The plate of spaghetti sat before her getting cold. She got up and … left the place without as much as a glance back. Calmly, without running, her plate left untouched, she walked out. She didn’t even smell the freshly chopped basil on the tomato sauce, or the butter still melting between the spaghetti.
The delectable fumes from her plate must have reached her nostrils but the information was unprocessed, unused and thus completely irrelevant.
As she walked away from the restaurant, she felt whole again for the first time in a long while.
Perhaps the first time in her life. She could not remember ever feeling so calm and composed.
At this very moment, she knew exactly what she was doing, where she was headed and why she was doing it. She had finally found her purpose in life. She had found her inner voice. And she relished in the comfort of it all.
She made her way calmly but purposefully through the market, past the spice stall, with its tiny mountains of powdered colours, past the fruit stall, where the vendor was shouting his latest offer, the smell of strawberries mixed with fresh herbs from the salad stall next to it was hanging in the air.
A woman in a hurry shoved her aside without an apology, without a glance. She barely noticed it as she walked past the cheese shop where the smell grew heavier; musk, amber and mould. She had never liked cheese. She had always loved markets and the Carmel market in particular. She had spent her childhood racing through its narrow streets at dusk with her brothers. Her brothers… It was over ten years now since she last heard from them.
She walked down the street that ran parallel to the main street, the ‘butchers’ alley’. The air was suffocating. It was a little after two o’clock. She was sweating profusely and had a haut-le-cœur. She felt suffocated and covered her mouth with her hand. The smell of blood and dead meat was overwhelming and more than she could handle. She had never liked it.
The pieces of discarded flesh, shoved in cardboard boxes and left to rot in the sun exuded an overpowering stench that only a stray cat could be attracted to. Those gruesome cats that seemed to be everywhere in the market and whose fur had lost all warmth, softness and fluffiness. Instead, it was dirty, squatted by unwanted tenants and crusts. She felt as repulsed by the cats as by the rotting meat on the floor.
Further up the alley, she passed a stall where a shirtless man was grilling the insides of some poor animal. She picked up her pace and wondered what had made her stray from the central alley for this one.
In an instant, she was out of the butcher’s alley and into the next one, where the flower shop was. Her mind wandered back to her untouched plate of spaghetti. She had not paid for it. It was the first time she had ever left a restaurant without paying, and she thought she should feel guilty about it.
But the truth was that she felt exhilarated and saw the reflection of her proud smile in the flower shop mirror, but had to turn her face away when she heard someone calling after her.
She turned to see a middle-aged lady with a happy, jovial face waving. She seemed so happy to have found her. She was holding something in her hand and had started waving at her as soon as she recognised her.
It was her bag. She had left it in the restaurant, under her table, under the cold plate of spaghetti.
The kind-hearted lady walked past the flower shop with the bag in her hand and a big smile on her face. She waved again, happier with each step.
The two women looked at each other, one frozen, the other smiling. They were 10 metres apart.
Their eyes locked.
One pair of eyes was deeply happy that she had found the owner of the bag.
The other pair of eyes had lost all purpose and colour.
When the bag exploded in the air – mercilessly taking everything with it, bits of flesh mixed with petals – they were so close they could have touched.
The happy woman’s smiling eyes were transfixed and forever etched in hers.
~AlexS, Tel Aviv