Remembering Bloomers
It doesn’t matter how many times you’ve talked about it. ‘He’s killing himself,’ you all say, maybe as a talisman, collective insurance against the pain of the news when it comes. And it comes. And then, before the vacuum of absence, there is a profound presence. Like he’s gone, but still here; burning momentarily brighter, blast-wave phosphorescence, crystallizing all the blur and blot you knew but never needed to synthesize. A spirit. Ectoplasm. The plummy timbre of his voice, the way he blushed, smirked sadly, looked down; now departed from the humiliated, corporeal plank that remains to mock our memory. Yet momentarily suspended in clear air: beautiful: a skein of smoke, before it fogs into reminiscence. This is a sad day. The consummation of an ennui that we who wake eager to greet each morning can only grope to comprehend. We send him off with kindness and with love.
And if twilight inside the tent is murky, impending darkness brings into relief slow scattered pinpricks, constellations of a life always there, scarcely visible under sunlight’s lion gaze. The day on the beach at Alberoni with Nic, Olinda, Paul, David, is not mere beauty refracted through the prism of memory. It was lovely there and then, and we all knew it, including him. His plaintive, face-wide grin after finally rolling up his shorts and paddling in the sea – a triumph – the water lapping at his pale shins as he pointed out to the horizon. Aschenbach as Tadzio. Reaching meekly for joy, the finest he could do at that point, closer to the end than we knew. Then slurping his favoured spaghetti alle vongole at the little Ristorante Bagni above the beach, acqua frizzante, the omnipresent goblet of Pinot Grigio sipped slowly but steadily. There’s something delicate, beatific, about joy in proximity to darkness. Something almost childlike. A gift.
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Nic is a loss. Even for me, who knew him only glancingly. A kindly man, stranded in the mud over there, closer to the edge of things. Closer to the place where we smile, wave, fall and disappear; one less figure shimmering between ourselves and the maw. Now life is one nice person lonelier; the edge closer. He was a lost boy, increasingly out of arm’s reach. Even the quality of his smile, his acquiescent murmur, the way he cast his eyes down while reflecting; these were acknowledgements of that dualism – loving the friends, the flirtation, the cheap Chinese, the vongole, the Pinot Grigio – but also being on his way. That we were around to watch the sunlight halo around him in that autumnal corona, even if just for a few Venetian days, is a treasure. I mean, what is Venice for, if not for that? A benevolent setting for an ending. It’s a beautiful memory. And a fine lesson in how to embrace the birdless silence.
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