When shadows grow longer E-Book

Rita Salvadori

• Herausgeber: Rita Salvadori
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

A journey of self-discovery, love, and awareness in the shadow of the beautiful italian hills. Can Irène discover more of herself through Maddalena's moving story?

Irène, Maddalena, Jonathan, and Marcello are united by their desire to go beyond appearances, beyond the traditional rules that reduce life to the simple and dry quest for survival.
A life that consists of little more than a series of mechanical gestures, emotions, and thoughts. Irène, the star of the story, discovers a new way of life thanks to her encounter with Maddalena, a fairytale writer, who becomes a sort of spiritual guide for her.
It will be Maddalena who teaches her the importance of seeing the world through glasses with colored lenses and who teaches her the importance of self-observation in achieving greater awareness and presence. Maddalena will finally take Irène by the hand in a journey of self-discovery, with the aid of a mysterious manuscript that was left unfinished and hidden in a medieval church in the hills of the Marche.Unfinished because it is waiting for a special person to continue the story that was started many years before.

This novel is a love story between four souls that chase each other endlessly and lose themselves only to reunite at a higher level, in a temporal dimension in which the boundaries between the past, present, and future are magically obliterated.

Leseprobe

Rita Salvadori

WHEN SHADOWS GROW LONGER

The meeting

I met her in Paris, in a crowded bookshop. Accidentally bumping into her, I hurriedly turned to apologize. Assuming I would be confronted by the usual anonymous face, I babbled a distracted and confused “sorry”. My thoughts and movements would have quickly moved on, had her magnetic gaze not paralyzed the passing of time around us.

Instead, my eyes remained glued to hers in an eternal moment full of depth. Who was this woman smiling at me with such a maternal and reassuring expression?

The words stuck in my throat as she continued to hold me in her childish gaze, which was perfectly fine with me. Her hands were holding a book with a colorful cover, fairytales probably. She wore a very odd, cream-colored, velvet hat, and a jacket with a soft, lilac fabric that hugged her hips perfectly. Light trousers covered well-sculpted legs. Brown wavy hair in a bob cut framed a rather square, but sweet, face. A nice nose and a mouth that looked as though it was created specifically for a welcoming smile. As well as kissing, of course. Welcoming those who, like me, were looking for answers... She was the one who broke the ice, if what was between us can even be called ice.

“Aren’t fairytales simply fascinating? I have no one to read them to, but I’ve never given up the pleasure of immersing myself in fantastic worlds and getting lost in daydreams. And these books carry such messages of hope! I really do love them. They help keep my imagination alive; they help me to remember that life is magical every day. Reading fairytales is like choosing a pair of glasses to wear: dark lenses or clear and colored lenses?”

She spoke candidly, much more intimately then I had become accustomed to in my role as an established professional, where I had learned to never give anything away, to never make mistakes, especially in personal relationships. You should never reveal too much of yourself to someone you’ve just met, a voice said within me. Nevertheless, this woman facing me, a perfect stranger, instantly touched my heart, and as I later discovered, this was because the heart was always her aim, bypassing all the social barriers imposed by family, school, and the good manners of society.

“Please allow me to introduce myself. My name is Irène, and you are?”

As I said my name, I saw a strange light in her eyes.

“My name is Maddalena. My dear Irène, in the end, I will remember neither your name nor your age nor your profession. Nor will you remember my name. In the end, we will only remember what we have learned from each other. Only moments of love will remain engraved on our souls. Nothing else. My name is Maddalena, but I'm not just Maddalena. I could have a thousand names and recite a thousand scripts. I can hold a thousand loves. Tell me Irène, what glasses have you decided to wear? Dark or colored lenses?”

Her statement puzzled me. My name is Irène and I'm Irène, I thought with conviction. Or am I?

“I’ve never asked myself which glasses I wear,” I replied to Maddalena.

“Perhaps you have never given yourself the chance to choose.”

True! It was hard to admit, but she was right about the color of lenses I was wearing. Dark lenses for a life that was generally monotonous and predictable and which, despite the comforts of wealth, I was getting used to over the years.

“You know Irène, it's not so much about discovering what color your lenses are, as it is realizing at a certain point that our sight isn’t at all authentic or direct, but conditioned by something external that no longer belongs to us. Is there something old and moldy in your life that hasn’t actually belonged to you for years and which prevents you from seeing the world through your own colors and listening to music through your own notes?”

Maddalena's words were at once sweet and urgent; they were disarmingly simple and at the same time complicated. They took me by the hand just to throw me to the ground.

Her every word literally swept away my old and dusty convictions.

“Sorry Maddalena, but now I really must go. It's late. Sorry again.”

“I have good news for you, Irène. When we are together, there is no need to apologize for anything. What is there to apologize for? I know you can’t feel otherwise just now. Never justify yourself for what you are, nor for what you want, with anyone, not at any cost! Au revoir, ma chère Irène.”

How strange, I thought, her accent had an Italian lilt. As she spoke to me, she never shifted her gaze from mine. When she realized I was leaving, she smiled at me, holding out the fairytale book clasped in her beautiful hands.

Resting on the shelves were all the novels I should have bought that day other than that book of children's stories. I smiled at Maddalena, the woman who loved fairy tales, and I left with the certainty that I would never see her again.

Never again...

Before, I thought I had a power over the course of events and absolute control over my life. Before, I believed in the certainty of my convictions. I firmly felt that I was the absolute master of myself. Indeed, coming out of that bookshop, I was sure that I would never want to meet Maddalena and her bizarre ideas again.

Before, I believed that it was enough to maintain my balance simply by avoiding any situations, things, or people that might cause me trouble. And so I did, but not for much longer!

Days passed, and I finally found my dear old balance again.

Yes, my dear old balance! Such stability in it! But also how gray! I felt so protected I heard almost nothing from the outside. The voices of the world no longer reached me. Everything I was close to was within a hand’s reach: security and stability.

Security, stability, and deadly boredom. Boredom in the fixed immobility of my actions and emotions.

The days passed and everything around me changed, while I remained motionless in my dear old equilibrium. It was not at all pleasant to feel life flow everywhere outside, nearby, but without ever touching me.

It was a feeling of suffocating loneliness.

I needed answers about life, or rather, I needed life. And love? And passion? And fire? And Maddalena?

I had buried them under a sea of habitual ordinariness.

One day, looking at myself in the mirror, I felt kidnapped by my own reflection, as if it were someone else's face. Who was this unknown person watching me mysteriously? I no longer recognized my gaze and I feared I might go mad beneath the blows of my own awareness, which now seemed to stumble and melt in a thousand streams. Desperately clinging to the convictions I had worked so hard to build, I felt the futility and vanity of all the effort I had put into settling my existence in well-organized and compact sectors. For a moment, I managed to put the puzzle back together, but in the next moment I again lost the defining boundaries of my being. Fear and dismay were now under my skin and, in the absolute confusion of my thoughts I could not help but abandon myself and ask for help...

Abandoning myself was like falling from a very high cliff where I could not see the bottom.

Someone, please help me! A powerful voice shouted inside me, one I had never heard before. I closed my eyes, looking beyond sight for an answer... I kept falling into a frightening void, dark and cold. I did not have the courage to let myself fade completely into nothingness. I opened my eyes again but the darkness still stretched out all around me, as if I were wearing glasses with thick black lenses.

I remembered those words and a shiver went through me: Maddalena.

I absolutely had to see her.

I knocked on her door one spring morning, transformed through the warm rays of sunshine after a whole night of travel. She lived in Concarneau, a quiet village on the Atlantic coast, in Brittany. A lovely little house with the scent of the sea and a garden full of colorful flowers. Nothing seemed to make any sense. No trace of the order that is usually expected in any self-respecting garden...

“Order does not exist, Irène. It is an illusory creation of the human mind. Is it not a marvelously attractive and authentic chaos?”

Once again, Maddalena caught me unawares, leaving me no time to rearrange my now faltering ideas into a thought that would at least appear sensible. This was her strength: undermining the logical categories of the speaker in order to put them in the ideal condition to show their true essence, even if only for a moment.

Chaos, which I loathed and saw as the archenemy to my ordered and rational life, a source of all things annoying and inappropriate, now actually began to appear to me as anything but. The mess of that garden actually made sense. The flowers, the plants, the blades of grass, the stones, the earth, and the wind were happily holding hands in a carnival of colors, scents, and sounds never before seen.

“It's like a dance, don’t you think? You should join in yourself Irène...

Try to let go of your limitations and jump, without fear or hesitation, into the sea of life... You have nothing to lose.”

From the moment of my arrival, more than six hours of absolute silence had passed, but the precious and delicate thread that united us never seemed to break. It was simply a pending discourse waiting to be completed.

Entering Maddalena's house was like passing through all the colors of the rainbow; she had painted each wall in a different color, regardless of canonical color combinations. The strength of the red warmed me, the vivacity of the yellow gave me joy, the intensity of the violet helped me to look within myself. The green ceiling of the living room looked like a meadow in spring, a world turned upside down. The upside-down world of Maddalena.

In the midst of this whirlwind of sensations, I finally felt at home.

We sat on a very soft couch facing a huge window from which we could admire the confusion of the garden and, beyond that, the immensity of the ocean. Not bad, I thought.

“Did you find it in the end, Irène?”

“Are you referring to your business card?”

“I put it in the book I suggested you buy that day in the bookshop, without you noticing. I knew you would need my address sooner or later, my dear Irène.”

“I hated you, you know...”

“I know, but you do not have to justify anything when you talk to me. The messenger of truth, whoever she may be, is always hateful to those who are awakening. Sleeping, rather than awakening, is much more appealing and painless, is it not?”

“I tried to close my eyes after our first meeting, but now my soul is screaming with greater and greater intensity inside me. Screaming in pain, from being imprisoned for so long...”

“I feel what you feel. I understand you because I too experienced it a long time ago. It's a miracle, a gift that is not given to everyone, Irène.”

“A gift? Completely losing your orientation? Being on the verge of insanity? No longer loving what you do? Living constantly arm in arm with dissatisfaction? A gift?”

“A blessing, allow me to correct myself. It's when things don’t go the way you want them to, that’s exactly when you grow. When unhappiness becomes unbearable, you give birth to a new person who saves you...”

“A new person who can save me? I’m not following you Maddalena.”

“Not a real person, but one of your many selves. One that has a fundamental role in your life. An ego that observes everything that happens to you with detachment. Observes, without judging. You know, Irène, we can only see something if it lies outside of us. For example, if your I-observer sees your confusion, even for a moment, you are saved. Because in that infinite moment you are outside of your own negative emotional state. Therefore, try to live all things passionately, but remember to keep that part of you alive. That part that is slightly detached from your turmoil, constantly observing...”

“I'll try, even if I'm not sure how.”

“Observe. Simply observe. Little by little, you will realize that the life you have lived so far has been nothing but a film in which you happen to find yourself. By observing this film, you are given the opportunity to leave and enter another film, one that is more pleasing to you. Or you can continue to stay there, but with a different awareness and a smile on your lips.”

“With what awareness?”

“Everyone has their own path, scattered with different tests that will lead them to still greater and more infinite stages of awareness. All this, however, is absolutely personal, Irène. Nobody can ever give you the recipe for the right way, other than experimenting and making mistakes. And why not? Which exercise is best for your soul? But tell me, why are you here today?”

“To meet you.”

“I'm just a pretext and a means, because you're really here to get to know yourself.”

“And your accent? You're Italian, are you not?”

“Yes. I lived in Italy many years ago...”

“Why did you move here?”

“It is the ideal place to write fairy tales, near the ocean and the two souls to which I am particularly attached...”

We spent a whole day together and what struck me most about Maddalena was the simplicity with which she alternated the stories of her life with long pauses of silence in which I was absolutely at ease. She was able to make every word that came out of her heart sacred, artfully modulating her voice and accompanying it with a gesture full of sensuality and sweetness.

With her, I began to experiment and savor the power and beauty of silence.

“Do you hear it, Irène?”

“What?”

“Silence... silence is not a void or absence of sound; it is, on the contrary, a gathering of all sounds: silence is freedom because it opens a thousand possibilities and contains endless references.

Silence. A magical moment of presence and depth in which everything naively is, without any need to be explained or demonstrated. In silence, one looks inside and allows themselves time for wonder and emotion. Listen to it, Irène. Listen to your silence.”

It was late afternoon when something strange happened though...