Susanna Lucatello

It always happens in summer, making fruit salad with watermelon, melon, strawberries, peach, apricot, and cherries, only after putting them to your ears pretending to have new ruby earrings, and only after eating one, because if it’s the lucky “first cherry of the year,” it will hold a wish, never quite like any made before, always different from those yet to come, otherwise, as everyone knows, it won’t come true.

I don’t believe that on a first date, a first rendezvous, people prepare by trying on their entire wardrobe, looking at themselves in the mirror and liking what they see, only to glance back out of the corner of their eye and think, no, not liking it at all, and so changing again and again, furnishing the bed with that blue shirt, but maybe it’s a bit too much, with that long, tight, very tight black skirt, but maybe it’s a bit too much, and that t-shirt that looked so good the day before, the colorful one, but come to think of it, maybe a bit too much, in short, furnishing it with many possible possibilities but not that single, absolutely perfect possibility, until that friend, the expert on the matter, gives the okay and utters the fateful “yes, like this it’s perfect.”

“More than meets the eye”

It shines brightly, suspended in a night that smells of jasmine. It opens up before me as I savor a spoonful of zabaione cream with my eyes half-closed, turning the quiet corner of the street toward home. It is perched upon an iron skeleton, appearing to warm it shyly, much like the dawn sun warms the sand chilled by the rough, 3:00 AM swell of the tide.

Exterior. 

San Sebastián, spring of an indefinite year. Andrea Laszlo sings, “the world is an irrational guy, it does what it wants, it gives no explanation.” A north wind blows, carrying away clouds and uncertainty. On a bench without corners, a man in a honey-colored jacket buries his head, eyes, nose, and mouth in a book so dense it seems to recount the entire universe. The sea sways, the world lives, the air lets meaningless words set like the sun.

What color are your eyes?

It depends on the weather.

I am fairly certain that on August 27, 2019, as I watched the seagulls cross the roof of the world on that chalk-colored beach in the Gulf of Mexico, they were British racing green. Just as I am certain they were the yellow of citron soda on that 21st of April when, standing by a door blown open by the salt-heavy wind, I said my final goodbye to my greatest love. It depends on the weather, the weather inside, I mean.

They tell me I don’t use punctuation, that I don’t know how to use it, that I’m not capable.

But I remember very well when, in elementary school, teacher Stefania in that classroom with wooden and glass windows embracing the pines and mulberry trees on the hill in the middle of the city explained to me that, for example, the comma is used to give a pause that isn’t too long, like taking a breath; it marks time, it doesn’t stop it completely, it alternates it like the sand dunes you ride over on a bicycle, going up and then down and then up again as you head straight toward the sea.