Luisa Montalto

IL SOPPALCO

E' il letto di ora. Letto in cima ad una scala di legno. Un nido sull'albero della casa. Salire è già un po' dormire. Anche l’amore è sospeso in una sinfonia risonante, come se alzarsi fosse anche amarsi, abbracciarsi. E poi dormire, senza gocce e pillole. Due sveglie sono meglio di una: scendere è doppiamente difficile. E il letto sopra i letti. Un signor letto. Restare nel giaciglio caldo, accampare scuse per non scendere. Letto viziato, accidioso, che merita solo chi ha carattere attivo e laborioso.

Sabrina Di Stefano

IL LETTO DI S.

Non è un letto, sono due: A e B. A è quando S. è sola, B quando è in compagnia. A è sopra e B è sotto come un cassetto che apri all’occorrenza. Ma per voi l’occorrenza non esisterà perché tu non occorri. A sta a B come la casa in città sta a quella al mare, luogo in cui arrangiarsi un mese o due fare scorrere le ruote di B sotto A. Per te con S. sarà sempre A e alla fine ti domanderai se B esiste e perché non viene fuori. E la risposta sarà perché tu sei improvviso e non calcolato. Parte di A e cioè di S. Una cosa che non ingombra e che non occorre. E infatti non vi sembrerà di essere stati stretti e a pensarci neanche di essere stati. Parti uno dell'altra senza la necessità dei calcoli e delle previsioni. Arrivato e rimasto senza altra etica che quella della felicità, sarai andato via senza lasciare dispiaceri. Anche questi sono letti che non si dimenticano: A e B, A su B, tu e S.

Barbara Fagiolo

Una volta il letto sarà stato un continente intero inesplorato e i corpi che lo avranno attraversato imbarcazione. Lei, zattera o gommone, avrà solcato lo stretto mare del contorno passando gli angoli come promontori. A volte la navigazione sarà stata tempesta e tu sopra ti sarai retto a fatica per non finire fuori dallo scafo. Avrete attraversato mari ondosi, doppiato capi di Buona Speranza, scoperto isole, nominato arcipelaghi. Poi, a forza di peripli, avrete gridato soddisfatti 'terra!'. Ma dall'alto della sovraccoperta viola, ancora guardando al mare come all'amico di una volta o al principio di ogni andare, vi sarete mossi come se il letto fosse piattaforma sull'acqua, palafitta e poi avrete ripreso la Via delle Indie.

Alessandra Sabatini

E' la cassetta degli strumenti. La valigia di chi sempre parte. La sedia di paglia con la sveglia, le sveglie. Il vademecum del riposo. Chi la Bibbia, chi il Kamasutra, le foto dei cari il lume. Sonniferi tappi preservativi. Tu il diario di anni di sogni scritti a penna e occhi cisposi per tenere il ricordo dei fotogrammi del film infinito di tutte le tue vite passate e future.

BEDS

The bed one

That’s the first bed. It comes after the kids’ pillow and lasts for five years. That’s a short bed and it’s a shame to give it away since it’s pretty. It’s all of brass, with high barred sides closing it from four sides. Sometimes, with an added blanket, it will become a playground for an unconscious game of shelter: to hide inside and defend one’s self from the cold, protecting one’s self. Underneath the blankets, among opaque brass tubes going grey in places, there’s shadow. With mild yellow light which passes over the white of the canvas, one can play shadows. Sometimes the still small foot will strike against the tubes and the pain will produce the short shiver of the first pleasures. It’s a bed of unserious illnesses, the bed of five days in bed and no school at a time when halls are neither a habit nor a pleasure. It’s a bed of bowls of pasta, of porridge, of sours soups, of thermometers shaken down in large movements. Of the smell of knees as if attacked with small pox. The sheets are linen, with double-sewn angles to pull them close by laces you can chew on, savouring the clean taste. It’s a bed of you being small and others having different ones. A bed of yours to count before you can get a long bed yourself. It’s a bed of brass. With bars.

Silvia Levenson

The first bed

That’s the bed that comes next. The bed of now you’ve grown. A big bed and you drowning in it. It’s a bed in a marine style, deep brown with brass joints and drawers underneath it, of which Mom leaves you one: the others will be used for the linen. Discussions, then resignation and in what you’ve got left you organise a Universe for yourself. You put into it certain things that you care a lot for: toys, books like Jose the Merry Optimist, comics, colouring pencils. Once you’ll even hide a sweet in it, to eat it the next day at school with your classmate Angelo Anselmi. It’s a bed finally equal to all the others. A bed that will last long. Your first bed and your second bed. Your bed for such a long time. The one of the kids’ room, where your bed and your brother’s are together. It’s yours: a pulpit from which to proclaim go play on your bed and your brother gets up and goes away or the two of you quarrel and give each other the first good strokes, the ones you try to make work, the ones that hurt. And a pain that follows after which you’ll get full of remorse. And your brother’s bed, identical but more orderly, newer, prettier. The bed of first jealousies, of micro-differences of the Enigmatic Week, a hunt for personality which makes you stigmatise a preference of your family’s for it. The bed of your first differences, of him who keeps it orderly, with dirty clothes on yours. The bed of covers the colour of rust. The bed of love on your own.

The bed after

The bed of first love, on the other hand, will be a pull-out settee which opens and closes as if it had a mind of its own. It’s got cashmere design in champagne yellow and grey. The one you’ve chosen your-self instead of being assigned to you. The bed different from your brother’s. The bed which means you’re no longer a kid. The bed which, one day, will make you say let’s do it now to a blond Italian-German girl and there will be three speedy minutes of pleasures preceded by millions of hours of anxiousness and the wish to feel better afterwards and the stories. It will be the bed you don’t want any more, the one on which you will imagine another bed, in another house of your own and without your family. It will be the bed of you wishing for another bed. It will be a bed to betray.

The country bed

It’s a servant’s bed, painted bright red over metal to protect it from rust. One layer waiting for the other, a temporary colour which becomes definitive through laziness. It’s a bed that’s put on top of another, then twin beds so you and your brother wouldn’t be one on top of the other, in the years which banish the difference. It’s the silent bed which looks, through the window, over a fence, a field, a valley, a village sleeping under a hill. A bed with no car noises, a bed without television from the neighbours. A bed with the cock’s calling, the snores of he owls. A bed good for dreaming.

The bed between beds

It will be a bed that lasts fifteen days. It’s in an exconvent in the Mountain Tolfa, near Rome. It’s the bed of your exit from the house. You will be appointed a cell and will stay at the castle. Where you prefer sleeping and must go up. Underneath Sandro Picchi from Florence. In other cells other two or three guys. Someone else in the small room. In the morning Knockin’on Heaven’s door by Bob Dylan from the Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid soundtrack and all get out of beds to clean Etruscan tombs, already cleaned by diggers, with brushes. It’s the first bed outside the house: an experience from which you return smoking Camel’s and listening to a new music. You use more slang and have foreign models. Your family says the experience had been bad for you.

S. ‘S bed

It’s not a bed, it’s two beds: A and B. A when S. is alone, B when she’s in company. A is above and B is underneath like a box you open as needed. But for the two of you the occasion won’t exist because you won’t happen. A will be to B like a house at the sea, a place where you can stop for a month or two and for a month or two you make the wheels of B run underneath A. For you, with S. it will always be A and in the end you’ll wonder whether B exists since it’s not coming out. And the answer will be because you’re an improvisation and not a calculation. A part of A is a part of S. The only thing which doesn’t prevent and doesn’t happen. And yet you won’t have felt squeezed. Parts of each other without the necessity to calculate or think ahead. having arrived and stayed with no other ethics but happiness, you will leave without displeasing. Those are also beds one can’t forget: A and B, A over B, you and S.

Make unmake remake

Even beds have their movements, a sort of gymnastics. Their 1,2 and 3, their position of departure which is specific for every house. Beds eternally in a mess, sheets wrinkled by heat, by love. Orderly, open like wallets. And beds and bed-covers, plush animals, a small zoo that some of your girlfriends show off like a defence of first days.

Silvia Levenson

Built-in bed

It’s a bed of the moment. A bed at the top with a wooden step. A nest in the tree of the house. To jumping it is already to sleep a little. Even love is suspended in a resonating symphony, as if to get up were equal to loving, caressing. And then sleeping, with no drops or pills. Two steps are better than one: it’s doubly difficult to get up. It’s a bed above beds. A master bed. To stay in the warm bed, finding excuses not to get down. A vicious and dangerous bed, merited only by those of active and working characters.

Sleeping in the open, Sl. bags and other things

One should have it in summer full of rest under the stars. Nor for having bad a beat moment, like Picasso had his pink and blue periods. One should have had it to break the archetype and solidarise with animals in their skins and the halo’ed pastors in transhumanity. The year of the fall of the Berlin Wall was my turn, and the turn of three guys from Eastern Germany in their first visit to the other side. The beds were: 1) at the entrance to Morocco on a beach not far from Ceuta, in a tent which was crowned by heavy steps of the seagulls - drug-smugglers all! - in the morning 2) South of Spain, on top of a moor full of red and a veritable labyrinth created between camp-fires and scorpions 3) other place at the South of Spain, Villarreal, open country in a Passat station wagon- a change from the Traban - getting a way in the morning with the engine low so as not to enervate the bulls grazing 4) after having said goodbye to the trio from Rostock in Barcelona, on the station of Lugano, fleeing the cold in a phone booth.
All these non-beds have a very uncomfortable taste now, but they are a comfortable memory, full of salvation for a hypothetical systematisation of the fortunes future brings, like the war for which one has a black box.