Robert's story

-"By their very nature," Robert muses to himself, "cities are haunted places." He sits nodding his head as if he needs to confirm this definition for himself.

-"A million lives, a million stories built up in layers in history." he adds after a short pause.

-"You are in a very philosophical mood today, Robert." I say.

-"Artists and dreamers, vagabonds, queers and mystics..."

-"Criminals." I interrupt him. He lets out a weary sigh.

-"Sounds like you´re describing a cabinet of curiosities." I add. "I noticed you were getting restless these last few days." 

Robert raises his eyebrows tiredly.

-"Do you have another tale you want to explore?" I ask. Robert runs his hand through his hair.

-"I do not want to bore you." he says sadly, "Don't you have a party you should go to tonight?"

I shake my head.

-"Why didn't you go to the Halloween ball?" I ask. Robert shrugs.

"I’ll go if you let me have a dance with you dance doctor." He smiles wearily.

"Now tell me your story first." I insist.

-"It's a long story." he emphasizes.

-"Does not matter." I reassure him.

"Oh, I see," he says, "the others are all at the ball, so I'm your only patient. That's sad."

-"I call it interesting. I have a little more time for you, Robert." I try to chase away his melancholy mood.

He takes a sip of his tea and his eyes light up:

-"The Devil's Daughter." he started nodding his head. "One dreary day she bound her horns to hide them and set sail for the city in a boat made from a coffin."

I look at Robert questioningly: "That sounds like an exciting campfire story for this time of year." I grin, but Robert looks profoundly serious at me.

-"The revelation of her true nature resulted in murder." he continues in a conspiratorial tone.

-"Sounds like heavy material." I say.

-"Shut," Robert shushes me, "You know I don't like it when you interrupt me.

-"Pray forgive me." I apologize.

-"Where was I?" he coughs.

-"Murder." I fill in.

-"Oh yes," he continues, "Black clouds raced like warhorses, pounding the sky. Lightning slit the darkness."

-"Sounds like a reflection of a condition of the heart." I say. Robert gives me a sharp look and continues:

-"What happens next is very complicated."

-"Isn't it always." I try carefully, a little irritated because he is telling me a fairy tale. Robert looks at me intently and continues a little offended:

-"My story has real people in it, you know? Young people who barely stood a chance in life."

-"It´s a story about desolation then?" I ask.

-"And pain." I could hear the anger in his voice.

-"And pain." he repeats one more time. "You know, doctor: I have been an outsider most of my life, raised in care or by abusive relatives.

-"Hence your ferocious empathy for outsiders." I pointed out.

"No doctor," he shakes his head, "Extravagant characters, wounded at heart, I call them."

-"Is there anything in your world that isn't haunted, Robert?" I ask him. "Everybody you ever mentioned was broken."

-"And reassembled!" he insists, "Broken and reassembled."

-" Haunted by oppression. Fake ectoplasms or real ghosts... it´s just stories with a haunted element. These are feelings and emotions you never released, so you replaced them with cloven hooves or the devil’s offspring..." I stop abruptly as I see his eyes fill with tears.

-"Your stories are about alienation and despair, in search of meaning in bottomless misery and pain." I try to proceed cautiously.

-"You have an uncanny sense of what it is like to be fiercely marginalized, doctor." Robert says in a broken voice. "An outsider, a freak..."

-"It´s just that I have an instinctive understanding of emotional states." I explain to him.

-"I guess I was born to be lonely." Robert says in a sad voice now.

One summer when I was wandering about with a knapsack, I had rented a room in a small inn. It was an ideal place to lie and dream. I was enjoying a sandwich in the dining room when suddenly the door opened. A rustic man came in and went sitting by the window. I nodded at him without actually looking at him. I was starving and was completely engrossed in my lunch. I had been walking all morning and was exhausted.

There was a sort of luminous mist hanging over the treetops. The day was settling down. The colors of the grass and foliage seemed to add radiance to the beauty of the land.

The innkeeper had a daughter, a sweet girl of simple country beauty. She came into the dining room with a mug, asked how I was doing and walked out again. I assumed she had not seen the old man sitting in the corner because she did not say hello. He sat there aimlessly looking out the window. His head was covered with silver hair, and he gave me the impression of something noble, though his clothes looked simple and even shabby. His hand rested on a sturdy stick.

I decided not to take offense at his disdain for my presence and went on eating in silence.

The smells of flowering fruit trees poured in through the windows. The grass was dotted with dazzling daisies, and the roses that climbed profusely over the window mingled their perfume with the sweet salty scent of the sea.

Then the man turned his head and began to speak. He had a dreamy calm voice, and he sounded like he was very far away. As if he was sitting somewhere where shadows weaved their dreams. His eyes seemed absent, almost in keeping with the timbre of his voice.

-"You are a stranger in these parts?" he asked. I replied that I was on a walking tour through the beautiful region.

-"I've lived here all my life." he sighed, "and I never tire of the beauty of this land."

-"So, you live in the area?" I asked, but he replied that he had moved and let his gaze drift wistfully over the thicket of blossoms behind the window.

-"Nowhere else do the flowers smell so sweet." His voice seemed to dissolve in the rustle of the rose petals climbing in at the window. "There's something magical here that reminds me of my childhood I was completely sucked into his way of speaking. It was like some inner force compelled me to give him my full attention.

-"The place fascinates me too." I said at last. It was as if we were two figures meeting in a dream. He fixed his gaze on me with an intense ardor.

-"Stay a little longer." he said in a muffled voice, " I will tell you why I'm here." I felt something of excitement running up and down my back.

"I'm here to call someone away," he continued. "Someone who really should be somewhere else."

He seemed overcome with sadness.

-"What do you mean?" I asked uncertainly. He looked at me piercingly. I started shaking inexplicably. Something was rolled out in me. Suddenly I understood that the past and the future actually exist together in a grand present.

-"Come to me later. When night falls." I heard him say. And just like that; he was gone. At that moment I realized that pleasure and pain were one and the same power.

The blossoms fell silent and the breeze from the sea had ebbed away. A yellow butterfly floated past the window. The birds stopped singing. The smell of the warm summer air rose from the fields, the unmistakable scent of June and the long days of the year.

Outside there was the buzz of summer life and countless children's voices accompanied by the sound of rippling water. The sunshine grew into a dazzling gleam, faded, and disappeared. The shadows had stopped dancing. The wind began to sigh the story of its love. I thought I heard someone calling my name a few times. A wonderful sensation of light began to radiate over me.

Suddenly the door swung open again and the innkeeper's daughter came in again, with her rural beauty originating in wildflowers.

I took some change from my wallet to pay the bill. I asked the girl if she knew the old man who had been sitting in the corner by the window and had now disappeared like a figure that had slipped out of a dream, without breaking its continuity.

-"It must have been a ghost." she said seriously.

-A ghost?" I asked, "you mean a ghost?"

-"The village spirit." she said softly, and added in a whisper, "He comes before a death."

She told me that the inn had long ago been a farm that belonged to a rather eccentric peasant. he had been very poor all his life until he acquired a fortune in his old age. The old man, however, never neglected his simple way of life and devoted his fortune to the improvement of the village and the aid of its inhabitants.

People had always been afraid of the old farmer, but after his death, he came to be known as the father of the village and is still held in reverence by the people to this day.

Shortly before his end, he started behaving strangely. He claimed to see things that others could not and to hear voices. People started avoiding his house after dark. Various gossips were spread, and soon an element of fear was associated with his name." The girl pointed to the forest of pine trees behind the inn.

-"There you can find him." she said. "He used to say that he saw the souls of those who were about to die dance there, and then he told his wife the name of who he had seen dancing, who then announced it to the villagers. And it turned out that those people the farmer saw going into the woods died.

He loved that forest, and on summer evenings he often walked there. He said he was meeting his old friends there and that one day he would not come back from his walk there.

His wife had tried her best to get him out of this habit, for people began to tell strange stories. She had even dared to follow him into that forest once. She saw him standing there under a big tree, where the forest is the densest. He was talking in earnest with someone she couldn't see. Her husband noticed her and became incredibly angry. She had never seen him so furious. After that, she never dared to follow him there again. He told his wife about the "others", who taught him wonderful things, which he had to learn before he could join them.

His story started to spread like wildfire in the village, and in time it became a hell-blown melodrama. Everyone began to tell of great veiled figures moving among the trees of that forest.

On the evening of his ninetieth birthday, the old peasant went to his wife, kissed her, and bid her fondly farewell. The poor woman was, of course, terrified and tried to stop him, but he slipped from her hands, and she was far too scared to chase him.

Later that night, she found him peaceful in bed: dead. Although the woman's story was only half believed, a funeral service was held to which the people came in great numbers.

You're the first to say you saw him." The girl concluded her story. "It seems he often sat by that window when he was alive."

-"He said he came for someone." I said.

"Did he say..." she began hesitantly.

-"For whom? No!" I reassured her quickly.

The girl picked up her tray from the table and left the room.

I spent the rest of the evening in my room reading.

The fruit trees dreamed away in the fields and the clouds sailed to other places over the sea. I decided to walk to the village to see the stone that was erected in memory of the father of the village. When the clock struck half past eleven, I left the village and crawled through a dark orchard toward the southern slope of the hill, lined with dense pine forest. Soon the inn was below me and the village around it was clustered in a soft black shadow. There was a sound of deep sleep. The stars filled the sky. A few times a night bird circled above my head. The combs of the trees stood like gigantic spears against the sky. I heard a rustling sound among their branches, while a night breeze danced over their countless little needles. The wind didn’t seem to settle in the trees. There was a kind of music between their twigs. Delicate scents of bark and earth rushed toward me. Impenetrable darkness stared at me.

Something emerged from the midst of that blackness. I thought it was my imagination, but a cold hand grabbed mine and led me along invisible paths to the unknown depths of the forest. The trees moved silently past me. Finally, I came to an open space. When I looked up, I saw the sky yielding to a new light, spreading swiftly across the heavens.

-"That is the dawn announcing its arrival." I heard a voice say, like a whisper coming from the trunks of the trees. I recognized that voice.

With wondrous swiftness, the light in the east passed into the gleam of early morning, and the rays of the sun rested in a golden circle at my feet.

"Come with me," my companion whispered in a deep voice, "time does not exist here.”

I pedaled softly over the shadows of the trees. I could smell the pine needles.

A little later I saw a hayfield lying in the glow of the day. Two great horses yoked in the shafts after a driver as he walked forward with one hand on their reins. He was a tough fellow, with a tanned neck and hands.

High on the trembling haystack on the cart, I saw the figure of a young woman. I couldn't see her face, but her brown hair escaped from under a white hood. She was holding a pitchfork. I watched the scene with such intense interest that I forgot how strange it was to be allowed here as a spectator.

-"I am the hay queen." I heard the girl laugh silvery. She slid over the back of the hay and ran down the road for a while. I could see her clearly, and saw the charming grace of her movements, and the loving expression in her eyes as she looked over her shoulder.

Just then I heard the old man next to me let out a strange cry. It went through my soul. The wind grabbed the girl's hair, and the next moment she lay on the ground between me and my companion.

"You called me by my name, father. Here I am. I'm tired. So very tired."

"Sleep now baby," I heard him whisper, "sleep now."

I had recognized the face and voice of the innkeeper's daughter. A terrible wail broke out from heaven and suddenly it became dark as night. The wind picked up and began to throw branches around us. The whole scene was engulfed in darkness.

The cold fingers gripped my hand again. I slipped through the hayfield, crawled back into the inn, and went to bed.

I never saw the girl from the inn again. After a few days, I decided to inquire with her father about her well-being. A strange feeling gripped my heart: the innkeeper replied sadly that she was dead, she had suffered sunstroke in the hayfields.

"That strange summer vision never left me." Robert sighed sadly.

I sat looking at him in silence. He took a deep breath and looked at me with a crooked smile:

-"What do you say Doc? Can I have that dance from you now?"