Fortune

CPFortune

#narrative, #metaphor, #chance, #memory

I’m walking on the empty path, going slightly uphill, while the sun is not yet too high. The light breeze promises a gentle descent in a couple of hours. On each side, aged eyes and faces appear in the curved olive tree trunks, bringing a sense of organised presence. Each of them is standing at a calculated distance from the other, shaped with a slightly different personality by time. Along the path, the bright wild fennel lightens the sight and smell around.

There is always this same point where the path eases for a couple of minutes, and you notice the mouth losing agility and the tongue sticking slightly to the sides. That is the right time. Just before the pine trees decrease in quantity, the fennel flowers start craving attention. While walking, your eyes identify the most precise and voluminous combination of yellow formations. You need to be fast. You catch the fennel stick with two fingers, about five centimeters below the flower and pull!

You feel the water being produced in your cavity, whilst your teeth smash the small yellow containers of taste. As it happens, the fragrance is soothing the efforts that are running down your face, and your breath seems to ease for a second. These are not violets, and their fragrance does not represent forgiveness once your fingers have pulled its stick. But there is a similar sense of chance involved in the picking of the fennel and the stepping on the violet. Or is there not? Maybe not.

The one’s fragrance is a generous gift of accident, the second’s a measured exchange. This fast moment of calculating expectations might take place unnoticed, to ourselves or to others. There might be fragrances and colours attached to the gestures and emotional reactions words can produce, that make us pull one flower and not another.

It is slightly earlier in the day now, and a conversation unfolds between four. They are not speaking at the same time, one speaks while the others carefully examine the sticks and flowers of the talk. There is one word in a sentence, together with the gesture and the slight change of head orientation, that releases a specific smell. The face of the person, now reached by that odor, changes expression. The fragrance has deformed its factions from inside out. As I look around, the others respond to the same chemical reaction with a

subtle choreography; the corners of their mouths slightly decreasing, as if pulled by gravity. From that moment on the decision has been made. A subtle combination of words, gestures, head orientations, and tones, which had first escaped my attention, shift my fingers to pull the stick, from a flower from a completely different direction.

As I walk on the path, I am aware of an automatic bodily reaction, when one eats wild fennel, it can aggravate the situation. It might taste differently than you had thought. If it does, you spit it out, without subtlety but with speed. It’s the same speed that you carry in your body when you lift your one foot to the next step on the rock.

When I reach halfway down the path, before the top of the mountain, I will be able to sit and rest. There is a cross, with two concentric stone steps at the bottom, where you can catch your breath. The wind is normally strong there, quite a relief, as the sun will have made its way to the highest point of the sky by then. There aren’t many wild fennel plants in this part. It is more rocky and more barren. Violets don’t grow there.