The Fabulous Tales of Don Domingo


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Third Story-The Seven Wonders of the World

Sonya De Ruentes was a floral artist, the best one money could buy you. For Sonya, flower arranging was not a job but a higher art, and she would get business proposals even from abroad for wedding bouquets and other, to quote her, “ tragicomic functions people indulge in to celebrate their boredom and guilt as they grow further apart, day by day, year by year from their dreams”. She would kneel in front of the flowers and kiss them and caress them and talk to them with gentle words and many times she would share her secrets with them and would remain quiet for a long time to console them and get consoled herself. Quite often she would touch a snow-white asphodel or a bright yellow rose upon her breast, close her eyes and get lost in the flower’s magical scent and perfection.When I first saw her walking around the inflorescent wisterias completely naked, but for an armload of blooming yellow roses, I got scared I might embarrass her and the thought of leaving crossed my mind, but she carried on working as if nothing was going on. She smiled at me innocently, without guilt, and I sat down on the wooden floor with extreme precaution as not to perturb the calmness and the shadows roaming around this place, a big, a very big, high ceiling room on the last floor of a neoclassical house with plaster ornamental designs on the ceilings, huge, luminous wooden windows full to the brim with flowers, ribbons, vintage brooches, beads, crystals, pearls, baby’s-breath, little stars, seashells, butterflies and furry pom poms, while the main wall was dominated by a huge copy of the Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch.It was where I first heard the music of a dream, the sigh of an unknown world the existence of which I had never before suspected since Sonya De Ruentes kept it secret and securely guarded. Dreams accommodate man from the day he is born, she said. They breastfeed him, they offer him security, they float with him in the endless universe.  They teach him to bravely spin around in life’s black holes; when he believes that he is once and for all sucked into the darkness and the dead ends, peek-a-boo , he leaps out reborn from his solitude’s cocoon. That is what you need to learn and not what you are made to parrot at school. Remember that desire gives birth to dreams in the same way that the earth bears flowers and the dreams give birth to life, like the flowers emanate their scent and man always is the most enchanting scent even when he is dripping blood.I looked at her with curiosity but she, even though she knew that I was still too young to comprehend her words, would carry on talking, or rather whispering inside me, to a self I had not yet met, without ever stopping her work.Once a sudden breeze made Sonya De Ruentes stand up to shut the window so as the gust of wind would not tangle her baby’s breath ribbons, take her starfishes and make a mess of her strings with butterflies and seashells. She then sat next to me.“Do you know which are the seven wonders of the world?” she asked me.“Yes” I replied and I started naming them “ The Pyramids of Giza, the Colossus of Rhodes, the Gardens of Babylon…”“The seven wonders of the world” Sonya De Ruentes interrupted me “are the kiss on the verge of the lip, the tender fondling on the inner thigh, the eyes, the instinct, the waiting, the painted toenails and the absence. This is the system from which dreams jump out.  Similar to the circulatory system that consists of the heart, the arteries and the veins, dreams have their own system.”She asked me to do up the zipper of her dress. Involuntary and trembling, I touched her back with my lips. She remained motionless for a few seconds and then made a step forward and then another and then another until she pulled away from me and then I saw her floating outside the window, with her arms wide open, as if she were a bird. Translation: Alexandra Samothraki