THEGARDEN OFUNSEEMLYPLEASURES

We always dress in white. Don’t ask me why, because i don’t understand it: if you ask me, it’s the worst colour - and some days, when i feel tired, i could swear i think it’s no colour at all; or worse, i could argue that during those times it is all the most unpleasant colours taking turns to jest one’s sense of connection with the world, twisting and turning everything that had a life before until it turns a sickly shade of distilled nothingness. I don’t need to waste much words on it, because it is clear: everything that is very ugly is always pretty much white. White are the bones of the dead: white their faces, white their mourning robes ( they’re black, but they are actually white: we just don’t see them long enough to watch them turn ) white is winter; white the clouds spotting the big beautiful blue skin of the sky; white are the fangs of the wolf, and white is the fleece of the lamb, meek and always ready to be eaten. White is marble, slowly crumbling down to dust; white is the floor, requiring constant sweeping; white the milk of the cow, candid juice of slave for slavers; and white are my robes, my ever-same robes, of which every drape is an insult to my body and to which every inch of my body is an insult. From our vile, silent, and obstinate fight none could ever emerge victorious, if not those who made us face each other and declared the war in the first place. Who are they, you ask? Let me introduce you to them: there, in the corner of the room, is the primary enforcer of the Law of White. Before you ask, yes, she is a woman. I know you might struggle to realize it now but if you watch her closely you will see, in her eyes, the faint memory of what it means to be able to create life. She doesn’t recall this memory, not at all; and i stopped hating her for it, because with time came the realization that my brutish gaoler is nothing but a wretched creature, and as such i shall pity her. She always was like that: with a handkerchief tightly secured around her uncomely head of greasy, thin, brass-coloured hair; with a tart fold of the lips, which made them barely visible and always readily unsheathed a gnawy line of small teeth attached to a tall, protruding ridge of gingiva; with a shapeless body that looked like a pile of blankets magically tip-toeing around the house with the grace and thrust of an ox; with small, duckish feet; but her eyes were beautiful and almost green: and that waft of unhideable beauty seemed to fluster her so much that she kept them always glued to the floor, almost as in denial of their existence; as if she didn’t use them they would be worthless; and she was eerily - tragically, i’d say - right. Her name was Bruna; and who knows if she believed she had been tainted from birth by such a humble name, which brought with it intrinsic memories of warm chestnuts, and waves of dark and voluptuous hair, and wet, fertile earth; hence why she kept to her white robes as if she was clenching onto them like those lost at sea do with their makeshift rafts; and it always seemed to me that it was her body hanging onto the cloth and not the other way round, for how bizarre this might sound; and maybe also because of her name she felt like there was redemption in losing one’s connotation of colour, and in those clothes she yearned the abstract erasure her soul - or whatever she might have buried under her heavy bosom - was longing for. As to why she was longing for this, one can only fantasticate; but there was a way she pronounced my name instead « Immacolata! » that had a slithering concupiscence to it that was unmistakable, as if the very idea to be blessed from birth with the hallmarks of spotlessness was so irresistible that it gave her a brief shiver of pleasure every time her mind encountered such a celestial proposition, if only for the brief time the syllables existed in her mouth and did not encounter their embodiment in reality - that is to say me. Because you can be sure of this if nothing else, dear reader: Bruna hated me; and she did so with such a fiery passion that one would think her flesh derived from my bereavement the carnal pleasure she so steadily denied herself. But when she said my name - in that brief, fleeting shimmer of time - one could also sense her lungs, her throat and her bulbous tongue all participate in the pleasure of stealing the small scales of irreprehensibility that comes with it, like the thieves of fables plundering the treasure of a sleeping dragon. She was just a stupid fool, but that made her nonetheless dangerous: because she was mandated with my welfare, she could also very well deny it. and deny it she did, for many many years, until one fateful day of early summer; she was upstairs, talking to whom the Law of White was conceived for and by whose account it was to be enforced strictly: my father, of course. He was, like most men, a coward: and as such, he mostly relied on traps, bars, bricks and books and pedantic laws to shelter him from reality, because they have all been written by people like him. Real men wouldn’t trade the dignity of their right to live and die meaningfully for a bunch of coins, a herd of pigs, a slanted roof; not even if the coins were of gold, the pigs very fat, and the roof high and solid. I mean, that’s what i supposed real men were like, because in my eighteen years of life i could not speak to any of them save my father; and as we’ve seen, he was as much a man as Bruna was a woman; that is to say, little; and all of that little, questionable. And yet, even with all their prepotence and preparation, with the support of the institutions they cited and quoted the word of God, the one who they said invented the Law of White and all the other Laws; how convenient to blame it all on him, so they could pass their obtuseness for zeal, their sloth for respect, their weakness for virtue! You are very much right in smiling, dear reader; and i’d do too, if i wasn’t too caught up in a whirlwind of disgust at the idea that, being today the second of May after one thousand and five hundred thirty two years since the birth of our Lord and Saviour, the discourse on his quite inoffensive bunch of parables has been hitherto reduced to talking about dresses; and i’m no theologian, or learned doctor of the scriptures, but i’m pretty sure that wasn’t the point he was hammering on and on, down to the last nail. It’s all a bit sad, isn’t it? To make matters worse, those talking are not - it seems to me - very fond of dresses at all; by way of their speeches one should be inclined to think they are very fond of nothing at all, save the uniforming blandness that squeezes them all together in neatly bundled lictorian fasces. And yet, they talk profusely: and with all their talking and debating and very devoutly misunderstanding everything that is painfully clear, they came to the conclusion that women are valuable, if not precious; and as such, they have the right and every reason to dispose of them the way that God ( to be referred to as not the real one, poor thing, but the entity that represents the acronym “Gullible Old Doctrinaires” ) prescribed. What “that way” is can be better described, as the learned would certainly say, apophatically; that is to say, we’re quite sure what God doesn’t want women to do, and, for how peculiar and strange that may sound, we are also unshakably sure that he, in his inscrutable omnipotence, deemed them so extraordinarily dangerous for themselves that he must have thought to give them free will just to make them grateful enough to the men in charge of preserving them from it. Honestly, dear reader? I’m not gonna lie to you, at this point of the story, i should tell you i think they’re right. Of course, i cannot admit that candidly, or openly; that would really make me sound silly, wouldn’t it? But to you i can open myself up. I know what you’re thinking: “Immacolata, you make no sense! Didn’t you just spend the last five minutes ranting and arguing against this very same notion?” I did, dearest, i really did, you’re not fooling yourself and i’m not trying to fool you either; and for what it’s worth, i did really think all of those things of my father and of the ones like him; but i had those ideas before that fateful day of early summer, the day i spoke to a man for the almost-first time; and after hearing him speak, and after recounting the words he said to me, i cannot draw any other conclusion than the Gullible Old Doctrinaires were bloody right; and that deep down in my heart i still wish to be preserved from the flames of my own will like the precious asset i am supposed to be. Gosh - to be pure! Spotless! how extraordinarily divine it must be to be free of droning on, devoid of anything fleshy and therefore hungry; it is so stupendous that even faking it for the entirety of a lifetime seems now an unspeakable blessing rather than a torturous privation; how clean can white look! I know what you want, dear reader, we’re getting there: what did this man say to you to make you abjure your beliefs in such a spectacular fashion? Well, not much and everything, that’s what i thought. Let me explain it to you while Bruna and my father are still upstairs, a felicitous circumstance we need to make the most of. Why, you ask? Well, dear reader, because i am about to leave this place and you are with me, of course; but they would most definitely not let me do it, given that i am very much forbidden to walk out the house without supervision, especially in the evening; but we’re doing it anyway. But i wouldn’t ask you to take all these risks with me if you weren’t fully convinced to come with me out of your own volition; and because i don’t want your sympathy, but your understanding, i must now recount to you the exact words that were spoken by that - so far - mysterious man i mentioned before; and, why not, give you a little bit of context as to where and how i listened to them, because as i said he didn’t say much; and i like stories with a bit of plump to them. Well, i was sitting not far from where you are right now, that is to say, the window: my room is on the third floor of our stately home, which is perched like a protruding bulge on the side of a fat turret; and from there, in the evening, one can see all of Florence’s roofs changing their colour at dusk, and wearing their nightly robes; and you can hear the voices, the voices of men, singing and bellowing drunkenly in the distance, coming from everywhere and nowhere in particular like the singing of cicadas. I thought i knew everything of this scene, having painstakingly learned every detail during the course of many a boring year; and that every nook and cranny of the silhouette of the buildings, or the embroidering of stars, or the flight of the distant wandering herons was not just familiar to me, but it came to have a predictability that was akin to ownership; but after that man spoke to me i started noticing a detail previously absent: something minuscule and yet exhilarating, imperceptible yet devastating. I started smelling a strange scent. The first time i saw him, he was walking by the street with a soggy gait, as if his whole body was timid: but he held his chin high, and he was singing. His clothes were neither rich nor bad; his hair thinning and frothy, leaping and drooling away from his forehead at every gust of wind, like a cockerel’s wattles; and even from here i could see the piercing light of his blue eyes, full of joys and sorrows alike, soar above the balconies and the banners to reach me at such an improbable angle that it must have been ordained that on that evening i sat exactly at that angle of the window and that he looked up at exactly the right moment to catch a glimpse of me. He stopped his steps at once; and at once he bowed so farcically that i couldn’t resist a chuckle; and when Bruna came over me, inquisitive about the causes of my inappropriate hilarity, he already switched to a vastly more gallant pose of nonchalant austerity that he could have been one of those pompous statues the men keep in such high regard in the main square. Bruna must have discounted my reaction as the whimsical chain of thoughts of a slow, capricious girl, and as such not to be speculated with, but rather adjusted with a swift cuff on my head. Oh, Bruna, if only she could realize what she did with that! You see, dear reader, even though it wasn’t at all her objective, by intervening as bovinely as customary for her, he let me see for the first time his irresistible powers of shapeshifter, his acumen for improvisation, trained like the ear of the best violinists; and because her cuffs were as heavy as they were sanctimonious, she exposed my ruffled, blushing, teary face to him. I think one or two of my braids were sent flying over to the other side of the head, looping around my ear; and all the wonky weight of my head was so suddenly disturbed that my sparrow-like little neck could not withstand it properly, and ended up looking at him while tilting on the side, like that stupid tower they built a couple of towns over. But reader...he laughed! He laughed so much and so heartily when she disappeared in the dark corner of my window, like the secondary character that she is; and i laughed again - the punishment had been already dispensed - with him; and that laughter became our first secret. It was then i could smell it: it was sweet, and sparkling, and fresh - but it was also rancid; and it was the rancidness that rounded it up more beautifully than anything else could have. It did to the smell what tears do to the voice of bards: they break them to truth. Reader, we really have to go now: i can feel the footsteps of my father’s and Bruna’s tracing down the stairs: it’s now or never. Don’t worry about what’s going to happen to me afterwards: there is no afterwards. That’s what he said as well, you see? Not that evening, but one of the evenings afterwards. It doesn’t make sense to me to separate them though, because i didn’t live those days as separate entities, each contained in their little neat box; the hours blended with each other to the point that only one hour existed, that is to say the hour he came talking to me; and every scent or odour of the world collapsed on each other so much that i could smell only one: and so, because i did discover it because of him firstly, i thought it was only fair my first question to him would be about this very scent. He said it was the smell of white and, trust me, i was taken aback! White! Smelling like that! But i knew he was no fool: he only smiled with me, and never at me; and i could sense he was telling the truth, because he always looked happy when he did. What do you mean the smell of white? I asked, aghast: and he laughed his brassy laughter; white was the worst colour, the odourless colour, how could it smell so good? And with his fingers he pointed into the distance, far away, at the intersection of roads that spelled the line of the horizon for me; and he told me everything about the garden. Now, i had been to that garden on many a leisurely stroll throughout my life: and it was, indeed, a beautiful garden. But it wasn’t the one he was describing: the one i knew smelled only of roses, and lavender, and in winter it carried the desolatingly lonely colour of wintersweet. And why do you think - he asked - that they never allowed you to see it after the sun has set its course, my darling? I didn’t know the answer to that, or so i thought. But then i looked at him a bit better, and saw he was just a man; and looked at myself, and thought i was just a woman. My thighs ached; my chest tightened and yet my spine was pushing it as outwards as i possibly could; and i felt a warmth that had nothing to do with the summer’s heat. The wind was shaping the cloth of his cloak against his shoulders, framing them in a sharp angular shape; he looked big, and strong, and i thought his hands - his humble hands of carpenter - were so intricately beautiful that no church could withstand the comparison to their architecture. Very well! I said, resolute, fixating my gaze into his - i shall find out why they forbade me to walk those garden in the evenings. You and all the other good family girls - he said - none of you is allowed to enter those gates after dusk: they only afford you the White they’ve been able to dilute, you see, but the White they give you is no White at all: it looked like it, but it’s nothing like it; one could say the white they give you is more similar to black than to the real White; and one wouldn’t be wrong at all. At last, i knew it, but by that moment it was already old news. And what happens after you see the real White? Ah, my beloved: there’s no afterwards. You see it and that’s it, it’s within you forever - and nothing, nothing ever could take it out you, not even yourself. There is no forgetting, unfortunately: because the White will turn you blind, so blind you’ll see right through things. What, dear reader? You think all of these are shambles, the cheap trapdoor-words of a lover? Of course you’re right. That’s exactly what they are, my faithful friend. By the way, thank you for closing the door when we got out: you might have bought me a couple more minutes of peace. Hasten up your walk, will you? It’s not far, but we got to hurry up. Can you imagine if he’s not there? No, it’s impossible: he promised. We’re getting close now, and the smell of the White is so strong and piercing it’s almost making me weak on my legs. Another couple of steps, the final twist of the road, the squeaking of rusty hinges: we’re there. The Garden. As i walk through its gravelly paths, my feet seem to sink at every step, as if the world itself was asking me to slow down, for heaven’s sake; i can’t, i’m sorry. Look! There are the familiar hedges, the ones shaped like horses and dolphins; let’s roam with them a bit, up until the very center of the enclosure, where the fountain is happily bubbling; wait, is it from the water that this impossible scent is rising? No. It’s from the flowerbed around it. I saw those long, elegant stems before; i know the ladylike quality of those leaves, small and orderly; and i know those waxy petals, arched around a modest bell, like the panels of a modest skirt: they are so, so white. On how many days, and for how long, have i looked at them wearing my very same humble regalia! But they did not smell, or better: they smelled of white, of nothing. Yet now here they are, the very same and the very opposite: just like me, it feels they escaped someone watching over them too closely and, ultimately, too vainly. There he is, standing in the middle of it: i don’t know if he wanted to be funny or what, but he’s dressed in white too, so even we are the very same and the very opposite. The flowers seem to bow down slightly when we walk over to each other, welcoming us in their circle. When i hold his hands my feet become roots; and when i grasp his chest, we twist on each other like vines. Our bodies are really just one body: i know they looked separated but they’re separated the same way a crown is separated into pistils. We are a flower, a white flower; and now you know the secret as to why White smells only in the dark. I see his face and an infinite litany of faces, all the men of the world, to whom all i’ll give my body and from whom all i will take a body; i see miles and miles of skin touching other skin, forever, a billion petal-shaped bodies; i hear all the love songs and read all the love poems; all of those little words, one after the other, falter from their soldierly lines and disintegrate against the pages: just like my words to you and your words to me, dear reader, they softly evaporate into invisible droplets, until there’s nothing left but air making love to air: how delicious is the smell of white! If you ask me, it’s the best of colours.