A Short Film About a Journey

A Story Instead of a Preface

By Strahinja Crnić

Today, as I wandered through Alberobello, a strange sound echoed inside my ears. It was a sharp, unsettling sound, accompanied above all by a bitter sweetness of scent that set my nostrils ablaze. In that instant I remembered my existence there and why I had ever set foot upon this unblessed soil of the Pyrenees. For hours we drifted through its winding paths without a single true sign that you would leave me there, break me, trample me beneath your feet, and forget me completely until the moment I reached the island. And yet, waiting now for that ending, I know it is only the beginning of an unreal story about how I became someone's poet.

Now, when I look back upon everything that stood between us, now that it is over and my life is barely pulling itself free from the volcanic ash, I remember that long ago I told her a story much like this one. It was the story of a young carpenter who died too soon. I think he was first the son of a carpenter, and when he finally died he was only in his early thirties. It was a sorrowful tale about a man wandering lost through the desert, about a father abandoned by life itself. Yet unlike Clementine and me, the Carpenter at least had sons of his own and sons who were not his. When his family left him, I imagine it wounded him more fiercely than any darkness the Romans had ever fastened upon him.

Only a few hours into the journey, it took for a bitter quarrel to erupt between her and the driver, an argument that cost us both dearly, in money as much as in feeling. The rough man behind the wheel, sour with ill temper, slammed on the brakes and abandoned us before a church with curiously low walls and two strangely playful towers, leaving us to the mercy of whatever came next. I believe it was a church dedicated to two brothers, Cosmas and Damian. At the time I knew nothing of them, yet that was where the story of the poet within me truly began, and where my life upon the island, which does not yet exist, first drew breath.

When another storm drowned Alberobello and trapped us within the crumbling shelter of that old church, an elderly preacher sought refuge beside us, a most unusual friar with long, unkempt hair. He told us the story of the brothers and how they had suffered for Christ. He spoke of miracles and healing, of how their prayers had once saved a man whose heart was rotting from within. Of all the stories he told, what I remember most is the rain striking the stone of that peculiar church, his voice echoing through its quiet walls as it followed the thunder. Then he said, "If prayer could heal a man whose heart had decayed, why does it never heal me, when I pray to God without ceasing?"

After some time, when the friar had vanished, the walls seemed even more exhausted, as though they were bending beneath the heavier burden of the rain or beneath confessions only just spoken and already forgotten. Then, in the desolate silence that followed, I saw a vision. She and I were standing alone beneath the warped domes of another church, far more beautiful than this one. Between us, without warning, stretched a long violet arm whose skin was scattered with white circles. Each one turned slowly before our eyes like ripples upon water. I looked through one of those circles and saw a young woman imprisoned inside a window. Her skin was pale with weariness, and strands of uncombed hair slipped from beneath her veil, falling across her body like rain. "That must be Clementine," I thought within the dream. The sharp scent of oranges cut through my chest and filled my lungs with something bitter and sweet. I collapsed to the ground like the final drop of that first summer rain.

I awoke alone. Silence, denser than stone, had descended upon that same Alberobello and spilled through every one of its narrow, winding streets. The air was heavy, suffocatingly still, as though the whole world had drawn a breath and forgotten how to release it. I rose, brushed the dust from my clothes, and only then did I realize there was no one beside me. The church stood empty. Not a single vendor remained, none of those who had shouted at us only moments before. When I rushed outside, there was nothing. I could catch no voice anywhere around me. The cafés stood deserted, the pastry shops looked starved and abandoned, and not even the stray dogs that usually wandered across the cobbled square were there. Everyone had vanished all at once. Only I remained, together with the pale skeleton of the town where I happened to be living.

Then I felt it again, for the second time. Everywhere around me lingered the scent of oranges. It clung to me, woven into every breath that followed, soaked deep into my skin. I tasted it most sharply upon my tongue. It was still bitter and sweet, winding through my nostrils, pressing against my ears, humming softly like a whisper. I began to cough, but the taste refused to leave. I started running. I raced past the white stone walls of the trulli, whose conical roofs resembled the hats of witches beneath the pale sky. My footsteps echoed, yet no familiar sound answered them. They were nothing more than dull blows against the silence that followed me all the way to the edge of Apulia. During my flight, I stopped only a few times to search for myself. When I glanced into the glass of one familiar shop window, I expected to find my own frightened reflection, yet the glass returned only emptiness. I stood still and looked more closely. Nothing. Only the white stone behind me and the dust turning without movement. I raised my hand, but the glass did not repeat the gesture. It remained hollow, as though it had swallowed my image and refused to return it. My breathing came in broken bursts. I stumbled forward, desperately searching once more for someone, anyone, but the scent of oranges only grew stronger. By then it was suffocating, filling my mouth with its dense sweetness. "Have I disappeared?" I whispered directly into the glass, yet my voice found no echo. It merely slipped into the white stone beneath my feet and vanished.

"One, two, three... thirteen, fourteen, fifteen... twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty... forty," I murmured beneath my breath, counting the days I had spent lost and wandering. Days spent drifting through countless cities, alone, searching for the mirage of an unnamed life, searching for some sign that someone still carried my fragile existence in the palm of their hand, for the faintest suggestion that somewhere, someone was still toying with my young, though by now already crippled, legs. After so many days in the desert, I had become certain that even my heart had been torn open by such endless walking.

"What is going to become of me?" I asked myself while the last remnants of my soul splintered into a succession of ragged, exhausting coughs. I wanted that cursed answer, an explanation for everything that was happening to me, and the reason I had been condemned to chase my own reflection all the way to the north of Italy, to Lake Como. If some merciless revelation awaited me somewhere, where else could it be except within the embrace of my greatest fears? I had always been afraid of that island and of you. And yet, over forty days I had seen forty abandoned cities, without finding a single proof that you had ever existed.

There, at the very heart of those deep, enchanted waters and the endless abyss spreading beneath me like the jaws of some ancient god, I saw it. Something irresistible, something from which no gaze could ever turn away. A flying fortress, drawn across the mist-laden sky by a flock of wild harpies. Their wings beat with a revolting grace, their feathers sharp and slick with blood. I tried to count them, but their twisted bodies grew more grotesque with every glance. With each new look I cursed at least once, until my mind finally gave way somewhere around the number forty. Always forty, as though it were the unspoken boundary of my terror. "Has the whole world collapsed upon me, together with forty monstrous things?" I said, just as my thought was shattered by the violent blow of a chicken's wing.

I do not know how much time passed before I awoke inside yet another unfamiliar cell. The stone walls pressed against my cracked skin. They were cold and damp. At first their touch brought relief, then it filled me with anger. Soon the smell of mould began to mingle with something darker, something older, until the room filled with the scent of forgotten years. Just as every prison cell must smell. My wrists throbbed beneath coarse ropes, while the air grew heavier with every silence, broken only now and then by the distant echo of footsteps somewhere beyond the walls. Only a few days later, the silence was broken by a voice, quiet yet rough enough to frighten me, carrying only a single message. "You are almost there. The island is waiting for you."

I could barely understand his first words. I was still disoriented, my mind still struggling to comprehend the nightmare that had brought me here. Everything between my disappearance and this cell felt like a dream, as though my own mind had begun to toy with reality. "The island?" The words sounded like a cruel joke, a promise of something far worse than anything that had happened to me so far, or perhaps worse than this fortress where I now found myself imprisoned. I knew I was inside the fortress. Then the voice returned, clearer this time, almost unnervingly familiar. "Innominato. He is the one who rules this place. He decides who will see the light of day, and who will become part of this fortress."

I strained against the ropes, trying to sit upright, but pain cut through me like the edge of a jagged blade. The following day, the voice continued, paying no attention to me. "He was never meant to become more than a forgotten name. But power has a way of reshaping history, does it not? They say Innominato made a pact. They say he sold his soul for dominion over life and death, and now this flying castle stands as a monument to that bargain." I tried to focus upon the voice hidden within the darkness, yet it seemed to come from every direction at once, as though the walls themselves were whispering the story into my ears. "He rules here, within the shadows. No one has ever seen him, yet every one of us has felt his hands close around our throat at least once." For the next several hours I struggled to wake from this diseased dream, until at last I fell asleep, still bound, soaked through, and without the slightest hope of understanding what was happening around me or why any of it had happened at all.

Before long, within the first true dream I had known since arriving here, I began searching for excuses. None of this could be happening. I could not believe any of it. I was a man of the twenty-first century, an age of reason, of progress, of cold and unyielding facts. And yet here I was, bound and lost inside an impossible dream, dreaming something far too absurd to belong to the world I had once known. I had to be dreaming. I always dreamed like this. I had suffered nightmares before. You know the kind. Vivid, relentless dreams from which you awaken drenched in sweat, trying to convince yourself that you are still alive. Sometimes I dreamed my teeth were falling from my mouth. Sometimes my body came apart piece by piece until nothing remained. That feeling, that helplessness, this was the same. It had to be just another dream. The twenty-first century, that is where I belong. The century of industry, of wars, of sudden transformations. A century that could only dream of the fanatical horrors I was now enduring. There was no possibility that any of this was truly happening. None at all. I belong to the same time that she belongs to. Soon I will awaken to her scent.

Within the dream, I closed my eyes, trying to drive the nightmare from my mind. The taste of oranges still lingered. The smell of mould remained suspended in the air. The ropes still tightened around my wrists. Everything felt far too real. "This is only another dream. Surely I am still asleep somewhere in my own bed, on some distant planet, alone, suffocating beneath those same smothering sheets, wrestling with yet another pile of pillows."

After so many bitten nails, after so many tears, I still failed to escape the cell. The cold stone floor became my only companion, its frozen silence slowly working its way into my bones. I often spoke to it, confessing my growing fear that perhaps I was not dreaming after all, that I truly was imprisoned inside some forgotten cell. It was not until I heard the distant notes of an unfamiliar violin that I finally understood the weight of my captivity. At first those notes unsettled me only slightly. Their sound cut through the silence like a sharp and uninvited visitor. I screamed. I clawed at my own mind, trying to silence it, trying to drown it beneath the deafening roar of my own thoughts. Yet the more fiercely I resisted, the louder the music became.

Then, I do not know exactly when, though it must have been around the fortieth day, I finally managed to fall asleep to the sound of the violin. Before long, its mournful sobbing became the only way I could sleep in that place. Its dreadful notes drifted through the air like the final hymn of my funeral procession. Clementine's warm breathing no longer lingered against my skin. There was no comfort left in familiar faces. Only the violin remained, alone, the last presence inhabiting the ruins of my captive mind. The nights passed. How many, I could no longer tell. Eventually the days dissolved into a blurred mist without edges. For more than a year the violin became my only anchor. I slept to its sorrowful refrain, every note drawing me deeper into the madness of my little cell, my own mind, my own fate. The days disappeared. The nights unraveled. And I remained lying inside that cell. I forgot Alberobello. I forgot the desert, the church, and the empty streets of Rome. I forgot everything.

Forty years. That was how long I knew I had remained there. Every notch upon the wall was a hollow echo of time slipping through my bound fingers. Forty years without food, without drink, without a single drop of water to moisten my cracked lips. Yet I endured. Hunger had abandoned me long ago. It wandered away like a name forgotten inside a dream. Even the wounds carved into my body by panic and despair had ceased to mean anything. The scars and scratches faded into whispers, leaving behind nothing but smooth, untouched skin. It seemed to me that my body itself had become another of my dreams. I wandered through the cell like an apparition, letting my hands travel across the damp stone walls, my fingertips tracing lines that shifted and curled beneath my touch. At times I swore those walls were breathing, drawing themselves inward and outward as though the room itself were alive without me. The cell devoured my years, only to breathe them back into me as dust. Once I pressed my ear against the floor and heard something moving beneath the stone, a distant whisper, like sand drifting across the endless thresholds of the castle. They say the Carpenter wandered the desert for forty days, his body starved and torn apart, his mind split open before visions of angels and devils. I wandered for forty years. I stretched an entire lifetime across the surface of my own mind. Time peeled away its skin, revealing layer after layer that I sifted through like the pages of a forgotten book. And I was hungry. Not the hunger that gnaws at the stomach, but something deeper, an ache that had settled inside my bones and seeped into my marrow. I hungered for escape, for sunlight, for the taste of oranges, bitter and sweet upon my tongue. Sometimes I could still smell them, sharp and alive, as though someone had only just peeled them beneath my nose. But whenever I reached toward them there was only emptiness, only air as thin as the veil between paradise and waking. Sometimes I touched my own hands, my own legs, without pain, without feeling. My skin no longer belonged to me. I scratched myself until blood appeared, watching narrow rivers of crimson find their way down my wrists before vanishing into the floor, yet nothing ever happened. It was as though I were clawing at the surface of a painting. I whispered to myself, counting the days as though each number might unlock a hidden door. I whispered to her as well. At times her name slipped from my lips like the final prayer. Sometimes I imagined her answering me, her voice warm and distant as it drifted through the cracks in the stone. But in the end the cell remained silent. Only the walls continued to breathe. Only the floor continued to whisper. And I was still there, hungry, yet never dead enough, bleeding, yet unable to feel myself dying.

I knew forty years had passed because I counted them. Not with clocks or calendars, but with my own body. Every frayed piece of myself became another mark carved into time, like a notch cut into a rotting plank. My fingernails became my seasons. I tore them away one after another, watching them grow back beneath the feeble light, brittle and yellowed like ancient parchment. "Fifteen days," I whispered to the walls. That was how long they needed to return. Never a day more. Never a day less. I measured the curve of each nail with my fingertips, feeling its edge press against my skin until it had grown long enough for me to rip it away once again. Fifteen days. I must have done it a thousand times. Ten fingers. Fifteen days. The mathematics carved themselves into my brain, twisting and knotting together until my thoughts themselves took on the shape of a violet crescent moon. I always began with my thumbs. Always the thumbs. They grew the slowest. They were the most stubborn. Every crack of the nail sent lightning through my joints, yet that pain became part of the ritual. Part of the rhythm. When they had grown back, I knew another fifteen days had drained away through the fractures of this place. It was grotesque. Revolting. Yet it belonged to me. My own grotesque calendar of life inside his prison.

Then, after all those years, without warning and on a day I can no longer name, I stopped sobbing, and I stopped hearing that dreadful violin. For the last several years it had done nothing but scrape the air like rusted metal. It had learned to move in perfect unison with me whenever I began to scream through a more beautiful kind of pain. A pain that was sharp and lucid, carving itself across the bridges of my mind, leaving behind traces of impossible memories. Then, all at once, it disappeared. From that day onward, the violin sank into silence. Its strings snapped one after another until nothing remained of it except my own voice, echoing once more against the prison walls like the cry of a dying beast. That was the first time I believed the end might finally be drawing near, and that this new symphony of days had become a requiem for me, and for the soul I had once carried.

In the end I even began counting the hairs that returned to my wrists. Every fragile strand marked the passing of time with the devotion of a fanatic. I tore them away with my teeth, arranging them across the floor like the bones of some small and delicate creature. When there was no room left, I scattered them with my burning palms as though they were ash. That was how I knew forty years had passed, and how desperately I longed to disappear. Yet the walls were growing with me. I could feel them expanding, swelling, their surfaces pulsing with every month that slipped away. Sometimes I pressed my face against the stone and listened to it murmur, deep and rough, like the heartbeat of something imprisoned beneath layers of dust. I whispered back to them. I traced their cracks with my fingertips, counted the veins running through every surface. They were lines upon some impossible map. And when the forty-first year finally arrived, I understood that they would not allow me to vanish. With every passing day I became more certain of it.

Once there were no answers left for me to seek, I counted my ribs instead. I counted every bone my fingers could reach until I could feel them pressing against my skin like slender knives. Hunger itself I had forgotten, yet I could still measure absence. I could trace the outline of years of starvation as though it were something tangible, something I could hold in my hands. The taste of oranges came and went, gliding across my tongue like the memory of sunlight. Sometimes I chewed the air itself, biting into the scent in the hope of feeling its bitterness crack beneath my teeth. Yet there was nothing. There had never been anything except that strange fragrance and my refusal to die.

When even the thought of a final ending abandoned me, the twisted comfort of hurting myself vanished with it. Every desire for those walls to shatter my body disappeared. Then I heard it. As tears streamed over my entire body, a sound reached me, so irritating, so hideously alive that it tore through my mind like the edge of a jagged blade. I was more certain than I had ever been that I had heard a single groaning creak, as though the cell itself were wrenching its own body from its joints. My body froze in that instant, in the middle of scratching, in the middle of thinking, in the middle of praying to no one. My arms fell limp beside me as I forced myself to turn, inch by inch, toward the sound. Then at last I saw it. A scarred door. A door that had remained sealed for forty years, without a single voice to mock me, welded into the wall like a tumour, had cracked open just enough to let the light slip through.

My body was exhausted, yet my mind could no longer understand what my eyes were seeing. The opening was no wider than the edge of a fingernail, and yet it seemed immeasurable. An abyss. The door had become a beast with open jaws embedded in the wall of death. It could lead me into nothingness, or into freedom. For a moment I believed it was only another deception, another hallucination conjured by the madness that had devoured me, determined to humiliate me one final time. But the breath of air drifting in from beyond was real, cold and sharp against my skin. I tasted it upon my tongue, damp, earthy, thick with life. I wanted to weep, yet my tears had long since abandoned me. They had been replaced by that brittle, consuming sensation of possible freedom, coiling through me like a serpent each time another current of air found its way inside. At first I did not move. I wanted to, yet my body remained rigid. I wanted to crawl toward the doorway, to drag my pitiful body across the floor like a broken insect, only to feel the threshold scrape against my ribs. I wanted someone to come, to find me, to cast me outside, outside into a world where the light would burn me alive, where I would become nothing more than a stain upon the earth. I wanted to become ash, because if I could burn now, she might come and gather what remained of me in her gentle hands, cradle my ashes within her palms, and scatter them beyond these walls. Lying there, I imagined the wind carrying me away, lighter than dust and bone, drifting above the hills before settling among the orange groves and the white stone gardens. I did not move. I could not. I only stared at the door, terrified that if I so much as breathed in the scent of freedom waiting beyond it, it would close again, sealing me forever inside the stale breath of this place and its slow death. So I held my breath and waited. I listened as the door widened, watching the light stretch toward me like pale fingers. I did not dare blink. I did not dare breathe until that whiteness had washed over me.

At last the white light broke through the crack like milk poured from a shattered jug. It crept across the floor, reaching toward me with pale fingers, scratching my skin with icy nails. I did not want to move. In truth, once again I could not. Then I saw it again. The violet hand was there. It emerged from the light, smooth and terrible, covered with those white circles that pulsed like blind eyes. It reached toward me, growing longer, its fingers curling as though beckoning me to follow. I tried to scream, but my voice collapsed somewhere deep inside my chest. Only a muffled breath escaped, clawing its way from my throat. My hands scraped against the cold stone. My fingers trembled like the legs of a crippled animal. I knew I had to flee. I had to crawl. I had to hide. Yet once again I could not. My body betrayed me, nailed to the ground beneath a weight I could neither name nor resist. In that moment I forgot my own name. Terror entered me, settled inside my lungs, hollowed me out, and made itself a home. It inhabited my body like a parasite, whispering madness into my ears, gnawing at the edges of what little reason I still possessed. I felt it behind my eyes like needles piercing the darkness. It lived inside my breath, inside my veins, seeping through my pores and leaving behind the smell of decay. I began trembling without control. My hands were soaked with sweat. My mouth was dry and split. Then I felt warmth spreading down my legs. The humiliation was so overwhelming, so childlike, that it almost dragged me back into reality. I had wet myself with fear.

That is all I remember before the shock of freezing water crashed into my face, dragging me downward with the weight of a thousand whales. My eyes flew open, and the light was gone. Only darkness remained, an endless mass of water, heavy and suffocating, without fortress, without prison. For hours I struggled in fury, kicking my legs, striking and clawing against the force of that lake. Exhaustion finally overtook me, and I began sinking toward its depths. The surface floated miles above my head, shimmering like the edge of a dream from which I could never awaken. My lungs screamed. The pressure grew, crushing me from every side. I opened my mouth to cry out, but only bubbles escaped, rising upward before vanishing into the darkness. There was no more stone. There was no more cell. Only the cold, merciless water swallowing me whole. I had exchanged solitude for the violin, for pain, for voices, for stone walls, only to exchange them all for this kind of freedom.

As I was dying in the depths of Lake Como, the cold of the water burned my skin, biting into what little flesh still clung to my bones. To me, that water had become the teeth of some ancient beast. I sank slowly, almost without a body, like a feather caught inside a rainstorm. There was no struggle left within me, only the gentle pull of the water, drawing me deeper and deeper into its silent heart. My eyes remained wide open, stinging from the cold as I looked upward through the heavy layers of liquid glass. Far above me, the surface shimmered, distant, free, forever beyond my reach. The water was astonishingly clear. Clear as a mirror.

Within that mirror I saw it.

At last I understood the truth.

The fortress I had glimpsed before, the wings of the harpies that had hidden the sky above the lake, their shrieks, the beating of their wings, the wildness of it all, had vanished. There were no harpies. There was no flying fortress. There was only the trembling reflection of the lake's surface, stretching endlessly into freedom, untouched by towers, by claws, or by shadows. My body grew heavier. The water pressed harder against my lungs. I opened my mouth, and the lake filled it with its icy kisses, pouring down my throat and flooding my chest. I no longer resisted. Together with the depths of this lake I would bury everything that had been nothing more than another of my terrible dreams. I sank farther still. My arms floated above my head. My hair spread through the water like ink. At last my eyes ceased to burn, yet I still did not blink. I simply continued looking upward through the shimmering surface that rippled with each of my fading movements, watching the image of the lake grow smaller, then paler, then ever more distant.

Now there was only the cold, the silence, and this newly claimed freedom.

In the end, I came to rest upon the floor of Lake Como, and I disappeared.