by Paz Marquez Benitez
Taking time out to read this short (with much-dreaded adjectives and all) really brought to light how much more twisted and cruel things could get. It showed how people used to be and makes you realize how much human nature has not changed. What’s the difference between then and now? Not much .. just a whole lotta adjectives.
An excerpt:
It was so easy to forget up there, away from the prying eyes of the world, so easy and so poignantly sweet. The beloved woman, he standing close to her, the shadows around, enfolding.
“Up here I find–something–”
He and Julia Salas stood looking out into the she quiet night. Sensing unwanted intensity, laughed, woman-like, asking, “Amusement?”
“No; youth–its spirit–”
“Are you so old?”
“And heart’s desire.”
Was he becoming a poet, or is there a poet lurking in the heart of every man?
“Down there,” he had continued, his voice somewhat indistinct, “the road is too broad, too trodden by feet, too barren of mystery.”
“Down there” beyond the ancient tamarinds lay the road, upturned to the stars. In the darkness the fireflies glimmered, while an errant breeze strayed in from somewhere, bringing elusive, faraway sounds as of voices in a dream.
“Mystery–” she answered lightly, “that is so brief–”
“Not in some,” quickly. “Not in you.”
“You have known me a few weeks; so the mystery.”
“I could study you all my life and still not find it.”
“So long?”
“I should like to.”
Those six weeks were now so swift–seeming in the memory, yet had they been so deep in the living, so charged with compelling power and sweetness. Because neither the past nor the future had relevance or meaning, he lived only the present, day by day, lived it intensely, with such a willful shutting out of fact as astounded him in his calmer moments.
