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Les fantômatiques aventures
de Leikki
dans la ville.
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(English
Text)
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No
one has ever seen Leikki. Her beauty is transient, not because
it does not last, but because it is far too brisk and fleeting
to be fixed.
Still, some say that if her image were to be captured on paper,
she would have the appearance of a young girl, with long hair,
dark and silky, whose almond shaped eyes would crease when,
inadvertently, she would smile in silence. |
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It was a day of wrath,
a purple day
a day of grey clouds and thick rain.
Leikki left, armed with a stern
frown and a severe pucker of the lips.
The park absorbed the liquid and filled up its gills.
As she crossed the limit, Leikki felt in her back
a warm rustle growing fainter.
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Leikki entered the room.
All those men, sitting around a circular table. Maybe in the shape of a horseshoe,
all things considered. Greyish and uninviting faces. She could not hear a word coming
out of those fidgety mouths.
Leikki left the dull room, and, humming gently, she set about to find more human
beings.
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Leikki has arrived at
the site. She enters the hall surrounded by glass walls, and waits quietly for the
elevator. At the very top, that’s where the sky touches the ceiling.
Then, looking North, in a cloud of light and flitting dust, in a reflection of the
metal and the glass, Leikki saw a face moving downward. She thought for a while that
she had seen her twin.
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Leikki goes down one
step, then another, then a third. Her light shadow bears the solemnity of the street
lamp, high on the sidewalk.
Her stealth shape follows the platform all along; she walks around the pillars of
painted cast iron, and counts each and every tile on the wall.
At the first vibration, muffled, of the metal express train, she stepped, silently,
toward the chasm, ornate with blue lights twinkling on and off.
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The women come and go
before the window. Outside, the cold is not yet biting, and often, girls walk by
barefoot. Each time, it is another one, and they all look alike. Inside, the music
carpets the colour of the air, and the alcohol lifts up the spirits.
I saw the shaped back of Leikki just when she left the table. She hadn’t said a word,
all the time she was with me, and that, having lost all hope, I waited at the window
for her unexpected passage.
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A gush of steam was escaping
a crack on the asphalt. Of course, the cold outside whitened that smoke from underground,
and drove it into the air, static and blue. A few meters above the earth, floated
the shadow of Leikki, amazed and amused.
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In the bathroom, Leikki
undresses. Her slow body sets down, and kneeling I circle her low waist. Her heavy
body vibrates and floats. Hands full, I listen to the resonance, on the tiled floor,
of the flow that chimes in the dark.
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It was a time when the
city swarmed with solitudes. The subway platforms were bursting with living beings,
who thought they knew where they were going. The perpetual motion washed along the
edges the dreggs of the day, who sat and observed, each time further away.
Then the brisk passage of time seemed to flow backwards, until the unknown time when
the hills straightened up, when the rivers started to flow anew, when the forest
recovered its monochrome hold.
Soon there was nothing else but the slanted trace of an old path, preserved by a
generous Nature.
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