The mouth is hers, thin to the left. The lips are shiny and bulbous. A small sheen shines over the lips clacking under her tongue as she asks me the price of the bananas. Rather I ask her, to get her talking. But then she asks me if I have an athlete in the house to be taking so many bananas? For the first time she looks at me. The eyes are green, rounded up by perfect whites. Eyes are deep, green, melancholy but in a way a lake is at the end of the summer. Eyes are pure and green. She looks me and there is a faint smile at the corner of that thin perfect mouth.
The spectacles are gold-coated in perfect round rims around her small eyes. The eyes have a figure of being enlarged as she looks at me through these small thin-rounded spectacles. The skin is very white. Below the faint smile, I can see perfect healthy white skin. The white sheen plasters her all over, in an even glow, up the green eyes beyond the perfect eyebrows and that dark semi-brown hair. She looks at me with the perfect smile and she asks me if I have a fidelity card. She tilts her mouth strangely as if she expects me to play a joke. Lingering, tilting her head, speaking with a sleepy breath, dreams running through her head, ambrosia blown in her breath. I shake my head.
She very slowly, with her manicured hands, hands me the receipt. Closes her eyes again, blinks voluptuously, says : “Look forward to see you again.”
A cold morning. The sun of last night running through my veins. My three-year old daughter running, enjoying the first sun of this year. The practice which starts in an hour. A cold morning, a deserted street, the clock hovering. Cold morning and cold steps and the joys of parenthood running through my veins. Bananas, she likes. Smeared all over her bib in the morning. Eats like a messy pilgrim. Then the sun of yesterday, those whirling plane trees, the statue with the olive branch…
Then, I have the feeling of sun in the spectacles of the girl who served me. Not my girl, she is safely at home, being tended to by her mother and then she has a few hours in the crèche. No not my girl. The girl of yesterday. Why do I see her swinging, playing on a see-saw the sun rising in her perfect spectacles and blinding me and she telling me : ‘Look forward to see you again’.
My steps fumble a little. It is a cold morning, and I see the girl who served me yesterday crushing cardboard boxes to stack them neatly in a pile. She is alone outside the shop, and in her spectacles, beyond her spectacles, I can see the clear white skin, and the deep green eyes and the mysterious white smile that made me a man twice her age think of looking into her eyes and relishing the darting sun rising so blindingly in the glares in a piercing flutter.
Berthe smears her compote on the bib. I scrape the traces of dried food from the corner of her lips. She has green eyes, like her mother. Green is the colour of the eyes, colour of salubriousness, colour of off-hand liaisons in an unlikely vein. Green is the colour of Spring under plane leaves and with statues holding an olive branch. And sun is the eyes of that animal that from afar, draws people together and holds them in a magnetic coalesce.
Green is the colour I want.
Artwork by: Otto Lange
