Selected Cronicas

SPRING IN SWITZERLAND

That spring was really dry, the radio crackled, picking up atmospheric interference; my clothing bristled as it released the body’s electricity, and my comb lifted magnetized hairs; it was an ominous spring. And so very empty. From wherever one happened to be, the impression was the same: the journey ahead seemed long, the road endless. There was little conversation: the body was as heavy as its sleep; eyes were big and expressionless. On the terrace, the goldfish gyrated in its tank; we sipped our drinks looking at the countryside. The wind carried the daydreams of goats from the fields. By the other table on the terrace, a solitary faun. Charged with static, we stared dreamily into the glasses in our hands. ‘What were you saying?’ ‘I didn’t say a thing.’ The days went by. But one moment of harmony was enough to capture once more that barbed static of spring: the rash dreams of goats, the hollow fish, a sudden urge to steal apples, the crowned faun taking solitary leaps. ‘What?’ ‘Nothing. I didn’t say anything.

But I could hear the stirring of a murmur, like a heart beating underneath the earth. Quietly, I put my ear to the ground and could hear summer breaking through, and my heart beating underneath the earth — nothing, I said nothing — and I could sense the persistent violence with which the closed earth was opening up inside as it prepared to give birth, and knew with what burden of sweetness the summer would ripen a hundred thousand oranges, and I knew that those oranges were mine, simply because I wanted it so.