In the eternal darkness, where there was no up or down, no right or left, wavering shapes appeared. They resembled human beings, but they were not. They walked aimlessly, like shadows condemned to move in a place without walls, without sky or ground. The darkness wasn’t just a backdrop but a primordial element, almost as if it were the amniotic fluid in which these figures lay. Every movement of theirs seemed like a visceral reflex, an echo of forgotten paths. No one spoke, no one looked at the other.
Moving their fingers forward, they seemed to be digging, trying to unearth something, or imitating natural actions (grasping, touching, lifting). Some movements were obsessively repeated, as if they were stuck in a cycle, while other gestures vaguely resembled the act of touching their own bodies, as if they were seeking confirmation of their existence. One of the mimes stiffened and raised his hand high, leaping, trying to grab something. But in the aura, there was nothing. In fact, it seemed that the more he moved, the less substantial his figure became. Yet he continued to move, with the desperation of someone trying to prove to himself that he is capable of an accomplished act, even if he cannot truly know it.
Suddenly, from that bottomless darkness, there was an indistinct sound, almost like the hiss of an improbable wind. From the fog of nothingness, a woman emerged.
No, it wasn’t a woman, but something writhing into that form. She was disfigured, as if some negative energy had consumed her. Her body, swollen and putrid, exuded a sickly-sweet, nauseating smell, and from the open wound on her side, clusters of yellowish grapes spilled out, like worms crawling from decaying flesh.
The mimes, who had wandered unknowingly until that moment, stopped in front of that monstrous figure. They didn’t flee, nor did they feel repulsion. They approached, drawn by a dark call, like moths to a flame. Their hands moved in an ambiguous gesture, like a dance without rhythm or melody. Their contact with the woman was only a pale imitation of an embrace, something that reeked of damnation, a sticky swamp from which there was no escape.
They knew, or at least they sensed, that above them, beyond that endless darkness, something existed. A god? No, not exactly. More like a rule. An unreachable order, an inscrutable law governing that nameless, purposeless void. It was unclear whether it was benevolent or malevolent, but its presence was palpable, like the air that wasn’t there. And that rule, that dark law, had decided their fate. Not to live, not to die, but to exist in a form devoid of meaning.
In the silence that followed, the mimes stood still. Even their gestures, once so restless, had stilled. There was nothing left to grasp, nothing left to imitate. They were neither blind tritons swimming in a pool of water inside a deep, dark cave, nor a multi-headed slime, neither fungus, nor plant, nor animal, because its nature depended on who could notice it.
And yet, in that total nothingness, the feeling of sin persisted. Not a moral sin, but something deeper, rooted in the very fabric of that impossible world. After all, if the world doesn’t exist, if the archetypes are hollow and ultimately unknowable, the greatest action is nothing more than a fiction, the stage on which the representation of something that can never be grasped is performed.
The woman, like a living swamp, began to phagocytize them slowly. There was neither violence nor passion in that gesture, just an inexorable descent into oblivion. And yet, it wasn’t death. It was worse than death. It was a slow, silent disappearance, where the bodies of the mimes, already without identity, gradually lost any semblance of form.
Adelino Carbonera was born in 1955 near Venice, Italy. Sales manager in a multinational chemical company. Now retired.
He published two collections of poems, and in 2024 a novel entitled ‘King All Inclusive’ (Re tutto compreso).
Published 10/31/24