3 - A ridiculous hairdo
Night came back, but still no trace of Martina. Perhaps she was still mad at me for something wrong I had said. Or maybe it was too risky to run away again. No, not run away. Making rehearsals, so to speak.
Perhaps, however, she had a list of possible shelters to check (because of pirates, or rather thieves and kidnappers) and she would not come back until she had examined them all. Perhaps, the night after her visit to the tower, she had gone somewhere in the woods, or in the basement of the church. Or she had climbed in a coach and run away somewhere. No, this really wasn’t possible. First she had to return to take back her little bag of biscuits. Hadn’t she left it here on purpose so she could come back? I believed so.
Every now and then my eyes went to the trapdoor, from which I maybe expected to see her black hair come out, but she didn’t come. I tried to think of some verse, to the moon, remember?, but nothing came to my mind. So at some point I went to sleep, certain that I would wake up if I heard footsteps on the stairs.
A few days passed by, during which my looks to the trapdoor diminished.
Thus, when one night I suddenly saw her emerge from the dark square, I was almost surprised.
"Ah, still here! Don’t you ever sleep?" she asked me as if the anger of the time before hadn’t passed yet.
"You're back," I stated. "It's because of the bag of biscuits, I suppose," I suggested, disappointed, sure that she would take it away. But maybe she had something good to eat this time as well. My hope wasn’t disappointed at all.
"Oh, yes. The bag. I'll have to remember to take it," she said as, like the first time, she came and sit next to me on the step. Again, she seemed to have forgotten her ankles. But she offered me, along with their vision, a small piece of apple pie, taken from a bigger container than the one she had left in my custody the previous time. That pie had a particular flavour.
"It's different from other pies. It tastes better."
"It must be because of the cinnamon. I put a bit of it. I made it myself, do you like it?"
I nodded as I happily bit the pie that she had offered me on a checked napkin. So she had prepared it.
"You are very good with sweets," I said just to say something. She evidently overestimated it as a great compliment.
"Thank you. In fact I like to make them. Just them, though. I don’t like to cook, I just like to make sweets. You live alone?"
"Yes, alone."
"And you cook?"
"No. Let’s say I get by."
"Don’t you have a housekeeper? No one?"
"No. I live alone. I have nobody."
"We are a lot at home. I have four sisters and a brother and also my aunt lives with us. My older sister got married, though, so now we’ve been left without her. Soon my brother is going to get married too. And the others have boyfriends. I am the youngest."
"And are you engaged too?"
"No, I mean, yes, but against my will."
"Isn’t your boyfriend sorry that you want to escape?"
"It's obvious that he doesn’t know that I want to run away. What do you think?" she asked impatiently, without waiting for the answer. "Indeed, it is his fault if I want to."
Silence. A little hand digs into the scented bag, unwraps another slice of cake and hands it to me, hopefully. I am beginning to understand how it works.
"Thank you. Why do you say it is his fault?"
Martina cheers up, she wants to talk, she cannot wait.
"It's an absolute injustice. Being a woman sucks. You can never decide anything. It is always males who command. My parents made me engage, without even asking for my opinion, with a stupid and arrogant dandy I don’t even like a little bit."
"Can’t you complain?"
"Of course I complained! But they don’t listen to me. He is the son of the banker, you know? He's rich. They say it's a good marriage. And he also owns the farm next to ours. But I don’t want to marry him."
Her face was the oval shape of a child’s, her little hands churned spicy sweets, her coal-black eyes were big and beautiful, dreamy eyes, playful eyes. Even the biscuits were a game for her. Even the pie. This was clear. The escape, a game.
"Aren’t you too young to marry?"
"A lot of girls marry at my age. What do you think, that I am a baby?" she asked, clearly offended.
I didn’t know what to answer, also because I didn’t know whether she had more pie in her bag, which she could close at the first sign of a wrong reaction.
"A friend of mine married at my age, and she already has a child," she said firmly.
"But you don’t want to marry and have a baby."
"What does it matter? Don’t upset me! I don’t want to marry, but I could if I wanted to. I could have a family, a husband, a house."
I smiled, imagining her in a tiny house, a dollhouse, with a grownup husband too big for the house, whose head burst out of the roof and whose arms and legs come out from the windows. And she, tiny, in a toy kitchen, bakes her delicious pies, but they are crumbs for him.
"Don’t get mad. I am honest with you. You will be a beautiful woman. Really. But you must still grow a bit." I blushed, because my eyes had stopped on her cleavage, confirming the evidence that her forms were still completely immature. Could a man find her desirable? To me, she only inspired so much tenderness.
Now, since it's night and we have time, let’s imagine the scene. I am the chosen, I enter the church in very elegant clothes, she is wearing a wedding dress, a toy as well, of course, and we walk to the altar. "Do you, etcetera, etcetera?"
Of course I do, otherwise why would I be here? I do not like to waste the time of people who work. I'm embarrassed, everybody looks at me. I can’t wait to leave. After the banquet, a banquet made of sweets, only sweets, we go home. I bring her to the clock tower and we go to bed. What should I do now? She is wearing her nightgown, the one that even now badly comes out of her clothes, while I am imagining her as a bride and she is sitting next to me, ready to flee. I hug her, plant a light kiss on her lips, which is too much already. In fact, she blushes. And, holding her in my arms like a doll, I tell her a story to make her sleep. This should be her wedding. Not with me, I mean. But I believe that the son of the banker would not appreciate her premature beauty, he would not be content with her sleep. He would assault her like a bad wolf, the one of the fairy tales. This one, however, does not have a happy ending.
"I'm glad you want to escape," I said finally, after having imagined her as a bride. Maybe first I should have also imagined her as a runaway, but I didn’t have that disposition. I knew she couldn’t be a bride, at least not to someone who thought about her differently than I did, and apparently there were no alternatives.
"So you wouldn’t tell anyone if I were to stay here for a while?"
"Would you cook some sweets for me, every now and then?"
"Of course I will. All the sweets you want. But you'll have to keep the secret."
"And what if anyone came to know? They would fire me. Where would I go? And then, what would you do?"
"Nobody will find out. If someone unfortunately finds me, I will say that I was hiding and that you didn’t know anything. Then I’ll decide what to do. For now, I haven’t thought about that yet."
"All right. You can come here for a while. But if you are found, I didn’t know anything, uh? Do you promise?"
"I promise. And while I'm here, I will not be a burden, believe me. I will take care of you. Looks like you need it" she said with a sidelong glance up and down at my figure, which could be distinguished.
She was returning my previous glance, it was clear. She had discovered, through my objectives eyes, that she was still a child, and I that I was unkempt, as unkempt as could be.
"First, though," she added "we must take care of your hair. The rest can wait, even if we will have to think about it, sooner or later. But that is really urgent."
"Hey, hey, what rest? What do you mean? And what do you want to do to my hair?"
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"Don’t get upset. Really. The fact is that you're pretty unwatchable. But, above all, what attracts more attention is your hair. You look like a savage, it’s unruly, your curls overgrown, they look more like a basket than real hair. We need to fix them."
Maybe she was good at cooking sweets, but she said irritating things. What was wrong with my hair? They were thick and lush, honey-coloured. They could do a lot of things. For example? They caught the light and turned it into specks of gold, and if you tried to catch them they turned out to be mirages or dissolved into nothingness. Cool, huh?
"No, not at all. Stop acting like a poet, you know you're not good at it. We must thin them out and give them shape. Something a little more modern. No male has long hair anymore, today."
"But I like it!" I protested.
"Okay, okay, I just said we will thin them out. I never tried to cut hair, but it shouldn’t be difficult. But we will need some light."
I sighed, resigned to undergo her whim, her scissors and her inexperience.
"And will you bring me another pie?"
"Do you only think about eating?"
"No, I compose verses too, as you know. For the moon, though. Just for it."
"I thought we had established that you are not that good as a poet. It’s not like the moon makes such a good impression in your poems. Maybe you should switch subject," she suggested, blinking more than necessary. Was she trying to suggest me anything?
"I might try to compose something in honour of your sweets. The ginger biscuits resemble the moon. It might be a good idea. I could write poems to the moon and everything like that. Like biscuits."
"That is not what I meant..."
"..."
"... anyway, this is what you have to do: get a pair of sharp scissors, some light and maybe a mirror. So when I come back we can proceed. Then, after I move here, we’ll do the rest."
What rest?
"All right. When are you coming back?"
"This time you asked. Very well, you're getting better. "
"If I don’t know when you’re coming back, I don’t know when to bring the things you need" I explained.
"Ah. Then I take back everything. You're not improving at all. In fact, I should go away and leave you here alone with that impossible hairstyle."
Here we go again. And from what I heard through the grapevine, it seemed that all women were like that. You never knew what to say to make them happy. This miniature one, then, really seemed impossible to please. Were whims inversely proportional to age? Then I could hope she would improve. Meanwhile I could only undergo her experiment. When I objected that perhaps she wouldn’t be able to make a decent cut, since she had never tried, she said: "It can’t be worse than that, anyway..." Worse than what? Never mind, never mind. She should go, so not to be discovered. Otherwise her people would become suspicious and keep an eye out for her, preventing her from implementing her sensational escape, on which need we all agree now.
I didn’t think she would really run away from home, that's why I went along. What the hell would she do, shut in the clock tower all day?
In the most unlikely scenario, if she really ran away, I knew that she would get tired quickly, and spontaneously return home, to her family, her comfort and her rich would-be husband. Someone with a trendy hairstyle.
"What sweet will you bring me?"
"I’ll surprise you."
And she vanished, pouting again. When she disappeared through the trapdoor, it occurred to me what she had said the time before, about the fact that a gentleman should walk home a girl at night. Did she mean me, saying gentleman? And herself saying girl?
Trying to substitute the words, it seemed to work. Not great, but good enough.
Next time, I promised myself, I am going to ask her if she wants me to walk her home. I'll impress her. She will say I am a real gentleman. Then I went to the mirror, and found that my hair weren’t ridiculous at all.