HOME > Imagination > Short Stories > Love stories > Me, never


    Me, never

Me, never. He couldn't' have said it better. Me, never. Never as first and never after.
He stopped and looked around. He had left some weeks before and since then he had only met a beggar and an alley puppy dog. The beggar had looked at him with disgust. "Wanderers", he heard him grumbling while withdrawing his dirty hand to avoid any compassionate contact. The puppy had seemed afraid of the unpredicted encounter and had abandoned the street to hide in the obscure paths of the woods. You could trust anybody, the young man had thought while looking at the puppy disappear in the woods, but an errand soul.
He brought with him an old leather sack where he kept his most precious treasures.
The journey had dusted his clothes of a young apprentice, dirtied his shoes with mud and tiredness, covered his hair with sweat and hope.
Still a few steps and he would come to the first village where he would rest for the night before leaving again for his journey. It was the market day. People were coming and going, running, pushing, swearing, shouting: "Fresh vegetables and fruits!", "The best horse of the shire. Touch its coat, sir. It's like touching velvet!", "A prodigy! The last medicine that will cure all your diseases! Come, ladies and gentlemen, come!"
The young man made its way through the crowd, fascinated by the vivacity he had left in his village and that he was now finding intact again in another place, so faraway from his home. The familiar noises, the spicy smells and the thousands promises captured him.
I'm hungry, he suddenly thought, attracted by the smell of baked bread.
He went near the stall. A young chubby woman gave him the once-over without crossing his eyes.
"I would like two of these", pointed the young man hinting at a smile. His eyes were staring at the crisp and warm bread on the stall.
The woman sniffled and looked at the clothes of the man. A sarcastic grin formed on her lips. "How you're going to pay?" The young man didn't lose his composure: he put a hand in his sack and came up with two daisies he had picked up during his journey.
"Are you making fun of me?" the woman grunted. "What shall I do with those useless flowers? Do you think I can make bread with them?"
The young man smiled, covered the corolla of the flowers with his hand and without apparently doing or saying anything he reopened his hand. Two shining coins had taken the place of the daisies.
"As your ladyship wishes", said the man giving her the money and taking the bread. He said goodbye to the woman with a nod and disappeared before she could accuse him of witchcraft.
People were not able to appreciate beauty, thought the young man while biting his lunch and admiring the liveliness and confusion that surrounded him.
I now have to find somewhere to sleep, he considered when his stomach was full. The bare ground was not a desired bed even by an errand soul like him. That night he would sleep in a real bed, he said to himself. Without fear of being attacked by every passing shadow. And he would grant himself the luxury of dreaming: it was impossible to do it when his two eyes couldn't rest peacefully.
He came to a inn and went in. The innkeeper accepted his money and didn't ask any questions. It wasn't a innkeeper's business to meddle with other people's affairs, as long as they were not an obstacle for his income. He had lived without troubles for thirty years without asking questions, and he could consider himself a satisfied man.
"The key, boy. You have to leave your room at dawn, otherwise you'll have to pay another night". And why that? The young man would have liked to ask the innkeeper, not understanding how a few hours more in the morning equalled to an entire night. But the innkeeper had been discreet with him and he wanted to be discreet in return. He grabbed the key with a nod and went up the stairs. He still had a piece of bread for dinner and he knew he didn't need anything more. Bread to calm his hunger and sleep to dream.
The confusion and the noise of the market hadn't abandoned him, not even at the inn.
Downstairs the shouts of the men who were winning or losing at poker could be heard, and the rooms near his were devoted to other wins and defeats of the male ego. This was also while he had left, because some thoughts should not belong to him under the roof of his father, who played both with cards and with his mother. Some thoughts shouldn't belong to anyone, he thought. They were non-thoughts. Whims of the mind, witchcrafts of the heart.
But he had always thought them and he wasn't ashamed. It was his way to affirm himself as a man. Thinking, and thinking his own thoughts.
He turned the key in the lock to feel like he were at home, and breathed the intense smell of rotten wood. He half-opened the window, a glass wound in the wall, to recover himself from the stink and regaining full control both of himself and of the situation.
The innkeeper had also gave him a candle-end, what remained of the memories of better times. The young man lit it with a match and put it on a table eroded by woodworms. Would he sleep?, he wondered remembering the constant work of woodworms in his house. Yes, he would, he told himself, they were only nocturnal workers and his mind would soon ignore them and travel towards new shores.
He closed the shutters, ignoring the noise that was coming from the street, from the room next to his, and from downstairs. He blew on the flame, which trembled and expired, pervading his nostrils with the sweet smell of smoke. The woodworms began their incessant work, shouts of victory, shouts of defeats, voices that covered the silence of the day, and voices that would soon give back to night its sonorities.

It was there. It was there where he re-discovered himself. Where he kicked doubts, fears, prejudices of the day. It's there where he wanted to feel at home. He shyly looked at the brown hair that were gathered in a neat chignon and he felt again that rush in his spine, that little somersault that had accompanied their first crossing of looks.
How could he define it? Love? Was he enamoured? Interest? Emotion? Emotion. There was no other way to express it, no other way it wanted to be expressed.
They had shaken hands. He would have started to work that day in the shop, as an apprentice. She had been working there for a while and she served the clients. They had usually said hello to each other but the encounter of their hands had broken the spell of extraneousness.
It hadn't been their greetings, nor the friendly encounter of their hands. They had worked for some time without seeing each other: he, in the rear of the shop baking the bread while she was sleeping, and she, serving the clients when he could go back to sleep.
Some thoughts of the warm bread, unconscious bridge between their hands, and nothing more. Until… that day he had had to stay longer in the bakery, the demand for bread had been higher because of the fair of the village and she had had to arrive before to open the shop and satisfy the grown appetite.
The constant demands of the clients had made him bring her the bread he had just taken out of the ovens and that she had sold immediately to the people in the shop. It had been when he was running from the oven to the shop and when she was running from the warm bread to the clients that their eyes met. He had smiled and said hello. She had greeted him in return, shyly. This was how it had happened and never happened again. The fair had ended, and they never met again.
It had been chance, he had thought. It had been fate, she had thought. It must have been so, there was no other way.
But now, lying in that unknown and tattered bed, he saw her, and once again he gave her the warm bread that some impatient client was already waiting for. He thought again of when he would have liked to wait for her at the end of the day, but never did.
Now, he was sitting on the steps of the rear of the bakery and was playing with a small stick drawing incomprehensible forms on the dusty ground. I'll wait for her, he thought. And I'll say hello again and I'll ask her if it has been a hard day. Sure it has!, he suddenly blamed himself, amused. So, I'll ask her if she's tired. And I'll tell her that for me too it's been a hard day. With all those people and the bread to bake! I'll tell her that I like my job and I'll ask her if she likes hers too. I'll ask her whether she's going to the fair, and that I'm going too. Yes, I'll tell her all this and she will answer and smile again. Yes, I'll make her smile, I'll tell her something strange or some nonsense, and she will laugh. At what I've said and at me, because she will find out that I make her laugh, and she will feel good and will want to go on laughing. She'll ask me to go on making her laugh. And I'll grant every wish she has.
There she was, coming out of the bakery. She had seen him and would look at him. She had wondered what he was doing there. I'm waiting for you, he would have liked to say, but it wouldn't make her laugh with such a sentence. She smiled again at him and again she said a feeble hello, as her voice had died in her throat. Was it like that? He didn't understand and had started making her laugh. He accompanied her home, and now she looked at him serenely and talked and there was no embarrassment. It was like "feeling at home".
See you tomorrow, they said to each other. And the day after they discovered themselves two strangers again: he in the rear of the bakery, and she in the front. Bread united and divided them. They never met again after the smile and the half greet of the day before, because he actually hadn't waited for her outside the bakery, he hadn't made her laugh and had never said "see you tomorrow".
It had been a dream, and from that night on the dream had repeated continuously. During the day they were two strangers, and at night they were friends. He dreamt, and in his dreams her face was so familiar as to make him feel bad during the day. He couldn't smile at her as he wished, talk to her or make her laugh as he did every night, because she didn't know, and maybe she didn't want to.
He could ignore her, he told himself, it wasn't but a feeling. He didn't know her and there was no way he could know her anyway. So many problems for a woman!, his father would have told him, between a glass of wine and a visit to the inn. So many problems, he too thought, so much imagination! There was nothing, nothing more than that stupid somersault and a look that had died too soon.
In the meantime, his dream made him know a young woman who he didn't want to leave in the morning. She was special, she was incredible, she was everything he thought he wanted to live. One night, he had accompanied her home, it was dark and a cold wind was blowing. Some steps before the door, the glare of the fire inside illuminated the street.
She had stopped to say goodbye, she always smiled shyly, her lips curved undecidedly when she talked to him. And he though: it's now or never. It had happened. He had revealed to her that feeling he kept in his heart with the only language he knew. Maybe he had rushed, maybe she would reject him, maybe his dream would be sharply interrupted. But it hadn't happened. He hadn't let it happen. The following day he had left the village, without telling anyone.
He couldn't be an apprentice anymore, he couldn't live that fake and cruel reality. It was all in his dreams and she didn't know anything, she couldn't imagine. He couldn't tell her anything, he couldn't reveal something he even didn't understand. That sudden and embarrassing feeling. That smile he had kissed without permission. The feeling that in his dreams belonged to her too, but that in daily life was swallowed by silence. His and hers.
He had left and had walked and walked without dreaming anymore. Until now.

"Wake up!", a punch on the door made the young man startle. "If you don't leave the room immediately you'll pay me another night!". It was the innkeeper, and the young man jumped off the bed. Cold ray of light were seeping in through the shutters, colouring the room with blue.
The young man grabbed the sack and quickly got dressed. He poured some drops of water in the basin and threw it on his face to wake up completely. He went out the room still wrapped in the last strips of sleep and dreams and went downstairs.
"Good. I see you're an early riser, boy. Slept well?". The innkeeper grinned maliciously and without expecting an answer turned his back to the young man to serve the first clients of the day.
The young man went out in the street and found himself contemplating the silence of dawn. No noise, no trace of the confusion of the day before. The village was still sleeping, while he was obliged to get back to his journey. I would have liked to dream more, thought sadly, holding tight his sack.
He still had to have breakfast and thought that just outside the village he would find some fruit trees. He had just left the last houses behind and saw the fields. He picked some apples and quickly put them in his sack. It was better not to be noticed. He walked for about half an hour, while the sun was rising at the horizon, delighting him with its company.
After the fields there was the forest. He sat under an old oak, savouring the first apple of his breakfast.
He didn't know where he was heading and he didn't fully understand why he had left; why he had taken that direction instead of another, why he didn't want to stop. How could he buy food?, he wondered after the first coins of his small treasure had disappeared in other people's hands.
When he was a child, an old magician had taught him the trick of the daisies. He thought he could use it to surprise her, to make her laugh, but never did. Maybe he would have thought he was stupid. And so he had kept it for that chubby and diffident woman who sold bread. He hadn't any magic powers, nor good nor bad, he thought sadly now that his journey had become his life. Go back, he sometimes said to himself. Go back and tell her what you feel, whatever it is.
Me?, asked incredulously another voice. Me? Never. Never.
He felt that somersault again. It hurt. It hurt more and more, and he didn't understand why. He was going faraway from there, shouldn't he forget?
Maybe, he suddenly thought, maybe I have to just do it.
He put a hand in his sack and came out with three stones, his three most precious treasures. Three middle-shaped grey stones he had picked the day he left. One in the backyard of his house, one in the rear of the bakery where he had been an apprenticeship, and one in front of her house.
These were the stones with which the young man had lived and felt like "at home". That was why they were so special, and that was why no gold nor any other treasure could ever bear the comparison.
He thought it was a good place. He started digging in the humid ground, and when he considered the hole to be perfect he threw the first stone in. The stone he had picked in the courtyard of his house, the first place he had called home and the first he had left. His father wouldn't miss him. He buried the stone, then dug another hole. This time he chose the stone he had picked in the rear of the bakery. He was happy to have been an apprentice, and the master baker had been generous with him, he considered him a son. He was sorry to have left so suddenly, without a word, but maybe the master baker would have understood. He buried that stone too, then dug the third hole. One stones was left. He took it and weighted it up.
This is the one I bury with great sadness, because I decide to forget something I've never lived, thought the young man caressing the grey surface of the stone. It had been a little stealth, a way to get closer to her in the real world.
"It's not chance, it's fate", he heard somebody say behind him. He turned alarmed, but didn't see anybody. He was completely alone in that forest. He looked around confused, he looked more attentively, but he still didn't see anyone. He was really alone. He thought it had been an hallucination caused by hunger. Some apples hadn't been enough to satiate him. He focused on the stone again, and let it slide in the hole.
"Farewell", he whispered. "I'll miss you". He began covering the stone with the earth when he felt somebody grip his arm and shake him roughly.
"Hey boy! Do you think this is the right place to sleep?", the young man rose his sleepy face and saw the master baker in front of him, with an amused look in his eyes. Next to him, there was his wife who kindly smiled at the young man.
"Poor boy, don't treat him that way, husband. He has worked hard all day!", and a few steps from her there was the young woman who looked curiously at him and laughed.
The young man stood up, he had been caught unawares by all those looks, and muttered some excuses: he had fallen asleep in the rear of the bakery. While he was waiting.
He looked down, then rose his eyes again. He wasn't wrong, his eyes did not betray him: she was still looking at him and laughing.
They all burst in a big laugh in front of the young man's sleepy face and ruffled hair.
He was about to adjust them, but stopped. He wanted to see that smile and those amused eyes for a few instants more. The time to find his words again and say them: "It's been a hard day, hasn't it?"

 

INFO AUTHOR

Written by Shiningarden and translated from the Italian by Marta F., 2008

 

Read other

Love stories

 

back to top