The Grammar of the Look

 II

God forgive me, but I decidedly hate chickens (the fowl). I had a bit less than to be able to say many in the home where I grew, which was that of my grandmother, a house situated on a foothill from where you could barely see the sea,(about which I always said that we had a proud vista of it), and a partial view of the old part of the city with its compacted houses and quite different from ours. Pervasively strange for me, even while the house and its environs were laid on a somehow perceptible slope our garden seemed placidly flat. When I was a kid, several times through living, I tried to teach some tricks to the few animals we had and kept in our scarcely spacious garden, loosely, and absentmindedly planted with some oranges, a fig, for some time a kaki.  There was a dear, immemorial but a finite mulberry which started their sequence, two peaches, several vines covering accidental patches of the spatial surroundings and others shadowing precise parts of the roof. And in the middle of all there was a lemon which in its best days timidly will mingle its branches with a rather daring but hollow pomegranate through which withes I always dreamed to hide, but invariably I would end to be embraced by the intimate shadow of the apathetic canes that were the border of the yard. Prod by Pavlov but mostly inspired from Chekhov’s “Kashtanka”, a book that I liked to open time to time, not as much because of those plotting impressions the first books I read knit in me which I failingly tried to unweave but mainly because its watery and uncontained, wine colored graphics, dispersed and borderless over the pages as on blotting paper, streamed, without loosing shape, vertically and quietly till they stood in abeyance, as some living tattoos on the boneless palm of the room or on the transparent abdomen of the garden, variably where I brought them, and they in turn suspending me while I was hastily pleasured by them because so I imagined it will be the memories I believed I would have, I could manage to teach how to perform some simple numbers to a duck, to a cat and to a rabbit. This last one I probably have only imagined. But exceptionally (from the other animals) I never succeeded, never achieved anything with chickens, no matter how hard and long, patiently and hardheadedly I tried for more than a year, it(the chicken) never learned anything, at all. I have never experienced something so distressing and gloomy and at the same time irritating, and perturbing because it was so excessively hopeless and inexorably stupid. I decided from that time to never permit myself to fall into the chicken trap again, as it was the first noteworthy trauma (drama) of my life, I definitely concluded and ruled that any time I will see patterns of that behavior to any object or living matter I would have to keep my unalterable or otherwise, only ever growing distances from them.