They smoke and they look serious and beautiful at the same time. It is as though they have practiced looking that way in their mirrors at home. They are dressed smart, their clothes bought from the best stores and their shoes given a glassy shine and their hair made to look like they are film stars or writers.
They talk in whispers, and they laugh – though when they laugh they laugh too loud and it does not really sound as though they are laughing. They talk about life mostly, and girls and what it is to love. They talk for the sake of talking and that is all part of the pose too. They think they are somehow different and that their lives will have a greater trajectory. Greater than the lives of their fathers who look tired and have always looked tired, and who work all hours just to put food on the table, and whose clothes smell of oil and wood burning, and whose hair has grown thin and limp. The boys on the bridge over the Onyar think for them it will be different.
I’d thought so too, once. Looking at them, they are no different to how I had been. I judge them to be almost twenty and I recall something of the optimism that life had for me then, when anything was possible and the future was a blank page just waiting for a story to be written down.
Her name was Alicia and she was the prettiest girl in all Girona and I was not the only one who thought so. She turned heads in the streets and people wore smiles after she had passed and sang songs to themselves, and boys on the Lovers’ Bridge imagined what it would be to kiss Alicia and to hold her, and they imagined what it was to love and to be loved. And Alicia is my story and all my story, though we are both of us old now, and tourists ask if they can take our pictures outside the Sant Feliu church as though we are part of the city’s old stone; and the boys in smart clothes and their shoes all shiny, those boys smoking Fortuna cigarettes on the bridge, they would not believe the story, our story, if I told it.
But then I would not tell it to them anyway, not even if they asked, for where is the need to take from them their optimism, their belief that it will be different for them, that it will be more? Besides, they have no real concept of what more is.
I hurry across the bridge and to Alicia waiting for my return. I can smell the aubergines cooking as I open the door and I can hear Alicia singing. I call to her that I am home. She comes to me, and though age has robbed her of what she once had, she is still beautiful to me, and I kiss her and I hold her to me and it is enough and more than ever I could have imagined as a boy, and I smile, and a song escapes my lips, and Alicia asks what I have to sing about so I tell her about the boys on the bridge and she laughs and her laughter sounds like birds taking flight.
… fell off the wall, and we all laughed at them.
Indeed!
Ha!
http://judithlindenau.wordpress.com/2013/05/18/may-18-2013-they-smoked-and-they/
They smoke and they look serious and beautiful at the same time. It is as though they have practiced looking that way in their mirrors at home. They are dressed smart, their clothes bought from the best stores and their shoes given a glassy shine and their hair made to look like they are film stars or writers.
They talk in whispers, and they laugh – though when they laugh they laugh too loud and it does not really sound as though they are laughing. They talk about life mostly, and girls and what it is to love. They talk for the sake of talking and that is all part of the pose too. They think they are somehow different and that their lives will have a greater trajectory. Greater than the lives of their fathers who look tired and have always looked tired, and who work all hours just to put food on the table, and whose clothes smell of oil and wood burning, and whose hair has grown thin and limp. The boys on the bridge over the Onyar think for them it will be different.
I’d thought so too, once. Looking at them, they are no different to how I had been. I judge them to be almost twenty and I recall something of the optimism that life had for me then, when anything was possible and the future was a blank page just waiting for a story to be written down.
Her name was Alicia and she was the prettiest girl in all Girona and I was not the only one who thought so. She turned heads in the streets and people wore smiles after she had passed and sang songs to themselves, and boys on the Lovers’ Bridge imagined what it would be to kiss Alicia and to hold her, and they imagined what it was to love and to be loved. And Alicia is my story and all my story, though we are both of us old now, and tourists ask if they can take our pictures outside the Sant Feliu church as though we are part of the city’s old stone; and the boys in smart clothes and their shoes all shiny, those boys smoking Fortuna cigarettes on the bridge, they would not believe the story, our story, if I told it.
But then I would not tell it to them anyway, not even if they asked, for where is the need to take from them their optimism, their belief that it will be different for them, that it will be more? Besides, they have no real concept of what more is.
I hurry across the bridge and to Alicia waiting for my return. I can smell the aubergines cooking as I open the door and I can hear Alicia singing. I call to her that I am home. She comes to me, and though age has robbed her of what she once had, she is still beautiful to me, and I kiss her and I hold her to me and it is enough and more than ever I could have imagined as a boy, and I smile, and a song escapes my lips, and Alicia asks what I have to sing about so I tell her about the boys on the bridge and she laughs and her laughter sounds like birds taking flight.