1 May 2020. Parable with Camelia Blossoms.
I’d say they’re like tears—except that the fallen blossoms are bright red, heaped there on the sidewalk in front of a white stucco wall. Just the winding trunk and a handful of remaining flowers on the low branches above. Unexpected, the color—seen first, then the plainness of everything else, although the alcove has elements of theater, just like life, awaiting a play...
A Hungarian prince, perhaps—maybe a Russian, who lives nearby, in one of the apartment buildings, next door to the nursery with a window overlooking the street. He hears voices in the morning as his neighbors gather in the garden below, to drink coffee and Turkish tea.
His beloved lives nearby, in a tiny room above the Oaxaca store. It can be noisy, with the early trains, but she’s arrayed her window table with many plants, and the place feels peaceful. Now she’s come out to greet him, walking on the avenue, or is it that he’s encountered her by chance? Or sees her in a dream? There’s an element of fairyytale here—because the story is so implausible—but as they reach out to each other, all the plainness disappears, and they’re in the hoopoe’s bower…
The messenger hasn’t far to fly—they’re not really very far apart, you see—but the hoopoe has become a part of the story—a necessary presence, whose letters and flights make more and more certain the truth of their love.
And now the world has caught up with them—how not?—the prince can no longer dash so easily to her room—there are proclamations and warnings about... So, for the present, the hoopoe must needs stay with them, as the prince and his beloved sit together in the evening, side by side, and converse over a small screen…
Yet whatever the distance...
