The only one of my aunts who never married. She never ironed a shirt and never cooked. She offered nothing more than green eyes, black hairand momentum in cha-cha-cha. And the men wanted nothing else. But ever since she retired, my aunt sat listlessly on the sofa, and her world was nothing but tapestry, crossword puzzles, and red tea. Occasionally we talked on the phone, and most of the time my aunt yawned on the phone. Months passed, years, and my aunt was still embroidering. But one day my mother told me that Aunt Eva had come to visit with a man. Who had just moved in with my aunt. My aunt was seventy then and had never lived with a man for more than three weeks. The man who had performed the miracle was called Kurt and managed to lure my aunt away from her sofa and take her on trips to Egypt, to the pyramids, to China,
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Love changes people
My aunt no longer had time for tapestry embroidery, because when they weren’t traveling, my aunt and Kurt were editing their video films, the trademark of which was my aunt’s off-screen voice. During the next visit, the documentation was presented. You could see the Great Wall of China (“It’s a tough climb. He’s about to turn around and come back. Kurt, Kuhurt!”), my aunt sitting on an Egyptian wastebasket in front of the pyramids, and Kurt’s feet (“Ku-hurt! Watch out , there’s a wave coming!”) on the beach in Mallorca. One day my aunt visited me with Kurt in Venice. They arrived at the dock not far from Piazza San Marco. I saw her from afar. My aunt wore a tight black suit with white dots, a white frilly blouse, and a white hat. A red silk rose trembled on her cleavage. The heels of her sandals were so high that my aunt swayed impressively as she got out of the boat. Kurt enthusiastically filmed her balancing on the boardwalk and throwing herself into the outstretched arms of a man. My aunt was eighty then.
They saw nothing of Venice but themselves. My aunt drank red wine and told the story of their first encounter as if it were a miracle cure. They met at the Lonely Hearts Ball. When she looked into Kurt’s shadowy eyes, she thought he had a stomach problem, my aunt said. But it was love.
Love is everywhere in life
Sometimes you start loving because the other person has a dimple in their chin or a scratchy voice. Nobody knows what ultimately leads to the fusion of the particles. It is believed that chemistry plays a major role in this. And of course physics. Magnetism. I still remember how the man of my life cut my hairoff my face and warmed my heart. We had known each other for three hours. You can feel right away when love is there. And even when she’s gone. One can also love without being loved back, sometimes for a lifetime. I recently met an old friend, by chance, in Venice, as always. I hadn’t seen him in a long time and I noticed that his cheeks had thinned. We stood on the Campo Sant’Angelo like on a theater stage, surrounded by tourists with dappled hats and Albanian construction workers on their way to their lunch break. “You look bad,” I said. And he said he survived a plane crash. I laughed and asked: “Are you the only survivor?”, and he said very seriously: “No, we survived together, she and I.” – “Still her?”, I asked. “Yes,” he said, “she came back.” “And?” I asked. “It’s inside me, it flows through my veins,” he said, and that at night, when he’d waited in vain for her to call, he’d always heard Gianna Nannini, always the same song, “Amandoti”: love me once more, very gently, a year, a month, an hour, perdutamente. People perish without love, they kill off
Love, they create works of art out of love. Without love there would be no sun, no ballads, no Divine Comedy, no Anna Karenina, no Tiffany novels, no Taj Mahal, no Out of Africa, no Traviata, and no Marble , stone and iron breaks”, no “Casablanca” and no “As time goes by”.
Love is transcendence. Love is stepping out of yourself, meeting something greater than yourself. In the face of love, unbelievers become believers. “If I spoke in the tongues of men and angels, / but had not love, / I would be a roaring brass or a noisy drum. And if I could prophesy / and knew all mysteries / and had all knowledge; / if I had all the power of faith / and could move mountains with it, / but didn’t have love, / I would be nothing.” So the apostle Paul.
But also my aunt Eva. Kurt recently passed away. At 89 years old. After the funeral, while the relatives were sitting at the funeral feast, I once again accompanied my aunt to his grave. I kept a little apart. The wind tugged at the chrysanthemum arrangements and the wreath bows. And then I heard my aunt say, “You were the love of my life.”
