Deskmates

Spring in pagan worship was the most important festival of the year, a celebration of joy because nature, after the winter slumber, awakens, buds appear on plants that will become flowers and fruits, they will be filled with voracious insects that transfer life from flower to flower, animals mate and give birth to the first offspring

ITALY. Something happens to us humans that we perceive as change. Christianity celebrates the passion, death, and resurrection of Christ; perhaps that is why it introduces elements of despair, pain, and mourning. It is true that there is the Resurrection and Easter, but for us ordinary mortals, death remains death.

Perhaps this is why for many spring produces fatigue and discomfort instead of joy. But this cultural conditioning still allows what spring has always meant to emerge, that trace of nature’s celebration that belongs to a long-forgotten past. I had to grow up quickly and become an adult soon, even though I was physically small and insecure. There was no time to notice the random and the ephemeral.

The essential thing was to study, to speed up the process, that is, to anticipate it if possible, like in a race to come in first. When I could have slowed down and even stopped, the race was unstoppable. It wasn’t success that made me run, just the unconscious drive not to be second to anyone, at least in terms of age. Becoming an adult without actually being one, a young person already old who repeated to himself and others the famous line from the movie: “I’m too old for this sh…”.

When the last spring of high school arrived, the game of growing up quickly was coming to an end. I had just turned 18 and was finally an adult, close to graduation. It was during those days of the last spring, before the end of class, that I looked out the window, allowing myself a brief distraction. In that moment, backlit, I saw dark, wavy hair at a desk not far away. Alice turned around, she wasn’t beautiful but she smiled.

The thick glasses of a nearsighted person concealed eyes that I sensed were attentive and surprised. Hair styled in a pompadour, a high-neck sweater, and a pleated skirt below the knee. I responded to the smile and noticed she continued to look at me. I had realized she was watching me, and she watched me often, interested, I thought, in my indifference, the sulk and the silence that belonged to me, my ostentatious skill. School was about to end, and now I was noticing her, in a way different from before.

She became my desk mate in the last months of school. Only now do I realize how important the ephemeral and the casual are, because they escape necessity. She told me that since she arrived in that class, she had noticed me right away and liked to watch me without being noticed. She considered me a kind boy. That spring window had lit up and our shadows had drawn closer. We spent those months talking, talking, talking.

She listened to me and admired me. I told her about the portrait of Dorian Gray, when she teased me because she said I was a kid with a few rare hairs on my chin and a childish face. I told her that my portrait was marked by time and pain like in Oscar Wilde’s novel, but my face would always remain like that of an immature teenager. The exams came and then the holidays, but Alice had already disappeared, she for me and I for her.

The memory does not age and my desk mate returns to me as a secret and good presence. Farewell my soul, now that memories clog the mind and have erased you. May your time-marked face continue to look at my sick portrait and may you still smile at it as from an open spring window.