Around four in the morning, you can’t think about everything. The bed was moving, but there are so many more alarming things that happen in your sleep that a moving bed is not, on its own, anything to be especially worried about. Even the echoing, deafening noise, like a waterfall overhead, didn’t make me the least bit suspicious. Dreams are like that. Something breaks in, like the mercury in the small tube of a fragile glass thermometer immersed in a cup of tea, and you’re not really able to see how it’s growing, much less how it’s spreading beyond its rightful boundaries, and my ankles formed a dike against the flow of watery sheets. The bed was the ocean, and by now I was starting to look like a fish stunned by an explosion, exposing its belly for all to see.
I had just enough time to choose my last thought. It was dedicated to my mother. I could see her face growing old in the rare snapshots I received over the years. Every photo seemed to have been taken purposely, each time further away. As if she wanted to hide herself in the background of the photo. Her eternal smile calcified on top of the wrinkles. A gesture, a caress, and she could have gone to pieces like an embalmed iguana. In the last photo I couldn’t make out anything except her shape behind a leafless tree, hooded to hide a body that perhaps no longer existed, leaning against the trunk to avoid slumping, it looked as though her back was turned. I think that by then she was no longer there inside her clothes. She had left behind the imprint of her being, her shell, but she had gone away, a cicada.
The flood gripped my hair like seaweed and my breasts floated to the surface, fluctuating like two small headlights that had gone out, spasmodically submerged by waves of rainwater. Those two headlights were too small to warn the objects floating by to stay clear of my head, and I felt myself being struck by books and all sorts of knickknacks. You really have no idea of how many loose objects you own until you have a flood.
I was lying there naked, with the water, calmer now, at face-level. I could see my body stretched out in front of me, with its grey and green iridescent shadows. A swollen, weightless body. I thought that maybe I should pierce my belly-button and put in a gold earring with a red stone, so at least there would be something shining amidst of all that pale flesh. Without any light, the room was naked too, like me; we were both totally silent. I would have liked to sleep, but the cold was penetrating. I drew up the heavy, wet sheet. I had to hold it with both hands, because the moving water sucked it away slowly, like a dead leaf sucked towards a drain.
I felt that I would finish in the drain, too, if I dared let go. My fingers grew stiff and permanently fixed their prints on the cotton material. All the objects I loved were here around me, immersed in the placenta of my room. Outside, voices could be heard now, far-away as though through a tight, goat-skinned drum.
- We’ll come back later for the body...
Now in front of me there was a parade of dry flowers from the vase near the door, candies covered with silvery paper, my apple-green slippers with the pompons…..
Barbara Serdakowski, born in Poland, grew up in Marocco and then emigrated to Canada. She has been living in Florence for seven years. She has always written in French, but since 1999 she has also used Italian as a language of literary expression. She has won several literary prizes in Italy, including the prize of the jury of the Eks & Tra competition for a short story which was later published in the anthology of the winners of the prize ‘Anime in viaggio: la nuova mappa dei popoli’ (AdnKronos, Roma 2001). Her stories are also included in the anthologies Kaboon (Edizioni Clandestine, Marina di Massa 2002) and Impronte. Scritture dal mondo (Besa, Lecce 2003). She also has published in international poetry magazines, and writes multi-language poems in which she alternates verses in all the languages of her migrant cultural background. Together with Cesare Oliva, she is co-founder,of the "Centro d'Arte e Ricerca Magma", in Florence (www.magmacenter.com).