When a woman starts by saying "I am not feeling too well", you should know something bad is coming. Whether she is severely and innocently fucking up your plans or it's just her PMS... you cannot know from the start. But do not expect anything good to follow the unfortunate sentence...
This is what happened to my plans to visit a nearby city today - the girl who was supposed to come up for the trip together with her boyfriend, called me in the morning and started with "Hi, I am not feeling too well". Since I am myself very familiar with this strategy, I started to look for alternatives in the back of my mind while in the background the second, third and next sentences were smoothly flowing. I said "get better soon" while thinking "bite me", hung up and lit a cig. I had no intention whatsoever to rot in the house today, having a car with a full tank at hand and a sunny spring day ahead. I called a friend (boring as death, but less boring than driving a couple of hundreds kilometers alone) and we went to the closest point of attraction the map showed us.
The road was a beautiful drive on the sun-lit Tuscany hills and through the forest, but nothing was announcing the small miracle called San Gimignano. I do not fancy too much medieval cities - the too narrow roads and the walls almost merging from two sides over the streets give me a feeling of suffocation. I get bored after the second building from I don't know what century and even before the first museum (which I graciously skip visiting). So I was glancing through the shop windows and taking a picture now and then.
My ear got caught in some sort of a whispered music and I suddenly had to walk that direction. I see the world, but I understand it way better through smells and sounds. San Gimignano smelled like incence, wet stone, laundry and trees and sounded like a corner of heaven. Behind a church there was this small piazza, a square surrounded by walls and with a beautiful acoustics. This guy was playing some Bach at the harp in one corner of the square and the sound of it... just broke the time and made it freeze into one sunny second.
I sat and smoked on the edge of the well near him, and dreamt. Life was unbearably light (like Kundera was saying) and the light was unbearably alive. The harp was talking with the voice of the forest, of the hills, of the clouds. The background tourist humming was not able to cover the sound of a fairy-tale, but it was maintaining that thin red thread connecting my mind to this world and allowing me to be there, but everywhere else as well. And when the music stopped, I got up and left without looking behind. I thought the day gave me more than enough already, I didn't want to bother the memory I just grasped.
The city was more generous to me than I imagined and the path led me to the inner yard of a former small castle. The smell was changed now - it smelled like grass and olive leaves, and a bit like still waters. Another old covered well and more music - this time a guitar, playing some Spanish strain... a bit more pushy and daring, more vivid and wild like a hot wind of spices, the music spoke of a different Heaven. A Heaven of touch, of skin and lips and arms, a place of togetherness. The harp invited me to solitude, the guitar reminded me of people from afar. Two moments, two sounds and two places made San Gimignano look like a universe in miniature, like a medieval lithography of the entire world.
Eeeee.... e basta per stasera.
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