The soul's path E-Book

Claudio Demurtas

• Herausgeber: lfapublisher
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

"Set in 1985, the novel is Claudio Demurtas' second narrative work. The main protagonist is a priest with a shaky vocation for an existential anguish which he cannot find the key to, thanks to the sudden discovery of sexuality embodied in Manuela. She is a very beautiful and very cultured girl, but a slave to drugs that she procures by prostitution. Don Emilio falls madly in love with her, but their story will draw to a tragic conclusion, making the pain in his soul unbearable, which she will try to soothe by leaving the sacristy and looking for other worlds and other spaces in Latin America. In fact he will encounter the misery of the favelas, the terrible injustice perpetrated by the established power against the masses of campesinos and their liberation struggle, in which he will participate almost unconsciously, dragged by the Christian inspiration towards the oppressed and the last and as a dangerous revolutionary he will be treated by the regime that will subject him to hard tests. It is in this context that his vocation will take firm roots, revolutionizing his life. "
 

Leseprobe

Claudio Demurtas

The soul’s path

-Novel-

The soul’s path

A novel by Claudio Demurtas

First edition April 2020

Isbn 978-88-3343-239-7

Cover taken from the painting by Lorenzo Mattotti”Vampires” 2014

The following novel is purely fictional,

any resemblance to real person or events its pure coincidence

LFA Publisher

Lello Lucignano Editore

Via A. Diaz, 17 -80023-

Caivano -Napoli, Italy

Partita Iva 06298711216

www.lfaeditorenapoli.it --- [email protected]

Distribution by Libro Co. Italia -Firenze -

It flies only who dares to do it

From:”Story of a seagull and the cat that taught her to fly”

By Luis Sepùlveda

To my life partner who gave the push to

“sa perda inquaddigada.”

ONE

As always, he was out of breath on the last stretch of the climb. That evening, however, the limestone buttresses that surrounded the old fortress loomed more hunched and wicked on the road to Abundance and so the Hail Marys struggled to make their way into his mind, as if occluded by fatigue and in harmony with the Passion and Death of Christ.

Don Emilio had used to say his prayers for years on those afternoon walks from the attic of Vico Quarto S. Giovanni to the hill that faced the city from the south. Once up there, a gravelly parting among the pines led to the terrace of the Belvedere and finally the gaze could sweep and knot in the colors of the plain and the distant sea. Then the trouble passed and his heart melted, arriving at the last post of the Rosary in via del Cammino Nuovo. In fact, it took him ten minutes to recite the Gaudiosi, for the stretch of Via S. Giovanni that reached the foot of the mountain. The seven, eight hundred meters of the ascent of Abundance, on the other hand, were equivalent to the Mystery of the Death of Croce, and it was the least pleasant part of the excursion, especially because a full stomach often cut off his legs and breath. Nevertheless, he willingly submitted to sacrifice, a very small personal ordeal that gave him height in enjoyment, then, and thoughts inaccessible to others, freedom. Therefore he strictly respected the itinerary and travel time, speeding up or slowing down as appropriate as if he had a metronome, to arrive punctually on the New Way in tune with the Resurrection of Christ from the Sepulcher. And he had just reached that goal, at four in the afternoon of that end of March 1985, the year of the Lord.

He felt tired, tired... and could not keep himself within the sphere of his devotions, instead diving into the very white and soft shapes that mixed with the wind, spinning who knows where.

Few people around, but it was always like this, given the inaccessibility of the avenue to cars: only a couple - soldier and maid on leave: the red hands betrayed poor stories

She was making out without thoughts, leaning against the parapet of the first roundabout.

Don Emilio passed on, hastening his pace to gain the edge of the hill and its bench: a lava axis placed in the center of the balustrade, facing the void. That bald clearing of beaten earth and the profile of the cliff the prow that was trying to break the distance from the sea looked like the deck of a ship.

There was no soul there either, and thank goodness; as always, after all: only in the first shadows did some motocross bikes populate the bushes and the results could be seen everywhere, limp and dull with furtive emotions, consumed by rolling the glances.

He sat down to rest. The silence was total cold hybrid. After the litanies, he closed the Rosary with a distracted Salveregina. A crow crept past... The priest had a loose shoe and bent down to tighten the laces; it was then that he saw the sheets scattered under the counter, startled at the sight of the colors and the photos.

Taking a look around, he picked them up with a thief’s gesture, stuffing them under his jacket. Then he began to peek, widening a flap of the clergyman, squalid evolutions of the sexes twisted and dissected by the spotlights. He seemed to have his eye stuck in a keyhole, with a mixture of helpless excitement and sadness, feeling very ashamed. The misery of men! He tried to imagine the commercial organization of those sold scenes, the fake expressions of ecstasy in front of the camera, contractual performances slammed on the platinum paper for lonely men... shit. The same things must have been thought by the lonely dreamer owner of the porn magazine which was then dismissed and thrown away, and he seemed to see him, adolescent and pimply in front of bodies slaughtered, getting lost later in the disgust of oneself and of life.

She sighed. Wasn’t he also falling into the same temptation, despite the bristly and interspersed gray hair?

He folded the leaves and put them in his pocket arching his back. The shadow of the seminary suddenly materialized, staining the hollows of memory with shapes and sounds...”From up to the top of the ancient tower, solitary sparrow... here listen” explained Father Farina,”you can almost hear the ringing the bell, din din...”

From the first bench of the side adjacent to the large window the sun overflowed over the anthology, throwing it outside to look for bleats and daisies and Marciano became his native wild village for eighteen-year-olds, greedy for walks as desperate and intense as those of the poet.

What was it that prompted him to become a priest? Not frustrations to be paid for, family miseries - his father was the town clerk and even without luxury he managed to get a dignified existence - and not even a crystalline vocation. No. He knew very well that it was the fear of death that endorsed his renunciation of the world: a dark all-encompassing feeling that had eroded him ten years after having witnessed, despite him, the sudden death of his grandfather. Before then his childhood had slipped as carefree as that of many children, but the blue-filled balloon had tragically burst over a pair of upturned eyes. And Emilio had abruptly experienced what the constructions of men were, the most tenacious affections, life, he who was viscerally attached to that old man. Nothing but a little bit of nothing, defectable vegetative precariousness ashes.

He had not even cried during the day, because it was not the pain that tormented him, but the sudden merciless awakening, the impact with the inevitability. Because he had seen death in the face and showed white hairs and unmade beds and terrible answers behind the lies that were told to children and so the sweet words of the parents had become stone and mirror of a reality to which they first of all, invincible fathers and charitable mothers had to succumb. And they could no longer send him back to Alice’s country, to games and fairy tales. He had become an adult all of a sudden. Sooner or later he would have done that too and nothing could save him, no strength, a woman’s womb, no one, Jesus! The only one who really had to look for and follow to distant places of the mind... he quickly became indifferent to the company of his peers, to facts, to everything, to things, introverting and dulling the eyes of deadly melancholy. Even the ophthalmologist had naively observed, causing stab wounds to his parents, that his retinas seemed tired, of an old man, as if it were not a couple of diopters, but something else. At thirteen he had entered the seminary: diploma, degree in literature, at twenty-four the priestly ordination.

Sitting on the tip of the seat, legs crossed and stretched out, Don Emilio had printed a half smile. How much water had passed under the bridges of his anguish! By now he was reduced to a thin stream in the plain of forty-five, but out of philosophical conviction, rather than out of the religious hope of a near future afterlife. When we are there, there is no death, when there is death there is no us, it was said in the letter to Meneceo and the assumption well summarized his current position and did not conflict at all with the Faith, on the contrary, rational acceptance and Promessa had led him to a sweet ataraxia that made him live for the day, making the most of every moment of the present.

A blackbird, holed up in some ravine, whistled and his thoughts ran like Hamelin mice behind that modulated sound towards other countryside and other spaces. Then the wind rose shyly, screaming among the evergreen walls and digging essences of years, spring impatience, shivers from one’s body. Once death was exorcised, in fact, the cleaver fell on him. He had heard it lucid and disruptive one summer day in Cala di Vipera, ridge bristling with sharp stones on which it was difficult to walk, to enjoy the sea, an ideal place for a priest. Before then it had cost him nothing to give up the love of a woman, he felt no desire. The only temptation he gave in to him every now and then was the dark chocolate, but the hemorrhoids took care of tempering his overeating. What was the reason that made his sex so he had always asked himself, unable to find any other answer than that of the mortal anguish that had sawn him, hibernating him, sewing on him a perennial depression. How could he have felt the sap flowing through his trunk if he already felt it dry? And one day when he had been in Assisi, in front of the famous Rose Garden he had caught an unpleasant sensation: even Francis had rolled among the thorns to silence the carnal call, until... He looked at the clock and the cirrus clouds, which began to redden on the side of the mountains. The air was silent, serene, crowded on the sides of the slope in tender slides smelling of gentian...

... he always left the car over the path, in the paved road and even that time he had reached the escarpment on foot under the August sun, the swimsuit tightly pulled over the navel, the clothes and the towel inside an Upim bustier. He could not breathe that morning and he immediately catapulted himself into the deep water of the rocks to disintegrate until the first shivers, then he played the hermit crab on the renaccione of the Costa del Paradiso. Usually, the harshness of the place evoked loneliness, so not even he paid attention to the discreet shouting, interspersed with giggles, that came from above, immersed as it was in his warm well-being. A strong blow to the temple, however, threw him out of the numbness with excruciating pain, alternating splashes of blinding and black light.

He straightened his torso pressing his hand to the wound, sure he saw it full of blood, but he wasn’t. At that point, his lucidity regained, he noticed the girls. They jumped like goats running towards him.

“Excuse us, oh, excuse us” one asked.

“Did we hurt her very much?” How stupid to start throwing stones! But we haven’t seen her, forgive us,”she added the other.

Don Emilio replied with a grimace, feeling the browbone that he was swelling rapidly.”A finger below and I would have lost my eye”, he murmured in a cold sweat and almost feeling faint.

“It was my fault, I’m mortified”, a brunette in her twenties had come forward.”Show me, does it hurt a lot?”

Despite her pain, he couldn’t help but notice how well her purple bikini was filled.

“Poor thing!” she touched the swollen draft.”He’s also pale, wait, lie down, put on like this.”

The girl guided him to rest his head on her lap.

“You will see that she gets over to her immediately.” Then she had given the handkerchief to her friend so that she could bring it back wet.

The priest was relieved at the fresh cloth and abandoned himself, closing his eyes, grateful. A girl…

When the malaise began to dry, he unexpectedly caught the insinuating scent of her thighs, which he enjoyed the contact with the nape of her neck, and a subtle agitation like leaf vein began to ant over her body. He was shocked and stiffened, closing his eyelids even more to better probe the bottom.”Oh dear, Laura, won’t he have fainted?” Tell me no, please. Is it true that you are awake? Don’t scare me!”

He reassured her with a grimace, but that you that was addressed to him, sweet and heartfelt, finished stunning him.

A switch clicked - peremptory sudden her sex - and suddenly peremptory she regained the vertical position by crushing the towel on her. That she happened to him, it was the first time.”I’m better now, I’m fine, thanks. She was very kind,”he heard himself say, cracked, cracked pitcher.

“What is this her? Among young people, do you not call yourself you?”

He didn’t object, enjoying the compliment and being careful not to reveal his years. He disguised himself as a teacher while the girls studied at the Magisterium. They talked a bit about this and that, then they said goodbye.

“Are you still staying?” Laura asked, looking at him tenderly.

“Yes” Don Emilio replied by inertia, while the stones stirred by the silence confronted the wound one by one, making her still ache. But the other also ached.

He sat on a rock with his feet in the water. Amazed. Weird.

In front of that girl his body had behaved like an induced in front of an inductor and suddenly the inertia of thirty years had dissolved, the rough and empty space of his condition as a priest that had never given him regrets because never

she had

known

known

not.

He had lived only to prepare his own death well, in fact, estotevato. That blow, on the other hand, had thrown it from abord out of its grainy shells into a flat plain.

He was terrified. From the bottom the boulders of him looked at him chubby very clear and clear, like the answer that jumped in his mind...

Don Emilio left the bench and went towards home, gloomy. The memory of those last years harassed him like an abscess, because it was from that cursed day that women, as long as they only caught him in the refuge of his home, offered themselves to him in turn from the glossy paper, materializing sensations that more satisfied and more resurrected intact and overbearing. There was nothing to be done. The porn magazines that he went to buy, in plain clothes, in the ugliest and most remote newsstands of the city, were no longer enough for him. He absolutely needed a woman in flesh and blood. A whore for want of better. True.

Don Emilio was thinking of this as he put the key in the door of the house. The entrance was a tunnel that always remained dark, with its smell of cockroaches and mold, at the end of which the light that rained from above invited you to climb up to the glass eye of the last landing. There he crouched his attic, a bohemian little place completely covered in wood, which opened onto a small terrace with black and white tiles, hanging above the steps of the alley, close to the mountain.

With a dead body on the sofa, a bluebottle beat and retorted on the French windows with useless obstinacy, acute melancholy that soon degraded into paranoid ideas, incubated images. The walls seemed to tighten and even the roof fell limp above him, until fear became a very cold blade that split him, making him regain a curious lucidity, like a tightrope walker poised over an abyss. He fled to the balcony clinging to his lemon tree. He was exhausted and couldn’t take the usual greasy images a moment longer, but what was left for him to do? Killing himself, starting to pray... his invocations, however, did not have the strength to even reach the New Way. He stirred and stirred and did not even notice the sky turned gray or the painful piercings of the railing. He only noticed the burning light bulbs and the night that he tried, despite the nearby factories, to stammer stars. Then he went inside, scattering his raven feathers with iconoclastic fury, dressing up in a turtleneck and moleskin pants, and he thought he was witnessing a swarming pornography of worms indulging in his corpse.

In the car he felt better, but his hands were cold and sweaty as for an exam when he found himself pinned by the first traffic lights of the ring road. His goal was the out-of-town avenues blinded by the peddlers, the whores’ market near the stadium.

At the edge of the accelerator, he took the first one, and they seemed vulgar and lascivious repellent paintings, and he was almost happy with it. He made rounds after rounds, thoughts dripping on the cream of the closed windows, that no one could see him, inconsistent dazed... He insulted himself with pity and all the previous cold determination gave way to a very great pain of himself, failed pesto defeated with the nose that it was dripping - I go home - but that was when he noticed it.

A pretty girl with her legs sheathed in a pair of loose-fitting fishnet stockings that stood out from her bell-shaped skirt; they could be seen well turned and firm. She was alone under the bus shelter. Was she one of those? She had to risk it.

With her heart pounding, he made an abrupt reversal, stopping in front of her, then he saw himself opening the door and asking her:”Do you want a ride?”

The girl, despite a veil of shadow around her eyes, appeared without makeup and instead of sending him to the devil, she walked over and dropped into the seat.

“Here we go!” she ordered her peremptorily, without even looking at him.

At that point, Don Emilio felt all the accumulated tension dissolve and, instead of being pleased, he became melancholy. A boulder of weariness fell on him.

“Where do you want me to give you a lift?” he gave a stupid smile.

She turned away, creasing the corners of her mouth. Even the night-colored eyes seemed to scoff at him.

“Why do you start acting?”

“I don’t understand what you mean.”

He was dazed, wavering, flowing.

“But look at this. And say you want to fuck, right?” the girl was annoyed.”Without playing at being a decent person.”

“Don’t be vulgar, please” he protested weakly wounded in pride,”you can be right, the fact is that... it costs me to do certain things.”

“Sure, it’s a hundred thousand lire, dear.”

“You looked so delicate, so nice” he murmured very softly.

“Ohe” interrupted the annoyed woman,”look, I don’t have time to waste and I don’t want to hear sermons. On the contrary, stop that you broke me.”

Don Emilio obeyed. Before opening the door, however, he was unable to take her hands by hand.

“I’m sorry, I don’t know how to deal with certain things. It is the first time that I go with a woman.”

Those words articulated his soul.

She suddenly changed her expression.

“Really? And why?”

“Yup.”

“Take me to your house.”

“No, for heaven’s sake.”

“So let’s stay in the car, go straight and I’ll drive you.”

At the edge of the city there were some low hills where abandoned clay quarries opened up. In front of the eroded flanks, wide unpaved clearings served as a landfill, but the night was an uninterrupted swarm of cars among the garbage. She stopped next to the carcass of an overturned 500 like a tortoise shell. The metropolis, behind those skinned humps, projected a diffused glow that barely mitigated, dirtying it, the collar of the darkness.

“What’s your name?” she ventured to put the safety on.

“Do you care to know?”

“Please.”

“Manuela. And you?”

She told him.

“Do you know that you are really strange? Men usually stick their hands under your underwear, ten minutes and go. And I prefer it.”

“Yes, it’s a business relationship.”

“But if you want to talk it costs you more.”

“Does it cost more to talk than... those things?”

“The time that is lost must be recovered. I don’t do it for sport either.”

A flash seemed to break the darkness and this time it was he who was baffled.

“It looks like you have to.”

“It is not about me that we need to talk, but about you. Listen, let’s do this, if that’s okay with you, I’ll stay with you all night for three hundred thousand and you can even play the comedy for me.”

He opened his wallet and placed the sum on the dashboard.

“Later” Manuela smiled almost affectionately.”Now tell me why you haven’t gone with a woman yet.”

“I’d like to ask you something too” she anticipated.

She approached him, caressing him on the back of his neck.

“Tell me” she invited him. She was very beautiful and it would have been divine if she had been her girlfriend...

“You don’t seem like a slut at all, you are fine, delicate.”

“I work when I need money” she grudgingly admitted. And then she, almost repenting that confession, she raised her eyes on him and made a shrill voice:”But what do you care, tell me what the fuck does it matter to you?”

The car jumped and frowned.

“In fact, you are right. It doesn’t even make sense that you talk about me.”

“To the devil. Just one like that I had to meet tonight? I get a hole, damn you. That’s why I need your dirty money.”

She burst into tears as if revealing her cost her much more than selling her own body.

“I’m sorry, Manuela!” It seemed great to be able to embrace her at the waist, smoothing her very fine hair, handing her a handkerchief...

“You’re a big bastard” she cheered up, kissing him on her mouth.

He barely moved her lips and it seemed to him the sweetest thing in the world, but she the girl pulled away.

“No” she struggled,”first you have to tell me why you’ve never been with a woman. Are you a fagot by any chance?”

Don Emilio smiled.

“I am a priest” he replied.

“What are you? What are you…”she repeated in diminuendo.

Dense and opaque spaces, diametrically opposed, jumbled.

“You didn’t expect it, did you?”

“I’d say. I’ve never been with a priest; Okay, you didn’t have it printed on your forehead that you are priests. And how did you manage to… indeed no.”

She was looking for the right words.

“Have you lived in chastity until now?”

“Partly. It has only been a few years since I asked myself the problem.”

“And before?”

“I was sexless, I didn’t feel emotions.”

“Absurd” Manuela commented.

“Do you think a priest cannot live in chastity?”

For a moment he felt like arguing the opposite of what her behavior showed.

“No. You are men like all the others.”

“Purity is a gift from God.”

“Exactly. Out of a thousand perhaps there will be one.”

“Not everyone is as miserable as I am” he punched on the steering wheel.

“Not at all! If women could talk, he who knows how many stories

they would come out, but I find it right, normal.”

The priest was silent, almost repentant and tired of the struggle he had waged to try to survive and then the toads took advantage of it, throwing the frogs into the ditches, with the sky squeezing milk from the udders of the hills.

“Emilio!”

“What more do I have to tell you?” he stammered, still caught in the snares of a thousand visions.”Besides, I wouldn’t want to risk boring you.”

“Come on, don’t be begged” the girl insisted patiently. Her interest seemed real. Or was it just a contractual technique?

“Death dried me like a leaf” Don Emilio began.

“Or rather, the fear of death, the anguish of a useless life.”

“Very understandable things, everyone’s things. And then?” she invited him to continue.

“I was a priest to prepare myself to die well, this is the pure truth, but I didn’t really feel pushed towards others.

Here, I discovered this in retrospect, after the blow to the head.”

“Don’t talk in metaphors” she admonished him with the little finger she said no no no.

“You’re right, now I’ll explain. It is such a curious fact that it deserves to be told.”

And she told of the morning on the seashore, finally unleashing Argentine stones, stirred laughter.

“It’s not possible, but really? You should have kept the stone that moved your wheels. You had them all blocked, poor thing. Now they run well, I bet,”Manuela concluded, dampening the hilarity and pulling up her skirt with a mischievous gesture.

Her thighs in the dark were a clear path. Don Emilio swallowed drugged, honeyed saliva, he who had played dead for not being able to live, now he found himself naked in the stubble singing the cicada, his dear companion on the high ground.

“Don’t think about it, come on” Manuela urged him.

The voice shook him, the roar of an engine that gave impetus to his mad hands along her legs, drawing sounds of infinite tiny needles, and he found himself headless rising, red pollen in the wind, until on a ridge of that soft earth - and it was woods and sides and valleys, furrows, screams, moans and blond thoughts - he felt himself slip and break.

Leaden, a slight start. Slime. Gross. The priest pulled up his trousers with a terrible effort, closing his eyes so as not to look at himself.

To not see each other.

“Have you been holed for a long time?” she suddenly came out of him, looking for the surface. The girl turned to look at him.

Her hair, just disheveled, arched under her chin, putting the oval of her face in brackets. She was really pretty and it seemed impossible that...

“I hope you spare me the sermon now.”

“Imagine if I can tell you something miserable.”

“Stop it” she interrupted him.”If you really want to know, it has been for several years.”

“If I asked you why I think you would send me to that country.”

“I would tell you to go to some bailout sociologist, one of those who piss you off with the usual emotional deficiencies. Have you ever read Pavese? Behold, mine is his own evil of living.”

At those words, Don Emilio was perplexed. Certain terms testified to a good level of culture and perhaps higher education.

“I’m in my fourth year of literature” the girl admitted,”and now don’t tell me that you have to be ignorant to prostitute yourself.”

“You won’t be able to deny though...”

“Or that maybe you have to be poor” she interjected,”the complain of the need for misery. I am neither the one nor the other, clear?”

“Of course you won’t be able to ask home for the money to buy drugs anyway.”

“If you say so!”

“Do you want me to believe your folks know everything?”

“I’m not telling you anything at all.”

“All right, stay buttoned” he replied in an offended tone.

“It wasn’t easy for me to talk about certain things either.”

“Then shut up, Christ.”

“And are you angry too?”

“Because you put me in a crisis, damn you. I have no excuse for what I do, I just hole up. Stop.”

A moment and she had given up.

“Without a reason it is not logical, dear” she tried to say her, with the intention of slipping into that hole that she seemed to have granted him.

“If it seems logical to you instead to come into the world... I didn’t ask him to be born in this shit. I slip into a hole to forget about it. Do you understand the concept? .”

“Yup. A way like any other to commit suicide. But life is a gift, an ever new discovery, and Providence exists.”

“Look, I can’t stand you if you’re a priest.”

“It’s love?” Don Emilio ventured, looking for holds. But she was slippery again, icy cold.

“The utopia of feelings, rows with bunches of grapes, hornets that become colorful butterflies... No, my dear. Just deflating bodies and cold, stinking sweat. Detachment. Dogs.”

“You speak like a poet, Manuela.”

“Not at all. A simple whore.”

“Absolutely not. You are a beautiful girl, cultured, intelligent.”

“You keep talking bullshit. You fucked my body, not my winged ideas.”

“You enjoy playing the part you’ve imposed on yourself, don’t you?” But you don’t give me a drink. You’re just trying to scientifically annihilate yourself by using this way of making money to get into that famous hole more easily.”

“You keep making mistakes, my dear, because if you really want to know the real whore is you and all those like you. In fact, it is I who buy your money.”

“I know I’m no better than you” she interrupted with great sadness.

“Wait, let me finish” Manuela went on very seriously.”It is I who buy because I, I have never sold myself! Just the mannequin of my body, but that’s lifeless, like you were before. Did you understand? Did you understand, priest head?”

Don Emilio felt himself sinking even deeper, and barely managed to say, in a feeble tone, almost apologetic:”I, on the other hand... I think I was... lucky to meet you.”

“Fool.”

He looked at her. Long.