Читать книгу Beat Space - Tommaso Pincio - Страница 13

10.

While Jack and Neal waited for the doors of Quantum to open, some miles away, in a curious international-style house built on the rocks of a waterfall, Norma Jeane Mortensen was sleeping in what her husband had defined as the doughnut position. Her insufferable husband and his idiotic definitions.

Norma Jeane Mortensen had entrusted her remaining hopes of finding that certain something to the Stars—and for a brief period of time she deceived herself into thinking she had found it in her present insufferable husband. At the end of the spring of 1956, however, she was living her life, not giving much thought to the fact that the Sun was about to enter Gemini. The horoscopes provided daily updates on the fluctuating movements of the humors and uneventful course of her existence, but Norma Jeane didn’t really associate the contents of those reports with the celestial vault advancing above her. She had a vague notion of the problem, she knew that the future was written in the Stars, but she didn’t connect the Stars to the sky. Stars was a word, nothing more, a beautiful word with a smooth sound that made things seem to flow better just by saying it. Norma knew perfectly well what a real Star was, but the Stars of her horoscope were, for her, the heavens of her dreams and the answer to all sadness, a heaven where the Stars moved like cartoon characters and the concept of the Spacial Void made no sense.

In fact, Norma Jeane hated Space. She hated it for many reasons, first among them being that her husband worked at the Orbital Control Command Center for Coca-Cola Enterprise Inc. The others were merely irrelevant and irrational variations of the first—that is, her protean hatred for her husband. Because her hatred for Space and for her husband were really just different sides of the same coin.

When she thought about her husband—thought because she now avoided looking him in the eyes—she thought him an awkward man with glasses, crooked teeth and an uncompilable list of other defects that at one time, not long ago, were collected in the “everything!” sigh with which she would answer the question: “What was it that made you fall in love with him?” This man, the last of the tricks by which life induced her to make the wrong choice, went by the name of Arthur Miller, and in Norma Jeane’s thoughts he was nothing more than the steady mirror of her tragedy, of her way of life that was essentially an ill-advised relationship with the male world, the world where men, those dazzlers, went fishing . . . first blinding her completely and then—only then—appearing to her as something they weren’t.

On that late spring morning Norma Jeane Mortensen doughnuted herself further and further in an attempt to escape the waking state that had now taken hold of her mind. She wanted to squeeze her lids shut and sink back into sleep. Her lips were slightly parted and her breath moved the fabric of the pillow imperceptibly. She was blonde and considered unanimously irresistible. With a nervous twitch of her body she squeezed the radius of the doughnut even tighter. She wanted nothing more than for sleep to take her with it, down to wherever dreams go at the moment of waking.