Black Alice

Looking at the mirror of times, crying an unknown love song, there was my life jumping over ledges, finding through the window a miracle which deserved to be seen by my eyes one more time before my soul vanished in the last night storm of the world. She -I- looked pretty in the past times, as the portraits in front of the bed have shown, when she -I- was an energic 20-year-old girl with an only desire: finding the truth about love. Not love itself, any child with a flower could find that -of course they can!-: I was looking for the truth, for the magic spell who could restore a broken heart and create a new soul where it was pain and empty lust up to then.

She used to be a blonde girl who dressed usually a blue dressing of calm and quiet desires, who could have stayed for hours straight to the nightsky, counting patiently every single star drawn by a weak divine light some milleniums ago. She used to dress with a lily on the top of the chest, a flower who had grown more and more when she pulled out from its original earth. The flower was a gift of her father, who dissapeared when she was four and never came back. She didn't understand for a long time why her mother had been unable to explain her the reason why she had always been crying on the sill with the family portrait, stroking carefully his face while tears had been streaming down. She didn't understand, but she finally understood with no questions -- when she was fifteen, and she learned about that bad-named sorcery of love.

Love,
live;
lust,
pain;
death,
desire;
gluttonery...
or just a miracle of the angels abused by our inner devils?
She, actually, haven't never came to an accurate answer.

When she was 20, she decided to turn to the city from her homeland in Alamaba. She wanted to know, to learn, to understand love in every sense of the word. She read, she tried to learn; rejected from psychology, biology and even phylosophy, because learning was meant to be a men's work. She, as a liitle woman -said the big bad men-, had the only responbility of agreening and saying "yes" constantly to her future husband. Or not.

Getting back to 1630 -being she 23 years old-, she met a gentleman, a real gentle man: black jacket covering a dirty body who understood long ago the art of Mathematica, a man of reason and not of established beforehand widsom; a man who could teach her whichever she would want to learn, the free knowledge, the Knowledge, the true knowledge of the world.

Wind blew, rain fell, and she turned out 30. She was a beautiful woman, with a miraculous looking into her eyes; she was so pretty, but still no flancé at sight. She told once "if I must wed a man, should he be"; the only man who threatened her like a real wise lady, not like a reproductive instrument or a trophy. Time to time, she got to be able to find that love is not just a game -- it's a hand stretching another. It's a bridge between worlds, it's the never told words of Plato. But, over all, love was to be able to trust someone when the entire world gave you its back.

Over the years, they have never been a real fiancé or wife and husband despite of a promise of looking alike in order to get her the full world by herself. She remained untouched, to the point of noticing how her hair was turning grey or her blue dresses were piece by piece changing to red. It was a symbol, because she got to understand what she ever wanted to; but, as years passed, he took a better life, a better afterlife.

And now, here is she: laying on a bed, at the age of seventy, looking her own portraits while she asked herself again the only eternal question:

- Did you ever really know what real love was? Or did you just convinced yourself about what should be love?
>> Would be your mother able to be saved from her tears if you told her the truth you discovered...if she was still alive?
>> Better! What would have she said...if she would look at you for a chance and notice how you remained as untouched as the lily you used to have on your chest?>>

- Well, actually -she answered herself- she would smile and tell you how proud is of her little child who finally could do anything she ever desired once...before passing away forever.

And those were her last words. She died with a board grin.