Encounters
Of failed meetings or disagreements, better not to speak.
Casual happy ending encounters, full of understanding and harmony, leading to friendship and with luck even to real love, ephemeral or long-lasting, superficial or profound, deep affections, infatuations, enchantment or disappointment, well, the changing course of life where the wind may lead us to, the destiny, the star, the forking paths and so on.
Before filling pages and pages with names and circumstances of the encounters I’ve had or still have to this day, I prefer to stick to some.
Interview… in passing!
What a wonderful day. Spring in the northern hemisphere.
With unusual generosity the sun condescended, not much, though. We are not in the tropics.
Without any special plan for being my day off, I stopped just where I was and started to think about some possibilities:
with this lazy, lukewarm sun, not quite decided to rise as to facilitate our decision about how to better spend the day,
I'm going up to the “Schlossgarten” [the famous ruin of the XVII century and main tourist attraction of the city].
Arriving there I will enjoy at the next terrace bar a nice cold blonde.
Perhaps it could inspire me to scribble some sentences that would lead to others and then …
On the main street of Heidelberg (Hauptstrasse), which right now piled already so many steps up and some good years,
pretty well lived and remembered, really grateful years, I walked calmly, totally absorbed in strange thoughts, toward the
well-known path leading to the Castle, there, just behind the funicular station, when …
Right in front of the stiff, serious looking Dr Bunsen in his heavy suit of bronze covered with patina, suddenly blocks my way, between friendly and cheeky, a stunning smiling blonde, kinky unruly hair, jeans miniskirt and a flaming orange shirt with silver flowers and Gothic motifs, napa and plastic bag, notebook in hand … stopping before me and apologizing, you don’t know me, but I know who you are and if I may, I would like to ask you some questions for our class of simultaneous translation, about ten minutes or so. Can it be?
I looked at the blonde, looked at the clock, hesitated for two seconds and then I said yes, of course. Impossible to deny a request made with such grace and brilliance in such blue eyes as I never had seen before.
Besides that — yes, the touched vanity. Being recognised by someone you do not know at all, and in such circumstances, besides the attraction of those light eyes and almost perfect lines of the face, dotted with small freckles, though, and last but not least two harmonic hands, softer than a melody of Schubert or Debussy … Unthinkable to say no.
We took place in the terrace café and I ordered two iced coffees (Eiskaffee), signing her of being prepared, assuming that a mere mortal from the tropics may ever be prepared to face a blond Germanic, without losing the poise and a minimal control, even more when having to answer God knows what sort of questions.