It was an unpredictable and banal mental association that made him find those words right there, in that moment.
He was walking through the colorful paths of the cemetery towards the niche in which his father was crammed, perhaps the only person in the world he had ever hated.
No come on, let's not fall into clichés, I just thought I hated it.
The occasions in which she went to visit him in that peaceful oasis of greenery, torches and beggars were rather rare, partly for logistical reasons, given that she didn't return so often to the village, partly because she didn't want to find herself going there reluctantly. His father was housed in a crypt belonging to another family, which made his name and picture stand out among others as the correct option in the easiest question of a TV quiz show. He preferred to go there alone, so he could feel free to look him in the eye and talk to him aloud as widows do.
I even cried once. Just a few drops though.
That Sunday he was very surprised to find, at the foot of the corner dedicated to his father, a crystal vase with a large sunflower inside. It wasn't the first time someone had left flowers there but he was pretty sure he'd never seen a sunflower in a cemetery. First, long before wondering who it could have been, he found the sentence in his mouth that threw him into an unexpected flashback: I died in a big sunflower.
He smiled.
He was in bed with Clara, the first girl he had made love with.
In the sense that I had slept with him because I was in love with him, not to have something to say to friends.
In fact, his previous passionate experiences had not been brilliant.
Mind you, I was the disappointing one, even though I often told the exact opposite. The truth was, I would have tried each of them again if they'd only given me one more chance.
He had met her by chance while moving from one area of Rome to another. He had tripped under the weight of some boxes and she had offered to give him a hand, giggling, demonstrating surprising strength compared to her small frame. She discovered that she lived right in the building across from the one he was leaving. Had they met just a year earlier, their relationship would have been more comfortable; now instead to see her he was forced every time to face the group of daytime, afternoon, night and often strike public transport. Many of their conversations began with tirades against those peasants of the drivers.
I could tell a lot about those pieces of shit. Never mind.
They shared little, indeed in many ways they were absolutely polar opposites, yet, who knows how, everything seemed to work out. Perhaps her secret lay precisely in her enormous sexual understanding, where her exuberance and curiosity matched perfectly with his unexpressed and somewhat lazy experimentalism.
If it were up to her he would have done it all the time. But I was more for the quality.
Those tender and poetic embraces made both more and more docile and satisfied. His friends said that since Clara had entered his life he had become less argumentative and even a little more likeable.
I have never agreed on this.
Neither of them felt objectively attractive yet the realization of being able to send the other into raptures with nothing electrified them. For example, it was enough for him to blow hard into her ear to see her go into fourth place, while she managed to make him helpless by stroking the bluish veins protruding from her wrist. However, what struck him more and more was the inexhaustible imagery with which Clara shared their relationship. In particular, she remembered the flowers, the main protagonists of her pleasure.
Perhaps, however, it is more appropriate to start with the colors.
It all started with colors. "It was light green", "golden yellow streaked with fuchsia", "this time it was a nice deep blue", "very red, with some purple veins", these are the phrases that Clara used to describe what she had felt during the climax. It was her way of letting him know "how it was", to answer that question that all males ask themselves but to which only the less sensitive give voice. She summarized everything like this, without needing to add anything else, before enjoying the ecstasy of the post in religious silence.
He was so ashamed to pronounce the word "orgasm". When he just couldn't help it, she said it in a low voice.
Once she explained to him that the intensity of her pleasure was proportional to the gradation of the colors she saw: the darker they were, the more beautiful it was. The maximum therefore had to be black, a color which however he never managed to obtain as much as he tried to mix his chromatic-amateur skills as best as he could.
As their relationship matured, colors were gradually displaced by flowers. She loved nature and animals very much even if he, son of the metropolis, felt an innate hostility towards anything that didn't contain cement as well as a deep hatred towards insects and dogs. The flower revolution made the concept of pleasure much more nuanced, less measurable. The imprecise mathematics of the colors finally gave way to the art of the image, to pure and elusive suggestion. He couldn't tell if poppy was better than broom, he had no idea if he'd been better at conjuring an orchid or a forget-me-not. But he was sure he had made her happy when once she collapsed and whispered to him: "I died in a big sunflower." The fact that she brought up death when life comes with all her strength shocked him pleasantly. Clara began to make flowers blossom one after the other, more and more particular and colorful, so much so that some of them he didn't even know existed. Sometimes, after they'd dressed, she'd come up to him in an awkward imitation of Nilla Pizzi and sing “Graaazie dei fiooor…” keeping her fist over her mouth like a microphone.
Their happiness seemed inexhaustible to the point that he, carried away by floral metaphors, often compared their feelings to the itinerant florists of Rome, those who stand on the edge of the sidewalks and who never close even at night.
Then I found out why they never close. Once at three in the morning I approached one of them and asked him. He smiled suggesting that I wasn't the first to ask him that question and then he said it was because of an ordinance from the municipality. Since they are only allowed to use a few square meters of public land, the stalls and gazebos they can put up are never big enough to enclose all their plants inside. The only solution is therefore to remain open twenty-four hours on twenty-four, taking turns keeping watch, like a military outpost. And I thought they were hiding some strange traffic.
Flowers always remained the main subject of Clara's visions, even if they sometimes disappeared inexplicably in favor of new and often decidedly enigmatic images. She had once found herself lying in an endless green meadow, which for obvious reasons he didn't pay too much attention to. Instead, he was rather dumbfounded when a couple of weeks later she said: "You promised me flowers and instead they were sailboats". The bliss with which she pronounced the sentence allowed him to immediately drive away the fear of an uninspiring performance but he would have liked to deepen the meaning of that strange vision.
More than anything else it would have been fun to inaugurate a new seafaring trend, also because she loved pirate films. Instead the boats never returned. Now that I think about it, even the death in the sunflower was only that one time.
Maybe that's exactly why the sunflower found there in the middle of the cemetery had dragged him so irresistibly back in time. It had been years since she associated flowers with sex.
And to think that when adults explain reproduction to children, they always start with the bee that pollinates the flower.
For a moment he hoped that it was Clara who had left the sunflower, with the double function of homage and reminder, a discreet and unequivocal way of telling him: "I'm back". But no, it was absurd that she had bothered to crawl all the way here, and then he would never have done it that way. Death, the real one, wasn't for her, it wasn't her field.
He left the niche with his mind still fixed on the flower and its consequences, so much so that he ended up suddenly finding himself guilty of an embarrassing erection. He sat down on a low wall nearby to keep some moralist with a soiled conscience from noticing him. He lowered his head a little and found himself eye to eye with his father, whose photo continued to look at him peacefully from the small window of the crypt. He blushed as if caught in the act; then, after a quick shrug, he gave him a wide knowing smile.
The author
Armando Vertorano was born in 1980 in the province of Salerno. After a degree in Communication Sciences, he first moved to Turin, where he attended a master's degree in writing and editing of audiovisual products, and then moved to Rome where he was offered a bizarre job: writing questions for television quizzes. In his spare time he writes short stories, novels, screenplays and songs. With goWare he published the collection Dindaléfrom which this story is based.
