Zbornik Mednarodnega literarnega srečanja Vilenica 2004 - Ljudmila

The Etruscan Vel Matuna
excerpt from the novel
Katarina Marinčič
VIII.
When Vel was sick, everybody did everything to please him. But when he
made demands, they rarely understood him.
»Take me out, I want some fresh air,« he asked once.
»Where would you like to go, sweetheart? Where shall we take you?
Would you like to go to the sea?« asked Fastia.
»Wherever, but not to the sea,« he replied, and felt bile rising in his
chest. (His anger was much greater than his strength. Ranti saw it, and
placed a cushion under his head.)
The following day, when he forgot about his desire and anger, they
carried him into the yard and hoisted a tent around him. The wind was
blowing up the white canvas, and the tendrils painted on it moved as if
they were real, as if alive. Vel had a feeling he would get caught in them;
he sobbed, but nobody heard him, not even Ranti.
Afterwards, even the walls of his room started puffing up and swelling;
the orange line underneath the ceiling wriggled like a snake.
IX.
Actually, at that time he didn’t want to go just anywhere. He wanted to go
out of town, to the place where the slope overgrown with tasselled grass
descended into the dell, where the murmur of a brook was coming from
below, where you could look at the adjacent hill, at the forest with thousands
of trees. The forest was rising in front of you like a rock, so close it
could crush you, immense beyond reach.
Until he fell ill he went to sit on the grassy slope almost every day.
In the mornings, when the sun was shining at his back, he could see
only one colour at the other side, the deep dark green penetrating through
the sunny haze like moisture.
Late in the afternoon, at the moment when the sun rolled over behind
the forest and the haze disappeared, the green disintegrated into patches.
The soft, almost translucent tops of the pines levitated between the full,
mellow planes, between the oaks and the beech trees; in between glittered
the eucalyptuses, and at the other end of the slope, the olive trees;
the cypresses looked like pillars smeared with resin.
In an instant the colours were interrupted by lines as soft as if chiselled
by a goldsmith. He could see every single leaf and every single pine
needle, even the ribs on the leaves, their rustling in the wind, their soft
upper and rugged lower sides.
Then everything disappeared, and only then, in the dusk, did things
from the forest floor start glimmering among the black tree-tops: the
freshly crushed white stones, and the smoothest, the lightest grey trunks
of all.
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