Passion Façade

I am sorry to bombard you with writing this week. This is as much for me to get these pieces "out" as it is a plea for help! thank you

They are here because the distance between New York and Barcelona is too far, because she is restless and he is lonely, because he is a stranger in this country and she loves him most for his strangeness.

He is home late with tomatoes and Spanish onions and muddied mushrooms. His nose is bleeding again, his calves quiver from the climb upstairs and the insomnia nights on the docks. His scalp itches, he will ask her to unbraid his hair, one greasy strand at a time.

His hands are Jean Cocteau’s by Man Ray. Long fingers, pale skin under the nails, like a mummy she has seen once. If he died she would not know it by looking at his nails. He pushes up his sweater sleeves, leaving streaks of flour but the sleeves fall again. His eyes are windows he would like shattered.

Spanish onions are sweet and mild. Full bulbs bursting to bloom, like the lilies they are. His grandmother in Bretagne taught him to roll the dough into a thin cool fragrant sheet. He will make her this offering for his absence this morning, when she woke alone, and for his eyes that won’t be shattered.

Her little novice boy still, his soles cracked in sandals in March. She climbed to the top of the eastern spire of La Sagrada Familia without him. Looking down on the abundant mosaic fruit and the Pyrenees in the haze, she felt her face drain. On shaking legs she made it to the churro stand below. She is ravenous still and the tart will never bake.

Josep Maria Subirachs, while building the austere so-called Passion Façade of La Sagrada Familia, lived in the cathedral, like Gaudi himself. The façade is finished though the cathedral is not, a long patient living stone.

As they wait for the tart he asks her to unbraid his hair. She snips at the ends of the braids where the synthetic hair begins. She is nauseated by the deposits of grease, the pile of hair growing on the table, the odor of his body’s waste thick as formaldehyde. Her nausea, the vertigo of this afternoon, fried onions, his wary distance, build and spill. She is crying behind him. It is a while before he notices. He takes the scissors from her then, sits her down at the kitchen table, clears the hair away and closes the bathroom door behind him. He emerges with a bag of hair and a scalp of shorn curls. He takes her into the dining room and opens the windows. The onions, baking in the oven, begin to smell of cut grass. It will be a while still before the tart is done but it is not so urgent.