In the Garden of Lunar Grapefruit

                                    Prologue

And so like a shadow our life passes, 
ever to return, nor we.
                                  (Pero López de Ayala, Moral Counsels)

I’ve said goodbye to the friends I love most in order to undertake a short yet dramatic journey. Long before sunrise, I find on a silver mirror the small case with the clothes I’ll need in the strange country I’m making for.

The tense, cold scent of dawn mysteriously strikes the huge sloping cliff of night. On the stretched page of the sky, the trembling of a cloud’s first letter; beneath my balcony a nightingale and a frog raise high in the air a drowsy cross of sound.

As for me, I’m quiet though full of melancholy; I make final preparations, checked by the subtlest emotions of wings and concentric circles. On the white wall of my room, stiff and rigid like a snake in a museum, hangs the glory-covered sword my grandfather wielded in the war against Don Carlos the Pretender.*

Reverently, I take down the sword, coated in pale yellow rust like a white poplar, and I strap it on, remembering that I shall have to endure a great and invisible fight before I can enter the garden. A most violent, ecstatic fight against my secular enemy, the monster dragon called Common Sense.

A sharp elegy of nostalgia for things that have never been—good, bad, large, small—invades those landscapes of my eyes which my tinted glasses all but cancel. A bitter feeling that makes me head towards this garden shimmering on the highest plains of air.

The eyes of every creature throb like phosphorescent points against the wall of the future… the things of the past stay filled with yellow scrub, barren orchards, dried-up rivers. No man ever fell backwards into death. But I, briefly contemplating this abandoned, infinite landscape, see early sketches of the life unpublished, multiple and superimposed, like the scoops of an endless waterwheel.

Preparing to leave, I feel a needle of pain in my heart. My family is still asleep, and the whole house is in perfect repose. Dawn, revealing towers, and counting one by one the leaves of the trees, dresses me in glinting clothes of lace that crackle.

There’s something I’m forgetting… I’m absolutely sure of it… so much time getting myself ready! And… Lord, what am I forgetting? Ah, yes, a scrap of wood… a nice piece of cherry wood, rose-coloured, tight-grained.I believe in being well turned out when I travel… From a vase of flowers on my side-table, I select a large pale rose and pin it to my left lapel, a rose with an angry but hieratic face.

The time has come.

(In the clashing silverware of bells, the cockadoodledoos of the cockerels.)