The giraffe
Her shyness was striking. I don’t know what shyness is exactly but if it were anything, it was her. When I met her, she had very short hair that left her neck exposed, even in the middle of winter. Now she had long hair, fine as cocktail sticks and always scented. After a break of five or six years, we started seeing each other again.
She kept leaving moments of silence between one sentence and the next, as if she were blowing up a balloon that was too big and she had to catch her breath, but she kept eye contact and only looked away when she couldn’t keep it up any longer. She had learnt to do her make-up very well, with the right colours and without going over the top, while her dress sense hadn’t changed at all. Her clothes seemed to come from the wardrobe of a holiday home, where things are left to gather dust until the next season. And even when we walked past shop windows, she never once turned to look like women usually do.
Her shyness didn’t prevent her from letting me read her short memoir about incidents that happen and are not understood, about new and old acquaintances that are worth remembering. She liked people and she remembered the most unusual facts people told her. Together we ate large tubs of ice cream, we got just one and took it in turns to dig in with our spoons. The first time was monumental, with little umbrellas and concertinas made of paper, but it ended with a sense of sadness because of a joke that came out wrong, her hands stopped moving and her giraffe neck bowed.
She used to laugh in delight to the point of losing control, then she always apologised out of shyness and tried to pull herself together when she brushed against things that didn’t belong to her with her head or another part of her body. Sometimes she would also wonder strange things. Had she read a certain expression somewhere or was it something she had imagined? So, she would ask me for confirmation to clear her confusion and I would smile, even before she started to speak.