Dear Raymond
I like your sexy black lining – so funereal – and I have to say, gossip columns are really my thing – the news is so tedious don’t you think. The multivalenced meanings slip with ease through the net of my mind. Do you know I never seem to have time to find a needle and cotton and repair it, you know, like the old fishermen on the beach at Viareggio. Words, like shoals of fish, come and go in a sort of darting ejaculation, a spasm, a shiver, perhaps a thrill of discovery. I know exactly what you mean, darling.
Yours ever hungrily
G
Dearest Giulia
Is it you hiding behind that single letter G? Peeking through with your sexy brown eyes? You never did explain to me why we could not be lovers. And now we’re on opposite sides of the river in a world torn by indifference. I can hardly get out of bed these days. I thought I might be able to slow time but the results of my experiment remain unclear. In fact I suspect that it’s not so much that time has slowed, it’s rather that time has disappeared. Or at least it’s changed out of all recognition to what it used to be. Good old time, like an old friend, tick tock, tick tock – it used to be there to see me through the bad times (ha ha!!). But I can’t quite do without it – so much of our language is time based and it’s all part of our wonderful shared inherited culture. Is time a cultural construct? I do believe I should have insisted on a room with a window.
Yours in what I shall call desperation
R
Raymond
Get a grip. My enduring memory of you will be a hands-in-pockets self-pitying wretch. It was for you that the phrase “get a life” was invented. Do you expect me to cross the river and rescue you? There are so many more important things that I have to do. If you need me you better get here pdq. I have it from a reliable source (a lover who also knows how to make money – unlike some I could mention) that one of the bridges is still standing. So take a hike, as the Californians like to say. It’s a fantastic gothic creation, crenellated, myriad towers and cupolas, caryatids and gargoyles. Perfect as a bridge to die from – if you can’t quite make it across.
I always loved you, darling
G
O Giulia
I almost got out of bed when I was half way through your cruel correspondence. But that was why I loved you – is loved the right word? – no I think the word might be addicted. Heroin would have been a more kindly indulgence. You, as soon as my eyes caught that first sight of you in the bar (the doppio zero, wasn’t it) in Naples, yes, you were the event of my life. How could I recover from that? Inside out, upside down – there was to be no going back. Do you remember I had to learn to speak all over again and it was much harder than the first time. Why isn’t all learning like the first time when we are embraced in the ardent love of mother? I have made a decision: I will wait for the light to change.
Adoringly yours
R