I have an aunt; she is almost 80 years old now. She is a deeply religious person (fact that doesn’t guarantee the goodness of her character).
During my childhood, I remember my grandmothers (her mother and my granny), my mother and her sisters and the whole family trying to find the proper suitor for the spinster.
An endless effort to find one man for her. All the family tried to convince her about the graces of her future husband (and the marriage of course).
I remember my mother to enumerate the advantages: he is not womanizer, he has a very good job, a car (these years was something rare), he is a gentle person… And the list was going on.
But, as we all know very well, if someone doesn’t like something, there is always a “but”.
“Yes, but, he likes to drink…” was the answer of my aunt.
“Yes, but, he has a mother and she will come to live with us…”.
“Yes, but, he is ugly and short…”
And this list was going on too… She didn’t like anyone.
Two lists. One against the other. And finally her list, the list of the unmarried daughter, was the winner. She never got married.
All my life as a kid, I remember her to open a trunk… You see, the picture is complete. Every spinster that respects her “spinster-ness” has a trunk.
This trunk was full of stuff: silk textiles with very vivid colors, delicate night dresses, cosmetics with strong smell…
Jewelries, lingerie of white expensive cotton (colorful lingerie was a scandal these years too), small woman’s things: leather wallet, silk socks, a pair of gloves to help her wear the silk socks without destroying them, several kinds of laces…
But this object that really was making my childish imagination burning was a pair of blue mules. An uncle of mine, that was studying Medicine in Turkey, brought them for her. Blue and silver crewels, made by oriental technique, with colorful stones. I adored these slippers. I was jealous. I always wanted something like that.
This trunk was a magic universe for me. So many strange things. So many beautiful, colorful things, pieces of the adults’ life.
But the shoes, the blue mules… For which princess was made for? For what kind of life? For nights full of passion, when woman waits for her man and after a blessing dinner gift him herself, because love obliges her to do it… Nights that she will convert in odalisque for him and make him feel like prince… So many passions, so many feelings, so many love…
She never wore them, or something else of the trunk things. She never got married.
There are many persons that put a limit in their life and they are waiting to live after it. A limit determined with an event.
Her limit was her marriage… She didn’t live; she is still waiting to live. She never had any kind of pleasure, because it was out of the limit. Away from the limit, different from the limit. Unpermitted from the limit. Forbidden…
Spent lives without a reason, except of the triumph of the limit.
Who has the courage to live out of limits (not only the time ones)?
Even the time that we are waiting to live is life. Our life that goes away and never returns!
Why is so difficult to understand that. Why the progress never help us to understand the important things of life. Why is so difficult to live?
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