DEAREST

PART 4: DENSE WATERS, Ch. 1

1

I understand the meaning of my dream only a few days later.

The images that repeat themselves become blurred, distant, but what remains in me expands like warm vapor. That has remained in me as strongly as the moment of the dream.

I think about it while I'm in the garden.

When I walk the narrow paths of flower bushes, gardening scissors in my hand and protecting myself from the sun under a wide-brimmed hat, the warm breeze of these days brings the images to me in a whisper.

I stand still, the wind flowing around me, caressing my skin, barely touching me with its tingling fingers.

Luciana walks behind me, quietly looking at the flowers. Sometimes she leans a little towards a bush and looks at a small bud. I didn't know she had a taste for gardening. But she asks for the scissors and fixes something that I've overlooked by mistake. Her long, pale fingers barely grasping the stem or leaf.

Luciana tells me that, while she was still healthy, her mother planted a garden behind the house. Her name was Laetizia, and this was before Luciana was four years old, so her mother's memories are fuzzy. She doesn't remember her face, so, if she must describe her mother's features, she can't be exact, or she simply doesn't dare to do it because she's afraid to say something wrong, and so, over time, she fears this mistake overlaps with her memories and creates an image that's not the real one, and that this replaces all she knew before. That's why she prefers that the images disappear.

It's one of the most painful things to happen, I think, wanting to remember someone exactly as you knew them, but things like their face, or the tone of their voice become so distant, and that is true abandonment. Never again to be able to reproduce a tone, color, or exact gesture.

Laetizia looked after the garden almost every day. Because red roses were her favorites, most of the garden was full of them.

Before dying, she wanted to be surrounded by things she loved, so she spent a lot of time with Luciana in the garden.

But, now, it's very difficult for Luciana to see red roses in the same way. What makes red roses so beautiful is that there is something so intense and secretly dark about them, like eternal non-revelation, that makes them so fascinating and enchanting, and so, in turn, everybody is attracted to them in some way.

After her mother died, no one returned to take care of the garden. At least, not with the same care and love. She wishes she could remember one or two things of what her mother taught her about it, or what she tried to teach her, but she doesn't remember anything about conversations with her, not even themes or fragments.

I listen to the things she tells me in complete silence. I supposed I could say "that must be very painful", but she already knows, she can feel that it is. Fearful of showing an incorrect reaction that might anger her father, she has got used to barely expressing any emotion, so that, in social situations, she is very unwilling to do so. Only the battle can make her to express something more extreme, as I have noticed. That's why she fights with such a spirit, even though she's surrounded by danger. Sometimes, when she asks for the scissors or points out something that she wants me to see, I look at her, and I notice her lonely look, submerged in her thoughts, alternating her concentration between her words and what she observes. But now that she's here, next to me, she tells me those things. I think a connection has been created between us, and thanks to it, little by little, Luciana has been willing to tell me this kind of things. Or maybe it's the fact that I don't interrupt her or try to impose my ideas on her narration. Whatever it is, my first impression of her, that of an attractive woman in uniform with elegant and taciturn features, who still shows signs of youth and kindness, is expanding, and I'm happy to begin to see and understand her in all her complexity.

I look at her with the same expectation as if I were waiting outside a door, just waiting for it to open, and that its obscure contents come to greet me and take me to the darkness and depth of her private world.