Clara.

I wrote this short tale some days ago. I've tried to take care of every single word to get a good story. The picture which accompanies it is mine too.


Clara:




Clara is seventy. She looks her age. Probably more. In the evenings, she sits opposite the birds’ cage in the park while she watches parents and grandparents accompanying the children feeding the locked birds. Clara’s got white hair and sunken eyes. Some days, she brings a book to while away the time, sometimes she forgets it and she amuses herself making up her own stories whose characters are people she finds at the park. Today she has left Emily Dickinson’s collection of poems next to the prescriptions on the table at the hall. Poor old woman’s head!

-Pauline, viens ici!

This French words attracts the old woman’s attention. A young woman showing slender legs, calls a girl about eight or nine years old who is running away from the caged birds.

Clara remembers she was the same age and every evening…

When coming back from school, the first thing she did was to throw, brusquely, her schoolbag on the sofa, kiss her mum and run fast like a flash of lightning to the corner bar. She put the coin through the slot and shook her fingers resolutely and with extreme virulence made the ball beat in a wonderful feast of light and sound. She loved playing flipper. It made her crazy. It was the best moment of the day.

-Et alors, la petite espagnole, elle dit rien? C'est pas bien ça, eh non!
-Bonjour, Monsieur Moulin.
-C'est mieux comme ça. Maintenant c'est une mademoiselle. Bonjour, ma chèrie.

Then when the ball got into the hole, Clara ran to the man and gave him three kisses on his cheek. Mr. Moulin was the nicest French man she ever knew. When they arrived at Paris, he had made them feel welcome; he had been very warm-hearted, helped her parents a lot. Thanks to him, her mother could find her first jobs as a cleaner and he gave his father a hand when the paperwork for the renting. Mr. Moulin held them in great esteem.

The evening she was remembering, he was offering him a fanta that Clara was drinking in a hurry. She left the glass on the bar and came back to the flipper machine to keep on playing. There were still four balls left. In that place she was the happiest girl on Earth. She felt so safe. Mr. Moulin near her, her parents and her older sister some metres away down the street. Everything was allright. At school there were not problems any more. When she arrived she found some difficulties, especially, with the language. Three years ago she hardly spoke any French but soon she learnt it and now she could be the first of the class if it had not been because of this dumb of Antoinette…

-Clara, my child. Let’s go home, your mother’s got your sandwich ready.
-I haven’t finished yet. There’s one ball left.

-Toi, Con d'espagnol, laisse la petite.
-Salut, François.
-Tu veux un Ricard? Ouais ou Ouais?

Her father nodded his head.

-Dad, give me a franc.
-No.
-Please, while you finish your Ricard.

Her father gave it to her, as he always did. Meanwhile both men were talking, Clara played another game. It was difficult to her to get to know how Mr. Moulin was able to understand her father. Definitely he had the best of his intentions since in the three years they were living in Paris, his father’s French was not improving at all. Anyway, he was still as charming as always. Her father was the most charming man in the world. He was so handsome and now more than ever with his thin moustache like Clark Gable.

-Hello, madam. Don’t you think birds shouldn’t live locked up in cages, that hey should be free, shouldn’t they? - A girl with green eyes was asking her while pulling her skirt.

Clara is seventy years old. Today’s her birthday.