Inf. 2.58 “O anima cortese mantoana”
Merryn: Sometimes the sun glints off the quartz in the rock upon which the city sits. It never glints gold but always a cool pearlish silver, soft grey rather than a yellow solar glow. Maybe it’s the time of day that I see it, always when I’m on my way out of the city early in the morning, driving fast along the bridge that connects the vast rock of the city to the rest of the world. Driving east, driving into the sun, catching the sparkle of my city in the rear view mirror.
I work at the sea. At the docks, I suppose they would have been, before all the industry finally went. In the early days of my work, when the dockside was a wall of container ships stacked three or four deep out into the sea, I would sit at the side and try to imagine what lay beyond the ships. I never saw the dockside empty. I was pretty then, they said, in all sorts of languages I didn’t understand, but I could see in their eyes what they meant, and I hoped that being pretty might prove some sort of solution to life, might reveal itself to be the place where happiness was to be found in life. But I would shake my hair and turn away. There were always more, always saying or doing the same thing. Sometimes they told me words that made them cry, and pointed out over the sea, pointing to where they had come from, where they would go back to.
Twenty years on and I’m still at the sea but I’ve lost my looks and every night I return alone to my flat stacked above and beside and under sixty two other flats. I know how those young men felt, stacked in their container ships four deep, ten long, numerous beyond counting, I know how insignificant they must have felt in relation to their gargantuan ship, and I regret that I shook my hair, I regret that I didn’t learn to say the names of their cities back to them.