TEN TINY TALES

When I arrived to Zagreb my soul was still in Amsterdam. It had left me in the middle of the road somewhere in Germany, during the night, and it traveled back home while my body went further East. This was very confusing. Besides I was tired and my friend Laura was pretty much in the same soulless state of blankness. She wanted to slow down and rest, and I had to hurry and go look for my soul. So my body took me under the blazing sun, in a mini-skirt and sunglasses, to the main square of the city, where I unexpectedly heard a couple of guys speaking Portuguese. I said ‘hi’ and asked them if they knew where I could change some money. They didn’t, so I set on a bench and wrote a bit, and then cried a bit behind my sunglasses, since I didn’t know what else to do. Soon the two guys came to talk to me, and they both introduced themselves:

‘I’m Mauro’ said one.

‘And I’m also Mauro’ said the other.

I took off my sunglasses and wiped my tears, hoping it wasn’t too obvious that I had been crying, and they didn’t seem to notice it. We spoke for a while, and they told me they were in Zagreb until the end of the month, sharing a flat with two other Brazilian, who were both called Adilson. After this I said goodbye to the friendly guys, changed some money eventually, and headed back to Laura's sister apartment.

Late at night I couldn’t fall asleep, and didn’t understand why. All I knew was that I was feeling terrible, and my body desperately wanted to get back to Amsterdam. Then Laura told me that I had probably left my soul behind, and after that I felt a bit better, and I finally started dreaming about envelopes on a road. Many envelops in different colors.

The next morning my soul had arrived. Laura and I spoke the whole afternoon - when she finally felt awake and hungry - and in the evening we went for dinner. When we passed the main square Laura met a friend, and while they were talking I set again on the same bench. Almost immediately, I heard some voices speaking Portuguese next to me, and I looked to see if they were from the two Mauro's. They weren’t. So I didn’t say anything. And then I heard:

‘Alice?’

I looked a bit surprised at the guy who was looking at me, wondering what was happening and why was he guessing my name. He rephrased:

‘Are you Alice?’

I said yes. He introduced himself:

‘I’m Adilson’

I didn’t get it. And then the other guy introduced himself too:

‘And I’m also Adilson’

I finally laughed. The first Adilson said they had been trying to find me, because the Mauro's had told them that I was sad. I didn’t mention anything about my SOUL DELAY.

We stopped by a restaurant bar on the way to Pag, and I went in to use the toilet. There was a little table next to the normal tables, and all around it a group of stuffed rabbits and hares were sitting down, playing A MAD CARD GAME.

‘CAN I SMELL YOU?’ this girl asked me, not knowing me at all, and I just laughed and told her that I stank too much to be smelled. But she smelled me anyway and said I had a lovely smell. Then she grabbed my foot and gave it a big sniff. She kept on sniffing my feet through the day every now and again.

In GAJAC there are big black fat insects lying on the sidewalks, dead under the sun. They don’t manage to cross over during the day because it’s too hot.

Yesterday we went to A BEACH ON THE MOON. The hills around it were totally white and it was somehow odd to see the ‘other’ Moon in the sky. However, at the same time, it made perfect planetary sense. Dana asked me, when we were going down hill, which book I was reading at the moment, but right after that we started talking about something else and I never answered him. Only later, when we were lying on the white stones of the lunar beach, I took my book out of my bag and told him that it was Life, The Universe and Everything. He smiled and mentioned:

‘By Douglas Adams? It’s the third time I speak about that book on this beach. There must be some kind of connection’

When the Sun slowly set down, the water became as white as the rest of the landscape. Edo and I saw two goats walking down the dusty white hills, one of them as white as the land itself, and the other one black, and then we went to visit a couple of donkeys we had spotted in a field nearby. The first one - apparently older – made us a very eloquent speech as soon as we approached it. It had the sweetest eyes.

Laura says she DREAMS OF SONGS. She says she actually composes them in her sleep. Dream poetry is apparently common.

Marco says:

‘I’ll enter your pet project and become an evil e-mail’

Laura sings:

‘Sorry, get a job, I’m so beautiful. Sorry, get a job, I’m so hysterical’

I write:

‘A big grape complex of instability’

Laura sings:

‘Every time I go into the distance, everywhere I go, I come into resistance, everywhere, that’s where I go’

Shine talks:

‘We’re the swimming society’

Laura sings:

‘When the soul takes off, we’re just women, only women’.

THE MYSTERIOUS PULA STORY is the one that Maya will never tell.

Laura andEdo needed to catch the bus to Motovun. According to the schedule, there should be a bus at nine-fifteen. They asked for a ticket at the ticket office, and the lady in there said she wasn’t really sure if there was a bus to Motovun. She told them to ASK THE CLEANING LADY. The cleaning lady was mopping the floor right next to them, and so they asked her about the bus. She said:

‘Ask the driver’

The driver was just standing near the cleaning lady, and when they asked him about the bus, he replied:

‘Ask the ticket lady’

Then the driver said:

‘I don’t think there is a bus’

And Edo told him:

‘But it says so here on the schedule; there should be one at nine-fifteen’

The bus driver replied:

‘Then there must be one’.

I feel like some kind of mermaid, early in the morning, making FISH CONTACT, rising sand underwater with my feet, creating tiny storms so that the fish will come and see what’s happening. They come in colors and the sand toned ones slide under the storms, getting closer and closer to my feet, trying not to be noticed. The striped ones come straight at me, and the tiny ones bite my legs shamelessly. It gets scary at some point, when I start getting surrounded, and then I giggle and go.

Some moments are so holy that I can’t help myself and have to giggle in some kind of ecstasy. Laura, Edo, and I are sitting in a café near the beach, quietly reading. The cicadas are shouting all around us, proclaiming their joy and celebrating summer time. In the morning I saw a butterfly on the road, without half of HER wing, unable to fly anywhere, and that made me deeply sad. The whole thing looked like a car accident without a car and without people. Just a butterfly in shades of orange standing on the side of the road, damaged and confused, and half of her wing lying on a stone ten or fifteen centimeters away.

At night bats were flying and dancing around me under the sky full of stars, as I was walking all the way home in the middle of the road. They flew above my head back and forward, all the way until the lamps were gone.