The immaculate - 6

We reached the coffee shop, sat in a kind of lobby and, maybe out of casual passion, I ended up asking her: what if life ended tomorrow, what would we do, now? And I can see her laughing and laughing without being able to discard an old bashfulness which consumed some of the fire in her gestures; laughing and somehow offering in that secret-sealed laugh the near sum of total surrender. It was barely a contention, more like an acrobatics of the inaccessible, a secret fearless art. She was herself in a way I had never seen before. And yet, very slowly, the meat-pie cracked in her mouth, invisible teeth chewed at the dough, lips dragging themselves with a fervent ardor that seemed to turn this Christmas Eve into a kind of D-Day. Some sort of challenge.

e

(to be continued)