Soundtrack no. 1.
Passacaglia in C minor BWV 582 by Bach.
The lit fireplace casts reddish glows on her, who, sweetly laughing, puts back with her hand a lock that has escaped her hairstyle. In front of her is the statuesque profile, the raven hair, the winter pallor, the severe eyebrows and the sensual mouth of Frédéric.
He stares into space as always. He is, as always, bored and serene, alone on top of a mountain; he looks around from up there and gets bored. He's always bored, he's a habitué of boredom. Who knows what he thinks as he stares into the air from the top of the mountain. Perhaps childhood dirges, scents of Christmas fir trees, memories of a virginity lost during some journey back to life come back to his mind; perhaps he simply listens to the air like an ascetic in prayer, wondering how many centuries he has continued to see the same sun always rise, to always cross the same desert, to always be reborn with his eyes open, realizing from the first glance that no, nothing has changed.
Antonia avoids looking at him, but her mind doesn't stop caressing him obscenely for a moment. She can't help but say yes, let him indulge his Flemish painter's imagination in bed, respect his need for solitude after love, when in white underwear he opens the window to let in the frost and says to himself The sunrise is beautiful.
Standing in front of the sun, he ties his silk tie and prepares for the only prayer he is capable of: the obsessive declination of horror vacui. He compulsively piles up inert words so as not to leave free spaces in which, inevitably, to think about death. He recites profane litanies, listing with religious scruple nouns, adjectives, verbal predicates, passages from encyclopedias, medicine leaflets, recipe ingredients, the catalog of the Trojan ships, the Ikea autumn-winter catalogue, Renzo's vegetable garden, the titles of the imaginary library of Saint Victor, the great genealogy of the Setites, the descendants of Cain, objective descriptions of things, people, animals, vegetables read in specialist magazines and memorized like a mantra.
Antonia turns and smiles at Michele. My brother is stupid, he doesn't deserve better, he doesn't see beneath her gray cat gaze, he doesn't see the snake's pupils, he doesn't know that she can't love him, she can't love, she can't love anyone. Antonia is sterile, she is sterile in her soul. I too let myself be deceived a few centuries ago, and sometimes the dawn, rising, still surprises me in bed with a mass of pain on my sternum.
I would like to have her back here for a moment, just a moment, the time of a kiss: the hand to cleanse the lips, spit away the contagion.
I think she would appreciate the quote (1).



(1) Carme 99 of Catullus.