SVIETA'S LETTER

Dreamer –

I can tell from your letters that you're doing great things for your people and eternity.

I remember well when I beseached you to take me swimming under the stars' indifferent gaze and, nude, I submerged myself in the sea lapping the island of your ancestors, lulled as it is by boats. You refrained from looking at me and I thought you were weird and lacking in instinctive responses. However, now, I know that your mind is taken up with grave matters, issues that are far more crucial than my decadent nudity.

I'm also captive to the private sphere and preoccupied with eternity, in a manner that differs from yours.

I've just had a morbid conversation with three violinists after a snack of brown bread and wine on the terrace. The urn containing the ashes of my brother arrived yesterday and his wife had to take the ashes and bury them herself according to prevailing custom. She vowed to herself that she wouldn't shed any tears, however, at the grave she got ever so slightly drunk on the cognac her husband distilled himself.

Anyway, the conversation turned to the rituals connected to funerary caskets. Some of them are absurd. My geriatric aunt, the one who secretely wrote the Manual of Prayer for Matrimonial Chastity, had kept her mother's ashes in a bookcase next to a prominenet cactus plant for three years. She used to say that whenever she had tried to bury her mother's dust, it would snow heavily and the streets would become inaccessible, a sign that the dead woman's spirit wanted to continue living in that house.

Matthias, one of the violinists, and who for the last three days has been sleeping in the loft as he'd like to levitate for inspirational purposes, had another funerary tale. He recounted that he'd stolen the urn with his uncle's traces. His uncle had been an archivist and an expert in human organs as represented in Bosch's paintings. He took the urn from a grave in Germany, híd it in the car and crossed the border into what was then Czechoslovakia. He still keeps his uncle in the wardrobe.

The three violinists played for a long time and the niece, Martha, stared at them in a manner as if they were to play at her own funeral. We ate, drank, laughed and look: you and I are still writing to each other about suffering and death.

I will stop here for today, dear poet of the Mediterranean.. I hope that your writing will be to your conteentment and that it will help shore up the cracks in your soul. Do not get too close to the edge of the world.

Eternally yours,

Svieta.

P.S. I want to send you Margit Rossman's new book: the interweaving of erotic images and the psychology of terminal illness is relevant to your recent works. I urge you to read the first and last chapters, dealing with „ The moribund Deer whose legs are splayed upwardly in the direction of the horizon”.

MARIO AZZOPARDI

Translated by Patricia Gatt