Dream (September, 20 2012)

I visited my friend L whom I haven't seen for long time and noticed that his house did not look as big as he told me before. When his wife , whom I knew quite well, entered the room I was impressed by the change in her look. She was not the over-weighted long-haired ungroomed wife I always knew but she turned into slim, sophisticated and elegant in full make up and high heels. Her hair was drawn back in a chingon. When I asked her about the secret of the change she mentioned the pressure from her husband. She was a bit reserved and not as friendly as I always knew her. 

The couple introduced me to their two beautiful daughters. After awhile a 5 year old son entered the living room from the terrace. I was a bit surprised because what I knew before that they only had two children. The boy looked very different from his sisters. He was dark and had the face of a rough grown up man.

Buffet food was served and at the same time the son came to talk and play with me. Everyone started to eat except me because I did not know how to leave the child and go to the food table. I was irritated that the parents did not tell their son to stop and let me have my share of food. Finally I could not resist my desire to eat and asked the child to stop talking and playing and to step aside. 

I hold my empty white plate and headed to the table but the food was almost finished. Ugly looking pieces of steaks only remained in the serving dish. I felt frustrated although the wife tried to find me something to eat and filled my plate with some rice.

Later I went to one of the bedrooms in the house to get some rest. I wore a pyjama and laid on the bed but a black maid entered the room and said it was the time to clean it. I stood up and left the room and noticed in the dark hallway another black maid and said to my self 'aha..so they have two maids'. 

I could see the family still sitting in the bright living room as the hallway, where I was standing up feeling uneasy, was dim. 

Grey

I looked at the foggy pale grey ocean and asked my companion “Does it get blue in summer?”. “Yes”, it gets blue in summer” He said and added “but not our blue”. The astonishing turquoise color of some Mediterranean shores flashed then through my mind. 

Neighbors

As I was growing up, we had neighbors, a brother and sister, living down the street. My sisters, who are much older than me, used to call the brother “baldie”. He was, as it said, bald, tall, thin and slightly lame in one leg. He must have been over 60 years old when he and his sister started to attract my young attention. The sister, who was a few years younger, had wide green eyes and looked distinctive for two main reasons. She always wore a coat even in the hottest days of summer and she had unmistakable outdated sense of fashion. I was not able to identify these two features in my early years of curiosity about them, but as I became older the coat and the old-fashioned look marked her off in my mind.

He apparently had no steady work. I used to see him walking around in the neighborhood in the afternoons with slow steps and serious, even grim, face. The sister, on the other hand, was going out and coming back home on fixed hours.

They could have been the-bit-weird-neighbors anybody could have, except for what my sisters told me about their past. The brother and sister had had another younger sister and they used to be very rich. They had been hosting lavish parties at their house for many years, and baldie was engaged to a beautiful woman. My sisters insisted that baldie himself was very handsome although I could not trace, in his shape at the time I was growing up, signs of old handsomeness.

According to my sisters, all changed dramatically in a short period of time. The young sister passed away, the parties stopped, the fiancée disappeared and the signs of wealth gradually faded. The brother fell ill and became paralyzed for a while before a recovery that left him with one lame leg.

Neither in their prosperous years nor in their austere times the brother and sister cared to extend social bridges with other neighbors, so we never knew the reasons behind the change in their life. My sisters' stories about the past were fascinating since I only knew those neighbors as the old poor silent brother and sister living down the street.

I recall an unusual incident that took place few years later. A loud part-time maid who used to clean their house, and other houses in the street as well, claimed one day that the brother exposed himself to her and decided not to work for them anymore, but the credibility of her claim remained debatable.

As they were discrete in life, they were in their death too. We did not know when baldie exactly passed away. The news spread that he died few months after his exact date of death. The sister lived alone for a while and then disappeared. She might have moved, passed away or just vanished. The house remained close for years before new residents came in.

I mentioned them to one of my sisters recently who she was quite surprised that I still recall them. I tried to remind her of some details but she said her memory was too cloudy to remember what I was saying.