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They recite some ideas and scenes from the annals of literature or complain that they have not seen enough African or Latin people, nor heard their music, nor eaten their cuisine in the city that does not exactly welcome outsiders. The friends stand in a circle, intermittently someone going up for another round of spritzers. Their weekly male bonding session happens in a central wine cellar where only white wine is available it’s often diluted with soda water by a pair of stern maids behind the dark oak bar, who make time between the television in one corner and flirty conversations with the oldsters to ladle out the swill. They’re not troubled by multiculturalism, exposure to the raw creative forces of a megalopolis, or even deadlines.
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They’re making music (blowing, singing, squeezing, drumming) or writing poetry and prose they ignore their surroundings, which is good for experimentation and gives them time to hone their art. The writer who cannot describe the city he lives in shares this ineffable feeling with a clique of vigorous males. The spot’s filled with customers, alive yet so incredibly dead, awake yet so utterly asleep, you yet so not you. I remember the restaurant, sit on the patio, absorb the fundamentals of beach and sun. Once I emerge from the cellar, I stumble down to the sea. The sound invigorates and humbles as I start to stretch. I scramble for the wine and after uncapping the bottle break the fast. Why am I standing in the dark, my hands tangled in beard? In agreement they plummet down one by one, twirling like umbrellas, landing in the canyon below my outpost of beliefs. Dancers twirl closer to its precipice, lured by voice and baited by mode. The dead master accompanies me on his melancholic harmonium, playing all the black keys, and a spectrum erupts inside me - who seems to become a stage. Decades transpire as I sing altos and tenors divine, sublime sounds pulse in my throat and guts, just five notes and their microtones. Somehow I understand it’s always changing, so I pull the door tight, dampen the candles, and open my soft black hashish mouth. Is that how you unravel your heart? Is that how you tune the organs and inner octaves to a minor scale? The pattern frightens me. The room smells like grease and cobwebs, grapes and salamander. My painstaking search among the surfaces of cedar and stone and then I find the right cellar, its doors burst open like a mouth. In the sack, bread and pomegranate, a wheel of fresh cheese and jerked beef, a flask of brandy and blond tobacco to accompany my burial among the rock walls and terraces. It’s a last chance to contemplate and I should eat. I rest on the steps of the plaza outside the chapel. Yet water and livable, even with bramble and fig for company inside.
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No one knows my whereabouts and I’m wonderfully alone.
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High in the valley, a sanctuary, a tusk of liminal silhouette, the sea notched in the cliffs, two islands talking in the distance, spangled with the movement of cars on mountains, words the speckle of fishermen traversing the channels, no sign of the sun but the warmth of the earth. Swaying olives are smothered red, fall’s aroma is indistinct but there. Oak and tamarind, a path of cypress cones and mint-like flickers above in the sky. A sack bumps along my torso, filled with candles, water, cheese, unleavened bread, no torch, just the ash-light of cigarettes. That night I leave, gather my supplies and chase the silver moonlight up the road into the hinterland. Any moment I expect to be devoured and to compensate I believe in magic, courage, spirits and adventure. The nocturne is intimidating, alive, wet. My clothes fall away that night at the cove and my body joins the stones, a scarab under the galaxies. It’s better and simpler: a village restaurant, cold drinks and the nearby beach. Beaten up but thrilled to be alive, I abandon the egg and drop down the gravel road towards the coast. Soon the glider’s thorax plunges into the lavender and rosemary until it splits apart and comes to a rest. I sail over raw number 27, distinct from the air, oil drums embroidering the faint chalky outline of my refuge on earth. There’s an airstrip on the island and I’m trying to land.