And suddenly she appeared to him, like an ice maiden with a smile of honey and gold, against a background of blue, lava rocks and sea. Child of winter who stood so beautiful in her blizzard of frost. A motionless statue with frosted eyelashes. She was so exquisite that the air around her started to shake. The sapphire brush of the Mediterranean, with a silky movement, painted her diaphanous and white silhouette in blue. And her golden hair flew in ribbons of wind.
He called her. She turned and smiled at him. She was blonde and Norwegian. Her name was Marianne. Marianne Ilhen.
Leonard didn’t know anything about himself yet, but he already knew everything about her. Which was beautiful and bright like a cold sun emerging from the ice. That she loved love and travel. The laughter and the poems. The songs and the tenderness. And that she would come into her life as sweet as a rainbow after a storm.
They were two beings who had come from the cold, from a landscape of whiteness and snow. She from Oslo, in the fjords of Norway, he from Montreal, in the province of Quebec. They were so chilled, despite all the years spent by the hearth trying to dry their pain and loneliness with the rustling of the flames of a beautiful bonfire, that they were still shivering. She had frost on her lips and eyes of diamonds and gold. He, with his heart in the shape of an ice floe, slowly glided towards her. Even in the middle of the Mediterranean, he still shivered from those long, harsh winters. But as soon as he saw her, he didn’t know why, he was never cold again.
Before he knew it, his love for her melted the ice all around. The great blanket of snow he wore on her shoulders melted in a secret corner of the pole. On the other side of the Aegean Sea.
A few months earlier, Leonard had left Montreal, a city of snow and cold. This Jerusalem of the North, which was his very promised land. He had dreamed of being a bard since ancient times. It was enough for him to close his eyes to imagine himself walking through the heart of the ancient capitals. Athens, Rome, Jerusalem. City that he wanted to know and whose scent of musk and incense intoxicated him. But at the time he was a poet of the new world. He attended literary readings from Montreal to New York.
Like a snowflake in the middle of a huge blizzard, little by little, it entered the environment.
A first exile had led him to London, in the footsteps of William Butler Yeats, where, thanks to a scholarship, he began his career as a novelist. Career that gradually turned into the destiny of a cursed and penniless poet. His novel stumbled every time his purse emptied. Eager to make a living from writing, like any poet lost in a gray city, Leonard was just another pariah.
But you know I’m poor
And my dreams are my only assets
And the rain kept falling.
It was then that the sun of Greece caught his eye in front of a travel agency.
Soaking wet, frozen, he walked in and asked:
“What’s the weather like in Greece?”
“It’s spring,” the clerk replied. “There is a radiant sun.”
He had no connection with London, much less prospects for the future. From Yeats to Elytis, there’s only one peninsula to cross. In a whim, he decided to dip into his meager savings and buy a plane ticket to Athens.
He first stopped in Jerusalem, the blessed land of Israel, the cradle of all Jews. During the day he would visit the ancient sites and at night he would sit at the Kasit café, a gathering place for writers. She wasn’t yet, but she was already pretending to be, smoking one cigarette after another, a glass of arak in hand.
Three days later he was in Greece.
Athens, city of the acropolis, lost in an ocean of concrete, where the Hellenes gather as if for a last sacrifice. Athens in the breach of time, where the whole sky is blocked. Heap of ruins and dust covered by two thousand years of history, with statues brandishing swords in anger, and the scent of massacres suspended in the splendor of the still air.
After a night of suffocating in noise and pollution, he reached Piraeus and from there embarked for Hydra.
Hydra the island of water. Well watered hydra.
Hydra the beautiful, where Mount Eros culminates.
Aegean Sea Hydra lost somewhere in the immensity of the Saronic Gulf.
Hydra facing the Argolis peninsula. Hydra the island of sleeping cats.
Hydra amphitheater city that dominates the sea as if it were giving a show.
Hydra where, from the first foot on the ground, he felt at home.
In Hydra, summer is a sweet torment and the sun is its faithful tormentor.
In the morning, a cascade of light falls on the city like an anvil, before breaking with a crash on the rocks, and then spreading in a shower of sparks in the dazzling glitter of the sea.
In Hydra, at midday, silence envelops the high terraces covered with vineyards with green and sour grapes, and bees buzz around the temples in the heat – a drum caressed by the wind.
In Hydra, when Aeolus gets caught in the sails of fishing boats, it’s time to get up from the table, have a last drink and go to sea.
In Hydra the air is saturated with the scent of bougainvillea, whose fragrances, weighed down by droplets of sea salt, dry the mouth, scrape the throat, burn the eyes and eyelids.
In Hydra the night is so sweet that the stars compete to go and pierce each other on the blade of the moon. In Hydra the gods have forgotten to retreat, and when the waves break against the rocks of its inhospitable coast, we know they are drawing their spears and shields.
And that, somewhere on this island of water and light, a new Trojan War has begun.
Leonard held a suitcase in one hand and a guitar in the other. He was immersed in solitude, light and voluptuousness when he landed at the Katsikas café-grocery store, where he met a couple of Australian journalists who lived on writing and freedom. Georges Johnston and Charman Clift bought him lunch, freshly caught grilled sardines washed down by a river of Retsinas, and kindly offered to put him up for the night. There were no hotels on Hydra. No electricity, no phone, no running water. Nor car or television. But fishermen and soft-hearted artists, there were plenty.
He knew then that this was his place. The place of a poet with crazy hair, a dark and soft gaze and hollow cheeks, skin tanned by the Mediterranean sun. And that here, in the middle of nowhere, sitting on the steps of this wonderful island, halfway between the silence of the sky and the music of the sea, between riches and poverty, he could be defenseless and happy at the same time.
In Hydra Leonard was satisfied with little. A little sun, sea and writing. Some walks on the dirt paths. Bathing in a cove, lying on a rock and feeling the tongue of the sun lick his skin while he protected his eyes from the sharpness of the light. Sit in a port taverna and watch the sailboats leave one by one. Living in slow motion, like a moon wanderer, light soul, with a few drachmas in his pocket. Confusing slowness with the sweetness of life. He finally had a monastic life, the existence he had always dreamed of and which led him little by little on the path to holiness.
He didn’t have to worry about anything but his own well-being, and create. Of course he was poor, but this poverty was more like a priesthood. Here nothing was as expensive as in a capital city. He rented a small house with whitewashed walls for fourteen dollars a month. A table, a chair and a bed. And a guitar.
The only luxury of a West so distant as to seem unreal – he had brought with him an old Olivetti typewriter and a ream of paper. In his suitcase, some modest belongings. A leather wallet from Russia, a box of new razor blades, a sailor’s sweater.
That is, more or less, the full extent of his legacy. He had no money, but he had freedom.
A total freedom that he used in the most noble way, both poetic and elegant. Because he did nothing but write, sleep and dream. He first of all he slept, with his eyes open in the shady coolness of insomnia, or with his fists clenched under the elephantine weight of sleep. Then he dreamed, in a succession of kaleidoscopic and sibylline images, of erotic ghosts, evaporated dreams and frozen nightmares. He remembered it when he woke up to squeeze the sap, the raw material of writing, fragile like the cocoon of a silkworm, to then constellate the verses on the page similar to a spider slowly weaving its web. Always, with a constant rhythm, he unrolled the tenuous and almost invisible thread of writing. He lived as an ascetic, in a sepulchral retreat, without counting the hours and minutes, accompanied by silence or shamanic music.
He excluded himself from life and drew the red ink of desire and passion from his own blood, to recreate it on a stage of ink and paper, a creator syndrome that shapes nothing but shadows, imperceptible shapes woven from a mysterious intertwining of dreams and fantasies .
He wasn’t quite Leonard Cohen yet, but her name was already Marianne Ilhen. She is sweet, beautiful and generous, Callipygia goddess with a pure heart and white breasts. He saw her go down to the port and reach her sailboat, accompanied by her husband and her son, her double Axel with whom she formed a perfect and holy trinity.
He already saw her, but she didn’t see him. At least not yet. Hours, days, weeks of an incessant carousel, in the deep crucible of secrecy. It lasted an eternity to look at her, surprise her, observe her. Seeing it rise from the top of a stairway, and disappear into the infinity of alleys. Or dive into the sea that bathes the village of salt and stones balanced on the rocks, the island of water and sun called Hydra.
In the time he stole from her, he hovered over her lips, mesmerized by the fire of her hair, by the aura of her beauty.
Until the day it literally fell on her. Face to face, heart to heart, as in a hand-to-hand battle. So she went on the attack. She was at the village grocery, at Katsikas, where she shopped for feta cheese, olives, retsina and eucalyptus cigarettes. She was there, he would always remember her. This time she couldn’t hide in the shadow of love, behind a wall, a shutter, in the corner of a church. He was thrown into his light, caught up in his reality, drowned in the whirlwind of his life. Dazzled by the glittering fires of his gaze. He then he spoke to her, he no longer remembered what, perhaps he had uttered nothing but a stammer. But it didn’t matter because he loved her from the first second. This, he could swear to. Besides, no need to try it. From the first glance, she knew it. You didn’t have to be a great fortune teller to know that he, all those years, had never stopped loving her.
A few days later, Leonard finally dared to take the first step. It was noon, in full sunlight. He was sitting at a table on the terrace at the port inn with Georges and Charman, waiting for the boat and the mail. Marianne passed in front of him, fresh and smiling like a pearl of dew slipping on the pavement still glittering with the moon. This time he didn’t let go. He stood up and, standing in the doorway of the grocery where she had entered, he asked her:
“Do you want to join us? We’re sitting out there.”
Because of the backlight, she couldn’t make out his face. It seemed to her a beggar leaning in his own shadow. But, at the sound of her voice, he knew what he wanted from her. She turned and smiled at him. And in that smile there were all the promises in the world. She joined him and they sat facing each other. Georges ordered wine, and Charman ordered souvlaki. And for the first time they devoured each other with their eyes.
Adapted from Dance me to the end of love by Maxence Fermine, to be released in Italy on 9 June by AnimaMundi Edizioni, translated by Roberta Castoldi.
