19 / ENOUGH (fine-tuning our writing 2)

It was very early in the morning and Martin was alone. Still in bed, hands under his head, he felt inevitably awake. “Thoughts roam around unsuspected places when sleep flyes away” he murmured when he realized he was missing the bells. The bells of the alarm clock, the bells in the school, the bells of the church, all those damned bells he had hated through his whole life, resounded now in his mind like echoes of joyful. That was an unexpected feeling since he certainly went into retirement as a prisoner reaches his release. Fed up of schedules, timetables, bosses, at last, fed up of people in general and particularly one by one, retirement appeared to his mind as a new brilliant world  full of vague promises of liberty, revived passions, and tranquility of the soul. But that morning had broken odd and his living apart paradise seemed, under the first pale sun lights, a huge amount of empty time.  There was a worm growing inside Martin. There was a worm scratching deep, in the soft thing. “Enough!” he exclaimed, “enough!”

The man jumped out of the bed, dressed up and made some tea, like a captain commanding his soldiers, with discipline and martial accuracy. Then, being the universe controlled again, took a book and started to read by the bedroom window. Morning seemed perfectly calm and quiet except for the birds singing outside, in the garden, mainly in the great old elm, which Martin’s great grandfather had planted according to the family record. That old tree had had a life longer than all of them. On the one hand, that great tree, on the other hand, those little lives, with their little business, insignificant troubles, pusillanimous joeys and sadness, little deaths and births.  All of them are the same as those birds which stirred up the leaves. “A huge amount of useless efforts” thought the worm. And Martin: “enough, enough!”

He closed his eyes and, suddenly, there was such a deep silence that Martin was affected. He looked again through the window and discovered a boy under the tree. He surprised he didn’t noticed him before, since the vision was totally out of the context. The boy was there, deeply concentrated, reading a book, as it was his habitual place of reading, a corner of his own garden. After a while looking at the boy but still not very sure about the reality of his vision, Martin decided to creep downstairs and, carefully, he opened the glass door onto de garden. He paced to the tree. “It seems a good book, doesn’t it?” For the first time, the boy looked away from the pages and, smiling in a shy but charming way, said: “It is the book of my life”.

Astonish, Martin looked at the boy for a long time while the boy got back to his book. He didn’t understand anything. Martin thought (or was the worm?) that that boy could be himself, or his father, or his grandfather many years before. “So, this is thing, the old wheel of eternal return start a new, the long series of little lives under the tree never end” And he thought (or the worm) that all the business under the tree are nothing but a huge amount of empty time. “ENOUGH!” shouted Martin. And the boy, suddenly, disappeared.