felt there was no portion of my senses left to be flooded. And abstracted from a reality that was so magic that it seemed not to be, I blinked for a stretched second, a stretched second during which I felt an indescribable calmness invading me from the chest to each of the portions of the rest of my mortal body.
A considerable time went by until she, taking the book gently from my hands, looked at it and said with care <<Keats is the personification of the perfect man, someone like him will never (again) exist>>. When she had finished whispering her words, I knew that what I had seen in the background of those green eyes could be shared by us wherever we were, probably for ever. We talked of Keats and Mills, of the films of Godard and the brilliance of Walt Disney, of the dichotomy Bernini-Borromini; we talked of Arden, Dior, Gandhi, Lennon and Maradona, the Punic wars, AIDS, the Queen of England and of the origin of dulce de leche. When we failed to agree on how to interpret the Shylock character, we decided to walk. Shakespeare had set us on our way.
On this side of the Tevere (the Tiber for me) she took me on a quite walk, in which only silence, me, her and the mild roar of the river accompanied each other, always calm, always absent, but always tangible. She made me contemplate the pale Fabrizio bridge while, across the river, she kept shaking her hands trying to de-focalize me of the scripture in Latin, which, at first sight, I could never understand. In Via del Templo we run in the depth of the streets, as poachers, between the pastel coloured buildings which, slightly darkened by the effect of a hiding sun behind a passing cloud, transformed themselves into some kind of difused.yellow.ocher.polen objects, which could only be appreciated deeply by the blurring eyes of a blind man. We sat on minimal chairs in a small table in the street and had that wounded heart black dark coffee which can be found anywhere in the world, but only tastes in such way in the marrow of this Mediterranean country. It would be a mortal sin to try to reduce to a description in words the food that accompanied our stay. None of those ‘plates’ should bear a name. Calling them anything would mean, somehow, to destroy the perfection of its essence, with the imperfection of syllables put together. The time and the roads and the indescribably shocking palaces and churches and buildings and stairways passed under our noses with the unparalleled speed of the always remaining ephemeral.
At a given instant, we sat in front of the Palazzo Cisterna. Via Giulia, perhaps, or the very long walk, had left me breathless. As the perfect silence came to us again, someone appeared to ask us about the name of the Church by which we were sitting. I probably returned a confused look. I never saw her face, but I am sure she gave me a complice wink before answering, in rusty English, that we spoke no Italian. The ride was marvelous. The Farnasse Square, had, minutes before, gifted us a passing rain, artifice of wind and fountain, which had moved her to dance alla Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face. I have no memory of having opened the corners of my lips so wide to smile as I did at that time. Roma granted me happiness and I, as its guest of honor, with open arms, received it.
On the Via Fori Imperiali, as the afternoon started to fall, we walked towards the Coliseum. It never crossed my mind to ask her where she was going that morning before we met. My eyes had dived into hers and ever since then, nothing other than what we did together was, to me, of any importance. We stopped at a very high figure opposite the Vittorino and she tirelessly amused me with stories on Trajan, Hadrian, Caesar and Nero. I thought I was in love when she understood, with empathic tuning, my obsession with Cicero and his democratic precocity. While I was returning from that trip to the Rome of the emperors, I found myself accidentally (or not), sitting, watching a show of force, drums and fire, at the Coliseum. It was while hearing that fabulous display of art and sensing the penultimate effort of the sun filtering between the cracks of one of the hundreds of ancient giant arches that I finally felt there was no portion of my senses left to be flooded. And abstracted from a reality that was so magic that it seemed not to be, I blinked for a stretched second, a stretched second during which I felt an indescribable calmness invading me from the chest to each of the portions of the rest of my mortal body.
When my blink was over and I opened my eyes, in a sharp but harmonic move of my tab, I could only perceive the smooth skin of a left hand posing over the totality of my shoulder. The cherry red nails neatly crowned the long fingers. <<Signore siamo arrivato a Fiumicino dieci minuti fa >>, the charming voice said to me. I looked around and saw no one but me and her, on board of what looked like a plane that had already landed. There were no arenas, or drums, or sun. There was no Coliseum. Instead, a themed silence invaded the scene. She remained standing next to my seat and extended by one more second (which lasted forever) the most perfect smile of round teeth that I have ever seen or will ever see again. She bearly breath out, motionless, waiting, probably, for my reaction. A paralysis owned my body or, perhaps, also momentarily, my mind. In my astonished confusion, I barely noticed the plastic gold batch at the height of her left biceps on her chest. Mora it said. I repeated with a happy, dim, passenger mumbling between my teeth: Mora . Of course, Mora. Through my memory, now materialized in her eyes that kept staring at mine, I saw a brick of the Coliseum or perhaps a drop of water falling sharply from the Trevi Fountain. And without saying another word, just smiling slightly, realizing that this place and this woman who, having been stuck in my chest for centuries that repeated cyclically during my trip, had stabbed me with a flooding of unreal happiness, I stood up and hurried my step. I left the aircraft and ran straight, without stopping, to Piazza Spagna, to wait. To simply wait, sitting on the edge of the fountain, with my hands on the ink of Keats and my eyes closed, that her, now in reality, now for the terrifying second (third or hundredth) time, came with her smooth hands and her perfect smile, to finally wake me up from this dream that does not belong to me and that for too many centuries of blurry existence I have been dreaming.
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