photograph

Andrew was a mama’s boy, raised as only child after 90 in Romania, Bucharest. He came in this world after a 8 hour battle with life on which he lost everything that he had on his first scream. His mother died after 2 minutes and 45 seconds, not enough time for him to see her, to open his eyes or for his lips to touch the energy from her breast; some will say that wasn’t even time for a song to moan her. Newborns always have blue eyes, the color is a gene that is present after a while, you could have said that when we arrive here we are all angels, without sin, with nothing on us in us, a matter that needs to be shaped to fit in this world. You could have say that he had a father there, with his heart as small as a flee but unfortunately he was the flee not being there and worse not wanting to be part of his life. It was a short love story between him, Christian, a depraved youngster, 28 at that time and Natalie a young girl that came to study psychopathology; she came from a village near Timisoara, a christian raised by her parents in the name of God; he, was raised by a stepmother that could have been her sister, a young model as old as he and as pleaseable as his father wanted; she had the religion in her blood and dreams while he prayed always not to leave someone pregnant  with that drugs and alcohol in his blood. They met at the university, you know, the place where you go to make a bright future, to carry bags of knowledge to evolve as an individual, to have a place here on this earth but it was the place where she sentenced her death as for him he poisoned his thoughts and drowned them in alcohol.

“What are we going to do with the kid, any next of kin, anyone to be informed?” the doctor asked in the room while he kept the kid in his hands trying to see if the is healty.

“He looks healthy as a horse, what a man, he will be”, he said while his mother was one meter next to him starting to loose body temperature, 37.5 , 34.. and starting to look pale while her body was getting cold and her skin rugged.

The four nurses and looked at the doctor and were thrilled by his calmity, “how can he be like that,

“There is a woman here, I think she is an aunt or something, her name is Andreea, should we inform her regarding this? But how do we say it, we know the procedure but..”

“We will do as per procedure, what the heck, it is what it is, it wasn’t our fault, we tried and did our best”

The doctor knew that his hands were shaking and that it wasn’t the first time the Hippocratic oath was broken, he knew in his guts that he could’t take it anymore, he was lost in his dreams and thoughts but dogs need to be fed, kids need to be schooled and wives and mistresses need to be pleased; he needed the job and admitting to be having a mistake wasn’t the road he wanted to take; he had time to go home and  stay in his sofa and drink bottles of wine to kill the sins that grew inside his body: “I feel like I have a garden inside me and each mistake I make and someone suffers makes another flower grow, and i try to poison this garden to kill it but can’t, the smell of flowers and the green of their leaves suffocate me,”

to be continued

he looked at the typewriter it was in the left corner of  his room and smiled: “hello old friend, time hasn’t been easy with you either, aren’t we a bunch of old farts in this fast forwarding life?”; the antique piece of writing was sitting there with a white paper that appeared to get a yellowish tint lately. It had been years since he wrote a phrase or even a word.

His name was Alfie and he was 35, more like 36 on the next month; an almost athletic man with a look between young Javier Bardem and old Leonardo DiCaprio. Brown eyes, short hair and fuzzy beard, you could have said that he was an ordinary guy but the stretched skin at his eyes and his small punctures near the mouth told another story; a game of decisions between a man and a boy, an individual always unbalanced that always believed too much and was cocky enough to burn his own bridges. He had that look in his eyes  that knew exactly what to do; always bagged with jokes and landing smiles but with a blink of an eye you could have feel the bitter and the sadness in his soul, it was screaming from inside cracking on those gentile looks. Once a woman told him something that he always thought it was true but too cruel about him: ” hey young man I like you but you have something inside you that scares me, you grew in me like a flower a nice bouquet of red and purple but unfortunately you gave me seeds of belladona and oleander and I can’t have them you poisoned me because I needed an antidote I had to do this to you to poison you with something worse in order to develop an antidote for me; I did’t loved you at all and now this suffering of yours will pave my sanity, I will be good, sorry”; since then he has some of those things on his skin, always to remember that of his poison from inside and be a “don’t get too close, you’ll be in soul trouble darling”. For each part of his soul that he lost he inked something on his body, he had 24 tattoos some kind or horcrux, a theory that he learnt from a movie very popular when he was young. He sacrificed parts of his body for living things that he encountered in his life, each one with a specific memory or a feeling. From the inside if you could have see like a radiography he had all drawn like a map; he knew that to build something you need a road and every time he went through some bad situation he needed to punt some rocks and walk, and some bricks and some paint, to create a road. Sometimes he looked back and saw some old bridges falling apart some Joanne’s, walks in the park and midnight movies watched among wine and popcorn, very old pieces; there were there just to remember him that once upon a time he could have walked with barefoot not with these boots dust and water proof; ” I wanted to walk on water, I know it’s a pathetic cliche but I needed the freedom and now I just beg for a road to walk  cause I am getting old and my feet hurt, and this struggle , man it looks I am Sisphus..”

p.aint

We were both living in Paris at that time. We had an apartment not far from the Latin Quarter; a tall place with old windows, painted in red, rugged carpets on the floor and warm light from the used bulbs. We had a small balcony , filled with flowers and bugs. It was our bar too; we loved absinth and gin in a country where wines ruled, but it didn’t matter, at least on Fridays. Near the bed we had a pickup and an old telephone with a long cable, it wasn’t wireless but you could have move and talk from all the living room, it game me the sense of liberty and perspective. In the middle of the bedroom there was an antique typewriter,a Corona from 1968 that was broken, such a pity though; sore of blue liquid and with some letters missing.

It was a long boiling summer of 89′ with heavy rain and cloudy mornings. Human nature and life cycle taught us that nights were for sleeping but as far as we managed ours it didn’t fit well. Francesca was suffering from Sleep Terror, a chronic illness that takes you in a state of frighten and panic and in some cases can cause sleepwalking. Apart from that she had a job, teaching at a prestigious University: Ecole Politechnique. Often I looked at her and admire the way she had to live: a calm breeze of first of may during the day and a terrible blizzard after the twilight. It was like I was living with a being that transcends but keeps all the good parts blended somewhere inside, for the next day to be brought in the light again.

As for me, I was a painter at that time,an honest one. During my life I had my fair share of music and writing; always searching for some new ways to express myself; to get rid of the creative substance inside me. I was spending ten, maybe eleven hours with the brush in my hand trying to paint as much as I can before the Alzheimer take me away. Coffee cups surrounded me like apprentices, each one trying to tell a story, a phase of the paint that I was creating. Most of the time I acted silly when I was daydreaming, acting like a child in a Belgian chocolate factory, dirty but valuable at first encounter with the art I was creating.

Due to Francesca’s condition I was painting mostly at night; I was needed to always keep an eye on her, to be present more than physic. All the senses had to be part of a new omnipresence. Often I could hear her screaming like an alarm, throwing away all my tools, clothes; she said that doing that was making her better. Beside her way of being, sometimes she could walk beside me like a ghost or an angel; you could only distinguish it just by the way she looked in the many mirrors that I had hanged on the walls. Lately I was painting portraits and mostly her, I don’t know why, it just felt that I needed to. You could’ve see on the left wall a painting of her, a summer morning, a three color sky that was melting and in the middle,her, bathing in Seine.In the spring showing her yellowish hat rising from the flowers of Champ Elysee. Autumn found her on a pastel downside the road towards the gardens of Luxembourg and the winter portrayed her with some red stains on her cheeks and buttoning up her coat in the blistering freeze of midday Paris. Vivaldi had the music and I had her visualized, on a piece of cloth and wood with some basic oily paint and sweat.

At 4 a.m. in the morning I got a call. The phone rang a few times before I got to it and pick up.

– hello, Marcus, we are calling you from Romania, it s you,no? Marcus Fontaine..

– hello, yes, it’s very early and yes, it’s me.

– unfortunately , we have to inform you that your brother is dead, he was killed a few hours ago by the communist party. He was there on the front line when they shot him. We will make all the arrangements, only if you cam be there …

– it really is unfortunate… I will be there in time.

I wasn’t much of a fighter in a way that was keen on brutal force and guns; I was more brutal with my creations than with a fly. I knew that I had a long road which will end with some flowers, dirt and a funeral. It did bothered me but the emotions weren’t overwhelming. I knew that I made a promiss to my folks although..

five two go

Friday morning is the last bitter sip that you give to yourself before the weekend. Nowadays we have just harsh winters and solid warm summers, yaws; no matter of what the knowing that you are at least 9 hours work ahead of the Friday night just makes you put your damn jeans, shoes and self esteem up and deal with it.

It was 7 o’clock, the alarm was ringing from the “under pillow soft spot” where my 6t was  involuntary placed. The feeling was complicated, it had to do with a scene from action movies where the cold blooded criminal was pushing his glock in a pillow where at the other end was a silly human crying impersonating the fragile fear through the goose feathers. On a simple scale from 5 to 10, it looked like a nine. Half an hour took me to get up, do some morning old man exercises and then the brush my teeth-shower-pee trio was playing in the yellowish light of the bathroom. From outside I could hear the sirens, and then the cars and some train stopping brutally. It was the perfect symphony that I didn’t need but I had to face. These mornings are the reason,place and time where my patience radius is rising.

While I opened Spotify and shuffled some morning vibes I took the chance to open the window and smell the fresh polluted air from Bucharest. It had the smell of burning iqoos; my eyes weren’t expecting either the thin sheet of fog that was placed between the pink sky and concrete buildings; it was like a bad project of a swedish interior designer. While I walked through the room the weeknd’ started playing; starboy was on and I was wrapping things in order to leave.

8:15, I was walking my way to the sub when I got a message from an unknown mobile number: “hy:)” and attached a photo of  two coffees from the corner that I usually buy mine. It looked strange, I had no idea what to think about it. Frankly it was a “who-this-why-that” moment but as I said, it was Friday, what could go wrong and I texted back: ” I will meet you at the corner, hope that’s the place”. As my playlist was playing, it got to Lana del Rey, born to die, a song that I particular play it sometimes, when another message came, it was a woman’s hand and a coffee, again, 5 to go again, but I wasn’t expected the pinkish fingernails and yes, the not so subtle wedding ring shining like a flair effect on a bad application from playstore.

Oh shit.