Veils
A dialogue
A young man of suprising sentiments found himself deep in an unknown forest. He liked the look of the place and decided to keep walking. Yesterday he had got up around Bagni di Lucca and seen a marvelous thunderstorm. Perhaps something sublimely similar would reveal its mysteries here.
The timish concept that plagued most people began to drip from his mind as he continued his wanderings. This often happened with his excursions and he liked it. He drank in such senses of bewilderment like wine, growing quite intoxicated on it. To the young man’s delight, the forest supported such habits and, as he walked, provided him with even heavier droughts of mossed trunks and birdsong until quite lost in the splendour of it all he dropped down on a couch of springy turf and lay there, hovering in ecstasy.
A footstep near his tousled head barely caused him to stir.
“Mary.” he breathed, extending a hand without a glance towards the interlopers’s general direction. “Come and drink the green, won’t you?”
Silence came in answer.
The young man craned his neck around to see the strangest vision looming over his prone figure. A man, looking to be about his own age was garbed in exotic dress from head to foot: scarlet cloth, gleaming bits of armour peeking through woven robes, and the most curious specimen of a blade bound about his hip.
The young man slowly sat upright.
“Are you lost?” the figure inquired directly.
“No. Well, yes. But I dont mind. Are you lost, yourself?
“Yes.”
“Would you… like to come and sit a while?”
The exotic figure lowered himself down to the forest floor with the grating of metal on metal. The young man watched in an uncanny amazement.
“How did you get lost?”
The strange man passed a hand across his face. “I fell in love with a great lady, we grew distant and now I am here.”
The young man said nothing but watched the trees making bowing motions to the wind.
“I am seeking her always.” the exotic figure continued, in a sorrowful tone. “I know every vision of her face, every manner of her speech. If not for the forest I would be with her already.” He turned to look at the young man besides him. “And you too, are seeking something, I suppose?”
“Sometimes. Sometimes, not. It is a ghost and a spirit that haunts me. Bits of it echo…around…about.” He settled himself back against a tree. “Getting lost, I can hear call it all the louder.”
“You cannot be in love then.”
“In love!” The young man laughed. “I am in love with it all. The entire thing. It is one grand romance.”
“But you do not know it.”
“No. But I feel it.” The young man glanced over at his companion. “You seem to have no sense of the sublimity of it all.”
“I have no need for ghosts. I know what I seek and thus my grand romance unfolds in the knowing.”
“You are lost as much as I am.”
“And which of us desires to remain as such?”
The young man sat up quickly. “You are the most self sufficent owl I have ever conversed with.”
“And you are a hound.”
“Your knowledge will render you incompatible to yearning.”
“Your yearning will render you incompatible to knowledge.”
A light flashed before the two men, illuminating the glade to the heavens. The stranger shielded his eyes but the young man gazed in rapturous awe. A lady descended from that brightness, a lady whose face was concealed behind a gauzy veil. She extended her arms to both men.
The stranger gave a cry, surging to his feet. The younger man slowly got to his. The light seemed to come from the lady’s very face, from behind that veil which concealed her person. An unsatiable desire to tear off that veil came over the young man. The many thousands of the ghosts he had pacified in his wandering into the forest returned to haunt his soul with vegence. He too, gave a cry, but of pain. He cluched his heart.
“Now we can go.” the stranger breathed, in rapt adoration. “I have found the way out.”
Ghosts swam about in the air.
The young man leapt forward, grasping at the veil.
“No!” the stranger cried, siezing him by the shoulders.
The young man writhed like a devil, fighting his companion and straining to reach the lady. Tears stained his face. With a tremendous twist the stranger hurled the young man to the ground.
The light vanished.
The lady vanished.
The stranger vanished.
The young man wept.