The Flying Creatures of Fra Angelico Read Online Free PDF

Alcobaça. Dona Inês was exhumed from her tomb. The chronicler does not tell us whether she was already a bare skeleton or in what state of decomposition otherwise. She was dressed in white, crowned and placed on an open royal coach to the right of the king. The couple were pulled by a pair of white horses with big coloured plumes. Silver harness bells on the horses’ heads jingled brightly at every step. The crowd, as ordered, followed on either side of the nuptial procession, marrying the reverence of subjects with their repugnance. I am inclined to believe that Dom Pedro, careless of appearances, from which anyway he was protected by the powers of a considerable imagination, was convinced he was riding, not with the corpseof his old lover, but with the real Inês before her death. One could maintain that he was essentially mad, but that would be an evident simplification.
    It is eighty kilometers from Coimbra to Alcobaça. Dom Pedro came back alone and incognito from his imaginary honeymoon. Awaiting Donna Inês in the abbey at Alcobaça was a stone tomb the king had had sculpted by a famous artist. Opposite Inês’s sarcophagus, on the lid of which she was shown in all her youthful beauty, and arranged pied à pied , so that come the day of judgement their residents would find themselves face-to-face, was a similar sarcophagus bearing the image of the king.
    Dom Pedro was to wait many years before taking his place in the tomb he had prepared for himself. He passed this time fulfilling his kingly duties: he minted gold and silver coins, brought peace to his kingdom, chose a woman to brighten up his rooms; he was an exemplary father, a discreet and courteous friend, a fair administrator of justice. He even experienced happiness and gave parties. But these would seem to be irrelevant details. Inall likelihood those years had a different rhythm for him than the rhythm of other men. They were all the same, and perhaps passed in a flash, as if they had already been.

Message from the Shadows
    In these latitudes night falls suddenly, hard upon a fleeting dusk that lasts but an instant, then the dark. I must live only in that brief space of time, the rest of the day I don’t exist. Or rather, I am here, but it’s as if I weren’t, because I’m elsewhere, in every place on earth, on the waters, in the wind that swells the sails of ships, in the travellers who cross the plain, in the city squares with their merchants and their voices and the anonymous flow of the crowd. It’s difficult to say what my shadow world is made of and what it means. It’s like a dream you know you are dreaming, that’s where its truth lies: in its being real beyond the real. Its structure is that of the iris, or rather of fleeting gradations, already gone while still there, liketime in our lives. I have been granted the chance to go back over it, that time no longer mine which once was ours; it runs swiftly inside my eyes; so fast that I make out places and landscapes where we lived together, moments we shared, even our conversations of long ago, do you remember? We would talk about parks in Madrid, about a fisherman’s house where we would have liked to live, about windmills and the rocky cliffs falling sheer into the sea one winter night when we ate bread soup, and of the chapel with the fishermen’s votive offerings: madonnas with the faces of local women and castaways like puppets who save themselves from the waves by holding on to a beam of sunlight pouring down from the heavens. But all this flickers by inside my eyes and although I can decipher it and do so with minute exactness, it’s so fast in its inexorable passage that it becomes just a colour: the mauve of morning in the highlands, the saffron of the fields, the indigo of a September night with the moon hung on the tree in the clearing outside the old house, the strong smell of the earth and your left breast that I loved more