KindleIn my dream, I was watching a boy who, sitting on a stool at the kitchen table, silently and obediently nodded to every of this mother’s warnings, perhaps scolding or simply instructing him. He was a handsome boy of big dark eyes on a pale face, under the lank brown hair. Carefully he listened to his mother and, after each of her sentences, nodded as a sign of understanding.
I witnessed the scene from very close, but — both knowing I was there, none of them seemed to notice me, attentive to each other as they were; though in the bottom of his stare the boy had as if an absent air, like that of one who steps on two worlds at once: the inner and the outer ones. I gazed at him with a mixture of pity and infinte tenderness, and as tenderly as I’m able to: his childlike countenance, so familiar and so alien at the same time, and his deep, clever eyes that seemed home to misterious thoughts, though perhaps they just reflected a most candid innocence.
I felt a great love for him and, mostly, an enormous simpathy: simpathy because all the sufferings he would have to undergone in life, that would age too early his tender and pure soul. Then, I came close to him and, tenderly taking his head between my hands, I put my lips to his cheek and kissed him warmly a few times, with the emotion of that who’s saying farewell forever — like my aunts in the village used to kiss me when, by the end of every summer, we returned to the city. And the boy, still attentively listening to his mother’s words, received my kisses without a stare, neither of affection nor aloofness; not indifferently, but as if… as if he had not been kissed at all.
That boy, whom I was visiting thanks to the magic of dreams, was myself.
And when I woke up, the spell gone, for a while I tried as hard as I could to remember: did I ever feel, as a child, the warmth on my cheek of some ghostly kisses?, did I ever shiver, being a boy, with the close breath of an invisible presence?, did I ever get the impression that someone was visiting me from beyond time?
