In those troubled times, the world seemed like one enormous prison. Not a perfect one, though. The barred window, open to the sea, let dreams escape toward a more normal world, somewhere beyond the horizon.
Crouched on the wet sand at the edge of the sea, in the middle of the night, with a pleasant breeze drifting by, I breathed in the faint lights of ships slowly sailing away or waiting their turn to enter the Danube. Luminous ephemerals tumbled among grains of sand and shards of seashell. Overhead swarmed the arrogant cosmopolitan cousins of faraway fireflies, much to the jealousy of the stars, frozen stiff with surprise. The waves lured thoughts astray. With their sensual, deceitful calls, they tried to draw you into their dance, down the path of the free dolphins.
On that horizon, where the sky stretched out to sleep without breathing. There, in the merriment of sorrows, a sailor played his musette with passion, hip-hop remastered. A premonition of the manele yet to come. On an accordion eaten away by time. Its bellows riddled with holes, wheezing rhythmically like a nose tormented by polyps. Everyone else was dancing.
He played with his eyes lowered toward his old sealskin boots, weathered and cracked by time. Deep in the hypnosis of the sounds, he swung his unwashed, half-bald head like the pendulum of a clock forgotten in some dusty corner of a room.
Left to right, pause. A chord slightly off. Right to left, pause, and another dissonance. His slippery body twisted after it, gleaming with the whale grease he rubbed into his skin every day. He twisted after the sounds inside his filthy undershirt, drier than the peeling paint on the deck.
The sailors danced the hot wine around their bagpiped bellies, full of amnesiac fish still swimming. They stomped face-to-face or linked arms, smiles across their bristly faces, their mouths adorned with yellow-brown teeth dangling here and there. Every last one of them dreamed of easy mermaids with raging libidos. Voluptuous mermaids with silicone breasts—beautiful ones—with all their teeth still in their mouths. Lipsticked. Up to their ears.
On the wet sand at the edge of the sea, in the middle of the night, with an almost pleasant breeze drifting by, nothing was happening. On the horizon, the lights were nothing more than the headlamps of sharks returning home exhausted from a day down the mines.
Toward morning, I closed the window. Evil will lose, I told myself, because all of us, once upon a time, were dolphins.